The Women's Business School



Audio Title: Dreaming bigAudio Duration: 0:55:00Number of Speakers: 1TranscriptNow what an exciting point you are in your business journey at the moment, just sitting on the edge of what’s going to be an absolutely amazing ride for you.I started my business 16 years ago and to tell you the truth, I probably started it because I was trying to escape from the corporate world. I wanted more freedom and flexibility and I decided to go out into business, bringing strengths that I already had in business and in leadership.So for the last 16 years, I’ve been working with CEOs and with leaders and companies, teaching them how to lead their business in a way that’s going to thrive, not just survive. So for 16 years I’ve been doing that. But along the journey, I’ve done a whole range of other things. So about nine years ago, I established my company Mind Gardener which was from a bit of a passion that when it comes to business, a lot of it actually comes to what we think.So Mind Gardener was created to teach people in business how to develop the right mind-set and also the essential skill of today of being able to be in the present and pay attention. So that journey into selling products as well as a service business took me on a whole range of other roots as well.In the last few years, I’ve been very fortunate enough to have written a couple of books. So I’m also a Hay House author of two best-selling books. The first one being Wired for Life: Retrain Your Brain and Thrive. The second one being One Moment Please: It’s Time to Pay Attention and I’m currently writing my third book as we speak.So that’s my journey and often when I’m doing interviews with people, I get asked the question all the time. That if I could go back and give myself 16 years ago some advice in business, what would it be? Without a doubt, as you can probably guess by my passion here, it would be all about spending as much time getting our heads right and getting into the right mind-set for success, as we do a lot of the other activities.So often when we’re setting up a business, we get very obsessed about having our website and having our social media up and all the right ticks in terms of getting our accountant and all these things that we’ve got to do, which are so, so important. But what we also need to do is spend as much effort getting the right mind-sets, getting the right attitudes and thinking a certain way because that’s the thing that’s going to really ensure whether you thrive in business or whether you just create a good business.So what will move you from being a good business to really being significant? It’s all about your mind-set. If you look at a lot of the entrepreneurs around the world that you might admire, it might be Oprah for you or someone like Brene Brown or Lorna Jane Clarkson. One thing that you will notice about all successful entrepreneurs is that they think about themselves in a certain way and they think about the world in a certain way.So in this module of dreaming big, what I’m going to explore with you is some of those foundations, some of those mind-sets and the way of looking at the world, that you can establish at the very start of your business to ensure that you do set yourself up for success. There are things that sometimes took me five years or even a decade to learn and the advantage of having them clear upfront, really, really important thing.I often say that when you go into business, what you are really doing is embarking on a personal and intimate journey with yourself. Besides I think something like a marriage or a relationship, there is nothing that is more insightful in terms of throwing up for you all your fears, but also highlighting for you strengths that you have, that you never thought you – you know, possibly would have had before.So it’s a real personal journey into yourself and the first thing that I would like to explore or talk about is that it is really an important part of the process to get to know yourself. That might sound quite crazy. You might be saying, “Well, I’ve known myself for 20 something or 40 something years,” but really actually developing a business that is authentic to you, that personifies every value and every approach that you have and creating something that is extremely unique.Often when I’m looking at someone’s business, I might be looking at their website. I would have to say the thing that I find most interesting is going to that little section that says “about me” or “about us” and understanding a person’s journey, getting a real good insight into what motivates them, what switches them on, why they created a business in the first place.It’s really the person behind the business that tends to sell the products and services for people. So one thing that I would really encourage you to do from the outset is to take yourself off on what I would call almost a little personal retreat. Carve a couple of hours in your day or a whole day if you can manage that. Go out somewhere in nature without your technology, but simply just a pen and a piece of paper and do some free writing, exploring some of the following things. Things like, “Who am I?” which is not about I’m a wife, I’m a mother, I’m this age. But really getting into, “Who are you as a person? What are you passionate about? What motivates you?”Things like why are you starting this business in the first place and not just those issues of, “Oh, I want some flexibility.” But what do you believe that’s going to be so ingrained in your business, that people are going to take notice of it? Because they’re going to say, “Well, that’s inspiring because I believe that also.”Another area is the values that really drive you because as you go into bigger and bigger levels with your business, it’s very important that the values you hold personally get translated into every single thing that you do.Also really understanding your strengths and this is a very, very interesting area because when I run workshops, I will ask people a show of hands who can tell me what their top three strengths are. Usually in a room of 30, I have one person putting their hand up.If I would have asked the question