We started by getting clear on your personal commitments because they’ll not only help you build a life you love, they’ll help you lead your business.
Your entrepreneurial leadership will inevitably face the same sorts of challenges and have the same familiar growth edges as your life outside of business. If you have a nagging disagreement with your partner, it’s likely that you have a similar nagging disagreement with a business relationship. If you have a tendency to hide from your friends and try to handle everything on your own in your personal life, it’s likely that you have a tendency to hide from your team or colleagues and try to handle everything on your own in your business. If you’re regularly avoiding important tasks in your personal life, you’re probably avoiding important tasks in your business, too.
I want to credit business therapist Nicole Lewis-Keeber for helping me see this mirroring of our personal challenges with our business challenges. Nicole’s work centers on helping business owners see how their patterns and Inner Kiddo influence the way they show up in their businesses. By surfacing these patterns, she can help them untangle them and step into more mature leadership roles.
Your leadership is key to navigating your business through the inevitable switchbacks, summits, and junctions it will face. You’re the one that makes the choices—big, small, and everything in between—every single day. Your commitments will be a reminder to choose toward your vision.
Of course, the leadership of your business is only one component of actually building a business. It’s an important one—maybe even the most important!—but it’s just one component.
While there are all sorts of decisions to be made about nuts-and-bolts business operations, they all start with strategy.
You are a powerful leader. Every moment before this one has led you here and informs your next steps. You are prepared and equipped to take the next steps for yourself and your business. Take a few minutes to reflect on what you've already learned.
What have you learned about yourself as a leader over the years?
What are your strengths as a leader?
What do you see as your opportunities for growth as a leader?
Strategy is a word that’s used to describe all sorts of things but strategy, at it’s core, is a choice of direction. Strategy says, “We’re going this way instead of that way.”
Strategy, like your commitments, orients you toward your vision. In this case, strategy orients the business toward the vision you hold for the business. Strategy can shift and evolve over time, as you’ll need to take different paths to reach your vision, but, at any given time, your strategy should be focused and clear.
Unfortunately, most small business owners don’t stop to find their focus on strategy. They concentrate on learning how to do the latest marketing fad or build a new product or send the best emails. They get caught up in the doing of the business without ever having decided what direction all that doing is taking them.
Nilofer Merchant writes in her book The New How, “Perhaps people fixate on execution (‘doing what’s required’) instead of finishing up strategy (‘choosing the direction’) because it’s easier to see progress during execution than during strategy formation and development.” We’re so hungry to say that we’ve accomplished something that we don’t question why we were accomplishing it in the first place!
The next step in this process, then, is to stop and set your strategy.