This month I was held hostage on the lounge with Henry watching The Wiggles. He wouldn’t allow me to go to the toilet, get dressed, have a shower or do anything that meant my attention wasn’t on him. 

This made me think about ways I have been held hostage in my business, either by clients or by staff members, in our 10 year history. Whilst it doesn’t happen very much anymore, in the beginning days this used to happen all the time. It would mainly happen with clients because people would want different things for their children that wouldn’t align with our values and so they would try and blackmail me into making decisions that were not based on the best interest for the entire school, but instead on the best interest of their child.

It took me a long time to be able to make decisions where I had the courage to stand up for what I believed in and for what was in the best interest for the majority in order for us to be able to move forward.

In the early days, I was very much a people pleaser. Any client that I had was a client and of course I wanted to do the best thing possible by them and didn’t want them to leave, because I had this business to run, rent to pay and staff to pay. So sometimes I sacrificed the things that were important to me to make people happy—but at the end of the day they weren’t happy anyway. I learnt this lesson very quickly.

When it comes to staff members there have been a couple of situations where I have been held hostage by employees because of decisions they wanted to make—again—that weren’t in the best interest and didn’t align well with the culture of our studio. In the early days I would let these slide because of the confrontational discussion I didn’t want to have. I would just do whatever I needed to do to keep the peace instead of standing up for the greater values and integrity of the school.

The lesson that I learnt from this is: Eventually it will come back to bite you on the butt anyway. And if you don’t learn the lesson the first time, the universe will try and teach it to you again and again.

These experiences taught me to up the ante in terms of our communication, our values and our professional development so that we have a really strong sense as a staff of what we do and how we do it. So when we have to make decisions of integrity, we now at least know where we stand, what to do and how we do it, so those decisions are a bit easier. I’m no longer held hostage by those beliefs that don’t align with our company because we are such a values-based company.

As for being held hostage watching The Wiggles and not being able to get up and shower? I managed to get out of there by telling Henry I would turn it off if he didn’t let me have a shower. (So I escaped not only to have a shower but to write this blog post!)

I don’t have great advice when it comes to being held hostage by your 2 year old, but I have certainly learnt a lot of lessons about ways to avoid being held hostage in business! And so much of it stems back to truly understanding your business’ vision, mission and values.

If that’s something you need help with, you can catch up on that at the following posts:

How to write a Vision Statement

How to write a Mission Statement

Developing your Business Values