EPISODE 06

Running your business with both intention and inspiration

Can you be both intentional and inspired in the way you market and run your business?

I say yes!

In this episode, I share why taking the time to reflect, to honor ourselves, and to spark inspiration is essential in life and business.

show transcript

Hello, my friends. And today, I wanna talk about 2 things that I think are important for any successful business, and that is intention and inspiration. Now as I started this year, I thought about my word of the year, which I think is a fun and useful exercise to help guide you in your goal setting, in your direction, in your actions, and everything that you do, and how you want this year to feel for you. And for me, it was so clear. My word was intentional.

And I think that as I in terms of where I was at and in terms of reflecting on last year, many things were going well. You know, revenue wise, it was my best year yet, but things had gotten off track. I was feeling very burnt out. The way I was running my business just wasn’t quite working. And so I put in some changes.

I, you know, restructured my week, and now it’s working much, much better. So I think that one thing when we think about being intentional is the fact that most people, I mean, or at least at some point in at different points in our lives, we get into this trap of just kind of living living our lives and running our businesses by default. Just going through the motions in an unconscious way without taking the time to really reflect, without taking any time to slow down. We live in such a fast paced society entrepreneurship really idolizes the the hustle mentality and all of this. You know, so we get into a situation where we’re not being mindful or purposeful.

We’re just reacting. We’re we’re running our business in a way that is reactive instead of proactive. So and so this was this was part of what was happening for me. But also, you know, this year I’m turning 50. Can you believe it?

Yes. So it does make you think, right? And I think, you know, I wanna be so intentional with how I spend my time. I want to I don’t want another year of my life to go by without without being proactive and without designing it in such a way that is fulfilling and joyful for me in the way that I define how I want my life to be, and in the way that I define success for myself in my business. And it can be hard to tune into understanding and knowing and clarifying what we really want because there’s just so much noise.

There’s noise on the in the online world. And just the fact that we’re so connected to the Internet and social media. And even before social media and the Internet, there’s a lot of noise in our heads. There’s noise around us from society, from our parents, expectations. It’s hard to tune into what do we really want, You know?

But this is so essential, and it it also relates to this great interview that was circulating around social media recently. An interview with Trevor Noah and Oprah talking about this concept. Let me play it for you here, and then I’ll come back. You’ve talked to everyone in the world who is successful. What would you say is the one common characteristic that you find gets people to where they want to go?

The the most important question is the people get to where they wanna go because they know where they want to go. Oh, wow. Most people don’t know where they wanna go. Most people a lot of people are going and being driven by what they think they should do Right. What other people say they should do, what they have carried in their mind for a long time they should do.

But the most important question you can ever ask yourself is what do I really want? Wow. And the answer to that, once you can establish for yourself what the answer to that is and have everything you do, every choice you make move you in the direction of what you say your vision is. Right. Yeah.

And when you do that, the the the the the forces of life rise up to meet you. The reason why most people have such chaotic lives is because they’re living in chaos in their head. And as soon as you get clear, it clears up. That’s powerful. Right?

And I think that when we when we strive to gain clarity on what it is that we want, we just we have to slow down. When we get into this trap of, like, constant movement, reactivity One of my clients always talks about how we need to be sometimes just human beings rather than human doings. Right? When we are able to slow down and reflect, that’s where the deep wisdom and answers and clarity comes from. But our our culture, our society doesn’t doesn’t like us being in a state of not not acting.

Everything’s about action. Go, go, go. Take action immediately without reflection. And of course, all great ideas need to be executed, but there is so much value in taking time to to reflect. And then as Oprah was saying, moving in the direction, taking baby steps and steps in in the direction of where you want to go.

Sometimes there’s certain events that happen in our lives. So, you know, for example, we get sick. We suddenly get injured. Someone in our life that’s close to us passes away. Maybe, we’re suddenly pregnant.

We’re about to start a family. Maybe we’re about to hit a milestone birthday and all these things or how about a pandemic happens? 2020? And all these kinds of things can make us stop and slow down and think. What do I what do I really want?

What am I really doing here? How do I figure out how to solve this constant struggle I’m having with x y z? As a business clarity mentor, as a business coach and marketing coach, I am always working with clients on multiple levels on both clarity and action, but intentional action. It’s really important that, you know, once we identify what we want and once we identify and clarify all the pieces of our business and brand from niche to message to business model to our overall vision and purpose, it’s important that the actions that we’re taking are aligned with all of that and with our goals. You know, even, you know, in a recent client session, I was discussing this with a client where we were talking about some really exciting things that we’re doing on social media.

