#extremely distressing and causes very genuine anguish. this post is not me making light of it it's just a funny thing that happened once | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

leowenila · 5 years

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God Bless The Broken Road- Part Seven

Hello! Originally I had planned on writing a very detailed scene about the moment Christopher was born and Amelia’s short time with him but while I wrote it, the part didn’t feel genuine to me and a story I would much rather share as a one-shot eventually if anyone is interested. So instead I began to write this chapter and the words just continued to flow out and I couldn’t stop writing until it was finished! Sorry for how long this chapter is, I hope it makes sense and that you enjoy! NEXT PART IS THE LAST PART!!

Heavy droplets of a rain and snow mix poured from the dark and grey clouds, landing on the windshield of Owen’s truck as he pulled in the driveway of his mother’s house she offered for the couple to stay at for as long the brunette needed to have a more comforting recovery from the birth of her son. After turning off the engine and ejecting his keys, the trauma surgeon released his warm hand from her colds and casually walked over to the other side of the vehicle. Where a broken version of his girlfriend continued to sit. Coming out from her constant gaze out the window, Amelia grasped onto Owen’s stretched out hand and allowed him to walk her into the home. Walking in front of her, he unlocked the door with the keys his mother had given him and guided Amelia to the giant couch in the living room. Seeing Amelia sit down on the couch, he gently kissed her on the cheek before walking into the kitchen to make her a cup of her favorite flavor of tea, as he waited for it to steep he removed his brown leather jacket onto the coat rack and threw his keys on the kitchen island. From afar sat Amelia with her hand resting on her empty stomach, mirroring the time she first felt her baby boy for the first time, two days before Christmas.

”Here you go, Mia. It’s your favorite. Do you want to keep your coat on or would you like me to place it with the others?” Owen questioned her, to pull her out of the current thoughts she had been having. Hearing his question Amelia removed her hand from her post-partpartum belly and studied his face. Not speaking a single word, the brunette carefully leaned forward for him to remove her jacket for her, praying not to inflict any more unbearable pain to what she was already feeling. Placing a blanket on top of her, the trauma surgeon handed the love of his life a maroon mug filled with the warm tea and walked off into the distance.

As he stood by the large front window for a few moments, watching the weather fall onto the ground he suddenly heard the shattering of glass and sprinted over to the living room. Maroon colored glass covered the floor underneath Amelia and a giant brown spot beginning to spread across the wool blanket that was still on top of her body, Owen pieced together the story in his mind before the neurosurgeon began to speak for the first time since they left the hospital.

“I’m sorry O. I was trying to put the mug on the table and it slipped out of my hands...” Amelia began to explain before Owen walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her frame without getting near the shattered glass below them in hopes to relieve her anxiety. With no tears falling out of her eyes but emotions building, he rubbed her cheeks and kissed her softly, wondering when the moment would finally come that the young neurosurgeon to expel her tears.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. It was just an accident. Stains are washable and it was only a mug. I’ll throw the blanket into the laundry than clean this glass up while you take a bath, okay?”

Amelia simply nodded as he took her hand and carefully lead her upstairs to the bathroom. As soon as they reached the top, he sat Amelia down on Evelyn’s vanity stool near the bathtub and turned the water. Remaining eye contact on Amelia, he placed his hand under the tap to ensure the water was not too warm or not too cold, but knew without a doubt that his girlfriend would not be happy with water not being as boiling as she enjoyed warm temperatures. Having a silent conversation with one another as soon as both of their set of eyes landed on her long sleeve shirt, Owen carefully unbuttoned the buttons without touching Amelia’s still swollen belly and moved upwards to unclasped her black bra. After most of her garments were removed, the trauma surgeon remained in his kneeling position for his girlfriend to use as his strong back for support as she removed her dark colored loose fitting lounge pants and stepped into the tub.

Rearranging her body multiple times to find the most comfortable position, Amelia leaned back in the oval-shaped tub and allowed the water to soak her tired and weak body. Owen sighed to himself as he watched his girlfriend settle into the tub before he got up and removed a small towel from the closet to soak it in extremely warm water from the sink and gently placed it across Amelia’s forehead. Noticing her facial structure relax from the touch of the cloth on her forehead, Owen exited the room to go downstairs and clean up the mess. He swept up the bigger pieces and vacuumed the tiny pieces left of the mug before he turned off the downstairs lights and grabbed the tea stained blanket to place in the washer in the laundry room. Keeping his mind on the task at hand, he couldn’t help but hear the muffled sobs coming from where he left only ten minutes ago.