of, “What are your weaknesses?” I guarantee you that every single hand in the room would go up because we are well too aware of all the things that we’re doing wrong, that we’re not quite good at. But in terms of carving out a really unique business, the more powerful path is to really understand your strengths.I’m going to give you some resources over the next four weeks to explore that a little bit yourself. But it’s also a good idea to ask the people around you. You know, ask your husband or partner. Ask the people that you work with, your family. Often when it comes to our strengths, our unique strengths, other people have a lot better view of what they are than we hold in ourselves.So just like it’s important to understand your strengths or your superpowers, it’s also really important to understand your kryptonite. What are some of those things that actually bring you down? What are some of those areas that you need to let go of or you need to do some work on as well?Once you understand this picture about yourself – and it really is about putting some focus on it, doing some free writing. You will be able to create a business that is uniquely you and this is so important because in terms of your business, you won’t be the only person doing that in the world. But you will be the only person doing it your way.I think too often we look over our shoulder at competitors. We do all this comparison of going, “Oh, they’re doing that. Therefore I will do this.” It’s much more important to actually create a business from what’s in here because no one will be able to copy that and it will always be your competitive advantage. Now on the topic of this thing about our unique strengths and what we bring to our business, it’s really important to make sure that those strengths are something that’s authentic to you because in the last few hundred years in business, a lot of the strengths that we have as women have been undervalued. I know for myself when I went into business, I was copying things that men do because that was actually our model for success that a lot of the time those characteristics that male business leaders had were the things that rewarded, where the things that were taught in universities and in courses and all of those things.But the exciting news for all of us as women in business today is that feminine qualities in business are now actually being very valued in the business world. So it’s not about people just saying, “Oh, OK. Women can compete with us in the business.” We’ve actually gotten to a point in the world where there’s a whole range of research that’s actually saying we need feminine strengths and feminine qualities to do business these days.To give you a bit of an explanation why, I just want you to think about the business environment that we operate in at the moment. It is very different to what I was in 20 years ago when I was in my corporate career. The business environment was slower. It was more predictable. You look at a business these days and the environment we are working in. It is messy. It is complex. It is unpredictable. It is uncertain that a lot of the things we think we’re going to target – the next day, they become totally irrelevant because the world has moved on. So we’re living in very disruptive, interruptive times and when I think about a business environment like that, being so messy, being so chaotic, being so unpredictable, I often laugh and think to myself, “Well, that sounds like dinner time at my place every night when the kids are going crazy and whatever is going on.”I would have to say for us, as women, we have a range of strengths, things like the ability to adapt, things like the ability to work with uncertainty and chaos and all of those sorts of things that stand us in really good stead for leading business in the future.This was backed up by a bit of research that was done probably nearly a decade ago and published in the book called The Athena Doctrine where two men actually did research and it was significant research. It had 64,000 participants in 13 countries that made up 65 percent of world GDP. That sample was representative of all the populations in those countries.What the research was actually about was they looked at a whole range of qualities that are needed in the world in the future. They ask people to say, “Out of all these qualities, can you tick what we’re definitely going to need in the world and in business in the future?” On the other side of things, they put to the other sample, here’s a range of different qualities. Can you select which ones you believe are feminine qualities and which ones you believe are masculine qualities? Some very interesting research came out of that.So 81 percent of people said that we need masculine and feminine qualities in business and in the world in the future. So when you look at that, that’s a very high sample. It would not have been the same a couple of years ago or 10 years ago. But the part that I found really quite interesting is for two-thirds of people, they believe the world would be a better place if men thought more like women. So very, very interesting here. But my point is that if ever we were in a place to play big and dream big, it is right now. You will see all over the place examples of the feminine rising and by that, I mean women who have risen to the top of things like politics, if you look at our political arena, but also a lot of women that are really leading the way that business is conducted in the future.So this is the time to bring those unique strengths and the thing is that the masculine way of doing business is very different from the feminine way of doing business. I should say from the outset, what I’m not talking about here is men versus women. Masculine and feminine essence is in absolutely everything. It’s the yin and the yang thing and I certainly know a lot of women who are very masculine and I know a lot of men who are very feminine.So I’m going to use the words “men” and “women”. But I want to say from the outset that we have all got those essences within ourselves. But as I mentioned, the masculine and the feminine way of doing business are very different. I just