If you focu on the recession – on lost income, lost sales, lost jobs – stress is a natural outcome.

However, if you focus on how this is the perfect time to turn your business around, you change your modus operandi into asset-based thinking. This energizes the mind to work differently and let’s you see more, think more and act more in tune with positive outcomes.

Your right brain gets very turned on and the intellectual rush will sprout forth ideas that in your daily fire fighting left brain mode you have overlooked.

If you start each day determined to move your business forward just one small step in one area, you start to cultivate an energy flow that will naturally tend towards asset-based thinking.

Sound a little too airy fairy for you?

Surprisingly, asset-based thinking is more rational and realistic than idealist and emotional. ABT does not deny weaknesses, it merely puts them into a more realistic context.

EXERCISE 1

1. List 5 things you have accomplished in the past week
2. Write down the skills, talents and strengths you needed to make them happen
3. Now identify how else you can leverage this asset set

EXERCISE 2

1. List all the actions you took yesterday
2. Score these according to whether they were PROACTIVE or REACTIVE
3. Start doing this each day at lunch and again at the end of the day

Regardless of how you feel about the future, you still have considerable power over what you do in the present. This is a time where Leaders are separated from Managers.