When plans unravel, resilience and adaptability become your greatest assets in building a thriving business. With over 20 years of experience, May Yeo Silvers exemplifies this as she shares actionable strategies for overcoming setbacks, staying grounded, and realigning goals to achieve both financial success and time freedom.
In the final part of her three-part series on strategic planning for 2025, May focuses on what to do when things don’t go as planned. She highlights the importance of setting intentional, detailed goals—covering financial targets and time management—to create a balanced foundation for both work and personal life.
How do you stay committed to your goals when progress feels slow or uncertain? May introduces the ABCDE framework from Martin Seligman’s book “Learned Optimism” to help entrepreneurs manage setbacks and maintain focus. This practical approach offers tools to shift negative beliefs, refine strategies, and stay on course.
Through personal stories and hard-earned insights, May explores the balance between ambition and well-being, showing how entrepreneurship is as much about mindset as it is about strategy. Can you truly define success without considering both financial freedom and time freedom? This episode challenges you to think differently, adapt boldly, and embrace the realities of the entrepreneurial journey.
Quotes
• “Do not be stuck in the ‘I want to make it perfect’ zone. If you work only in your head, nobody knows whether it’s perfect except you. But you are not the buyer. Your buyer will determine whether what you’re putting out there is going to attract people to pay for what you are selling. You are not the one buying; you are the one selling. So, you can’t use yourself as a gauge to decide whether it’s good enough to be on the market. You will only know once you put it out there, collect data, and gather feedback.” (08:22 | May Yeo Silvers)
• “You cannot tell yourself that you expect this outcome in the first month, second month, or third month. You have a goal but you cannot be so rigid that when the outcome or the result is not what you expected, you get discouraged. It can go both ways: the outcome could be better than what you expect, or it can be less than what you expect. Do not attach any meaning to the outcome. It’s just an outcome.” (15:44 | May Yeo Silvers)
• “Time is the most expensive resource that we cannot get back.” (48:15 | May Yeo Silvers)
• “Whose happiness is most important? Your happiness. And your happiness is created by you, not given to you by these people. You need to remember that. Your happiness and your fulfillment is created by you, not to be given to you by all these people.” (56:10 | May Yeo Silvers)
Links
If you have invested time and money in learning the “what to” and “how to” for your events business, BUT you still feel like “something” is missing to catapult your business, perhaps having a supportive community of EVENTrepreneurs where you can bounce off ideas, seek advice from and get emotional support to cheer you on your EVENTrepreneur journey is the missing link.
Inside our Unstoppable EVENTrepreneur Live Support Community, we have Eventrepreneurs at different stages of their business and we share business strategies, event experiences etc so you don’t make costly mistakes and learn from those who have been there and done that. Hear from these EVENTrepreneurs the ups and downs of being a business owner so you don’t feel so lonely on this journey! Click on this link to learn more about the EVENTrepreneur LIVE SUPPORT Community.
Connect with May at: [email protected]
Website: www.mayyeosilvers.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayyeosilvers/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mayyeosilvers
IG: www.instagram.com/mayyeosilvers
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mayyeosilversofficial
FB private group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/events4anyone
