What if you could create your business from out of the box - just by being as different as you are? You don't have to be outrageous to stand out and be successful. You already have that with you - but are you letting it all shine through? Are you holding yourself back?
Here are three ways you can embrace all of you and bring it out to play in your business and life:
Know that you can
Sometimes we may look at some situations in life as if they were bigger than us. And this is something you can start to change by changing the way you think about yourself. Yes, you can achieve more by harboring nice thoughts about yourself.
Say you're going to a job interview and you would like to feel more secure in yourself. If you have the point of view that you are going to fail and that you are going to mess it up, what are you most likely going to create?
Strangely enough, our point of view creates our reality. So, before going to that job interview, look at yourself from many different angles. The same way you pay attention to the clothes you wear to an interview, be aware of the thoughts you have about yourself. Don't let them lead you to where you don't want to end up. Ask: is this point of view conducive to where I want to go? If you answer 'yes', keep going. If not, erase it and replace it with something that creates more for you!
Don't follow other people's models for success
There are many people who can't decide what they are going to do with their lives; they are interested in so many things - sometimes completely disparate things! Quite often they are people who study or try lots of different fields, jobs and interests (sometimes even at the same time), stay for a short while, and then leave or drop out before finishing and moving onto something else. They are often curious, talented people, who don't actually care about going deep into the details of one specific thing, but they may be skilled and interested in many different things.
Although they are frequently judged as uncommitted, inconsistent, or not having the capacity to follow through, they are always coming up with something new and innovative, and tend to function at a very different speed. What if they didn't drop a class or leave a job not so long after starting because they don't know what they want? What if they've actually gotten what they were looking for and didn't need to stay, because they're already done?
And what if it's not wrong to be done sooner than others? What if it's not wrong not to finish everything you start?
If you don't follow anyone else's model or judge yourself as inconsistent or a quitter - what if it's just a different rhythm of functioning?
What if you moving from one thing to the other is actually how things work for you? And if you didn't judge it, how could you begin to use it to your advantage?
All of your experience counts!
Do you include all of your abilities and talents, even the ones that you don't have a formal degree or qualification for? Rather than separate your abilities, interests and talents as those of value or not of value, what if you started integrating them into your life and business and see what shows up? What capacities do you have that you have not valued or included in creating your business before now? What would change if you did? The apparently unrelated areas of knowledge, experience and interests you have, may be able to be combined in creative and generative ways - how much fun could you have playing with that?
Rather than trying to create business from the perfect model or formula, the "right" expertise or way of studying or working, what if the greatest asset in business was you being yourself and creating exactly the way that works for you? By not holding you back, you are the difference that your business requires to create more than you currently believe is possible.
This guest post was authored by Norma Forastiere
Ms. Career Girl was started in 2008 to help ambitious young professional women figure out who they are, what they want and how to get it.
