Every year, the same story repeats itself in the autumn: first the harvest sprint, then comes the vinification period, and then the launch of the new wines, the holiday season, etc. As a winegrower, I’m sure you know this by heart. What a crazy race that, with each season, finds a new excuse to get back on track and never give you the slightest respite. Producing a good wine takes time. So why do so many professionals work in a permanent rush? In this article, I reveal the secret of the rare winemakers who have the time… because they just create it.
The expert syndrome
What is the current situation of many winegrowers?
As soon as we try to contact them, wine, Champagne or Premium spirits professionals give us the same answer: they don’t have the time!
They are caught up in a spiral of repetitive tasks that follow one another at an infernal pace. Nothing surprising, they suffer from the expert syndrome: “only they know, only they can do … “There is no arrogance here, but the irrepressible need to master everything… Very often, these professionals have suffered a setback that has seriously affected them, whether it is a climatic disaster, a health problem or a divorce.
Those who survive for 20 years in such a situation must be as strong as Rambo or Lara Croft! Better to laugh about it, isn’t it? Forgive me if I’m blunt, but telling it like it is helps to tackle the difficulties in depth.
Even today, when the usual procession of fairs has been cancelled by the health crisis, most winegrowers still don’t have time. For a long time I’ve thought that it was a question of organization and delegation. These are of course essential subjects, but they only scratch the surface of the problem.
Compensating for anxiety
By dint of accompanying winegrowers in their commercial development, I have understood what drives them to drown in this daily hyperactivity. They are anxious. Often in a diffuse and unconscious way. But they carry within them a nagging anxiety that they try to muzzle by taking a multitude of actions that are as disorganized as they are ineffective.
They have a constant feeling of urgency that leads them to create their own vicious circle: the more they are afraid, the more they jump from one file to another without going into detail, thus generating more anxiety. Finding a restaurateur or a wine merchant, opening a bed and breakfast, organizing a drive-in in a few days to cope with the lock-down, convincing an importer, trying to sell online when the website is not working well, etc.
They get very poor results and exhaust themselves trying to do too much. How many wine professionals don’t sleep at night anymore?
A tough round of constraints
In reality, and this is the secret I wanted to share here, such anxiety is akin to post-traumatic stress.
Actually, the wine industry has been under many attacks over the last few decades: administrative constraints, salary constraints, legislative constraints, climatic constraints and the latest to date, the health constraints linked to the Covid-19.
Anxiety has set in over time. It requires a long-term adaptation, a reaction which is not punctual but permanent. This succession of overly strong emotions creates the symptoms of post-traumatic stress and leaves its imprint on exhausted bodies.
Have you been running after time for years without being able to settle down? It’s probably because you suffer from excessive anxiety related to an overly restrictive professional environment.
So, how can you free yourself from it?
Put an end to stress
I propose what I call a “physical cleansing” of your past stress in order to regain serenity and to be able to take the right actions in the present. So that in the future, you can concentrate on the 20% of these actions that generate 80% of your results (and not the other way around!) So that you can define and adopt a clear strategy that will allow you to be successful.
To meet the demand of many professionals in the field, I have called upon a certified Canadian therapist and created two new modules in our club20:
- A “Sleep Well” module offering a simple solution to get back to sleep in a few days, without any medication;
- A “physically healing from excess stress” module, with a series of basic body exercises, without any psychoanalysis.
This is a useful preamble to any positive change.
Would you like to go further?
What if we discussed your commercial situation and your sales outlooks in France and through export?
Make an appointment today for a strategic session. This link gives you direct access to my agenda.
Post-traumatic stress… Some will say that the term is excessive. But recognizing the difficulty means starting to address it. Although wine professionals have been terribly mistreated in recent years, no union, no inter-professional organization is posing the problem from this angle. What do you think about this?
See you soon!
Cheers,
Galatée