Audio Title: Low Res Dreaming Big

Audio Title: low res dreaming big

Audio Duration: 0:55:00

Number of Speakers: 1

Transcript

Now what an exciting point you are in your business journey at the moment, just sitting on the edge of what’s going to be an absolutely amazing ride for you.

I started my business 16 years ago and to tell you the truth, I probably started it because I was trying to escape from the corporate world. I wanted more freedom and flexibility and I decided to go out into business, bringing strengths that I already had in business and in leadership.

So for the last 16 years, I’ve been working with CEOs and with leaders and companies, teaching them how to lead their business in a way that’s going to thrive, not just survive.

So for 16 years I’ve been doing that. But along the journey, I’ve done a whole range of other things. So about nine years ago, I established my company Mind Gardener which was from a bit of a passion that when it comes to business, a lot of it actually comes to what we think.

So Mind Gardener was created to teach people in business how to develop the right mind-set and also the essential skill of today of being able to be in the present and pay attention. So that journey into selling products as well as a service business took me on a whole range of other roots as well.

In the last few years, I’ve been very fortunate enough to have written a couple of books. So I’m also a Hay House author of two best-selling books. The first one being Wired for Life: Retrain Your Brain and Thrive. The second one being One Moment Please: It’s Time to Pay Attention and I’m currently writing my third book as we speak.

So that’s my journey and often when I’m doing interviews with people, I get asked the question all the time. That if I could go back and give myself 16 years ago some advice in business, what would it be? Without a doubt, as you can probably guess by my passion here, it would be all about spending as much time getting our heads right and getting into the right mind-set for success, as we do a lot of the other activities.

So often when we’re setting up a business, we get very obsessed about having our website and having our social media up and all the right ticks in terms of getting our accountant and all these things that we’ve got to do, which are so, so important. But what we also need to do is spend as much effort getting the right mind-sets, getting the right attitudes and thinking a certain way because that’s the thing that’s going to really ensure whether you thrive in business or whether you just create a good business.

So what will move you from being a good business to really being significant? It’s all about your mind-set. If you look at a lot of the entrepreneurs around the world that you might admire, it might be Oprah for you or someone like Brene Brown or Lorna Jane Clarkson. One thing that you will notice about all successful entrepreneurs is that they think about themselves in a certain way and they think about the world in a certain way.

So in this module of dreaming big, what I’m going to explore with you is some of those foundations, some of those mind-sets and the way of looking at the world, that you can establish at the very start of your business to ensure that you do set yourself up for success. There are things that sometimes took me five years or even a decade to learn and the advantage of having them clear upfront, really, really important thing.

I often say that when you go into business, what you are really doing is embarking on a personal and intimate journey with yourself. Besides I think something like a marriage or a relationship, there is nothing that is more insightful in terms of throwing up for you all your fears, but also highlighting for you strengths that you have, that you never thought you – you know, possibly would have had before.

So it’s a real personal journey into yourself and the first thing that I would like to explore or talk about is that it is really an important part of the process to get to know yourself. That might sound quite crazy. You might be saying, “Well, I’ve known myself for 20 something or 40 something years,” but really actually developing a business that is authentic to you, that personifies every value and every approach that you have and creating something that is extremely unique.

Often when I’m looking at someone’s business, I might be looking at their website. I would have to say the thing that I find most interesting is going to that little section that says “about me” or “about us” and understanding a person’s journey, getting a real good insight into what motivates them, what switches them on, why they created a business in the first place.

It’s really the person behind the business that tends to sell the products and services for people. So one thing that I would really encourage you to do from the outset is to take yourself off on what I would call almost a little personal retreat. Carve a couple of hours in your day or a whole day if you can manage that.

Go out somewhere in nature without your technology, but simply just a pen and a piece of paper and do some free writing, exploring some of the following things. Things like, “Who am I?” which is not about I’m a wife, I’m a mother, I’m this age. But really getting into, “Who are you as a person? What are you passionate about? What motivates you?”

