Microbusiness Mentor

My fellow microbusiness entrepreneur Dawn Rivers Baker has been a long time advocate in the area of microbusiness enterprises here in the United States.

Recently we had an opportunity to talk about an aspect of microbusiness entrepreneurship that many of us rely on but can probably reflect more often on: the mental game of business.

This is a Blog Talk radio interview where I spoke about carving your own road and swimming down your own path as a microbusiness entrepreneur, even if most others seem to be swimming in the opposite direction. It is about being truly “free” and designing your business in a way that supports both your personal growth and your life.

“…Jane has gone through all sorts of business and personal challenges and nothing can change the fact that she is one of the most brilliant, creative, and mindful people I know…”

David Troy tells us how entrepreneurship really works, and I am especially pleased at how he strips down the phenomenal successes of mega celebrity entrepreneurs (Gates, Branson, Buffet) into the reality and the hype!

This also explains a few paradoxes that I have observed in my own entrepreneurship path, for example:

I take risks – yet I see myself as risk-averse.

OK, quitting a $100,000+ job without a solid Plan B is taking a risk. This was what I did in 2004, when I could not sit back and watch the industry I worked in (pharmaceuticals) conduct itself in questionable business practices.

Not having a completely written out business plan is a big risk. Not having customers already lined up (well… I wasn’t sure WHEN I would be quitting, or even IF I would be quitting, to be fair) – that is a big risk.

Yet I had taken a calculated risk, by saving up enough money where if I made absolutely nothing for 365 days, our financial position would not be dramatically affected. We’d be delayed a bit – we were saving up to buy a house and this was during the astronomically priced housing bubble years – but our lifestyle would not be affected much.

I dislike the uncertainty of not knowing what the future holds – yet I love the freedom to design my own future.

I can’t say that I have gotten used to the revenue flux, especially when I drive a lot of the changes in this flux, by restructuring my business model and testing entry to markets, etc.

Not to mention my stubbornness to expect to generate a 6-figure revenue by working no more than 10-20 hours a week so I do not miss out on my son’s newborn – now toddler – years. I made a 6-figure business by working 40+ hours a week – but can I do it in half – less than half – that amount of work time?

Yes, I face uncertainty as an entrepreneur, but I am also responsible for deliberately creating “controlled adversity” for myself.

Maybe it’s because I keep thinking that I can be like a microorganism (I was a microbiology undergraduate major in college) – if I push my limits and plunk myself into a hostile environment – I might just pick up a few plasmids (skills, adaptations) that allow me to grow where and when others cannot.

I learn from the best – yet I am the person who makes it happen with my personal best.

I have worked with many business coaches and have enough “data points” to know this:

If you want to make incredible things happen – you’d better learn from the best – people who have skills or insights that you need to make incredible things happen with your talents…. But this is not enough!

I know so many people who boast about investing a ton of money in their own education and professional development, like that says something about their results. It does say something about their commitment to learning and improving themselves – and this is all.

(Then I begin to wonder if they are using learning as a procrastination device against actually doing.)

Your results is what speaks for your ability to make incredible things happen using the tools, skills, insights you’ve gained.

I have had 4 different coaches using diverse coaching approaches who have worked with me and told me that the results I have demonstrated ranked in the upper 1-5% of their clients’ results.

I thought maybe I was “just lucky” after the 1st or 2nd time. But now I think it’s less mystical than that – I simply DO things with what I had learned.

If these coaches’ clients all DO things at the level that I had done, they may very well experience just as much – maybe even more – results and success as I had experienced.

What entrepreneurship “paradoxes” have you seen along your journey?

Do you ever end the year knowing that you want to explore a particular “theme” on your journey (whether this be personal, professional, or entrepreneurial) for the new year?

This year my personal / professional / entrepreneurial “theme” seemed to be “struggling and stressing”. I made the decision earlier this year to raise my young son full time, rather than hiring a nanny (we’d interviewed 6 or 7 nannies before I came to my decision) resuming my regular business activities and working the way I used to work before I became a parent.

Since my decision I’d been struggling to shift the way I “used to” work (i.e. 12+hrs a day doing something relating to my businesses) to how I now have to/want to work (i.e. working in 5 min increments and maybe 30-90 minutes during child’s nap or after child goes to bed).

I was stressing out from this struggling!

For the new year, I’d like my theme to be “going with the flow!”

I want to produce at least the same – or better – business results of this year, but at half the stress level.

(In a separate article I’ll share some of my lessons learned for producing the 6-figure business result I produced this year.)

