“Take Courage”

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
• Top trend predictions for Christmas 2021
• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

On a plane earlier today, I watched the excellent re-make of the Lion King.

The digital animation is absolutely superb and the animal’s movement incredibly realistic, so I can thoroughly recommend it even if you don’t have little people to watch it with.  The story is a familiar one, but there is a message here for many of us.

The young Simba had exiled himself from the kingdom because of guilt and untruths told by Scar about his father’s death, and so hadn’t claimed his rightful place in the Pridelands.  Increasingly I seem to be running across more people who are seemingly held back from achieving their dreams and ambitions due to the words spoken to them by others.  There is a crisis of confidence which is fuelled by social media.  You see, we are increasingly comparing ourselves to others and thinking we are not good enough compared to the success stories we see on social media.  Guess what, though, people only put out their best bits, often photo-shopped, which gives us a false comparison when comparing ourselves, warts and all.

I ran across a great quote year ago by Steve Furtick, “The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”  Everyone, even outwardly very successful people struggle with all sorts of negative feelings that you wouldn’t imagine.  A friend of mine who is a very successful speaker and author of many books, wrote recently of ‘imposter syndrome’ when he sometimes feels that his achievements are no big deal and sooner or later, he will be exposed as a fraud.  It’s actually quite common amongst public speakers to think that they have nothing to say and others are far more worthy of being on the stage than they are.

The difference between those who achieve more of their dreams and those who don’t is that they have learned to put aside those feelings, surround themselves with positivity and they step forward and take risks.  Not everything works and stuff often goes wrong, but I, of one, would far rather be someone who puts my neck on the line and ignores the negative words of others than someone who sits on the sidelines.  In fact, if I had listened to two lots of naysayers right at the start of the Cotswold Fayre journey, the company wouldn’t have existed.  I am glad I ignored them!