 Thank you, Perrin. Thanks for inviting me. Very good to be here this evening. Your business done the right way for you. I want to tell you what it's like when things aren't working. Let's pretend like you're putting out a lot of effort and you're not getting out a lot of results. You're working your little booty off every day. Stuff is happening, but it's not that much stuff. It's not that amazing. And the level of effort that you're putting out versus the level of your return, not even close to being a match. Like 100 efforts in one return type of a feeling. Very frustrating. You're not using your superpowers. You're not feeling the love. You may be sure or not quite as sure about who you are and who your business is. And that is reflected in who you're doing business with, the people that show up, how well the work goes. Even if there are bright spots, it doesn't always stay bright. This is a picture of what it looks like when things are not working. I won't leave you with that all evening, but I'm going to let that hang in the air a little bit. To talk about, first, who we are in the room, and then I'll talk about what we're going to talk about. So let's introduce each other first to start the conversation. I'm Chris Carey, as Peran has just said. I do coaching for little tiny businesses, usually solo entrepreneurs and maybe their small teams. A big company, I think the biggest company I've ever worked with is 37 people. Little tiny companies. Often I just work with free agents, just people who are sort of those otherwise self-employed as I think of people in the real estate business or the financial business where they don't work for somebody and yet they're in an office type setting from time to time. If you're somewhere on that continuum, then what that means is if you don't go do something, you don't have any business, and you don't have any clients. There's not an overseer handing you things. There's not a ready paycheck every Tuesday, that type of feeling. What I do is help those people realize who they are and what their business is so that you and your business can work together as partners and bring whatever it is you're looking for into the world. What I'm doing here tonight is hopefully getting a seed planted of who you are and who your business is so that you can produce more of those results. Which means it would be really handy to know who's actually in the room. Let's get a little feel for who's here and what you were thinking about when you came. As you sit here, what's your name? What's your business? How many years have you been in business and what brought you here tonight? So most of us here at the first stages, although you've already done it and you're just gonna come back to it from what I'm hearing from you CJ, is that right? Let's look at what we're talking about tonight because often when people come to a class like this or a conversation like this, and I'm hoping it's gonna be more of a conversation than me talking at you, you can tell these slides are not super informational, so it's designed for us to be more of a conversation than take this home and memorize it. What I really want for you is to think about you and your business as partners. There's you and then there's your business and then there's the place for you to overlap. It's a Venn diagram and we'll see a picture of that in a minute. If you don't think of you as your own entity and your business as a completely separate entity, then you're already setting yourself up to, I don't wanna say fail, it's a bit of a strong word, but not be as successful as you could. Also I don't want you to think that you own your business because your business is a complete free spirit and it's got its own ideas and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that. When people are new, they tend to think that I'm gonna do a business and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that, which is a great idea, except that in reality, what it turns out to be is a partnership with an entity that at this point you barely know and it's kinda like you married him. Maybe it was like an arranged marriage per se. You didn't know each other so well at the beginning and now it's arranged because you wanted to arrange it and yet you're gonna need to learn how to love and grow together over the years. That stuff is not necessarily present at the beginning. I'm thinking of this as a relational approach to business rather than nuts and bolts. So there will not be a lot of nuts and bolts, almost none in fact, tonight. If you're looking for a nice 10 step how-to thing, I mean I can talk about that another day but that's not what we're talking about this evening. This is very much a counter-intuitive approach to business. As in the more I know me and the more I know my business, the more we can be partners to produce something down the line and that actually is a straight path to the money because that requires a level of clarity that quite frankly most people just don't have. Does that make sense to everybody? We're gonna look at who are you like I said and who's the business and then who are the two of you together? This is a Venn diagram. A Venn just means two circles who overlap or however many circles that are overlapping. We just have this two circle Venn here. We're gonna start with the two circle Venn and before we get there, there's a couple of takeaways that I wanna make sure that you get from this conversation. Basically I wanna make sure that you get permission to be yourself and to know who you are and to do it your way. I wanna make sure that you are empowered to be yourself, that you take things at your own speed and that this is a symbiotic relationship between you and your business and that it's mutually supporting and mutually reinforcing. That's what I'm hoping you're gonna take away from tonight. So we'll see how that conversation goes. If it gets a little esoteric, like I said, this is a conversation not a talk at so please raise your hand. This is the style this is gonna work, please, hopefully. All right. Are you ready to dive in? Looking at who you are is kind of an interesting thing because we mostly think we know who we are. We've been on the planet a certain