Image by Ivan Prole

As much as buzz may generate hype around “secrets” of high performance, I have found that best practices that help you gain visibility as “The Person to Watch” is more about discipline in action than the divulging of any secret.

Ask yourself how much you:

Track Timelines and Deadlines.

I know that you may work with projects that are lengthy and have long vesting cycles, but this doesn’t mean that timelines don’t exist or that deadlines may constantly shift downstream. Some professionals brand themselves with a promise to respond to phone calls and emails within 24 hours. If this is too demanding for those of you who travel a lot or have personal priorities that aren’t conducive to a tight turnaround time. You can adjust your personal response time accordingly, but do hold yourself accountable to a turnaround time.

When I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry and had a 10-state territory within the western United States, I used to make an effort to respond to calls and emails within 36 hours. Now that I’m raising a child and have less control of time and schedules, I have to develop realistic expectations of what deadlines or timelines I may adhere to.

Focus on Fruitful Interactions.

Too often we seek out those we feel comfortable with, rather than those who may challenge us and take our skills and personal development to the next level…. that means we have to be willing tofeel a little uncomfortable at least at the beginning. This goes for clients, customers, coaches, and any collaborative or co-creative relationships we cultivate in our lives. Getting used to being uncomfortable is a mental muscle that we can train. The more often we practice building bridges with those who may at first brush us off or communicate in a way that we’re not immediately used to, the better we become at crossing that barrier. This also makes us a more valuable, marketable collaborator in the big scheme of our professional journey. Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page claimed to intensely dislike each other at first – but they didn’t let their discomfort around each other blind them to the fact that their intellectual jousting could lead them to co-create a game-changer – like Google, Inc.

Ask More Questions.

Those of us who are in the business of being experts can get trapped into the dangerous mindset of thinking that we know everything, or must act like we know everything. The know-it-all is an exhausting act, and often unpersuasive. The funny thing is that the more questions we ask and the better we become at listening, the more people think we know and the smarter people think we are.

I’ve found that the main requirement to asking more questions is to have an opening in my awareness that there is a lot that I don’t know, and that I will not fully grasp another person’s view unless I ask him or her. One of the benefits of assuming a position of “wonder” and asking more questions is that I can put my performance-ego on the backseat, relax, and enjoy learning about what the other person thinks.

Now more than ever, companies want high performers working for them, and clients want high performers working with them. Framing or re-framing our mindset around time, growth-based relationships, and listening requires consistency in action (discipline). You may find that delivering high performance may be as philosophically simple as “chop wood, bring water”.

Image by John Hughes (Germany)

I’m not going answer this tough question by saying “BOTH! BOTH ARE IMPORTANT!” because the question asks, “which one is MORE important” in leadership… and of course, if I can give both or get both, I’d want to have both.

By asking the question as an “either/or”, however, we’re in a way asking, “which comes first?”

When the intention is aligned, the execution may be a matter of coordinating the resources to see it through. Chief executive officers (CEOs) therefore need (chief operating officers) COOs in big organizations to make sure the intention (vision) is supported by execution (action).

As a microbusiness entrepreneur, I don’t get to choose one or the other if my businesses were to survive and thrive. This is because I must play the role of both CEO and COO (and company secretary and mail clerk… but I draw the line at plumbing)!

As a microbusiness coach, I prefer to focus on intention if I can only pick one. At least I know that my client will walk away with clarity that is needed for optimal distribution of resources toward manifesting that intention. If I focus on execution – I am making a gamble that my client’s intention is clear and aligned with his or her (you name it: values, essence, purpose, passion)… – one or two scenarios can happen:

If the intention is aligned, the client will return to me with focused results and a high probability of experiencing positive movement forward.

If the intention is not aligned, the client will return to me with focused results and a high probability of experiencing confusion and additional questions that the client feels need to be explored because somehow, the results however stellar, don’t seem to “hit the spot”.

That spot?

Intention. Specifically, Intention aligned with (you name it: values, essence, purpose, passion).

Indeed, some of us focus on intention to the point of “analysis by paralysis”, and frankly, as a method of procrastination. I’m not talking about that. We do need to conduct the necessarily mental gymnastics of identifying what exactly we are looking to do through our businesses or our careers, and how our intent relates to our approach to life as a whole. Giving tools is important, but if one doesn’t know which tool to choose for what intent, then it’s akin to giving a surgical course on the ways of handling each surgical tool without knowing what surgical cases I should use which tool.

Image by Ilker