It’s time to share my story

Welcome to the new normal. It’s a strange place, where we don’t know what comes next, where we take two steps forward and one step back, where things don’t add up the way they used to. But it’s what’s in front of us, so we have to deal with it.

Finding the inner resources to do that has been the story of my lockdown. But it also led me to some profound realisations about myself and about the way I live and work in the world.

Here’s what happened …

In early March, before shops and offices closed and roads became eerily empty, work was business as usual. We were delivering a lot of value to our client base – in digital marketing, social media, driving promotions – and while we’ve got clients in America and Europe, focusing on the local market was really starting to pay dividends.

Then everything fell off a cliff. When lockdown happened, I had a couple of hours where I was just like, what the hell am I going to do? I broke down. People were thinking it would just be for a short time, but I’m trained to look 18 or 24 months ahead, and I was already thinking that there’s going to be a recovery period and a transition period, so 2020 is over. Over.

By the last week of March all my clients had gone. I remember the phone call from my last big client, who was a massive percentage of my business. He simply said, “We’re going to have to stop your services,” and that was it. Now there was no business, no turnover, and the last invoice went out a few days later.

Mentally, I was really in a bad place. People were ringing me and looking for positivity, and I would give it to them then put the phone down and crash, every time. And I felt alone and, like millions of others, trapped by COVID-19 in a house that became a prison. We were all incarcerated.

My instinct was to find routine and structure to get me through it, so even on days when I was really low I’d haul myself out of the house to walk. I was just after exercise, but I discovered that walking made me think a lot, about my life and who I am and what I had and hadn’t achieved and what was positive and negative. I realised I’d not spent enough time with those closest to me – they’d had to work around my work and I’d never achieved a good balance. I remembered feeling guilty about making the effort to pick my daughter up from nursery. My own daughter!

Gradually the walking made me feel stronger, mentally and physically, and the walk became a faster walk, a walk with a backpack full of weights, and finally a run. I started to breathe better, my brain started to work better, I felt more energised.

Then came the last weekend in May, when everything really changed. I’m a single parent with a teenage son and a four-year-old daughter who comes to me every Thursday morning to Sunday. I was still in a dark place and I remember thinking, “Dude, you’re going to have to snap out of this or you’re going to have a breakdown.” My daughter was a bit clingy, so I was focusing a lot on her at the same time that I was thinking about what I needed to do workwise and the best way to go about it.

Somehow that combination was really fruitful. I felt needed. Not only by my daughter, but by all the people calling me for help and reassurance and confidence and positivity. And I realised that meant I had a business right there, something I could build on. I didn’t need to be with people for a whole day, or even half a day, but could talk to them for 45 minutes or an hour and make a real difference. I needed to take care of myself, focus on things I could control, on the positives, not the negatives, and get ready to move forward.

I saw something else, too: people were calling me, Stephen Balmer-Walters, not 8rc, the agency. That was a big wake-up call. I was talking to individuals, not just businesses. Entrepreneurs and professionals and university graduates. Some had a business or were thinking about starting one, some just needed some help mentally to get into the right space. But whereas I’d been really anxious before to build a brand, and so I used the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ a lot, now I, one person, would become the brand.

And that’s freeing. I could be the real me, not some ‘formal me’ but the full me who’s able to help people in business, to enable people to get their mindset in the right place.

Who is this ‘full me’? I’ll tell you.

• I am Stephen Balmer-Walters.

• I am a black man.

• I am 50 years old and a parent of two children.

• I am a businessman and mentor.

• I have worked in manufacturing and merchandising in several sectors.

• I own my own business.

• I have a long, long list of valuable experiences and insights to share.

• I am ready to share my story.

It’s that simple, but I’ve never been ready before. Successful 50-year-old black businessmen are pretty invisible, crowded out by lazy stereotypes of black men as sports stars, rappers and criminals. So it’s time to change, to share my stories on this blog, to enrich and inspire people, to help them develop in business and in life.

Lockdown was a catalyst for me, and I hope this blog can be a catalyst for you.

We know what’s in front of us. Now we have to deal with it.