A comrade of mine recalled an incident when he was training cadets. It happened to be an offensive operations exercise, and the cadets had fared very badly. During the main debrief, which was of course after all the After-Action-Reviews (AARs), “Hotwashes”, or what I personally have come to disdain as “Hogwashes” and so forth. When the sequence of planned events was compared with the sequence of actual events, it was evident that the whole endeavour had gone horribly wrong, and the mission would not have been anywhere near accomplished. No discernible initiative had been observed and even basic warfighting skills had been noticeably absent. In fact, most of the force on the exercise would have been killed by friendly fire more than by enemy action. In mitigation, the exercise commanders protested that there had been a lot of confusion because “the enemy had been deployed wrongly.” My comrade looked hard at the assembly and then intoned, with his famous dead-pan expression, “You always have the option of attacking correctly.”

Do you feel disrupted by series after series of unfortunate events? Maybe you feel that life isn’t fair to you and your business. Well, the good news is that while life may not be fair to you, you can certainly be fair to yourself! What are your core skills and expertise? Are you really good at what you do, or are you still at the “professor” stage? Puzzled? Ok, name ONE core skill or expertise you possess. Mine’s being a Zoomer, how about yours? Then ask yourself how your clients and customers gain from your expertise and/ or products. Mine is that my clients gain the clarity which propels them to take action to better their businesses, and I engender that outcome in various ways according to who needs what at which time.

Come up with that ONE core competency yet? Find it, get it, and develop other core competencies. As those competencies increase in both number and depth, you will be less bothered by what others call “disruptions.” After all, as Henry Ford said, “The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.” Is that you? Become that competitor, and you need not fear the disruptions that are already on their way!