The personal is collective. You can't separate the way you are leading your business from the results you want to achieve, and the impact you're here to create.

How you create success is what the world becomes.

Do you remember the corporate days? When you had a feeling of panic on waking, Monday morning felt like stepping back onto the treadmill? 

You were often stressed and miserable? Burnout, or closer to it than you’d like to have admitted? 

You were drawing on all the inner resources you had, looking for the ways in which you could remain positive, empowered, resilient?

But you didn’t want to be more resilient so you could endure more of the same. You wanted a change, a new path, another way. 

And that way was starting out on your own, founding a new venture that would give you the freedom, flexibility and balance you wanted. 

While contributing to meaningful change and making a difference with your knowledge, skills and experience.

Without compromising your health, wealth or relationships.

You are the change

Whether you’re shaping an alongside business or have transitioned fully to run your own business, it can be hard to stay true to your values when you don’t have a map or pathway for creating success that feels good. 

Which enables you to be fulfilled, creative, self-expressed and of service, and that positively impacts your physical health, emotional wellbeing and personal relationships.

Throwing off the beliefs and conditioning from childhood, education and conventional career pathways, can feel scary, uncertain and risky.

It is normal to experience both excitement and anticipation while also feeling vulnerable and exposed, perhaps even nostalgic for your previous employment.

You may regularly face fear, self-doubt, comparison and question your ability or right to step out and stand up. Wonder if you really do have a right to do so.

To question, go against the grain of your family of origin, friends, peers, colleagues. Decide that you want to create a new way of doing business, living life and role modelling success for future generations.

Except, it’s precisely your willingness to experience the discomfort which makes you a leader.

Through founding your own business, you can play to your strengths and zone of genius, choose to value your life wisdom and experience not just your professional qualifications and expertise, and manage your time and energy in a way that honours your body's inner cycles and rhythms, and ensure that you're well-resourced and supported in all areas of your life.

Every choice you make can move you away from an unsustainable hustle and burnout within towards a more life-affirming, life-thriving style of leadership and business model. The ripple effect of this is huge, and will touch many more lives than you can imagine.

The personal is collective. You can’t separate the way you are leading your business from the results you want to achieve, and the impact you’re here to create. This is a privilege.

Meeting your shadows

If you've grown up in a Western culture then it is impossible to separate yourself from the beliefs and behaviours of that culture, including hierarchy, separation, positive materialism, neoliberalism, gender bias, racism and colonialism.

It's not easy to meet these shadowy places within yourself and bring awareness to the ways in which they may influence your leadership. This can be a painful process, which is why most people will shy away from it, find ways to numb and distract, and look to blame and then fix others and the outside world. It’s hard to acknowledge that you are also part of the problem.

Hypocrisy, complexity, nuance, contradiction and paradox show up everywhere – and no-one gets away without being human.

Cultivating presence, awareness, self-compassion and accepting that perfection is an impossible project will enable you to stay open to change, unlearning and having the courage to try new approaches and emergent strategies in your business leadership.

What's more, observing and spending time in and with Nature can help you access a deeper wisdom and knowing. One which embraces decay as intrinsic to new life and growth. From death comes rebirth, renewal and regeneration. 

Vision and imagination

As you're sitting with those shadowy places, and allow time for quiet, stillness, reflection, and release, you will begin to reignite your imagination, hope and sense of possibility.

Given the right conditions, new shoots can emerge from your imagination, and awaken you to dreams and visions for the kind of world you want to live in. That you want to create and contribute to with your leadership and business.

I actively cultivate my imagination through embodiment, creative and Nature connection practices, and dream work. This is what gives me direction, enabling me to align my actions with my vision.

The vision that’s come to me through dreams, visualisation, vision quests and intuition walks is of a world that is flourishing and thriving. Where everyone has an inherent sense of place and worth, they are valued for being who they are, and for their unique gifts. Children are running free, the water and air are clean, there are clouds of butterflies, and there is green everywhere. 

When I’m setting goals in my business, I bring my vision to mind and let it guide me through self-enquiry and reflection. It helps me to prioritise my days and weeks.

>>> If everyone is thriving, what do I need to do and who do I need to be to thrive today? 

>>> If everyone has an inherent sense of place and worth, am I backing myself 100%, do I have a sense of my work coming from a place beyond my individual self, how am engaging with my local environment and community?

>>> If the children are running free, do I have enough left over from my working day to have the time an energy to be present with my children, is my parenting in alignment?

>>> If the water and air are clean, what foods am I choosing to fuel my body and mind with? How am I travelling from A to B? Can I contribute in ways which go beyond my consumer choices?

>>> If there are clouds of butterflies and green everywhere, how can I be in service to wonder, awe, diversity, Nature connection, abundance, creativity in my business?

Self belief and possibility

A clear vision that is magical and meaningful for you gives you direction and is energising and enlivening. What matters as much as vision is self-belief and a sense of possibility.

It's keeping that self-belief and possibility alive that will keep you out of burnout and in service to more flourishing life-thriving futures, knowing that tending and caring for yourself is an important as tending to and helping others. Self-care and care for others and the planet aren't mutually exclusive, they can happen in synchronicity.

You have to believe that your vision is possible, and that it’s possible for you to be both perfectly imperfect and take the steps you need to take each day to make it a reality.

You have to believe you can make an impact.

You have to believe that you can be for yourself, others and the world.

You have to believe you don’t have to compromise who you are or sacrifice your health or relationships for success.

You have to believe you can achieve your vision and enjoy financial, emotional, physical and spiritual wealth.

You have to believe that re-imagining and re-creating what your internal belief systems is a radical act.

What you believe is how you create success. How you create success is what the world becomes. The personal is collective.

What do you think? I’d love to know. Here’s three powerful questions to get you started.

• What kind of world are your leadership and actions creating?

• What does success that feels good and does good look like for you?

• How would you role model that, and what could be the ripple effect?

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