Things like why are you starting this business in the first place and not just those issues of, “Oh, I want some flexibility.” But what do you believe that’s going to be so ingrained in your business, that people are going to take notice of it? Because they’re going to say, “Well, that’s inspiring because I believe that also.”

Another area is the values that really drive you because as you go into bigger and bigger levels with your business, it’s very important that the values you hold personally get translated into every single thing that you do.

Also really understanding your strengths and this is a very, very interesting area because when I run workshops, I will ask people a show of hands who can tell me what their top three strengths are. Usually in a room of 30, I have one person putting their hand up.

If I would have asked the question of, “What are your weaknesses?” I guarantee you that every single hand in the room would go up because we are well too aware of all the things that we’re doing wrong, that we’re not quite good at. But in terms of carving out a really unique business, the more powerful path is to really understand your strengths.

I’m going to give you some resources over the next four weeks to explore that a little bit yourself. But it’s also a good idea to ask the people around you. You know, ask your husband or partner. Ask the people that you work with, your family. Often when it comes to our strengths, our unique strengths, other people have a lot better view of what they are than we hold in ourselves.

So just like it’s important to understand your strengths or your superpowers, it’s also really important to understand your kryptonite. What are some of those things that actually bring you down? What are some of those areas that you need to let go of or you need to do some work on as well?

Once you understand this picture about yourself – and it really is about putting some focus on it, doing some free writing. You will be able to create a business that is uniquely you and this is so important because in terms of your business, you won’t be the only person doing that in the world. But you will be the only person doing it your way.

I think too often we look over our shoulder at competitors. We do all this comparison of going, “Oh, they’re doing that. Therefore I will do this.” It’s much more important to actually create a business from what’s in here because no one will be able to copy that and it will always be your competitive advantage.

Now on the topic of this thing about our unique strengths and what we bring to our business, it’s really important to make sure that those strengths are something that’s authentic to you because in the last few hundred years in business, a lot of the strengths that we have as women have been undervalued. I know for myself when I went into business, I was copying things that men do because that was actually our model for success that a lot of the time those characteristics that male business leaders had were the things that rewarded, where the things that were taught in universities and in courses and all of those things.

But the exciting news for all of us as women in business today is that feminine qualities in business are now actually being very valued in the business world. So it’s not about people just saying, “Oh, OK. Women can compete with us in the business.” We’ve actually gotten to a point in the world where there’s a whole range of research that’s actually saying we need feminine strengths and feminine qualities to do business these days.

To give you a bit of an explanation why, I just want you to think about the business environment that we operate in at the moment. It is very different to what I was in 20 years ago when I was in my corporate career. The business environment was slower. It was more predictable. You look at a business these days and the environment we are working in. It is messy. It is complex. It is unpredictable. It is uncertain that a lot of the things we think we’re going to target – the next day, they become totally irrelevant because the world has moved on. So we’re living in very disruptive, interruptive times and when I think about a business environment like that, being so messy, being so chaotic, being so unpredictable, I often laugh and think to myself, “Well, that sounds like dinner time at my place every night when the kids are going crazy and whatever is going on.”

I would have to say for us, as women, we have a range of strengths, things like the ability to adapt, things like the ability to work with uncertainty and chaos and all of those sorts of things that stand us in really good stead for leading business in the future.

This was backed up by a bit of research that was done probably nearly a decade ago and published in the book called The Athena Doctrine where two men actually did research and it was significant research. It had 64,000 participants in 13 countries that made up 65 percent of world GDP. That sample was representative of all the populations in those countries.

What the research was actually about was they looked at a whole range of qualities that are needed in the world in the future. They ask people to say, “Out of all these qualities, can you tick what we’re definitely going to need in the world and in business in the future?”

On the other side of things, they put to the other sample, here’s a range of different qualities. Can you select which ones you believe are feminine qualities and which ones you believe are masculine qualities? Some very interesting research came out of that.

