Career Coaching Blog

More and more I find myself quoting what I’ve learned from my book, Scrappy Startups to my clients.  I had hoped that my book would inspire people to create their own businesses and I’m finding that is true .

What can be more inspiring to people serious considering a start up business of their own than to hear how others have done this?  After all, when we begin to let ourselves dream about the possibilities of a business, the glow of creation is often followed by the slam of the gremlin voice telling us how what we were thinking was actually rather ridiculous.  I wrote earlier about the various ways in which this reluctant part of us tries to do us in when we make moves towards something new.

But today I want to talk about the inspiration side of things:  How the actual way in which someone just like us has made the dream in her heart a reality.  After all, if another person has been successful at doing something, it’s an indication that we too can do that act as well.  Interestingly, NLP – neuro-linguistic-programming, a process that allows us to find strategies for success was created from studying the success of outstanding therapists such as Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls.  If a whole industry can grow up around the notion that one person’s success can lead to another’s, surely we can apply this notion to successful entrepreneurship.

One of the amazing issues I uncovered from the women I interviewed while writing Scrappy Startups is that just about every one of them did not think about the money they were going to make when they had successful businesses.  They were more oriented towards the creativity that their business was unleashing in them and the good works they were putting out in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, these were not saints; they were ordinary human beings who had to make a living, but they found perhaps almost by happenstance, that money was simply the by-product of doing something they could put their heart and soul into.  And with the advent of the Internet and more ways to reach a market, whatever they had created had a better chance of reaching the very people who would want what they were putting out into the world.

The trick for each of them was to find something they really, really, really wanted to do and pursue it with gusto.  How did they find what they really wanted to do?  Some got quiet and listened to their inner nudges, others looked for gaps in their community, still others came upon their venture through the good fortune of being exposed to the opportunity through someone else.  Above all, these entrepreneurs were engaged in their lives, their communities, their needs and those needs of the people around them and from that arose the seeds of their ventures.

I like to call this keeping your antennae up – being almost hypervigilant about what’s around you – intensifying your senses and paying attention, almost as if your life depended on it.

So if you are wondering what you are going to do to fully express yourself in the world, put less attention on the fret that you haven’t found what that is yet and more attention on observing the world around you – look for gaps, look for opportunities, look for inspiration. Consider what you find yourself complaining that someone should do something about – you may just stumble on your own scrappy startup opportunity – and the world will be better for it.

Thanks for paying attention here,

Melanie

Tags: business, career change, career development, career exploration, career transition, careers, coaching, entrepreneur, life style, lifestyle, personal development, personal growth, personal transformation, reinventing self, self-development, solopreneur, starting over