How to Get the Business You Desire as an Entrepreneur
Leslie Hassler, Small Business Scaling Strategist??
Unlocking Freedom | Creating Predictable Profits to Grow and Scale Your Business | 1:1 Consulting | Profitable Growth Incubator | Speaker | GS10KSB Alumni | Author of "First This, Then That" and "Scaling Rich?"
Summary: As you continue on your entrepreneurial path, ensuring that your business thrives and aligns with your deepest aspirations and desires is crucial. This journey is about more than just success in traditional terms. It's about shaping a journey that resonates with your values, brings you joy, and fulfills your unique vision.
Let’s explore strategies to fine-tune your business direction, ensuring it mirrors the business you desire. We'll offer actionable insights to help you align your business priorities with your core desires, enhancing your satisfaction and business success. Join us as we navigate the steps to mold your ongoing venture into one that truly reflects your aspirations and drives.
The Importance of Desire in Your Business
In every successful business lies a powerful desire more profound than surface-level wants. Digging deep to uncover what genuinely motivates you is the name of the game. This core desire influences your choices, directs your goals, and plays a big role in how happy and satisfied you feel with your business. When your business accurately reflects your true desires, it thrives, infusing every day with excitement and satisfaction, bringing you closer to the business you desire.
Let's consider Marcia Baczynski's perspective. Marcia is a sex educator, relationship coach, author, and owner of Asking for What You Want (https://askingforwhatyouwant.com ). You're probably going, wow, what are we talking about? What do sex education and relationships have to do with business? Well, a lot. I was at a conference with Marcia a few months before I interviewed her, and she talked about this concept of desire.?
As you can imagine, her work intimately helps people rekindle and acknowledge desire. Not only is she a sex educator and relationship coach, but she is also a business owner and can offer a unique perspective on desire in business. "It's really easy to lose touch with why we started our business in the first place and what it is we want it to do for us. We get caught up in the day-to-day operations and the pursuit of financial goals and sometimes forget the core spark that motivated us to begin our journey. It's crucial to reconnect with that initial desire to ensure our business grows, aligns with our personal vision, and brings us genuine joy."?
By keeping this foundational spark alive, you ensure that every aspect of your business aligns with the business you desire, reinforcing the significance of staying true to your initial motivations.?
Overcoming Misalignment Challenges: Path to the Business You Desire
Many entrepreneurs grapple with a profound sense of disconnection when their business endeavors fail to align with their deeper aspirations, leading to a cycle of frustration and burnout. Have you ever taken a moment to reflect on your achievements, only to be struck by a poignant realization that whispers, "Despite all my hard work and success, why does my business still feel so distant from the dreams I once pursued?"
Imagine trying to reach the finish line in a race, but you're running on a treadmill — no matter how fast you go, you're not progressing toward your goal. That's the frustration you feel when your business isn't aligned with your desires.?
Progress is slow, efforts seem wasted, and you might feel like you are floating without direction. This misalignment can blur your vision for the future, zap your drive, and leave you feeling lost.
In order to address this, it's important to consider where your business stands versus where you would like to see it. Think about what's off track and what changes you need to make. Adjusting your business to align with the business you desire sets your direction right, so every decision and action moves you closer to your dream business, reigniting your passion and pushing your business forward.
A Personal Journey to Realignment:
Let's dive back into Marcia’s story, “When you're the business owner, you're ultimately responsible for your business and the life that you're setting up for yourself. In sexuality, you're ultimately responsible for your sex life and your sexuality. I tie these things together - taking responsibility for what you want and learning from the people around you.”?
“To clarify, you need to get ideas from the people around you, but ultimately, you must captain your own ship. This is crucial in business because there's so much aspirational marketing out there designed to make us feel insecure about our businesses and lives if you look at the bigger picture of marketing. There's so much advice out there that can lead us down different paths. It is almost like it is designed to make us feel insecure, and it becomes easy to lose touch with why we started doing this in the first place and what we want our businesses to do for us.”