wanted to give you some examples. So the masculine way of doing business is very much high on intellect, thinking, logic, rationality. When for women, the way of doing business is very much about embodied wisdom. We all have those times where we get a gut feel about something or we follow something because we’re excited, so that wisdom lying within our bodies. The masculine way of business is very much a drive for profit. What motivates the feminine essence when it comes to business is a real drive for purpose, for making a difference, for healing the world, for helping people in society.The masculine essence is more geared towards competition where the feminine is more geared towards collaboration. The masculine tends to be more of a short term focus where the feminine is more of that long term focus.The masculine is very much about perseverance. So when you’re bringing masculine energy, it’s about I’ve got a goal and I’m going to do anything to drive towards it and get there.For the feminine side of things, it’s more about that adaptability. That I might have a goal, but that goal shifts every day and once I start working with things, I could start here and end up totally somewhere over there.For the masculine, it’s very much about control whereas for the feminine way of doing business, it’s more about creating an environment and then allowing that success to find you. So, so many different examples.Another example is in the masculine, very results-focused. The feminine, very relationship-focused. So as you see when I just go through all those traits, it’s not about saying one is better than the other. But clearly in the business world, we need both of those sides and it’s very exciting that now, as women, we can bring that to the table. I was just talking to a businesswoman the other day that gave me a really good example of this. She was talking about how the night before, she had gone home to her husband and she had said to him, “Oh, you never believe what happened today. I was walking to a coffee date that I was having and I was walking along the river. I just got this amazing idea that kind of dropped out of nowhere and it just brought together everything that I feel like I’ve been training for my whole life and I’m really excited about it. I got to this coffee with a group of people. But you will never believe it. I met this other woman and we instantly had an amazing connection. I found out that she had a key part to this business that I want to explore. So we’re thinking about going into business together. We’re exploring things.”The husband straight away said, “Where’s the profit in this? Don’t you realise that 95 percent of businesses fail in the first year? Also business partnerships can be a disaster,” and brought in a lot of that logic, brought in a lot of that risk assessment that the masculine is so good at. I thought that’s a really good example of what we’re talking here about. We are bringing different sides to the same equation. But if we – if there was never a time before, it’s now that we have to give ourselves permission to dream big, to play big, but also to realise that all we need to do is show up as ourselves and bring the strengths that we already have with inside us. Not to actually copy something else or bring forward something that’s not authentic to ourselves, because every time we do that, we end up on the wrong path. We end up in Struggle Street, with overwhelm, all of those things.So very great time to be a woman in business. What I want to talk to you about further today is five feminine advantages. So five traits of the feminine that if from the outset, you are committed to, you wire up the mind-sets for, they will see you thriving in this messy, disruptive business environment that we have going for us today.Those five firstly is about intuition and our inner wisdom and about not looking for the answers out there, but finding them in here. The second one is about adaptability and working with the flow of energy. When you’ve got a changing work environment, business environment, the best entrepreneurs will be able to follow what’s emerging out there more than what they have in their head. The third one is around coming from the heart. So really making how you’re going to serve the world a business that’s based in care, how that’s really, really important.The fourth one is about dreaming big in specifics without constraints. So being the person who can envision a really big vision and can constantly keep that in mind. The last one is about strong relationships and having really good connections. They’re the absolute key to business.So if you look at those five factors, they’re all things that often come naturally to a lot of us as women and they are a real competitive advantage in today’s business environment.So I just want to explore those one by one. First starting with intuition and being able to access your internal guidance system. So as I said before, this is really about recognising that the answers aren’t out there somewhere. They’re actually in here. But often we’re not tuning in to that place.Now all of you would have had many situations where you tapped into your intuition. So you met someone. Automatically, you knew what type of person they were or you went to an event and all of a sudden, you get this feeling in your stomach and you know that it’s not the right thing for you.So they call that women’s intuition for a reason. We have all had this experience. But what we need to do to really stand out in business is to be able to access it more frequently. There’s a saying about always trust your gut because it has worked things out way before your mind has. I think what has happened over the last decade is women are getting more and more in their heads and less attuned to their bodies.When you think about it, business wisdom isn’t all up here. Often it’s the time where we feel something in our gut. It actually sits within our gut, but also when we’re pulled towards something because there’s a feeling in our heart. This is really about accessing those other levels of wisdom other than the brain and overthinking things.The reason why this internal guidance system