amount of time. It's not like we don't know ourselves at all. And yet, there's a level of knowing yourself that can go even deeper than whatever level you currently have. Even if you're crazy, super self-aware, there's usually another layer underneath that. If you haven't really talked about yourself with a coach or a therapist or read any books or gone to any weekend retreats, if you've never done any of that sort of thing, then there's a whole world available to you of knowing who you are. This level of knowledge is very empowering. And if you know who Ann Lamonte is, she's a writer who lives here in the Bay Area. She has this great quote of figuring out who we are and this is what she says. We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice who we are already, that we have already found who we are already, truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations on how people perceive us, how we get more of the things that we think are gonna make us happy and with keeping our weight down because she's a woman and women are obsessed with that, basically, right? So the real issue is how do we stop being who we are not? You know, there's a quote from David White, who's a poet that says that man is the only animal that's able to act contrary to who he actually is. That's what she's referring to, that idea that we can stop being who we aren't. The question is like how and when are we gonna do that? How do we relive ourselves to the false fronts of people pleasing and of affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain and the psychic spanks that keeps us smaller and contained? For men, spanks are those things you put on that squeeze your everything so that you look skinny in a dress, just FYI, right? Here's how I became myself. Mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments and endless extensive reading. Limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment and endless conversations with my best women friends. The loss of people with whom I could not live. The loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying, betrayals and much greater loyalty and overall choosing as my motto, William Blake's line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love. I just think this is fascinating. This is how she figured out who she was. She just went out there and she screwed it all up and at some point she had a better idea. She lived life. We can certainly do it that way. I'm sure you already have been. And there's a couple of other ways that might be slightly more organized that you might approach this. When we think about who you are, you wanna let your quirkiness shine. There's no use in hiding whoever you are because we're gonna see it either way. And if we don't see it and you're hiding it, what's gonna happen is it's gonna feel awkward for you and for us. There's this idea that as we continue to grow and age and go through life, we often stop with a picture of ourselves. In my picture is somewhere in junior high, quite frankly, and then I've got another picture of myself somewhere in college. And then there's some picture of me like in my 20s. Okay, I'm not 20 something anymore. I don't wanna shock you. But when I think about those different times of my life, I am not that person anymore. And yet in my head, that's how I feel sometimes. Like I'm 13, or I'm 15, or I'm 25. If you don't catch up with who you are now, then you are living out of an older version of yourself, which is, again, this level of incongruity which does not make you successful. Does it make you who you actually are at this moment? And I have a quote that I think is really nice that goes with this. This is William Gibson, he's a science fiction writer. She knows now absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct. That her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly, umbilical, down the vanished wake of the plane that has brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly and are left behind and must be awaited upon arrival, like lost luggage. You're flying across the Atlantic, your soul is doing what it can to catch up with you, and at some point you'll get off the plane and you're gonna have to hang around and wait for your soul to catch up. That's what it's like when we don't know who we are and don't stay current with our current version of ourselves. Does that make sense to everybody? The other thing that makes it easier is to know your strengths. This is a nice, objective way. This is one of the few nuts and bolts things of the evening that's not just a concept. It's an actual how can I go do this tonight when we leave here type of thing. Discovering your strengths, you can do it objectively or subjectively. If you do it subjectively, it's something that you'll do with another person and we'll talk about that in a second or you could do it alone. Objectively, there are assessments out there that you've probably run into a lot over the years. Knowing your strengths is important because what that does, and I'll tell you more about how to discover those in a second, knowing your strengths is really nice because what it does is it allows you to lean into what's already right about you, what your natural predisposition is, rather than trying to fix your weaknesses or shore up the whatever's or be the well-rounded person. In my opinion, being well-rounded is completely overrated and totally not worth it, just so you know. You get no points from me for knowing how to canoe if you're not a natural canower. You know, if you go, I'm not a natural surfer, I went to Hawaii last year for the first time and tried surfing. After an hour, three bruises and about a gallon of swallowed water later, I was like, check that off, the list is not my sport. It's okay to go try these things out, this is how we know. And yet, if it's not your strength, please don't keep trying it. Just chalk it up, move on to what's next. So let's look at how to discover your strengths from an objective or actually for homework, let's do a subjective sort of. Well, let's do it like this. Yeah, okay. So for homework, let's do the objective view. This is where you go pay someone to tell you who you are, so to speak. The Strengths Finder is