Building Personal Resilience – Lessons we can learn from the untimely death of CCD’s VG Siddhartha

The recent death of Mr. Siddhartha (founder of Café Coffee Day) has made me think on a very important subject that is related to resilience and possibly business continuity.

If you reflect deeply, building resilience in our personal life is just as important as building resilience and continuity in business but often we do not give a great deal of thought to it.

If you think about it, our life is the most important asset in the world, but how much time do we give to ourselves to build resilience in our personal life?

Let us understand the parallels between these two fields “Business Continuity” and “Personal Continuity “, if we may call it so. In business we put together a set of skills, products, in order to sell it to the customers, however we always know that at some point tragedy, disaster, can differently strike. In order to mitigate the risk of disaster and to be able to get out of it, to continue our business, we have Business Continuity Plans.

In case of our personal lives we do pretty much the same thing. We are building a business! As we grow up, we go to college, we get skills, we build an asset, we deliver services, we are the product, we deliver the product to our clients who are other people. We are indistinguishable from business. Why then don’t we build enough resilience to be able to overcome any disasters in our personal lives? Do we do it in a meticulous way in which businesses plan for disasters? Probably not.

In our life too we will be often be facing disasters and we need to plan adequately for continuity. I have known friends who had been very successful and had never tasted failure in their lives. When failure did strike, they were totally unprepared for it. Some of them even went to the extent attempting to commit suicide. Of course, this is a very sad occurrence but it also points to the fact that each one of us has the responsibility to plan for our own personal resilience.

When times are good, do we think about the bad times that it may be lurking around the corner?

Do we have plans to address the tragedies or disasters that might unfold?

Have we put the financial resources to manage the same?

Do we have backup plans?

Have we stored the details of our finances which can be retrieved easily like important documents?

These are some questions that we need to ask over selves.

There may be largely two major impacts of a disaster that may affect us:

1. Disaster may be very serious in nature and we may not survive it. Can the people depending on us continue?
2. The situation may be such that we may be able to come back and recover. In that case do we have the resources? Do we have that plans that ensure that we can bounce back?

There are many things that can be done in order to survive personal disaster. We need to ensure that we have all our records in place, we do adequate planning of our finances, we have emotional support, we have friends, we have society, we have some social connect rather than being isolated.

The other issue is about entrepreneurs like Mr. Siddhartha is that they tend to be isolated people trudging a lonely path as far as the business goes. Such individuals must find a way to cope with the failure. When we say cope with the failure it is not just about have financial support. It is also about the emotional support, it is also about family support, it is also about been taking adequate rest and vacations. Prevention is also a great aspect of business continuity.

We all need to build in lot of resilience into our lives in order to survive a disaster. It is sad to see a smart person like Mr. Siddhartha committing suicide, but tragedies could happen to anyone of us and we need to be prepared.

(Keith Prabhu is a Member of the Business Continuity Institute. He is a contributor to the BCI Good Practices Guide 2013. He has been a judge for the BCI Global BCM Awards. He is the Founder & CEO, Confidis, an organization that provides services in the domains of Business Continuity Management along with other services. For assistance in any of these domains, please write to us at: info AT confidis DOT co )