As if on a switch, sobs wrecked through her body as every single emotion that were buried deep inside of her soul for the entire length of her pregnancy, unexpectedly released. Tears poured out of her blue shaded eyes like waterfalls and her voice became raspy as she cried loudly. Owen ran into the bathroom to find Amelia’s face resting on the wall beside her as she hysterically sobbed. Without a moment to think; Owen lifted her bridal style out of the tub onto the floor and wrapped a towel around her as she continued to sob in his arms.

An hour had passed as the two continued to sit on the bathroom tile together before a few sniffles escaped from Amelia’s nose as a sign of her emotions settling down. Bringing her to her feet, Owen asked Amelia as she began to shiver if she wanted to get ready for bed and received a nod in reply to his question. Opening the one of the three suitcases on the giant bed in the master bedroom he had packed, Owen grabbed his oversized Harvard shirt he knew Amelia loved and a pair of her lounge pants. After he carefully helped her dress, the brunette laid on the right side of the bed as she watched the trauma surgeon change into a black T-shirt and navy blue boxer briefs before laying beside his girlfriend. Without saying a word Amelia placed her tear stained face on Owen’s chest near his heart and created a wet spot from the silent tears continuously streaming out from her eyes. The brunette played with the hem of the redhead’s shirt in attempt to not becoming too emotional.

“I was someone’s mom, Owen. Christopher was my son.” Amelia said, breaking the silence between the two of them. Soon before he began to speak, Owen heard several sniffles coming from her.

“You’re still Christopher’s mom, ‘Melia, He’s just not here anymore.”

That night was just one of the several nights that caused the brunette unbelievable anguish of remembering her baby boy being taken from her arms after he showed signs of distress and wishing that could have had more time with him. Completely and totally broken.

But just her father taught her when she was only three years old on their family vacation and similar to how Derek reminded her when she was twelve years old after buying her the special stuffed toy, Amelia firmly believed that; unicorns are magical creatures that do great things- her baby boy, Christopher Ryan Shepherd-Kerrigan was her Unicorn Baby. That did a countless amount of great things in just the forty three minutes he lived on this planet.

#greys anatomy #omelia #amelia shepherd #owen hunt #amelia and owen #owen and amelia #omelia fanfiction #omeliafics #private practice

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cybersummit · 3 years

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Our Important Techniques That Can Really Increase Your Business Resilience

Concerned about your company stopping working due to COVID-19? Resilience is critical for business owners today, and it will prove to be a key dimension for measuring success over the next decade. Here are three potent techniques to build continuity planning into your company to get rid of and make it through 2020 and beyond.

Strategies to Make Your Business Resilient

Anxious About The Future? Rest Easy!

In this series, I will show you how to safeguard your business and credibility against the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and go over a few of the practices, programs, resources, and techniques that are readily available to small business owners, soloprenuers, and gig economy employees.

Business Continuity and Resilience Planning

In this post, I'm going to discuss what "business resilience" implies and why it's crucial to get management in your company concentrating on business continuity planning prior to an emergency.

I'll also propose 3 agile methods for constructing resilience into your company now that might assist your business endure the next worldwide pandemic.

Twenty-twenty will definitely decrease as one of the hardest years many of us have actually dealt with in our lifetimes. For me, 2019 was right up there. I lost my papa, my pet dog, and a new service within the latter 6 months of the year.

Geopolitics, financial downturns, and many other elements can have significant results on your functional capabilities and efficiency.

Customer spending in the United States fell by ~ 20% throughout the very first two months of Coronavirus's speeding up spread, according to the US Department of Commerce, while the pandemic also disrupted ~ 75% of supply chains, according to the Institute for Supply Chain Management.

Economic Disruption and Natural Disasters?

Even before COVID-19, lots of services were struggling to prepare for, react to, resume speed and keep pace with technological change.

Sarah Bond and Gillian Shapiro of the Harvard Business Review performed a survey of 835 employees from public, personal, and not-for-profit companies about what was occurring in their lives that required resilience. What did they figure out? They didn't indicate disasters or the economy-- they pointed to business culture and their colleagues.