Marcia illustrates the business owner who felt off course. She felt bogged down by the daily grind, which didn't match up with her original vision. She had listened to what other people thought it should be and allowed her business to change over time without being the person to change it.?
She took time to reflect and realign her business with her true desires. It was time for her to hit the brakes and step back to see her finish line again. She didn't just look at her business plan or financial goals. She thought about what made her excited about starting her business in the first place.
Once she recognized what she truly wanted from her business, she realigned it accordingly and more than met her targets. She also found her passion for her work again.?
We all want to fall in love with our business and entrepreneurial journey again, right? Let’s look at how to get you there.?
Going Beyond the Grind: Aligning Your Business with Your Desires
1. Define Your Core Desires: Discovering Your Business's True North
Marcia introduces the transformative "Good Girl Recovery Program," shedding light on a dilemma that many entrepreneurs face—the internal battle with the "good girl" persona. This persona is tangled up in expectations, constantly questioning, "What am I supposed to be for others?" and "How can I discover what I truly want?" Such queries can blur an entrepreneur's vision, particularly when diving into the exhilarating yet daunting world of starting a new venture. The initial thrill of launching a business can quickly be dimmed by a barrage of decisions and external pressures, from establishing a social media footprint to crafting the perfect website content, causing one to drift away from one's true purpose and aspirations.
This scenario strikes a chord with numerous entrepreneurs standing at a crossroads, unsure of their authentic desires or the path to fulfilling them amid the clamor of expectations and an overwhelming to-do list. It underscores the necessity of defining your "North Star"—your guiding vision or set of core desires that steer your entrepreneurial journey. Before aligning your business with the business you desire, it's crucial to delve into what that vision truly encompasses for you.
Embarking on this exploration involves more than jotting down objectives. It is a profound journey into what ignites your passion, what activities captivate you so deeply that hours fly by unnoticed, and what your personal definition of success is. Whether it's impacting others' lives, leading in your field, or having the freedom to shape your lifestyle, these revelations will direct your business's course.
Writing down these core desires serves as a navigational chart through the complexities of entrepreneurial decisions, establishing a solid foundation for a business that thrives financially and aligns with your innermost motivations. It's a beacon that reminds you of the reasons you ventured into entrepreneurship, ensuring that every step you take is aligned with your ultimate aspirations and guiding your journey.?
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2. Align Actions with Desires: Steering Your Business Towards Your Vision
Marcia touches on a concept that resonates deeply with our philosophy at Your Biz Rules, particularly our approach to Scaling Rich?. She emphasizes the importance of having clarity about what you desire from your business, whether it's more time with your family, consistent financial security, engaging with a specific clientele, or venturing into a particular market sector. However, the challenge arises when you're uncertain about the steps to actualize these desires, leading to confusion that can feel disempowering.
Just as Marcia aids her clients in aligning their personal lives with their core desires, Your Biz Rules guides entrepreneurs to synchronize their business strategies and operations with their professional aspirations. Our team specializes in helping entrepreneurs like you clarify their vision and establish concrete, actionable steps to turn that vision into reality. Understanding your core desires is just the beginning.?
Once you clearly understand your core desires, the next crucial phase is to align your business's strategies and operations with these aspirations. This alignment process is akin to fine-tuning your sails to harness the wind effectively, ensuring that every move propels your business in the direction you wish to go.
Engaging your team in this alignment process is equally vital. It’s about creating a synergy where every team member understands and contributes towards the collective vision. By collaboratively identifying which activities resonate with your business’s core desires and which don't, you establish a more cohesive and motivated work environment. This collaborative effort allows you to strategize and enact changes that bring your business closer to your goals and ensure that every team member is aligned and invested in the journey.
This approach isn't just about business efficiency; it's about creating a workspace where the aspirations of the business and its people are in concert, driving towards a shared vision. In this way, every decision, every strategy, and every success is a step closer to realizing the business you truly desire.
