Guest Blog: Karen Leigh
Isn’t it funny how, even as business owners, we can look at others and admire their success and confidence and abilities, forgetting that they too were once where we were: learning, growing in business and as a human, ‘failing’, then reaching milestones.
I hadn’t anticipated just how challenging being a business owner would be when I trained in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) in January 2022 and set up practicing immediately afterwards.
I’d already been on an intentional growth journey for years by that point, growing my confidence and self-belief, digging deep to see what I really wanted in life, what would make me feel fulfilled. I had no idea training in NLP to help others would be so beneficial to me too, as it further helped my self-belief and remove any limiting thoughts which remained.
However, it did not set me up for self-employment life and business!
As business owners, we each have our own unique journeys, challenges, ‘failures’ (I actually don’t believe in failure, only lessons and re-directions), and no-one can really prepare us for them, and there is no way to foresee them! It can sometimes be a lonely journey, I’m sure you’ll agree.
I’m a big believer in having your desired outcome in sight. What is that big goal for your business?
I think, and have learned the hard way myself, that it can be so tempting to try and control how everything will unfold in our businesses. We have that vision, and we have an idea in our mind how that will happen, the twists and turns and opportunities. I believe this mindset actually makes the journey more challenging (in my experience).
I always say to my clients, focus on the desired outcome, let go of how you get there!
Because we can’t predict life! We don’t know what external factors will hit us, what will happen in our personal lives which will ultimately have a knock-on effect in our business.
This is a great thing too!
We don’t know what opportunities will come our way. People we’ll meet, experiences which will have positive impacts on us and our work. Imagine if we’d strategically planned how we achieve our desired outcome and stuck to this like glue (I am 100% all over strategy, however, I believe we need ALOT of room to pivot and allow opportunities in).
By trying to control how we get to our desired outcome, we could actually be blocking opportunities, people, anything at all, that’s trying to make it’s way in!
We can look at others who we deem successful in our line of work and feel like they have it all together, because we see the final result and they make it look so easy. We don’t see their internal struggles and the challenges they faced to get there or the opportunities that acted as a stepping stone, or the breakthroughs, realisations, sleepless nights.
So if I could give you two takeaways that have helped me hugely in my own business journey they would be:
1. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it! It’s not easy (so, well done you!), and every successful person/business we see has suffered moments of self-doubt, had to overcome challenges and limitations, and have exposed themselves to opportunities which further progressed their work.
2. Let go a little. Take a breather. Focus on that desired outcome, take the necessary actions to get there, trust that your scary leaps will pay off, and let go of everything else let people and opportunities in.
And as for trusting those scary leaps.. we have two options here, faith, or fear. Faith that everything will work out for us, or fear that everything will go wrong. We can’t see either of them, but we get to choose one of them!
Written by Karen Leigh.
Find out more about Karen’s work here.