one of the best-known assessments on the planet. It's spent years, the Strengths Finder 2.0, this one on the bottom here, spent years on the New York time bestseller list. It's been around for more than 10 years. It's really quite handy. You take an online assessment, takes you about 40 minutes, out to pop your, either your top five strengths or the full list, it measures 34 different strengths, so you can also get your full 34 strength list. What I love about this is that it has a way of measuring you against other people. It's measuring against your peers, not against some objective reality. What it tells you are things like, I'm good at maximizing, which means I take something that's good and tweak it and make it amazing. Or I'm good at deliberating, I can see every side of an issue and come to a conclusion knowing that my conclusion is sound. This Entrepreneurial Strength Finder is a similar version of that. It's measuring you against 10 things that they have discovered that entrepreneurs have. And the who is the they, it's the Gallup organization, the one that does all the polls for election time is usually when you hear about them. Or if you've been into Wells Fargo lately, Gallup will send you a poll and say, how is your service today? For each of these, they surveyed millions of people for their data. And you're comparing yourself to these other folks who have identified their strength and in aggregate, you're starting to understand what it is that we do as people that makes us strong in this strengthy, strengths-based kind of way and then you get a list that's based on who you are because of the way the assessment's set up. It's one of my favorite ways to figure out strengths. It doesn't cost that much. If you do just the top five version of the Strength Finder, it's gonna run you about $15. If you do the full 34, which is actually the one I would prefer you do, it'll run you $89. Either way, it's not a big number. The Entrepreneurial Strength Finder is gonna run you closer to $14. For an hour or two and maybe 25 bucks, if you go for the less expensive versions, you've got a really good sense of who you are that you can start using right away, applying in your personal and your professional life. The Strength Finder is its own special animal. What it does is it, because the sample sizes are so large and because it comes from Gallup, doesn't just do the pulling, they also have a huge training organization. They go take a lot of trainings into corporate America, which is why these two things were created to begin with. What they wanna do is start a conversation within Working America about what is right with people. So if you're gonna do any work with the Gallup stuff, it's gonna cost you some money. And again, $15. 15.15. Yeah, you can pay $89 if you want, which I would love if you did because then you get a fuller version of the assessment. But if you're feeling like you're on a little bit of a budget today, $15. Yeah. Gallup Strengths Center, and that's Strengths with an S, gallupstrengthcenter.com. And you'll find both of these assessments there and you'll buy a secret code and you'll go plug it in and bammo. If anybody's curious and you don't wanna do it alone, I spend a lot of time working with entrepreneurs taking these assessments and then walking them through what it means. So I highly recommend working with someone else, not just yourself, when you get your results so that you can dig in it a little bit deeper. There's a lot of stuff there to learn. And I've done this, I've done them both, of course. I did the Strength Finder first probably close to 12 years ago now. And I still revisit the information on a regular basis and it still means something to me. It's relevant. It's relevant like forever kind of relevant. In a shocking way that some of the assessments you see, they're like, oh, that was kind of fun way to spend half an hour. This has a lot, it's got a lot of stuff going on here that you can really get. So an example of what this looks like, we're gonna call him Bob, he was a client of mine, ran an insurance company, very linear business, very sequential guy. And the Strengths for him were things like analytical. You might make up a story that if the guy's running an insurance company and he's dealing with clients all day, he's gonna have to have something that lets him relate to people and he's also gonna have to some part of his brain that allows him to understand how the insurance company world works. So it was things for him like analytical and a few things like command, which means I'm good at being in charge. And maybe a few relationship things like adaptability, where you're able to kind of go with the flow a bit. The thing that didn't work for him, and I say here that he used his strengths unconsciously, is that if you have a strength like command, which means I'm the dude in charge and you're not being conscious when you use it, if you're not using your superpower for good, what it's gonna show up as is that you are an arrogant bossy guy, which is actually how he showed up, disproportionately I would say. He was a really nice guy. And yet, he didn't understand why he was having a lot of staff turnover. He had a staff of 10 or 12 people. He didn't understand why people weren't connecting and bonding, why weren't they talking so much. And it was because of this air that he was putting out that he didn't even realize he was doing. So if he's using command for good rather than evil, then command means I'm the guy in charge, I'm the one that you wanna trust with your business and your payroll and your health insurance and all that. And he did have a nice solid base of customers because of that. We all have the capacity to use our superpowers for good or for evil. This is why it's so important to understand what they are so that you know when they are and also when they are not showing up or when they're showing up in the negative. That makes sense to everybody? And I know I've been doing a lot of talking. This is the part where you guys get to talk as well. And there are three exercises in here so I hope you get your vocal cords warmed up because I definitely don't want this to be me talking at you for two hours because that