Learning how and when to stop

You're allowed to change your mind

I was sitting at my parent’s kitchen table, picking at my already red-raw fingernails, with the occasional tear running down my cheek, when my mum and my auntie gave me the option to stop the business that I was running. “You don’t need to carry on”, they said. “You can close it down. It’s in your control.”

The thing is, it didn’t feel like it was. I wasn’t in control of myself. My vision had taken over. I knew what I wanted to achieve, and I wasn’t planning on giving up until I got there.

I’d left a great job to run the business full time and I’d finished year one exactly where I wanted to be. As I shut the doors to a hugely successful pop-up shop in the centre of Soho, brands and investors were knocking. My business plan was going to plan, the only option was full steam ahead.

Because there was a sustainable department store and innovation centre to open, selling products, telling stories and building brands for companies using business for social and environmental good. A space to change the way we shop, to change the way we make things and how we consume them. I had it all mapped out. Was I just to rip up the map?

There were people I would be letting down, businesses I was supporting, investors I was speaking to, people I loved working with. And then my most brutal client and aggressive critic, I’d be letting down myself. I’d be rejecting my destiny whilst jeopardising the future of the planet and a new wave of business. Melodramatic much?

At the time I associated stopping with negativity, with giving up, quitting and failing. The expectation was tragedy but in fact the reality was quite the opposite.

With distance, I can see that all I was doing was stopping. Stopping something that was making me ill, at that moment in time.

Change may be difficult, but businesses, relationships and friendships that aren’t working - for whatever reason - need ending. Stopping things is brave, not cowardly. It shows strength, not weakness.

You are allowed to change your mind. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed or quit when it got tough. It just means you’ve stopped something.

And I’ve learnt that the beauty of stopping one thing is that it always means the start of something else.