What Coming Back From A Setback Taught Me

Coming back from injury taught me more about patience than anything else has. Earlier this year I picked up an injury that put me out of training almost entirely for a couple of weeks. For someone who trains most days, that was its own kind of hard, harder in some ways than the injury itself.

I'm not going to pretend the comeback was quick or straightforward, because it wasn't. There was a long stretch where progress was slow, some days it didn't feel like progress at all, and the temptation to either push too hard or give up entirely was constant. What actually worked was neither of those. It was showing up consistently, doing less than I wanted to, and trusting that it would add up eventually.

It did. It just took longer than I wanted it to. I adapted what I could do rather than doing nothing, protecting the fitness I'd already built without making things worse, and slowly building back towards full training properly rather than rushing it.

I think about that a lot when I'm working with business owners going through their own version of a comeback: after a tough quarter, a client that fell through, or simply the slow grind of trying to get a business off the ground. The instinct is always to either force it or walk away. Rarely is either the right answer. Usually what's needed is the less exciting option, showing up properly, doing the unglamorous work consistently, and giving it the time it actually needs.

It's the same principle I bring into client work generally. When something in a business has broken down, whether that's a process, a client relationship, or momentum itself, the fix is rarely a single dramatic move. It's the unglamorous, repeated, slightly boring work of doing the right small things consistently until the bigger thing is fixed.

If you're in the middle of your own comeback right now, whatever that looks like for your business, that's the only advice I've got that's ever actually worked. Keep showing up. It counts more than it feels like it does at the time.