I have met many people saying they are interested in starting their own businesses. Most never make it past this point. I have also met many who say they want a romantic relationship. Many of them never make it past this point either. Both require work. Intense work. They also require dedication, perseverance, and a tremendous amount of knowledge of yourself. The relationship you have with yourself is the key to your success in all areas in your life, as everyone around you reflects back to you who you are and what you bring to the table.

Why is this relationship and knowledge concerning yourself so important? Without it, you will not be able to manage yourself. If you spend tremendous amounts of energy shaming yourself for not getting things right or perfect, instead of building what you desire to build with all of that energy, you are stuck.

First off, you are going to fuck up. Epically. Many, many times. The cool part is how much we actually learn from our fuck ups. They are our greatest spots of growth as they open up doors we never knew were possible until this occurs. You can spend all of your energy on your screwing up and berating yourself or you can see it as the learning opportunity it actually is and adjust what you are doing from what you have learned. Personally, I enjoy having at least one major fuck up a week with small ones at least daily. Why? They remind me I am human and that being human is an amazing experience. So, how is your relationship with fucking up? Do you withdraw? Try to force it to work? Surrender and walk away? Pull back and reevaluate? Trouble shoot with others? Blame others? Knowing how you handle failure says more about you than how you handle success.

Many just quit their careers to start this new business. This scares me half to death to see. They do not spend months setting up and tailoring their foundation and ground work. Many do not have months of salary saved or a partner that is on board with the business project and holding the rails financially until it starts to bring money in. Most businesses take about 2 years to start making a profit. This is not a bad thing. It is much better to build it slowly and intentionally than to rush it and be forced to scrap it before it actually takes off due to running out of funds to spend building the business. You can set the ground work while working in your career right now:

• What is your vision, what does it feel like, why does someone want what you have?
• Create your business plan so you know how to steer your creation
• See who would be good contacts in your creation
• Identify what your definition of success actually is
• Identify your mentors making this successful & speak to them about what has worked and not for them
• Start saving up funds – how little can you live on?

I have mentioned many of these simple steps of ground work to those wanting to create a business and they do not have any interest in doing this work. Instead, they are off to their next conference or class spending significant amounts of money, but not moving their business forward. Learning is gorgeous and if you are not taking what you have learned and implementing it, the course was a waste of your money. Return on investment is important to look at. What have all of your courses done to create expansion and zeroing in on in your business? If you are just doing them for the fun of learning, own it completely. There is nothing wrong with this, but understand if you are spending that much energy & money in those classes, that energy and money is not being put into the building the relationship with your business.