A lesson on how the "how" doesn't matter

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A lesson on how the "how" doesn't matter

Happy Sunday, Soothers. Recently I was on a lovely spiritual retreat in Sedona, Arizona. (Check out Katie, who hosts these retreats, she's the best.) Each evening at 8pm, after a day full of journaling, meditation, hiking, you name it, we would meet in the living room for that evening's circle.

The small group of lovely women (many of them entrepreneurs like me, or wanna be entrepreneurs, gathering the courage to do their thing in the world) would gather for conversation, or activities; one night we spontaneously burst into an hour of dancing and laughing to 90s tunes that would have filled my middle-schooler's heart full of sleepover dreams.

One evening, one of the retreat guides had us do a simple exercise. We were to pair up, and draw the other person's face.... but we couldn't look at the paper while drawing, and we also couldn't lift our pen off the page. We had to stay focused on the person's face, and do our best to capture it, just trusting the process that our pen was taking us through, no matter the outcome.

As a perfectionist and truly, a horrible drawer, my little scared rabbit heart skipped a beat at this exercise, even amongst the kind and welcoming women of the group. But nevertheless, I was game, and I paired with the lovely Bria, and we dove in.

At the end of our processes, we marveled. What we had on our pages wasn't necessarily museum worthy, but they were undeniably faces... our faces! They even kind of generally sort of looked like each of us (if you squinted).

And then Bria dropped a life lesson bomb that I'll remember for a long time:

"This is just like my business," she said. "I just need to know that I'm aiming towards building my business, I don't need to know exactly how. If I can draw a face without even looking, just with the intention of drawing a face, and it ends up undeniably a face, then I can do the same with my business. It doesn't matter how. I just have to set the intent. And I WILL create a business."

I thought Bria so beautifully captured a reality that so many of us forget: 

We think we have to be "good" at a thing to do it. 

We think we have to know exactly how we'll approach it. 

We think we need all the right tools, the know-how, the permission from others, to know exactly what the thing we start out thinking about is going to be or how exactly it's going to look and unfold.

But nope. We just need to take a deep breath, set the intention (draw a face; build a business; cast a vision) and let our unsteady pen strokes lead the way, going this way, and that. Sometimes we may be convinced that the nose we're trying to draw is definitely going to end up looking more like an undefinable blob, but nope. More likely than not, it will end up a nose, because that's what we set out to create.

We may not get there in the way we thought; it may be messier than we want; sometimes we'll 100% be convinced we have no idea what we're doing and have gone horribly off track.

And yet, the chances are likely, we'll create what we set out to create.

We just have to have the courage to imperfectly start.

If you relate to this story and lesson, especially in the arena of starting your own business, I invite you to sign up for the waitlist for Secretly Ambitious, my 12-week business course for highly sensitive people who want to become entrepreneurs or self-employed but don't know where to start.

This is the course that will give you unshakeable mindset, incredible self-trust, and tools to step into a new identity of the entrepreneur, as well as practical tools to help you understand who you want to serve and your ideal client’s needs, how to market in a way that feels right and authentic to you; the mindset and nervous system regulation tools that support you in the ups and downs of doing stuff like selling or becoming more visible; and so much more.

Sign up now. By being on the waitlist, when you enroll, you'll get $100 off the $997 of the course, plus some other goodies I'm still dreaming up. (And it's a business expense, so you can also write it off!)

Secretly Ambitious opens in July. I desperately believe we need more creative, heart-centered and empathetic people in the business and entrepreneurship space, and I'd love to help teach you how I got where I am in my biz today.