5 ways to build your business in a more conscious way
Subconscious limitations and trauma are like a team member you no longer want to work with. A long time ago, you needed support for a project and you brought that team member on. Let's call her Jane. Her skillset matched the project to a T, and she did a great job.
Except that now, the business has grown and you need someone with a different skill set.
And quite frankly, Jane is acting quite entitled around the office. She's been here a long time, feels at home and thinks she knows what's best for the entire team. She doesn't want to uplevel her skills because she's still stuck in a past where her current skills got the company quite far.
Jane is quickly turning into a liability. She's slowing the entire team down and creating office politics by pitting old hires against new ones. It's not a pretty picture.
You get along great with Jane. She's an old friend, loyal, reassuring, comforting and very supportive of you. Losing her would feel like losing a precious ally, and you're not ready to make that jump.
So you decide to sit on a different floor and and carry on as if she isn't there. You focus on positivity, say affirmations and beef up your vision board.
But most importantly, you double down on work and feel good about it. You feel a sense of achievement when you look back on your day everyday and and see that you were so busy you didn't even have time for lunch. You track every hour of every day and have all your productivity ducks in a row.
What you don't realise is that part of the reason why you're having to work so hard is to make up for the lost momentum Jane is creating around the office. You're having to pick up her slack on top of having to motivate other team members out of the funk caused from too much office politics. Jane has derailed your work and is causing you to spin your wheels without making much progress.
But you still feel good because you're working hard. You look around and see all of your other entrepreneur friends with their own Janes, also hustling away, and you feel reassured. Society is even lauding you for being so busy all the time because we've been conditioned to conflate busyness with getting somewhere.
All of us have several Janes lurking around in the form of :
insecurity
lack mentality
lack of boundaries
lack of self worth/of not being enough/of not knowing enough
fear of struggle
fear of the past repeating itself/fear of the future
people pleaser
fear of success or failure/of responsibility/of being different/of making waves/of being seen/of speaking up
Perfectionism
Don't get me wrong. Businesses get built and some might get quite successful with a lot of Janes in the house. Most of us aren't even aware of our Janes. Which is why success feels hard and elusive. Why wouldn't it ? It's like trying to run a race with pebbles in our shoes.
You can keep burying your head in the sand and plow away, or you can decide that there is another way. That the other way is to be bold, to sit down with Jane, have an adult conversation with her and let her go in the most loving way possible. That approach is uncomfortable. Jane might be telling you things you don't want to hear. You might feel angry, lost, destabilized and scared of the unknown when she walks out.
But then just imagine all the energy that was spent on fixing Jane related problems now streamlined into building your business. Imagine all team members on deck, pumped up and powering ahead at full steam. Imagine working from a place of flow instead of working from a place of resistance and gasp, having time to eat lunch and even enjoy it while making even more progress.
You see, there are 2 ways to navigate business and life. One is the unconscious way, where our subconscious is really the one calling the shots and making a lot of decisions for us. Where we can stay trapped in set behaviours for a long time and keep recreating the same scenarios over and over again until shit hits the fan, where we stay in a life where our potential remains largely untapped. Where we deprive the world of our true shine because we're so trapped in perpetuating stories that aren't ours to tell.
Or we can take the approach of radical self awareness. Strive to take action from a place of deep alignment and seek to honor and understand the times when things are sticky so that personal growth can happen in quick increments and our businesses can also shift to reflect our internal growth.
And guess which way is more supported by the universe ? The goal of the universe is expansion. So the more you're on the path of personal growth, the more the universe will support you because in doing so, it's supporting itself.
See below 5 concrete ways you can start to build your business in a more conscious way.
Know your strengths
This isn't some trite business advice. This is game changing advice. We all yearn to do this and yet think so little of our strengths that we don't feel that they're enough to build an entire business around. Well they are. We've been endowed with natural skills for a reason. It TOTALLY is possible today to build a business around 'connecting people' if that's what your superpower is. So get in touch with what you're naturally good at and STOP trying to recreate success in a way that doesn't match with your skills and talents. If you're serious about building a sustainable, fulfilling AND successful business, the best and most joyful way to get there is to be laser focused on what you do well naturally.
Work on your money mindset
This one is pretty obvious right ? For me this is the foundational work that every single entrepreneur needs to do, hands down. Ditch the elaborate business plan. Do the money mindset work instead. Really. I cannot stress this enough. Your relationship to money is going to inform everything you do in your business. The goals you set. Your positioning. Your pricing. The way you sell. The way you negociate. The way you interact with your business partners. Pretty much everything really.
Surround yourself with your people
in the form of coaches, mastermind groups, other entrepreneurs who have your back and genuinely want to see you grow. This isn't just about doing business strategy together. See, we humans are pretty bad at becoming self aware all by ourselves. Meditation and journaling are great tools but they're not enough. We need others to reflect our blind spots back to us, and it's through our external interactions that we learn more about ourselves. You need to go out and confront yourself with people who'll hold a mirror up to you and allow you to see things you're unwilling/unable to see by yourself.
Everytime you get triggered, pause
Every single time you get a strong emotional reaction about a given situation, it's telling you something about yourself. This isn't about wallowing in your emotions. This is about understanding that emotions are powerful compasses that bring our attention to something internal that can potentially shift our awareness in some way. Guilt, denial or shame are ways we abuse ourselves when we feel emotions we don't want to feel. We're taught to suppress and belittle our emotions and 'get on with it'. A conscious way of operating is to understand that emotions and feelings are our body's way of telling us when we're in or out of alignment with ourselves.
Look at all the times you're saying 'I should'
Few things are more indicative of societal conditioning than the 'shoulds' we tell ourselves. So much so that this has become a favourite practice of mine. Every single time I tell myself I should be doing something that I'm not particularly excited by, I ask myself why I think I should be doing that thing. And most of the time I end up not doing it because I realise that that 'should' was based on society's idea of what I need to be doing. Ideally, you want to be so aligned that everything you do is stemming from you genuinely wanting to do them. This is an ambitious goal. But it's a goal that'll get you closer to building a business on YOUR terms rather than on somebody else's. I'm not telling you to re-invent the wheel every single time. I'm telling you to go down a beaten path only if it feels right for you to do so.
Choosing the conscious path isn't easy. It's a commitment that you decide to renew everyday. But commit to your own personal growth and see the full extent of your potential unfold. We are by design made to go as far as we want to in life. Building success isn't so much about contorting and over-extending ourselves to reach our goals as it is about removing all the blocks we've consciously or unconsciously put on our path to getting there.