is so, so important in today’s business environment is because there is actually no rule book. So when you think about it, no one ever in the world before has been in a business environment that is this unpredictable, this complex, this ever-changing.So in a lot of ways, we are creating the rule book. Yes, you can listen to advice from mentors and learn from people’s experience. But no one would have ever experienced some of the challenges or some of the opportunities that you’re going to experience in business.So in a lot of ways, what you have to rely on is yourself, so really important to be able to establish this connection, because as I mentioned before, for a lot of us, we have lost connection to our intuition, to our internal guidance system. But the good news is, is that it is almost like a muscle that can be trained. That the more we tap into it, the greater you’re going to find it.Certainly my journey over the last five years, I’ve made this the biggest priority of my life and I now constantly just get messages on opportunities that I need to follow, places that I need to be at. It’s the most powerful thing that I would ever tap into.So really important that we do a couple of things. The first thing is to start activating our internal guidance system. I think of it almost like putting in the phone line, that you can’t be expected to make phone calls when you don’t have a phone line. We’re talking about a landline here.It’s sort of the same with our intuition, that until we activate it, we’re not going to be getting the most out of it.The second thing that we really need to focus on as well, which I will talk a little bit about, is quieting down our busy minds because when we’ve got a busy mind, it’s like music or a radio playing in the background. We can no longer hear this voice of wisdom.So I’m going to start by just talking a little bit about how you can activate your connection back to your intuition. Again, it’s just about going there once a day, having a conversation with your inner self. I’m going to get you to do a little bit of an exercise now. All I want you to do is put your hand on your heart, one hand on your heart, the other one on your stomach. I want you to close your eyes and just take some really deep breaths. So breathing in for a count of four. Just holding for a count of four and then breathing out for a count of four and holding for a count of four.So just do that a few times. Breathing in for four, three, two, one, and holding, four, three, two, one. Then breathing out, four, three, two, one and just holding again, four, three, two, one. Let’s do that a couple more times.As you’re slowing down that breathing, imagine yourself going deeper and deeper into your body. This is the place that we meet our internal guide, which is essentially your higher self, the person though that doesn’t come with the fears, that doesn’t come with the not-good-enoughs. But that part of you who actually knows that everything is perfect, that you’ve got all you need inside of you to succeed and to be fulfilled.So really picturing yourself going into that place and meeting with that higher part of yourself. Now I just want you to ask a question, like maybe starting with, “How am I feeling about starting this business?” So just ask that question and just know what comes up. How am I feeling about starting this business?Your internal guidance system sometimes communicates in pictures or images or words or even feelings. So don’t expect to kind of have a conversation like we would be having a conversation with a best friend. But just look into what’s being said there.Then I want you to think about something that you’re deliberating on at the moment. So it might be which website design to go with or which person to choose as your accountant, whatever it might be. I want you to ask your inner guide again for some advice. So a question that you’ve been deliberating on. Ask your inner self and then maybe just asking what are the really key things that I need to focus on in starting this business. See what response is made to that.For the first few times, you may not get anything back as I mentioned before. You can open your eyes now and come back to the video. But as I mentioned before, it takes a while to develop that connection in. But what I would recommend and I still do this after 16 years of business. It doesn’t matter what level of success that you get to. I go inside every single day in the morning and I ask my inner guidance system, “What would you have me do today?”So just a question around what’s the important work for the day. Some of the answers that I get from that are surprising and they’re always amazing. The other thing that I would suggest is in order to develop the connection, think about giving your inner guide a name. So for Peace and Katy, co-founders of the Women’s Business School, we did a little visualisation together where we went and sort of met our internal guide. Then at the end, we said in the visualisation, “What’s your name?” and we had a whole range of different names come up. For mine, for some bizarre reason, it was Pam and that made me giggle at the time because I don’t know what the relevance is of that.But quite often when I’m struck with some deliberation, I say to myself, “What would my inner Pam say about that?” It really does help you distance yourself from an issue and get back in touch. So I recommend that you do something every day to connect into that inner source of wisdom, but also when you are overthinking something or you’re really challenged with something. Just do that exercise of going inside and knowing that all the answers lie within there.The other issue is around quieting these busy minds. I’m going to talk a little bit more about this in a module down the track on creating the life that you love. But these days, the average person has 70,000 thoughts a day, 12,000 internal conversations. When you think about that number, it’s huge. But it’s the radio station that is playing all the time that is blocking you from not only just hearing things in terms of that inner wisdom. But it’s stopping you from just seeing things.To really access your intuition, you