I have my own business. I don't work a regular job.
To get you caught up from most of my other posts, I went to Peru, came back to California, and then learned that my skill with organizing was helpful, needed, and monetizable as a career. I moved to Utah and started my business in the spring of 2017.
I am now in full swing of my business, though it doesn't seem to be full-time. I went to the gym today from 9:00-10:00. I'm able to do that because I don't have a full schedule. But that's not really what I wanted to talk about today.
What I did want to talk about today was the revelation of identity that is solopreneuring. (If you're not familiar with the term: solo + entrepreneur.) I'm the only employee in my business. Previously in my life, I never thought I would be a business owner or a leader, but I feel like I'm both right now. If you couldn't tell from previous posts, I consider myself an introvert, and sales and marketing were never my strongsuit. So here I am, the business owner of a home organizing LLC in Utah, trying to figure out where to go next.
I thought I learned about myself considerably in Peru, and I did, but I feel like I've been learning a ton about myself lately that is equivalent to another trip to Peru. My mental patterns haven't been as clear to me as now. Here's what I've learned:
- I have excellent reasoning and analytical skills, but more frequently than I'd like to admit, I allow those to rule my feelings. I get stuck in analytical patterns that prevent me from feeling happier and taking action.
- I have played small for most of my life. Yes, there are notable times when I haven't and my greatness has just flowed out of me to bless other people's lives, but my default operating system is not rocking the boat and speaking up.
- Self-sabotage is a very real part of my life. I just got the insight yesterday that a probable root cause is feeling like I'm not worthy of success.
- I have outsourced my decision-making to other people for most of my life. I've taken in other people's opinions (or perceived opinions) too much, and I realized that I'm the decider of my life--where I go and what I make out of it.
- Lack of momentum is due to lack of clarity in vision. But now that I learned I'm the decider, I choose where to go.
- My realism has skewed honesty to the negative rather than to the positive. I don't give enough credit to all the good, and I tend to fixate on the bad.
In all this, though, there is hope. Being aware is the first step, right? I have recently been introduced to a tool that is allowing me to trust myself and search within myself for the answers. Though it was shown to me by another person, it has helped me with my relationship with myself. It's called the Self-Coaching Model by Brooke Castillo. The assumption is that there are circumstances, which we can't control, that trigger thoughts, which we can control, which lead to emotions, which lead to actions, which lead to results. If we change the thoughts, we can change the emotions, actions, and results. It's a different way of looking at things.
The clearest example Brooke shares is, what if I said I had a winning lottery ticket for you? What would you think? How would you feel? And then what if it wasn't the winning lottery ticket? What would you think? How would you feel? Nothing really changed except your perception of what was going on. In the same way, we can change our perception of a situation in order to feel better, even though that situation might not change. I kind of compare it to Viktor Frankl's accounts of the Holocaust: when it comes to survival, it's all about mentality. Same with Louis Zamperini adrift for 40+ days on a life raft after his plane went down in the middle of the ocean (Unbroken)--all about mentality.
So this mental work is probably the most important work I could be doing as a solopreneur, because since it is only me, I determine where I go, and it's clear to me more than ever before. I decide what I want in life, and then I make the action to get it.
I've been sharing this story to illustrate how I can press forward: I was invited on an anthropology trip on the Colorado River, just outside the Grand Canyon park boundaries. We would be documenting petroglyphs (rock wall carvings) that hadn't been fully surveyed since the 1980s. However, instead of just taking a picture of the petroglyphs, we had to draw them to capture the most information that we observed. To do this, we took a pre-made string grid, taped it to the wall on top of the petroglyph, and then drew the image to scale ad with correct proportions.
Other people's desires and opinions have been the string grid on my life, but now I get to decide my own framework for operating, and as I do that, I'm able to operate within it to achieve what I decide I want. I create the structure. I decide what's important to me and how I will operate.
To you who have still subscribed to this blog, congratulations. Thanks for preserving a space for me to share my feelings. And if not, I'll share them anyway, because I was meant to, and I will not play small anymore.
