I spent my primary and secondary school weekends working in retail. I learned so many skills in those years.
About people, business, customer service. Leather, clothes, glass and china, kitchenware. There isn’t much I don’t know about Waterford and Swarovski Crystal.
If I was working in the shops, stock taking was a rather laborious and manual chore. As most things were then.
Even nn the offices- no automated systems in those days. We worked off hand written counts of product codes and prices. I had to enter them all manually on one of those calculators with a receipt roller. I used to love the clickey buttons. The office was the place to be at stock taking time.
Back then, many of us were seldom surprised about the volumes of what we did and didn’t have in stock. We didn’t have machines keeping clock of what was in store or the warehouse - we had to know and if we didn’t, we’d leg it in to the back to physically check what we had in or didn’t.
Stock taking was part of the cycle of retail. Helped us focus on what we had, what we needed to shift, what had sold like hot cakes, what not to order ever again. What to double down on next time.
TAKING STOCK OF Courage
One regular feature of my research in courage, is how little time people spend noticing or accounting for the courage that they have practiced in their life. The brave moments that have been forgotten. The courageous decisions that were carefully considered.
I can see why this might be the case. By its very nature, being brave and courageous doesn’t always mean we get the result that we had hoped for. We might have made a decision or acted in a way, that with the best of intentions didn’t more us to where we had hoped it might. So we move on and hope to forget about it.
Or we get the outcome we hoped for, and award the merits to circumstances, to external factors, to someone else. The humble people-pleasers and perfectionists amongst us especially are wonderful at giving credit to others but never to the self.
However, we often fall in the trap of measuring the wrong thing. It is not the outcome that matters, it is the strength in the merits of our decisions that is where courage rests. That which says most about the person we are becoming and the character of who we are.
It is in seeing the courage and bravery that we have within us, that we have acted and practiced in the past which gives us the confidence and connection to be able to do so again. When we begin to understand thar we have courage at our disposal, that we have been using more of it than we ever gave ourselves credit for, we beging to realise that we have it in abundance.
Far more of it than we will ever have need for in fact, for it is in limitless supply.
Give Credit To Your Courage
Don’t allow the courage you have accumulated over a lifetime to go unnoticed.
Pause and take stock to notice it.
Where will you find it? In the most uncomfortable and difficult of times you have been through. In the conversatiosn you didn’t want to have. The decisions you laboured over. The things you think you srivived or th times you feel you only just got through.
Go back and take stock and notice what rewards in resolve and strength it offers you.
Courage inspires courage. We know this from research.
That means that your own courage, when you give yourself permission to see it, will show you just how capable and brave you are. Giving you the connection and confidence to draw on the infinite amount of it you have.
Knowing the reserves you have changes everything. You can deploy, target and plan strategies specifically designed to optimise it. You can choose to be braver not when circumstances dictate. But because you are choosing to.