need to be present with your body. Harvard study revealed for us that the average person spends 47 percent of their day just completely lost in thought. We have no hope whatsoever in being able to tap into this intuition, when our body is doing one thing and our mind is on a completely different journey somewhere.So I’m writing a report. But my mind is thinking about what’s for dinner tonight. So in terms of our brains, they are no different to our body, that how you use it, we get very, very skilled at it. So if you think about something like a bicep curl, you do lots of those and you get big biceps. But it’s the same in the brain, that if you are constantly thinking about a million things at once, doing one thing while thinking about something else, you are literally training your brain to be very busy.So it’s really important that you start to slow that down to – twenty times a day, ask yourself, “Where is my mind right now?” I’m doing this thing. But where’s my mind right now? Is it reading or is it off on a completely different adventure? Bring those two things together because when you bring them together, the other thing that’s really, really important here is that you begin to be able to distinguish between fear and intuition, because there’s another loud voice inside of us and that is our fear voice.For all of us, when you think about the brain, the reason that it came into place in the first place was for survival, to protect us from threats and to help move us towards reward. Yet today, we are operating on a very out-dated fear mechanism in the brain.What I mean by that is that the things that our ancestors needed to avoid, when they’re roaming the plains and trying to avoid getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers are still the fear voice that’s coming up in our heads all the time.So this is essentially what Wired for Life is about. There are five fears that are wired into all of us and they’re things like fear of failure or fear of losing control, fear of standing out.So for a lot of people, public speaking is – the brain experience is that – like it is death, because it’s something that’s wired into us because from the earliest of times, it was safer to blend in. But now in business, we need to be able to stand out.Fear of facing the truth and moving into that victim mentality, but also the fear of missing out. This fear response is getting activated in us all of the time. Think for example – you know, someone has asked you to come up on stage and showcase your business and all of a sudden, your heart is pumping and everything within your body is saying, “Don’t do it.”That’s not your intuition. That’s actually your fear. That’s your brain saying if you stand out, you might get killed. Don’t do that. So it’s really important to – when we’re having those responses, come back inside and have a conversation with your inner self. Is that intuition? Is that fear? One way that I do that is just a presence, a feeling in the body. So if I’ve had someone offer an opportunity and all of a sudden I feel myself backing away from it, I come deep inside again. I find out where in my body I’m feeling that and I might say, “I’m present,” to a thumping in my chest and I just ask the question, “What’s beneath that?”Again the answer will come up. What’s beneath that is I don’t feel good enough. I feel like I’m going to stuff this up, whatever else it might be. Once you actually know whether it’s fear or intuition, you are much more armed to actually start moving beyond the fear.We will never get rid of fear because it is a mechanism that’s wired into the brain. But what we can start to do is getting control of it in a way that we’re bringing it along for the journey, but we’re not letting it make any decisions.So I often again name my fears and when they arrive, there are things like, oh, that’s just the fear of failure. But I’m going to choose to take this opportunity anyway. So really important part to start working with your fear and distinguish that intuition and fear are not the voices – are really quite different when you go into them.So that’s the most important one which I spent most of the time about, this intuition and accessing your inner guidance system. I would also say that as you explore the curriculum over the next six months, use it to inspire your intuition. So come back to that point that there will be heaps of knowledge that is shared with you. It’s not about saying, “Oh, those people are right. I’m going to pick that up and I’m going to implement that exactly.”But it’s about using information, using mentors, all of these things, to inspire your own intuition. If you stick with that, you will never go wrong in business.So that’s intuition. The next one I wanted to explore is about adapting and working with the flow of energy. I often think back 20 years ago, when I was working in businesses, I used to help leaders come up with their business plan and would sit down and we would go, “OK, this is the goal and we got to do this before that, then this before that, and we will achieve the goal.” The business plan will be typed up. It would be put in the drawer and we would only get it out – you know, it’s a five-year business plan. We would get it out five years later and when I think about that process, I just think how ridiculous it is because most of the time, once your – the ink on your business plan is dry, something has changed in the environment and you need to adapt. When it comes to masculine energy around things like business plans or creating a business, it’s very much like the building of a house. We need to have the foundation. Then we have the walls and X plus Y equals Z. We build it up. We construct it and all of these sorts of things. The feminine essence when it comes to building a business is more like you being a gardener. So by that, I mean if you’re going to create a garden, in your backyard whether you love gardening or not, just think about this scenario. If you were going to build a beautiful garden, the first thing you would do is have a picture for it. So you would have a vision about the type of garden and I will plant some gerberas there and some