Microbusiness entrepreneurship has become a personal mastery journey for me. Instead of checking out business opportunities based on earning potential (don’t we all!) or business growth potential, I go after business opportunities that represent the next stage of my personal mastery.
When I first became a microbusiness entrepreneur, I chose business models where I was at the helm of literally everything. I played CEO, COO, and CFO. I was responsible for sales and marketing as well as training and consulting. I was web developer and web designer.
I wanted to gain the knowledge and experience of all aspects of the business I created, to test the limits of what I could do versus what I thought or wished I could do. Making myself accountable for all aspects of a business let me see where my strengths are and where I could have done better to outsource. I spent the first five years of my microbusiness journey gathering credit and credentials. I focused on being known by name. I was pretty successful at it, and I did quite well by it.
In the past couple of years, though, my focus began to shift. I had learned much from doing everything myself, and the time had come to “entrepreneuring a different way”.
Since I had long been a control freak, the next stage of my personal mastery is about letting of that illusion of control. When I became a parent at the end of 2007, the reality of this control-illusion hit me hard! I no longer have what felt like unlimited time to explore anything I wanted. I had to learn to stop in the middle of what I was doing to tend to an infant, and many hours later, pick up where I left off. I had to learn to coexist with uncertainty, not knowing how each day played out.
Getting through a year of discontinuity and ambiguity has loosened my grip on the control illusion. I got better at asking for help. I started prioritizing. I asked myself harder questions about what I wanted from my businesses, and I was shocked when I discovered that the answers weren’t always about money.
The beauty of softening your beliefs about “how things should be done” is that you become receptive to new opportunities. Your eyes begin to see doors that were always there, but now you realize that those doors are accessible to you, if you choose to open them and step through. Your ears tune into conversations for collaboration. Your head starts to nod and you say “yes” to ideas that “the old you” may turn away.
I had been preparing for my collaboration journey, even before I knew I was preparing for it. By December of last year, I had no less than 5 separate opportunities to collaborate – three in the form of actual business entities – two in the form of web-based collaborations. I don’t know what will come of any of these collaborations, but the way opportunities unfold tells me that I’m on the right path.
Here’s the secret: I’ve discovered that the real question is not whether you’re on the “right” path.
The real question is whether you truly know “the traveler” (YOU!) of the path.
