When positive thinking becomes the shooting squads blind fold.

At some point (probably many) in every entrepreneur’s life they will face tough situations and for most the way to deal with that is to think positive thoughts and vibes. Now positive thinking has its place, but, it can be just as dangerous when it’s used like an ostrich, to bury your head in the sand and ignore the possible outcomes.

Business success in the real world is realised not because of optimism or determination, but by the wise pursuit of opportunity and sensible risk management.

Nobody teaches you how to recognise opportunity or manage risk though, you have to learn it, and that’s the real currency of business.

Excessive optimism masks the potential doom lying beyond a bad decision because instead of facing our fears and working through them we find it easier to avoid or ignore them.

The only sensible way of dealing with tough situations is to build a plan or mind map so that you can see what it is you really fear and explore potential solutions and outcomes.

Soon, you will realise that your fear is over glorified, that there are multiple solutions and resources that you can tap into and there is a path to navigate your way out of the potential outcomes.

A similar approach can be used when developing a business plan to avoid the over optimistic projections and get down to the real planning of how these ideas will come about, not just from positive thought or hope.