basil over here, et cetera. You would have that vision.You would plant the seeds for what you want to occur. So you do a whole range of activities that actually said this is setting it in the right direction. You would pull out the weeds because you don’t want any kind of obstacles coming up to things. But then you would step back and you would watch actually how the garden grew, how it interacted with your environment, because you might have thought the business was going to look like this.But as it got more sunlight than you expected, it started to adapt. So you then intervene and say, “No sun. I want it like this.” You actually went, “Well, given the external environment, I need to make an adaptation here.” It’s the same with how you run your business. Yes, you need a vision and you have goals and all those things.But the most important thing that you do every single day is have a fresh look at what your business is and what the plan is. Look at what has changed in the external environment that requires you to actually do something different.This is all about working with the flow of energy. Too often I see people making mistakes in business because they have a plan. They have a project plan of how they thought things should unfold and then guess what. It didn’t unfold that way. So what did they do? They said, “Well, this is the plan. I’m just going to push harder. I’m going to talk louder. I’m going to make this happen,” and they almost just started fighting against the business environment. What we need to do is put things out there. Watch how they are taken up. Sometimes what you’re putting out here actually sparks a bit of energy over here and you adapt paths. So it’s really, really important to not be attached to the plan in your head. But instead be attached to what’s unfolding directly in front of you. So I hope that makes sense to really – and I think that analogy of thinking of yourself as a gardener is really way more relevant to a business, because the other thing that I see people do in business is they fall into a trap of going, “This has to happen before this and then that will happen here.”Sometimes when an opportunity is thrown up in front of them, they go, “Oh no, we can’t do that because we didn’t think that would happen for another year in our plan.” The ones who really create great businesses, they’re opportunistic. So they go, “Yeah, we had a plan. But look what’s emerging here.” I’m going to jump on that and I would say that all my great opportunities in business have come off the plan because I was more in tuned to how things were adapting.This brings in the notion that it’s really important to almost see your business as one big experiment. That too often we try to perfect it in our own heads and get it all right and get it all designed. I’ve had people who have said, “I’m two years into my business and I’m still trying to perfect that marketing strategy.” I’m thinking, “Well, if it’s taking you two years before you’re getting anything out, then that’s a real issue.”So really seeing it as an experiment. Always releasing something great but realising that it’s not until it gets out there that it actually develops the energy and starts to show you where it’s going to go. It’s going to put a different spin on failure as well. So all these people trying to avoid failure, in this type of philosophy, there is no failure because what went over here has now led me to over here and maybe it took me backwards. But then it took me forward and really following that energy of how things are unfolding, so adaptability.The next one, number three is about creating from your heart. I mentioned earlier that from the masculine energy side of things, often businesses were started because of profit. It was like I saw an opportunity out there. There’s a gap in the market. It’s going to make me a lot of money. I’m going to pursue that.What I’m suggesting here is not that we don’t make money. We all want to be able to make money. But the most successful businesses that are sustainable over the long term will be more focused on a purpose motive than they are a profit motive. By purpose, I mean the difference that you want to make in the world, how you want to solve a problem in the world. Why is your business here? In different modules, we will be looking at things like working out. Why am I starting this business? What do I hope to transform in the world for example?But there were a whole range of studies that were done some time ago that looked at similar companies in comparable industries. They might have had the same product. But one of them was purely focused on making money and the other one had a really strong purpose motive of how they wanted to make a difference.This research followed companies over a hundred years and found that the ones who sustained that longevity of success over a hundred years started because they had a strong purpose, not because they were just focused on profit.Again, as I said it’s about – it’s not about ignoring money or profit. That’s important. But the view here is that if you really focus on how you can serve and how you can make a difference, the money just comes. It’s like fuel for the car. It’s just something that kind of comes.So really important from the outset that you work out what your why is, how you want to change the world for example will just solve the problem of the person next door. Most of us as women have a business idea because it is solving a problem. So really important to do some thinking around that, but also important to make every business decision based on it and I fell into this trap big time about a decade ago when I was starting my Mind Gardener business.What I released was step by step guides that help you create a certain mind-set and I knew that everyone around me needed one on happiness, that the world is going through a depression. I wanted to solve that problem. I also knew that all the people I spoke to were complaining about having busy minds.So I wanted to create one on how to tame the busy mind and get some clarity. I knew that relationships were breaking down and that was a problem that I wanted to help solve as well. So I had these