Almost 2,000 years ago, Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." ... modernised to "The Obstacle is the Way."

The idea is the way forward is to confront your blocks, fears and frustrations.

Acceptance and Commitment psychotherapy outlines the concept of "Experiential Avoidance", which can be the root cause of many personal issues.

It describes suppressing or avoiding short-term negative emotions or discomfort required to deal with a situation which will lead to better longer-term outcomes.

Instead of dealing with the situation, we ignore it or engage in coping behaviour such as alcohol, food, or other drugs, social withdrawal, crisis creation, and many more escape behaviours.

This doubles down on the damage... the situation gets worse, and our escape behaviours create new problems.

These concepts can also be applied to business.

How many businesses fail or suffer because they avoid short-term discomfort, such as dealing with toxic staff or customers, changing their business model or learning new skills?

Being "Too Busy" is a common avoidance strategy.

Several years ago, as part of a research project, I asked a restaurant owner

… "What is your biggest Frustration?"

The answer..…

"Customers Rave about our food and service, but they don't come back."

My next question was .." What have you tried?"..

The answer was, as you might guess..

"Nothing; we don't know what to do and, anyway, we're too busy."

A final question .." Have you tried asking the customer to come back?"

A Simple Goal

This question led to a project with a simple goal "Get every customer to come back within three months with two friends."

The frustration became a challenge, creating a cascade of actions leading to the restaurant topping trip advisor, massively increasing repeat business and fully booked weeks in advance.

But the cascade didn't stop there ...

The next stage of this story is we have taken the ideas developed to solve the frustration and created a scalable software solution which we now make available to our clients...

.....all starting with one question.