| Hi, this is Darla LeDoux of Aligned Entrepreneurs and welcome to today’s video called, “Don’t Throw Out the Baby.” This is in response to a question I got recently which was asking about which of my corporate skills, my corporate background … I call myself a recovering engineer and I worked in product development for years and then in marketing. The question was, “Which of your corporate skills translate into the business that you do today?” It’s a great question and I want to address it on two levels. |
| First of all, a lot of the skills from my corporate job translate everything from how to manage a project which a lot of people don’t know actually, I’m grateful I learned that, to some of the very specific product development and marketing tools that I learned about in branding and all of that. A lot of it translates but here’s what I want to share, is in the beginning, I really didn’t get that and I really didn’t see that. I see this happen with a lot of people as they get into business and they decide, I really want to align with my heart, I want to do the things that matter most to me and they throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak. I did exactly that. |
| When I left my corporate job, I was kind of frustrated. I felt like I was working really hard to make money for the man and I was marketing products that I didn’t really think people needed more of. I was a little disgruntled, we’ll say. I went into business as a coach and I knew I wanted to really help people get at the heart of who they are and what they’re about and get on the right track for themselves and their business and their lives. I was really excited about this. What I did is I basically closed the door on everything I knew before that. I went, “This is the right way to approach life,” all of the coaching tools I had learned and I was really right about that. I totally forgot about all these other skills I had. I was a life coach and I worked with people mostly on their careers, helping them figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up. It was great and I loved it. People got a lot of change and a lot of my clients left their job and became entrepreneurs. I went, “Oh my gosh, I better learn how to help them with their business.” I went to work, studying everything I could about how to run a business, how to market yourself, all of that. |
| Meanwhile, all of those great skills I had amassed from my corporate gigs still were tightly locked up. Until one day, I just had this “aha” and I realized I used to help my company to develop products, physical, tangible products. Well now, I’m helping my clients to develop themselves as product. I used to market and create brand strategies for how to build the business and grow the brand. Now, I’m helping my clients to do that too. I had totally shut that part of myself off, focusing on the pieces that were more exciting and new for me. What happened was, I opened that door up. I started to integrate the pieces that I knew from corporate and actually own those experiences and that gifting that I had from all I had learned and what was natural to me. It made a huge, huge difference for my clients because they knew they could come to me and not only could I help them know what they were meant to be when they grew up but I could help them sort through the ideas and know what products to offer and what to market. It made a huge difference. |
| It’s amazing to me looking back how I felt like those were 2 separate things. I know I’m not alone. I’ve seen countless clients do this. It comes to mind the client who was a graphic designer in her job and was working really hard designing for people and wanted to get away from that place of working so hard and was actually fed up and frustrated by design and moved into this whole other area of helping people with their creativity and play and some of those things and totally shut this part off. Something wasn’t right. She, just like me, had to reopen that door and integrate both of those things and create a business that honored this part of herself but also brought in this new part of herself so that she was working in the design arena but in a whole new way with whole new clients and a whole different set of boundaries and rules for herself which made a huge difference. |
| Our corporate stuff translates 100%. I think it’s a great exercise for you to sit down and actually make a list of what are the skills that I amassed in my prior world that actually apply to this work today now. Then don’t take them for granted. Don’t ignore them. In fact, when people buy you, even though they’ve got this whole piece of you over here that you’re developing, they also get all of these years of experience. That is huge. Your old stuff translates is the first piece, 100% take the time to go through and list out why does your client benefit from the fact you had those old experience. Then you want to look within yourself because for me, to open that door and let the old things in, I had to heal some of my hurts and some of my judgments and baggage about the old world in order to integrate that into myself as a whole. You’re going to want to do that work so that your clients get the benefit of having all of you and not a part of you that’s jaded about that work you used to do. |
| Great question, thank you so much. This is Darla LeDoux of Aligned Entrepreneurs and I look forward to being with you again soon. I invite you to comment below! |