three guides and then for the last one, someone came in and gave me some advice sort of saying the whole area of parenting and of having babies, it’s a really booming area. It’s going to be worth X billion dollars and it’s a really smart thing to get into.For some reason, I listened to that. On some level, I still believe obviously it was going to make a difference. But it wasn’t a problem that I identified. It was based on a need of someone saying that’s a really good market and guess what happened. The three that were based on me seeing a problem and passionately wanting to solve it sold out within two years. You know, best-selling type of status. The one that was based on the parenting one didn’t sell.So a lot about business is behind our intent of why we’re making choices. The point here is really don’t do it based on comparison. Don’t base it purely on profit. But do it based on this question of asking yourself, “How can I serve?” Because as we know, that people always make purchasing decisions based on emotions. If you even think about your local café where you might go and get a coffee, the one where you can see front of mind, they are about serving you. It’s the one you will always go back to.The one that you go to where you can just see their mind is elsewhere because they’re trying to get you off your table, so they can bring more people in, they’re not the places that you go back and visit. There’s this beautiful quote by Maya Angelou which says people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But they will never forget the way you made them feel and so, so important in business that a lot of time is not about your product or service. But it’s about the way you make the people feel. You connect from the heart and you engage people at the heart level. That is the biggest motivational area.So that’s that one. Now we come on to dreaming big, which is the title of this module of course. But really this is about that strength of visioning without constraint. Women are really, really good at this and in fact in ancient times, in indigenous cultures, it was a specific role that was given to women. Women would sit around the circle. They would vision for how to solve community problems. They would sit in their circle, visioning for what they want for their world. It was something that we always did. I would have to say that even when I go into business meetings these days, there will be a room full of men and women. It will be the women going, “What about this? We could do this amazing thing,” and all of these big types of ideas really come quite naturally to us if we park the inner critic, which is very, very important.So a few things I want to say about dreaming big, it’s very, very important. The first thing is to make sure that you have a vision which totally blows your mind. If it doesn’t excite you, if it doesn’t make you a little bit nervous and perhaps make you even a little bit fearful, then it’s not big enough.The reason why you want to set up a really big vision is because it stretches your brain and you will get way further than you would had you set a small vision. It makes sense because if you set a vision that was there and you only got halfway, then you only got to here. If you set a vision that’s up here somewhere, you get to halfway, you’re way up here.So really, really important that what we plant in our heads is a vision that is grand. Like, when you’re thinking about setting up your business, think about starting it as a world-changing movement. I often think it’s a really good opportunity to practice this when people ask, “What are you doing?” So someone might say, “Oh, I heard you starting a business. What are you doing?” and often we hear the commentary of, “Oh, I’m just starting this little marketing business,” and often we’re just talking ourselves down. We’re talking our vision down. It’s very different to meeting someone and saying, “What are you doing these days?” Well, I’m actually starting a global marketing business and that it’s all going to be based around this passion of mine to change the relationship between people and how they access products and services.When you hear a vision like that, it makes you want to lean in at a barbecue and say, “Tell me more. How can I be part of this?” When you hear this little vision – oh, I’m just trying to set up this one store. It’s not necessarily inspiring or something that people want to move towards. So really set up a big vision and I would also encourage you to feel that vision. What I mean by that is seeing and feeling yourself as having achieved that vision before you even have. From the outset, way before I was an author or a speaker at conferences, what it said on my business card was “Susan Pearse, author and speaker,” and I wasn’t at the time. But I had a very clear view that I would be.It really made a difference of me feeling like I was that person. So just let me say as well as having the vision. Be that person. Be the person who walks into a room already owning that. Even if you need to take some confidence tips from a Harvard associate professor – you may have heard of this little experiment where she encouraged people to do power poses. You know, like a Wonder Woman pose where she just got participants to strike that pose for two minutes and found that testosterone skyrocketed. Cortisol came down and it had a real effect to people feeling more powerful and feeling more confident.So really making sure that not only is your vision huge, but you actually believe it. You believe you can get there. A really good way to convince your brain of that is to put it in pictures and put it in feelings. So for some of you, you’re already working on a vision board. Those things are great to actually have pictures. Your brain doesn’t really communicate in words. It communicates in images. So the more you have the pictures of what it’s going to look like, the more likely the motivational area of your brain is going to want to pursue it. So very important. The other thing about visioning is that there is no room in the visioning circle for your inner critic. So for all of us, we have this voice that every time we try to dream