Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Business Bonfire
As promised, here's the story. At my coaching course, I got some fantastic coaching from my fellow students. In one especially great experience, my coach helped me get through a huge block that has plagued me since I began my business.
I have always been excellent at following rules and making things work. I am very proficient at doing things efficiently and well. However, I don't enjoy it in the slightest. My favourite thing is making it up as I go along, relying on my ability and intuition, dancing in the moment with whatever comes up.
So I start this great program designed to help me become a big success in my self-employment journey, and immediately get plunged into this strange world of sales and marketing and networking and taxes and policies and trademarks and....basically, plenty of things to DO. Doing all this made me feel very competant and on top of things. In fact, I searched the internet for even more information about what to do and how to do it well.
Yet despite all I have done, I felt that I wasn't accomplishing much. It all seemed a bit empty and annoyingly corporate. I was able to see, through this inspired coaching, that it was because I was receiving advice focused on a goal that didn't interest me. I don't want my company to become the next McDonalds or IBM, and I certainly don't want to sell it off and make wads of cash.
It became abundantly clear that I needed to make a strong stand rejecting other people's views on the "right way" to be an entrepreneur. So I bundled up all of the handouts and flyers and notes I had made and took them down to the beach and burnt them. It took a surprisingly long time, and it turned into a great meditation on trust and freedom. When I left, because it started to snow, I felt so much stronger.
This is not to say that I don't need help; of course I do, and I ask for it all the time. But I need to trust my own instincts about what is important and take the next step that makes sense to me, even though it might appear crazy to a traditional business advisor.
Technorati tags: business coaching doing/being
I have always been excellent at following rules and making things work. I am very proficient at doing things efficiently and well. However, I don't enjoy it in the slightest. My favourite thing is making it up as I go along, relying on my ability and intuition, dancing in the moment with whatever comes up.
So I start this great program designed to help me become a big success in my self-employment journey, and immediately get plunged into this strange world of sales and marketing and networking and taxes and policies and trademarks and....basically, plenty of things to DO. Doing all this made me feel very competant and on top of things. In fact, I searched the internet for even more information about what to do and how to do it well.
Yet despite all I have done, I felt that I wasn't accomplishing much. It all seemed a bit empty and annoyingly corporate. I was able to see, through this inspired coaching, that it was because I was receiving advice focused on a goal that didn't interest me. I don't want my company to become the next McDonalds or IBM, and I certainly don't want to sell it off and make wads of cash.
It became abundantly clear that I needed to make a strong stand rejecting other people's views on the "right way" to be an entrepreneur. So I bundled up all of the handouts and flyers and notes I had made and took them down to the beach and burnt them. It took a surprisingly long time, and it turned into a great meditation on trust and freedom. When I left, because it started to snow, I felt so much stronger.
This is not to say that I don't need help; of course I do, and I ask for it all the time. But I need to trust my own instincts about what is important and take the next step that makes sense to me, even though it might appear crazy to a traditional business advisor.
Technorati tags: business coaching doing/being
Comments:
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I completely understand where you are coming from on this! You go girl. Create your own recipe for success.
That makes no sense at all! You destroyed anyway in which you could market yourself to others at the event. Word of mouth is crap, people like paper or business cards.
It does seem like you'll just have to redo all of that work at some point. I understand the impulse though. Not being a business type is probably the main reason more of us don't start our own businesses. It just seems like a lot of drudgery or else you'd have to hire someone to do all the boring, distasteful stuff for you. I'll be interested to see how you manage your business without that stuff... If it works it will be inspiring to say the least.
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