What Glastonbury's Mud Loving Customers Can Teach Organisations

The media is awash this weekend with pictures and tales from Glastonbury's mud embracing customers. Up to their knees in brown stuff, and soaked to the skin with rain, some 137,000 festival goers have shrugged off the weather and appalling site conditions and have gone about their business in the most jovial of ways.

In normal circumstances, subjecting customers (and, not to forget, the festival staff) to these kind of conditions would be enough to spark protests, general strikes and fevered calls for the government to adequately regulate the weather.

But Glastonburyers (is that their technical term?) are a prime example of what can be achieved when you "choose your attitude" - a simple adjustment to how you decide to deal with things that present themselves.

Choosing your attitude, in a business setting, is vitally important. Times may be tough, work may be hard, but how you decide to deal with it is what will set you apart from your competitors. In recessionary times this is even more pertinent. Nobody wants to deal with a business who is projecting an aura of failure and abject depression.

I don't mind admitting that when I first started my business that I struggled to get to grips with this. Choosing your attitude is a skill, and like all skills they take practice before you can fully master it. You have to learn to focus on the positives (always), down play the negatives (always) and, most of all, get past your own emotional responses to situations. Much easier done if you are in a group of 137,000 doing exactly the same. Not quite so easy if you work alone.

There are many ways of doing this. I have worked hard at acquiring the language of positivity. Some people call it NLP, I just call it a much more pleasant way to talk to yourself. I no longer have problems or issues, just challenges. Failure is a learning  opportunity. I never have a bad day, just a day that was more challenging than others.

The rewards are worth it.

Imagine the possibilities if (and I'm going to be slightly controversial here) public sector workers accepted that the country had a finite amount of resources to work with and chose to approach this challenge with a positive attitude. Instead of unions, protests, disruption, stress and strikes, we'd have proactive solutions, positive rallys, focussed workforces and direction.

Businesses that are struggling in this recessionary climate should also take heed. Are you talking yourself into a situation of less customers, less income and less resources. It's a well known fact that the most successful entrepreneurs are those who view the world with abundance, and for whom opportunities exist at every twist and turn.

So tomorrow morning when you get ready for work, give some thought to how you are going to make it a good day. In fact, not just a good day, a great day. You will undoubtedly come up against challenges, but decide not to let them affect your great day. And see if you can taste the difference.

If you really believe that this is impossible, just look to Glastonbury for inspiration.