big, there’s this voice on your shoulder going, “Oh, that’s not really realistic,” or “You’re never going to achieve that, “Oh, they wouldn’t want you at this thing here. You’re not good enough for that.” This really helpful or not inner critic, that does not belong at the visioning table. Visioning is really about dreaming without constraints. When you come to execute it, there is nothing wrong with bringing in more rational thinking or risk assessments. But while you’re visioning, that inner critic’s volume needs to be turned down because you really need to be in a zone of anything is possible because what you focus on grows. It grows in your brain. It grows in your life. So you want to be focusing on the big things. Also have mind-sets that support dreaming big. If anyone presents me a challenge, I always go, “That’s easy,” or if anyone sort of says, “Why me?” I say, “Well, why not me?” But really having mind-sets that support dreaming big and dreaming big on a daily basis and I often think – you know, even when you go to something like an expo and there’s someone up on – a stage there, in your mind going, “That will be me one day.”Planting these seeds and visions in your brain every single day and it’s like when these amazing things happen for you, which they will. You won’t even be surprised because you saw it from the outset. So onto our last one now, which is all around relationships and connections. You’ve probably had an experience already that [0:49:48] [Indiscernible] you’re very good at this, that – you know, for a lot of women, just think again, I will go out with my partner and by the end of the night, I would have picked up a whole range of new best friends. I would know every detail of their life. He would come home and would say, “What did you talk to such and such about?” Oh, you know, not much. It’s like a completely different way of doing relationships that I find that women develop very close connections. Again, I’m generalising here. But we have that ability to develop those close connections and relationships.Again, relationships are the most important thing when it comes to doing business. So we think it’s the product and the service or getting the font right or whatever else. But most of your big opportunities will come from relationships. But the thing that you need to remember is that the relationship that’s important will always be unpredictable. By that, I mean that a lot of the time in the business environment, you see people going, “Oh, I’m going to be nice to that person because I think they can get me to my vision over here.” Guess what. The human brain is so attuned to knowing when someone is developing a relationship with you because they want something. The reality of how it works out is for me the relationships that I’ve built even 16 years ago, amazing things are happening from those relationships now that I would have never predicted. So when it comes to relationships, I have a firm belief that I treat everyone the same way that I would my inner circle. I treat everyone with the care and the respect because you just never know where things are going to head in the future.So really important and really important to invest in building the relationship again when I look at – if I’m having a meeting with a key partner, I won’t go in there and go, “OK, yeah. What’s the agenda? We got five minutes to do this. What outcomes do we want?” I will spend the first five minutes getting to know them as a person and establishing that connection. It’s just so, so important and it makes the outcomes just flow extremely effortlessly. So again they need to be authentic. They need to be coming from a place of care. When people feel like you care about them, their engagement skyrockets. So it needs to come from that place because again what I see a lot of the time and it happened to me the other day is someone contacting me on LinkedIn and it said, “Hey, Susanne!” I knew straight away my kind of – you know, my intuition was telling me, “I don’t know where this is going.” But it was this person going, “Oh, I think you could benefit from my business. I never normally do this but I’m going to offer you a VIP seat at my next conference.” I politely said, “No, thanks. I’m kind of not interested in that.”He came straight back. I don’t normally do this but I’m prepared to let you speak to me for 10 minutes for free. This would normally cost people a lot of money. That’s not relationship building as I mentioned before. You would know that the human brain is just so attuned to going, “They want something. They are only connecting with me because they want to make a sale.” You will talk about this more in the Sell Module as well. But always that skill of relationships, valuing that.So they’re the five feminine strengths that you will get a lot more time to have a play with over the next four weeks. But the really important things from this module is to remember, to create a business that’s uniquely you, because you will see that there is a thread from when you are a little kid through to when you finish this business. That was why you started the business. That was your unique story. So spend some time getting to know yourself and your story.The second point is to really step into the power of feminine business qualities arising. Be proud to bring what is authentically you. Tap into that intuition. It’s more important than what’s in our head or what we’re reading. The answers are in here. Adapt to what’s going on. There are way more exciting things adapting than what’s in our head again. Always doing business from the heart, asking yourself, “How can I serve?” Dreaming big, silencing that inner critic, not bringing them to the table, whatsoever, and also valuing people first.If you really set these mind-sets and this approach for success, you will find that you will absolutely thrive and all the other things will come quite easily to you.So good luck with your journey. You can find me at or and I look forward to hearing all of your stories of your amazing, successful businesses that you will create. Thank you.[End of transcript] ................
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