| Hi. This is Darla LeDoux, founder of Aligned Entrepreneurs and creator of Retreat and Grow Rich. Today’s topic is The Magical Heart of Your Story. |
| A lot of entrepreneurs struggle to determine what the heck their business is about. They have a really good idea of the difference they want to make in the world. Maybe they know how they want to work. They picture themselves traveling to excited locations and working from their laptop, or being able to stay home with the kids and have that freedom and flexibility, but they aren’t really clear what their business is about. |
| This becomes an issue because, as you go through life as an entrepreneur, you’re going to run into people who will be more than happy to tell you what your business should be about. If you’re not clear, you can find yourself kind of waffling or floating in the winds, so to speak, so we want to get clear about the heart of your business. That comes from being really clear about the heart of your story. |
| I’ve worked with countless entrepreneurs now where we looked through everything that’s kind of happened … not everything, but the key points that have happened in the history of their story that give them the perspective that they have today. I call this your unique perception in the world. When you can be really clear about how you uniquely view the world, it helps you to know exactly what you offer in your business and what makes you unique from everybody else. |
| Because, guess what, there isn’t a single person out there who has the same view that you do because no one has your collection of experiences. It’s really important, as you start business, before you name it, before you decide your tagline, before you pick your brand colors, or any of that stuff, that you get clear about who you are and why you do what you do. |
| I’ll just give you a couple of examples. I call this your clarity point. Your clarity point has to do with what you know for sure. It’s that way you view the world that colors everything. Believe it or not, it’s already there. You go through life, and you see things that happen or certain people or situations, and it causes you to go, “Oh, this is how I would make this better,” or “This is what needs to shift here.“ |
| You have that filter naturally. When we can discover what it is and isolate it and name it, it gives you a lot of power in going through life. Because you’re not trying to take care of everything or handle everything or fix anything, really. You’re just really clear about what you have to offer. |
| I want to share with you a story today as an example, a story of a client who really wanted to get to that magical heart of her business. She’s a physician who is also a holistic practitioner and also a coach and is moving into leveraging her time and using her knowledge through coaching. |
| Based on her history, there were a lot of potential clients that she could work with. She could work with other physicians to transition the way she had. She could work with other people who wanted health benefits, and work with them on her health, or she could work with just general people, women who wanted to become more aware or more conscious, and she wasn’t really sure where to go. |
| We looked at her story and as she shared her story, some pieces started to fall together. The reason she had actually made the transitions she had is when she was a physician, she was working so hard. She was picking up all these hours, pushing herself, taking care of everybody else, and putting herself last, to the point that she herself actually had a medical emergency. |
| The whole time that she was experiencing her own symptoms, she was in complete denial and kept saying, “No, no, no. I’m fine. I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong.” To the point she got to the hospital and continued to tell them nothing was wrong. She was fine and she needed to get back to work. |
| The truth was she wasn’t fine and the truth was that the doctors could clearly see that, but she just refused to admit it. Because she was clear she needed to keep going and keep pushing and handling everything on her own. She wouldn’t even let that help in or that healing in. |
| As she looked to her story, what she realized is fundamental to what she learned in that process was kind of two things and here’s how she states it: “Healing is connection and connection is healing.” She got to she how disconnected she had become by pushing and doing everything herself and all of that, to the point that it really affected her health and vice versa. |
| With that perspective, she was really quickly able to decide who she most wanted to work with, how she wanted to offer her gifts, but also, she could really clearly see she could choose any of those audiences and bring that filter to the table. Then, it became just choosing the audience that worked best for her. |
| How do you use this in your business? Here’s what’s tricky is a lot of times we can’t see our own story and we can’t see the thread, or what’s so amazing, that magical heart of the story. The first recommendation, I have is to get some support with it, and it could be someone in your life that you could work with. Ideally, it’s someone outside of your life who doesn’t know everything intimately so they can actually see that thread with new eyes. |
| I’m happy to support you with that, so if that’s something you’re into, reach out to me and my team. We do a whole retreat around it. Get someone outside of yourself who is able to see the heart of what you bring to the table that maybe is a little bit different than what you may have thought to begin with. |
| This is Darla LeDoux of Aligned Entrepreneurs and we’ll be with you soon. |