Social Dynamics Caused the Biggest Drain

Comprehending that, in times like these, the secret to moving on is thinking favorable (albeit challenging), and ending up being durable. While I've been dealing with my own individual resilience, I've also been working hard to make sure that my relationships, my other business, and my neighborhood and environment, are gotten ready for unforeseen difficulties and hardship.

As Diane Coutu reports in "How Resilience Works":

You can bounce back from challenge with simply one or two of these qualities, but you will just be genuinely resistant with all three. These 3 characteristics hold true for resistant organizations as well ... Resilient people and companies deal with reality with staunchness, make significance of difficulty instead of crying out in anguish, and improvise services from thin air.

Why is resilience in business crucial?

When others are failing, it indicates your company makes it through-- or even grows--.

Resilience Reduces Stress

Resilience is a term typically utilized in psychology to describe "the procedure of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, disaster, risks or considerable sources of tension."

Establishing an Increased Capacity to Identify Additional Sources of Stress Builds Resilience

For individuals, resilience indicates you recover (instead of falling apart) after a crisis (like relationship difficulties, health problems, work conflicts, or financial setbacks).

Resilience will not eliminate danger or solve your issues, but it can provide you the chance (and clarity) to see past them while better managing your tension levels.

Resilience Planning Recession-Proofs your Business

Miriam Webster defines resilience as the "ability to recover from or change easily to misfortune or change."

SearchCIO extends this meaning, keeping in mind that "business resilience is the capability an organization needs to quickly adjust to disturbances while keeping constant service operations and protecting individuals, possessions and overall brand equity."

Business resilience planning is also often described as business continuity planning , and is an assessment of the sustainability of a given organization.

In the past, I taught week-long courses to skilled Fortune 100 organizations and their executives on catastrophe healing and center and business continuity planning in the enterprise, with a more comprehensive focus on details, computer, and network security.

For these companies, business resilience indicates carrying out digital systems and processes to ensure business continuity, while offering product and services that remain (or ended up being) desirable in the face of global events, financial instability, or dangers to a service's core operations.

" In the face of a crisis or financial slowdown, resistant companies ride out uncertainty rather of being subdued by it."-- McKinsey Quarterly

During the last downturn, McKinsey & Company traced the paths of more than 1,000 openly traded companies in various markets and with various maturity designs, and discovered that just about 10 percent of those companies fared materially better than the rest.

While the last slump was extreme, some business flourished in spite of present dangers

They found some intriguing parallels in how sustainable companies would weather a storm: how they got ready for them, how they acted throughout tougher phases, and how they came out of them.

With most of these organizations relying greatly on information, analytics, and automation, it ended up being clear that digital technologies will prove to be a significantly vital component of business resilience tomorrow.

Still, one core insight prevailed: the business that made it through-- those that showed real resilience-- moved early, ahead of the slump. They started preparing early, their numbers dipped less, and they came out on top.

" When the economy started heading south, what differentiated [them] was revenues, not revenue. By the time the decline reached its trough in 2009, the earnings, determined as revenues before interest, taxes, devaluation, and amortization (EBITDA), of [these business] had increased by 10 percent, while market peers had actually lost almost 15 percent." A resistant business responds quickly to tackle crises, recovers from difficulty so that it can surpass its competitors, and transforms itself to remain ahead of peers in the future.

In the past four downturns since 1985, only about one in 7 business increased both its sales development rate and its earnings margins, according to a 2019 BCG research study. These companies grew sales by 14% more and enhanced their margins by 7% more than the 44% of business in distress that declined on both criteria.

" A business requires to embed resilience in every element of the company, from its go-to-market approach to its operations to its most crucial facilities. Vulnerabilities in any location might impact the business's capability to prosper and survive," says BCG.

The 3 Fastest Ways to Make Your Business Resilient

In their research study, McKinsey & Co identified 3 core strategies that assisted these business avoid downtime and develop this revenues advantage:

They created a safety buffer by cleaning up their balance sheets before the dip A lot of companies cut costs ahead of the curve They focused on growth, even if it suggested sustaining costs

While useful, these techniques can be a bit tough for smaller companies to do something about it on. So, for maximum impact, my goal in this post is to cover 3 strategies that leaders at the majority of business will find:

simple to understand, ( reasonably) simple to carry out, and repeatable across different verticals.