3. Overcoming Inner Conflicts: Embracing Your True Business Aspirations
Next, we address a challenge you might be facing without realizing it: you know your goals and how to reach them, but something invisible holds you back. This unseen force often stems from a conflict between your business ambitions and your values. When what you're working toward in your business clashes with your core beliefs, it can stop you, preventing you from taking the necessary steps forward.
For instance, Marcia recounts the story of a businesswoman whose aim was a six-figure income, a goal misaligned with her deeper yearning for more family time, illustrating an apparent conflict between her professional ambitions and personal values. This dissonance prompts a crucial self-reflection: What's truly holding you back? Is the goal truly yours, or do external expectations impose it? Are you fearful of the success you might achieve? It's an introspective journey, examining whether the resistance stems from a fear of achieving your desires, potentially feeling overwhelmed by the reality of obtaining them.
This narrative extends beyond business, drawing parallels with personal aspects, where the difficulty in expressing desires and receiving can mirror our professional blocks. The challenges highlight the ingrained notion that work must be arduous, advocating for a shift towards embracing ease and satisfaction in our achievements, a perspective often neglected in our work-centric culture.
This introspection is vital for entrepreneurs at a standstill despite knowing their desired path. It's an invitation to align your actions with your true values, ensuring that your professional journey is successful, fulfilling, and resonating with your personal aspirations. By reconciling your internal conflicts, you pave the way for not just achieving your goals but enjoying the journey and the results, fostering a business and life that are in harmony.
To navigate this, it's essential to introspectively ask yourself the hard questions: What's truly holding you back? Is it possible that what you think you want isn't what you genuinely desire? Or is there a fear associated with achieving your goal? Just as in personal relationships, where expressing desires can be daunting for fear of them being fulfilled, in business, too, we might fear the changes success could bring.
Here are some practical steps to resolve inner conflicts:?
1. Self-Reflection Sessions: Dedicate time to self-reflection, possibly through journaling or discussions with a mentor or coach, to unearth the real desires behind your goals and identify any conflicting values.
2. Values-Based Goal Setting: Ensure your business goals align with your values. This alignment can dissolve conflicts, making your business aspirations more authentic and achievable.
3. Embrace Receiving: Challenge the narrative that work must be a struggle, and that pleasure or ease in business is undeserved. Learn to receive and enjoy success, recognizing that a fulfilling journey can be as rewarding as the destination.
4. Address Fear of Success: The fear of achieving our desires can paralyze us. Address these fears head-on, exploring their roots and how they can be mitigated. Recognizing that success can bring change doesn't have to lead to negative outcomes.
5. Adaptive Strategy Development: Develop adaptable business strategies considering values and fears. This approach ensures that as you evolve, so does your business, allowing for a harmonious journey towards your goals.
By confronting and resolving internal conflicts, you pave the way for a business journey that is not only successful but also deeply satisfying and aligned with your true self. Embrace this introspective journey as a crucial step towards achieving the business you desire.
The Benefits of Aligning Your Business with Your Desires
When your business's direction aligns perfectly with your innermost desires, the results can be truly transformative. This alignment does more than pave the way for traditional success. It infuses every aspect of your entrepreneurial journey with a deeper sense of joy and personal accomplishment that transcends financial rewards. It creates a business that withstands challenges and prospers, accurately mirroring your passions and the essence of what you aim to achieve. It gets you out of the daily grind of entrepreneurship and steers your venture toward a future where personal satisfaction and business success go hand in hand. Commit to this journey wholeheartedly, and witness your business transform into an authentic manifestation of your dreams and aspirations.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Are you ready to align your business with your true desires and carve out a unique path to success? Start today by reevaluating your goals and ensuring they align with what truly matters to you. If you're eager to transform your venture into the business you desire, take action now. The best part is that we are here with you EVERY STEP of the way! Reach out for guidance, tap into resources, or initiate a change that brings your business closer to your heart's aspirations. Don't just dream about a business that embodies your desires—create it. Schedule time with us today, and let's embark on this transformative journey together!
Embracing change and expanding your self-perception is key to unlocking your full potential as an entrepreneur! ?? #GrowthMindset