One Year Later…
One of the ways that I help clients achieve exceptional results is to help them establish a routine of reflections. Today, I am practicing what I preach and reflecting on the first year of owning a business. I’ve learned a lot, met a plethora of fascinating people and had the privilege of celebrating some major milestones with our clients! Within the first couple of months of starting our business, a friend asked me “what has surprised you about your business, so far.” At the time, I didn’t have any major “ah-ha’s.” As I write about my year one reflections, I can finally answer that question. Throughout the first year, three important themes continued to emerge for both me and our clients: 1. Defining your personal brand, 2. Creating space for ideation and 3. Building a practice of mindfulness.
Defining your personal brand
Whether you realize it or not, every interaction that you have with another person is an opportunity to either create, maintain or erode your personal brand. Your personal brand is the combination of the impact on and the promise to the person on the other side of the interaction. Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” How you make people feel is your personal brand. It is the legacy you leave behind. It’s powerful to think that even after we are gone, our personal brand will live on through the impact that we had on others. This is why it is so critical that we each take the time and intention to define what we would like for our personal brand to be. Through intention, we can make the most of our interactions with our friends, family members, colleagues, teams, customers and stakeholders. When we are mindful of what we would like for our impact to be, we are more likely to act in ways that consistently build and maintain our personal brand.
Creating space for ideation
In order to maintain a positive personal brand, creating space for ideation is essential.
We are all familiar with what it feels like to have back to back meetings, the never ending to-do list and overlapping time-sensitive commitments. It feels like there just aren’t enough hours in a day. For many of us, our natural tendency is to push through and get it all done. While we may get results, those results are achieved at a cost. Our time and energy are not infinite. If we are spending our time and energy racing from one thing to the next, we are not using our time and energy to ideate. If our brains are constantly focused on completing tasks, we do not have the capacity to innovate, create and envision sustainable solutions for the future. In order to maintain a positive personal brand, creating space for ideation is essential. This could mean designating one day a month as a “no meeting day” or shifting to a hybrid maker’s calendar. I encourage you to find a solution that allows you to maintain a sustainable balance between creating and producing.
Building a practice of mindfulness
“Be disciplined about what you respond and react to. Not everyone and everything deserves your time, energy and attention. Stay in your light.”
-Sean Fargo, founder of the Mindfulness Excercises
Mindfulness is about being aware of how and where you're focusing your energy, then making conscious decisions about what will keep you in alignment with your purpose. Sean Fargo, founder of the Mindfulness Exercises, urges us to: “Be disciplined about what you respond and react to. Not everyone and everything deserves your time, energy and attention. Stay in your light.” Establishing a practice of mindfulness can take many forms. Here is a short list of my go-to practices:
Journaling
Mindful breathing
Meditation or Prayer
Yoga
Gratitude lists
Positive Affirmations
Visualization
Scientific research highlights the efficacy of using mindfulness techniques to develop new thought patterns, which ultimately result in more effective action and results. Rick Hanson, author of “Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence,” states “Meditation physically changes your brain to benefit your whole being.”
Establishing a laser focus on the people, things and actions that are aligned with fulfilling your unique purpose will save you time and allow you to increase your results without increasing your input. An effective mindfulness practice allows you to “be more” while “doing less.” As a result, you shed the crushing weight of the endless cycle of meeting marathons, never-ending to-do lists and never enough hours in a day.
The biggest surprise was how easy it is to live the life of your dreams by making a few key mindset shifts. I experienced this first-hand. The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center is an organization committed to supporting women entrepreneurs to clarify the vision for their businesses, achieve key business milestones and build a sustainable support network. I participated in the 12- week Milestone Circles program at the end of 2021. As a Milestone Circle alumna, I’m serving as a Cornerstone mentor for new participants of the program. There is a visualization exercise that participants are guided through during the first day of the program. The exercise is designed to help participants “see” the future they are attempting to build. As a participant, the exercise felt a little awkward. However, a short six-months later when I revisited the visualization exercise as a mentor, I realized that I was envisioning a typical day for me. Without an outsized effort, I created my ideal reality by being clear on my brand, leaving a margin for creation, and being dedicated to a practice of mindfulness.
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