Today I want to give you information about an important Business Book called “Upping the Downside: 64 Strategies for Creating Professional Resilience by Design” by Mike R. Jay.  This is a recent book which builds on a previous one about personal resilience although you’ll do fine without the previous book.  

Mike Jay is apparently an extremely bright guy and this book presents much of his thinking around professional resilience.  There are essays from others about the process of gaining resilience, but the heart of the book is transcripts of Mike teaching his system for developing professional resilience.  Be careful not to be turned off by the huge amount of jargon, invented terms and confusing systems in the book.  The heart of the book gives some very important messages for the owner of a coaching business.

First, think about the idea that your business must be resilient.  In today’s culture, everything is changing at an unprecedented pace.    In order to be a successful business owner, you will need to be adapting your business to important changes in the world that affect you or your customers.  Resilience is the idea of being ready for anything and is rapidly becoming THE most important characteristic of a successful entrepreneur.  There are very few successful coaches whose business is structured today in the same way it was five years ago.

Secondly, Upping the Downside looks at what is specifically required of the self-employed.  Feel this quote, “Most entrepreneurs are really employees who are having hallucinations about business ownership.  They have not learned how to be a business owner, but they don’t want to be an employee, so they end up creating a bad job for themselves.”  Ouch.  I see this over and over with beginning coaches who have not thought through what they are doing. 

The point of the book is to move you away from this trap by increasing your professional resilience. Mike Jay presents his system through the use of 64 points from several categories that define professional resilience.  Although they may be referred to by different names in the book, the basic categories include physical well-being, monetary well-being, wise relationships, self understanding, focus of client service, business planning and development, strategic thinking, intentional creativity, and allowing contradiction.  I have no doubt that one or more of these categories could stand some work in your business so you may want to check out Upping the Downside soon. 

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