Advice from my mum & Isaac Newton for your tourism business

Hibernation or regeneration?
 
As the nights darken and temperatures drop I think we’re all starting to feel ready for hibernation. At this time of year many of us normally feel jaded and ready to retreat from the world for a little while. This year has been extra ‘special’.
 
There's no wonder so many of us feel tired, frustrated, confused, unsure what’s going to happen next.
 
Time to make a choice. Hibernate until Spring. Or use this time to regenerate. Retreat a little, but also plan exactly how you’ll bounce back when it’s time.
 
Like many I’ve started to mull over what might happen next, how Winter will feel when we can’t see our loved ones or work in the way we’d like.

It's easy to get down-hearted, but I’ve started to feel much better since I decided to expect the worse and plan what to do. That probably sounds counter-intuitive. It's based on a childhood lesson from my mum.
 
We used to have to walk about a mile up a very steep hill home from school each day. The kind of hill that’s so steep and long you can’t see the summit from the bottom. Standing at the bottom, our skinny little legs ached at the very thought of the climb. But our mum didn’t allow us to moan. Her answer to climbing a steep hill or facing any difficulty was always the same: get on with it and it’ll soon be over. That’s stuck with me. I still walk up hills as quickly as I can.
 
So, back to the present and Covid. Hibernation or regeneration?
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I see a steep hill ahead: another lockdown, and months before we can welcome back visitors in any normal way. But I’m also trying to keep my eye on the hard-to-see summit. We’ll get there – we just need a plan.
 
I’m planning to combine the cosiness of hibernation – cosy fires, blankets, and a little retreating from the world – with some regeneration. Once again we’re going to have some time on our hands.
 
This is a really good time to do all those things we’ve not really got round to doing:

• Sort out all the mailing lists, clean them, re-focus them, think about the best way to use them
• Create the best ever image library so social media, web work and journalist requests are much easier. Label every image and sort them so it’s much quicker to find the right one. Work out which additional images are needed
• Think about all the words and images on the website. What needs to be done to improve them?
• Get to grips with all the software I pay for but don’t fully use, and watch all the tutorials so I feel really confident about using it to its full capacity

 
We might not be able to generate as much income as we’d like right now but all this activity will make it much easier to recoup later.
 
And if my mother’s advice isn’t enough for you, you might like to take additional inspiration from Isaac Newton. He retreated to his country home and garden during the 1665-66 Plague Year. Newton made pretty good use of his time there: he invented Calculus, discovered that white light is made up of every colour, and wrote his theory about gravity after seeing apples fall from the trees in his garden.
 
So who knows what incredible progress you might make between now and Spring? As my mum would tell you, you don't really have much choice so you might as well just get on with it...

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