More than a year back, I had blogged about buckling up for a rough ride when the so-called recession of the lifetime had started showing its ugly face.
Recession is Over!
While the expectations of many was that it was there to stay for a long period, but the recent days indicators are all pointing towards things normalizing back. A lot of credit for this, IMO, goes to the coordinated and collaborative efforts amongst the nations.
I would be hoping and praying that most of you would have weathered this recession without much strain and now are looking forward to the better times. There may be very few of you who might have felt the heat of this recession more severely than others; but again I would be hoping that you would now have emerged much stronger with the experience.
As many who might have experienced recessions in the past would tell you – recessions are cyclic and we are going to see many more in our life time. IMO, it is going to be the fact of life especially when majority of the businesses today around the world are driven by the supply-and-demand kind of a model. The key now is how well we (as businesses or individuals) learn to make use of the good times and adjust in the challenging times. More importantly how well we anticipate and adapt to the changes – again be it from a business perspective or even from an individual perspective.
In my conversations with many – I am now very interested in knowing what has that particular individual learnt for his/her own individual self while going through this recession cycle. The learnings could be from the perspective of individuality or work or career or even from family perspective. My assumption here is that these learnings would vary from individual to individual. Also, my belief is that if the individual can abstract their lessons-learnt at this moment – better they would be prepared to adapt to these cyclic nature of business cycles in future.
What have I learnt from the Recession?
So if you have not done it already, I would strongly urge all of you to take few minutes and capture your thoughts about what you have learnt as an individual over the last year or two in these recessionary times. May be the following questions guideline to evaluate your learnings might help -
- Did the recession affect you in some way that now you feel that you are well prepared for the better times and even for the next cycle? (Yes/No)
- Some of your strengths which you think helped you in this recessionary phase? (e.g. skills, family support, good bank balance, etc.)
- Some of your weaknesses which you think came to the fore during this recessionary phase? (e.g. inadequate skills, wrong job, expensive habits, etc.)
Hopefully while you are thinking about the above questions, you would also be thinking about how you would strengthen your attributes in Point (2) and work on your weaknesses in Point (3).
So as you prepare to take a big sigh of relief and make plans to use the better time to the fullest – I would also encourage you to retrospect. There are going to be pundits who are going to analyze the lessons learnt at a national or a business or a corporate level. But as an individual, you owe it to yourself to do this short exercise for your own sake.
And if you can share the results of your retrospection exercise with others (paste it in the comments section) – may be many others can learn from you too.