But then at the same time, I said, okay, hold on. We need to pause for a moment and talk about our goals again because I wanna make sure that all the marketing and social media posts are actually aligning with our business goals at the moment. We talked about short term goals in the next 4 months. We talked about the fact that she wants to take most of the summer off. So that’s a lifestyle goal, and I love that.

And even just by saying that, it increases the probability that that will happen, you know? It’s setting those intentions. And and then we talked about our other business goals for September, and so that really gives us some clarity on what kinds of posts we should be doing right now on social media in the next 4 months to meet our business goals, and what those are. And the kinds of clients we want to land for her, and the, the services that she wants to sell right now in the next 4 months because she is like a lot of my clients. She has multiple different offers and different services.

So you really have to. That’s why clarity always comes first. Right? Otherwise, we’re just wasting our time, and we’re not being intentional with our time and our actions. So speaking of social media and the content that fuels social media, as business owners to to some degree, we are content creators.

Not in the sense of being an influencer. That’s not what I mean. But we there is so much content that needs to be created in our business. On a foundational level, like for example, on your website that’s more marketing content, the website text and content there. But then on a on a weekly or daily basis where we are creating more thought leadership content, brand awareness content, that basically moves people through this process of getting to know, like, and trust us enough to buy.

And so with all that content that needs to be created, there’s a couple things that can get us stuck here. 1 is lack of clarity, but another is lack of inspiration. And so often, we are running so fast and packing our schedules so tightly that we are literally not giving ourselves any room, any breathing room for inspiration, and no space for creative thinking. There are many sources, I think, of inspiration, but we first have to be we have to have the foundation of just feeling rested enough. We have to prioritize just being in a healthy restful place, number 1.

Right? Number 2, we need to to make time for this. We need to also get different inputs. You know whether that’s attending different business events in your community, reading business books, listening to podcasts, even things like, you know, going to art exhibits. I was recently at a lovely art exhibition with a friend who also does a lot of artwork and photography, and and she was saying how much she loved going to to events like this because it sparks inspiration.

So think about that for yourself and and at the same time know that sometimes inspiration comes from just getting started. Picasso famously said, inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. Meaning, you know, I think sometimes we think inspiration is just gonna magically for many for many of us it’s about having some clarity, setting an intention, and sitting down and starting to do the work, and it finds you while you are working. It develops as you are developing, for example, a piece of content. But whenever ideas come to you, it’s important too that you have a place and a method for capturing your ideas.

This could be incredibly simple. It can be capturing ideas that come to you in the notes on your phone. It could be what I do is I I have a text document that sits on my desktop called content ideas, and anytime an idea comes to me, I have a place to put it. I type I open that document, type in a few rough notes that make sense to me, close the document. It takes literally 10 seconds, you know, 30 seconds max.

So that’s really important that you have a place to capture your inspiration when it does come to you. One of the interesting challenges I see again and again with my clients is when we are creating the social media and content plan for their business, there there’s always this push and pull between intention and inspiration. So this is where these 2 come together. Can you be intentional and at the same time leave room for flow and inspiration? Can you have something that’s highly structured and a clear plan, and at the same time be able to not feel constricted by that plan?

And I think the answer is absolutely yes. You can have both. You can have a plan but know that it’s flexible and agile and not set in stone. Now another thing to look at here is sometimes some of my clients love having a very detailed plan right down to the exact day that certain things are going to happen. You know, I’m going to, put out this email newsletter on March 12th.

Yeah, for example. I’m going to post this thing on social media on March 13th. And that level of detail and structure brings calm and clarity, and that works really well for some people. For other clients, not so well. And the solution there is usually, hey, let’s set some big picture goals and intentions, and what exact days they happen doesn’t matter so much.

So I’m going to set an intention to post twice a week on Instagram. Whether that happens on Monday or Wednesday or Sunday, it doesn’t really matter. So, yeah, the the the level of detail and structure can vary a little bit, and I think sometimes we just have to have a little grace with ourselves honestly can be winding. It can change. There’s gonna be some detours and bumps in the road, and there’s many different paths to the same goal.

So that’s my final thought for you today. Stay intentional, stay inspired, and take care of yourself.

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