April 28, 2023
A Moment of Honesty About Entrepreneurship
I started as an entrepreneur with a few simple goals:
- Have more control of my own time
- Work only on projects and with people that I enjoyed
- Be a better wife, friend, sister and daughter.
- And most important, be more present with my children.
I spent the better part of this journey working for the Someday.
The Someday of when I would reach the goals I dreamt up when I first started.
Six years into the dreaming and hustling, I wasn’t much closer to my goals than when I started.
Two things were to blame.
First, my goals were financially based – and as money and goals do, they tend to grow with each other. Each time I got closer to a goal I had set, I would think to myself “I can do better than that”, adjusting the goal to a bigger one, all without recognizing that I had given myself that much farther to go.
Secondly, being brutally honest, I was focused almost entirely on the “what” of my business instead of the “whys”. In other words, I was focused on bottom lines, details, and minutia, abandoning the passion that got me started in the first place. I figured that Someday, surely, I’d be able to meet all of my goals and THEN I could focus on the “why.”
Wrong.
It’s human nature to keep going after the next big thing, the next “what”, but we don’t realize is that there is an unlimited supply of “whats” in business ownership. There’s always something new that can be added to the To Do list, another meeting to can cram into the schedule, or another great idea that needs just a few minutes to work on.
But the “why” – why you started, why you do what you do – that’s in much more limited supply.
Good news though – I wasn’t alone.
There are other women who, just like me, find themselves mired in details, ever increasing financial goals and more than just a little bit of shame that they’re not putting their passion and dreams around why they started their business in the first place, first.
This epiphany changed how I set goals. I’ve actually dared to redefine what setting goals look like, instead focusing on the question: What does success mean to me?
In a culture that values more and bigger, meeting one goal generally means creating a new one with higher expectations.
But what if, what if, you and you alone set your personal standards of success?
What if you defined your boundaries based specifically on YOUR why and your metrics for success?
What if you were able to run your business, focus on your why, live your purpose AND do it with joy?
It’s my goal to help you stay in your whys instead of constantly being bogged down in the hows. If this resonates with you, send me an email and we can chat about next steps – because I believe in what’s possible for you today, tomorrow and all the days after that. Let’s work together to redefine what entrepreneurship means to you, your business, your family and your community.
ABOUT AUGHT
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For female entrepreneurs at all stages, this is a safe space for you to ask questions, vent about an annoying business concern, get advice, make friends who “get it,” and more.
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