It is this mix of elements that makes these strategies effective for creating business continuity. And proven methods can help in reducing the sources of stress that test your resilience in the very first location.

The 3 techniques that match all of these elements are:

Repeating Revenues Productized Service Offerings Automated Client Acquisition

Strategy 1: Recurring Revenues beget Business Continuity

While this very first method might seem a little "on the nose," the reality is that a number of you are running pure service organizations that count on you to repeatedly "offer" every job to each and every client, each and every time they require your help (I understand since I asked).

When you change to a recurring design, you're automating the continuation of a service over a period of time (be it every month, quarter, or week), and with it, increasing your CLV (consumer lifetime worth).

Understanding that, it's easy to comprehend why automating recurring earnings is one of the most effective ways to produce resilience in your service, despite your service model, and it's a technique everybody need to consider.

It may not be as easy as simply altering your billing frequency however, because clients will require an inspiration to transfer to a recurring payment model.

You'll have to adjust your prices, use annual or quarterly discount rates for innovative renewal, and productize your service offerings to make it easier for clients to understand what they're purchasing, and why they ought to pay in advance.

Which brings us to technique 2 ...

Strategy 2: Productize Your Service Offerings, Now!

Stop Trading Time for Money Whether you're making a living as a freelancer or consultant, or running a traditional "service business," you are trading your hours for dollars. Your service likely still depends on project-to-project earnings to keep the lights on if you have a a group.

Even when your consulting business is prospering, you still only have a lot time to exchange for money. This makes it very difficult to scale, and is a huge factor a lot of service business are not resistant.

While service businesses are arguably the simplest to begin (and can be some of the most lucrative, at scale), they're also typically the most difficult and expensive to grow.

To have the ability to keep growing as you quickly adapt, you need to:

constantly find, educate, and transform brand-new customer leads, thoroughly certify those cause sell them high-ticket offerings, constantly handle new customers, even when your skills and time are restricted.

By productizing your service offerings, you can reduce your sales cycles while automating 80% of the acquisition and certification processes.

What does it mean to productize your service offerings?

From your client's perspective, it most often implies a "done for you" solution with a strong worth proposition at a set rate and with a predefined scope.

From a company owner's viewpoint, a productized service is one that runs systematically, scales geometrically, and continues to grow and produce incomes with or without your consistent care and feeding. That is how you construct resilience into a service company and grow as your rivals flail.

To be successful in productizing your business, you don't require to provide more services, you just require to use better ones.

Technique 3: Automate Your Client Acquisition

The last strategy, and the one that increases the efficiency of both of the previous strategies, is that of client acquisition automation.

In basic, there are 3 distinct stages of customer acquisition, each of which can generally be enhanced with automation:

Preliminary Lead Generation Thorough Lead Qualification Ongoing Lead Segmentation

By automating each of these 3 stages, you create a "funnel," where numerous thousands (or perhaps millions) of prospective prospects enter into the top of the funnel, and as you tactically qualify, segment and nurture those prospects, hot leads come out the bottom, prepared to buy your repeating, productized service( s).

This is the essence of what the marketing world describes as a "sales funnel," and we'll enter into more information on each of these phases in the 3rd installment.

This post is intentionally light on strategies and heavy on technique, and it's indicated to make you think of what you've been doing up to now.

Throughout the remainder of this series, my objective will be to help you create resilience by guaranteeing your organization:

Exists in a growing market Concentrate on repeating earnings Does not count on loopholes Automates numerous human activities Concentrate on high ticket sales Delivers results quick

Whether you know it or not, resilience is the key to longevity, scalability, and eventually, the success of your company.

Does your service have a recurring revenue stream?

Are your services already productized?

Are you utilizing systems to automate your customer acquisition?

Do you have an excellent foundation to develop resilience in your company?

Resilience is top of mind for business owners today, and it will prove to be an essential dimension for determining success over the next years. Here are 3 powerful techniques to develop resilience planning into your business to endure and conquer 2020 and beyond.

I lost my dad, my pet dog, and a new organization within the latter 6 months of the year.

Sarah Bond and Gillian Shapiro of the Harvard Business Review carried out a survey of 835 employees from public, personal, and not-for-profit firms about what was happening in their lives that needed resilience. These 3 attributes hold real for durable companies as well ... Resilient individuals and business face reality with staunchness, make significance of challenge instead of weeping out in despair, and improvise services from thin air.

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