Your employee screws up. Let’s say your employees really messes up an assignment you’d given them. First, it’s key to consciously set aside any immediate emotional reactions you may have when you hear about or discover the screwup. Next, decide how you’re going to use this particular mistake as a teaching or training opportunity for your employee to learn something new. The end result? Your employee has become more valuable with the new knowledge and ability they’ve gained and will be able to apply it in future situations. The bonus is that you’ve kept your relationship with them intact by deciding to contain and redirect any negative emotions you have about what they did.

Factors outside of your control are affecting the operation. When factors out of our direct control – let’s say, weather, markets or government policy – begin to impact our farm in a negative way, we have a choice. We can decide to become angry and frustrated, or we can decide to make our operation better to withstand these challenges. The ultimate goal is creating an operation that’s good enough to survive and thrive despite the outside factors that are and will always be out of our direct control as farmers. This might mean internal improvements such as working on better efficiency in a couple key areas of your business, or spending more time working on risk management plans, including marketing and merchandising plans.

Unexpected challenges keep coming up in your operation. When a new challenge arises internally, consider it another opportunity to get better as an operation. Ultimately, having different, flexible ways of accomplishing your farming goals makes you less reliant on certain ways of doing things, which makes for a more agile and less risk-exposed operation. Having to change plans quickly can also be a blessing in disguise. Learning how to design a different way to accomplish a goal makes you a more creative thinker, which translates into more creativity in problem-solving in other areas of your operation.