So 81 percent of people said that we need masculine and feminine qualities in business and in the world in the future. So when you look at that, that’s a very high sample. It would not have been the same a couple of years ago or 10 years ago. But the part that I found really quite interesting is for two-thirds of people, they believe the world would be a better place if men thought more like women.

So very, very interesting here. But my point is that if ever we were in a place to play big and dream big, it is right now. You will see all over the place examples of the feminine rising and by that, I mean women who have risen to the top of things like politics, if you look at our political arena, but also a lot of women that are really leading the way that business is conducted in the future.

So this is the time to bring those unique strengths and the thing is that the masculine way of doing business is very different from the feminine way of doing business. I should say from the outset, what I’m not talking about here is men versus women. Masculine and feminine essence is in absolutely everything. It’s the yin and the yang thing and I certainly know a lot of women who are very masculine and I know a lot of men who are very feminine.

So I’m going to use the words “men” and “women”. But I want to say from the outset that we have all got those essences within ourselves. But as I mentioned, the masculine and the feminine way of doing business are very different. I just wanted to give you some examples. So the masculine way of doing business is very much high on intellect, thinking, logic, rationality. When for women, the way of doing business is very much about embodied wisdom.

We all have those times where we get a gut feel about something or we follow something because we’re excited, so that wisdom lying within our bodies. The masculine way of business is very much a drive for profit. What motivates the feminine essence when it comes to business is a real drive for purpose, for making a difference, for healing the world, for helping people in society.

The masculine essence is more geared towards competition where the feminine is more geared towards collaboration. The masculine tends to be more of a short term focus where the feminine is more of that long term focus.

The masculine is very much about perseverance. So when you’re bringing masculine energy, it’s about I’ve got a goal and I’m going to do anything to drive towards it and get there.

For the feminine side of things, it’s more about that adaptability. That I might have a goal, but that goal shifts every day and once I start working with things, I could start here and end up totally somewhere over there.

For the masculine, it’s very much about control whereas for the feminine way of doing business, it’s more about creating an environment and then allowing that success to find you. So, so many different examples.

Another example is in the masculine, very results-focused. The feminine, very relationship-focused. So as you see when I just go through all those traits, it’s not about saying one is better than the other. But clearly in the business world, we need both of those sides and it’s very exciting that now, as women, we can bring that to the table. I was just talking to a businesswoman the other day that gave me a really good example of this.

She was talking about how the night before, she had gone home to her husband and she had said to him, “Oh, you never believe what happened today. I was walking to a coffee date that I was having and I was walking along the river. I just got this amazing idea that kind of dropped out of nowhere and it just brought together everything that I feel like I’ve been training for my whole life and I’m really excited about it. I got to this coffee with a group of people. But you will never believe it. I met this other woman and we instantly had an amazing connection. I found out that she had a key part to this business that I want to explore. So we’re thinking about going into business together. We’re exploring things.”

The husband straight away said, “Where’s the profit in this? Don’t you realise that 95 percent of businesses fail in the first year? Also business partnerships can be a disaster,” and brought in a lot of that logic, brought in a lot of that risk assessment that the masculine is so good at. I thought that’s a really good example of what we’re talking here about.

We are bringing different sides to the same equation. But if we – if there was never a time before, it’s now that we have to give ourselves permission to dream big, to play big, but also to realise that all we need to do is show up as ourselves and bring the strengths that we already have with inside us. Not to actually copy something else or bring forward something that’s not authentic to ourselves, because every time we do that, we end up on the wrong path. We end up in Struggle Street, with overwhelm, all of those things.

So very great time to be a woman in business. What I want to talk to you about further today is five feminine advantages. So five traits of the feminine that if from the outset, you are committed to, you wire up the mind-sets for, they will see you thriving in this messy, disruptive business environment that we have going for us today.

Those five firstly is about intuition and our inner wisdom and about not looking for the answers out there, but finding them in here.