Remarkable. Creative. Successful. Upmarket businesses push the envelope -- does yours?
Molly Gordon is the owner of Shaboom Inc., a company devoted to helping Accidental Entrepreneurs who are allergic to business develop the skills they need to prosper. She’s an artist, writer, marketing consultant, and coach -- as well as a paddle-boarder, cyclist, singer, and grandmother. She lives in Suquamish, Washington with her husband, two hens, and Bolivia the Wonder Cat. Molly blogs at http://www.shaboominc.com/blog, where you can also sign up for her weekly ezine, Authentic Promotion.
The most common objections I hear about getting organized, planning, and de-cluttering is that such order is at odds with creativity. But there’s a huge difference between building a fire in a fire pit and triggering a wildfire. Understanding that difference will help you find the right level of organization for your creative process.
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with lists, especially those that claim to contain the secrets to success. That said, I’ve been reflecting for several weeks on what I could say about succeeding in life and business that would be generally true, widely applicable, broadly useful. What do I know about being successful that might possibly hold still long enough for me to get it into words without deteriorating into self-help pablum?
We do not have to do everything on our to do lists any more than we would have to eat everything at a buffet. Accepting that we can not do it all is part of the pleasure of acknowledging the wealth of opportunity before us.
In the fog or darkness of our lives, we have to stop looking outside for answers. We must stop struggling to see what is obscured and turn our gaze inward, attending to another source of information and guidance.
A “have-to belief” is a way of understanding that resonates so deeply with your sense of purpose, meaning, and service that you willingly embrace it and subordinate your choices to it. A “have-to belief” is one that you hold with conscious commitment and self-reflective awareness, knowing that it is a belief (not a fact) and being responsible for the ways this belief endows your life with meaning, purpose, and focus.
Without experience and feedback, it’s hard to know if you’re doing your work right. If you have what it takes to succeed. You feel clumsy and ill-suited to the business side of self-employment. You feel out of your depth. But you could be mistaken.
The difference between a really great juggler and a poor juggler is that the great one integrates failure into her performance. No apology. No scrambling to recover. Just a fluid, flexible adjustment to the new reality. And when things really go catawampus? Instead of freaking out, they take a bow.
If you’ve ever talked yourself into buying a pair of shoes that don’t fit, you know the consequences of bright shiny object marketing.
You may have created your own definition of success. Yet you may still be subject to and struggling against the definition that prevails in the culture around you. When that happens, your definition of success and the culture’s definition fight each other-and your heart, mind, and business are battlefields.