is just not gonna work. All right, let's do this. The first part by yourself for a second and then I want you to turn to the person next to you and share the answers. The first thing is to list three favorite, this is more of an objective way that we would do without an assessment. You can list three things that you like about yourself. What are those things? Like I'm kind or generous or I like to share, I'm collaborative, whatever. And then you can think about three priorities in your life and then I want you to describe to the person next to you, again, who are you and what are these priorities so that they understand for reals who you actually are. So I don't want it to be like some sort of blow off thing like I'm good with pets and I have a priority of keeping my kitchen clean and now you know me because obviously we don't know you just by knowing those things, we know a little bit. I would love it if you just dug a little bit deeper and grabbed three favorite things and three priorities in a way that when you say them to somebody they have a better sense of who you really are and what's important to you. So take just a second, jot those things down and I'm curious what people learned about themselves and about each other. Did you find some interesting things out about yourself and the person next to you doing this? What did you come up with? Yeah, this would be something that would be great to do at home when you give yourself a little more time. We think about getting to know yourself and stereotypically you might go on a long walk on the beach, that type of thing. That actually does help. Any place that you can go that feels creative or expansive where the ceilings are high. I mean I like this room just fine and because the ceilings are low this is not a great room for brainstorming or thinking about bigger things in life because the container is too small. So anytime you can go into a bigger container whether that's got space or visual interest maybe some arty stuff, anything that's a little outside your norm that feels bigger. That helps with these questions actually. So for instance today from my work life I do coaching pretty much individual coaching and group coaching. And I also facilitate a get clients now group so I did some of all of that stuff before I came here today. So if I was just describing myself in this from this perspective just from today's work I would say I'm a person who is focused and dedicated and concerned about making sure others have a place and an awareness so that they can be everything that they're hoping they can be and that they can bring their business to life and one of my priorities is making sure that my time is arranged in a way that that's what happens for the other people and as well for myself. It's kind of like a small personal manifesto like a personal mission statement or something like that. Let's take a look at who your business is. We've got a small start on who you are. You all jotted something down about yourself and your priorities in life. Let's take a look at who your business is and notice I'm saying who is your business not what is your business. What is very important and it is not the question we're asking right now. We're gonna take for granted that you know who your target market is or your ideal client or how you're gonna actually monetize the thing that you're thinking about or that you have a sense of a business model you'd like or any of the 300 other nuts and bolts things that are gonna be necessary for you to actually run a business that makes some money and or does whatever you're hoping your business will do. Not everybody's trying to make a bazillion dollars with their business, right? We all have different goals for why we're doing it. We're gonna put those into a separate category for another talk and right now we're asking the separate question who, who, who is my business? If I'm a person who's determined or kind or visionary who is my business? What's their deal? How do we get to figure that out? So you wanna be thinking about different ways that you can get in touch with your business. Wouldn't it be lovely if you could just ring them up on this phone and it would just answer you. That would be so handy. There's a lot of ways you can get to know your business. These are just some random thoughts I had and by no means comprehensive list. But I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if you were just looking at people that you admire the businesses that you admire? What might you emulate, emulate? What qualities does that business have that your business shares? That's one of the things that I've done since the day I started and I still do it today. There are still several women, business owners in particular who I know and it doesn't have to just be women but the two women pop to mind. I love what they're doing in their business. I love who they are showing up as, as the business owner, as the business partner. I love who the business shows up as because the business is quite meaty and robust and I love the partnership that they've created together. It would be nice if my business had some of those qualities. I think it would be quite a bonus. You could just obviously write things. Journaling is very handy. I like this note to self thing there in the middle, writing a postie note and just asking the question who is my business and putting it someplace where you're going to see it frequently during the course of each day. And after a couple of days moving it to a new location because once we've seen something for a couple of days we don't see it anymore. So you move it to someplace you can see it now. I'm a huge fan of the dry erase markers and I write them on my mirror or any sort of glass surface. I live alone, it's easy, people don't think I'm crazy but I did have a boyfriend come over to my house once and say what's with all the postie notes and the notes on the mirror? She might want to think about that if you've got guests coming over or let them just deal with it, right? So reading is nice, meditating, drawing, talking to other people. I love talking to people in my industry. Coaching is not, it's not a competitive industry. There are some industries that are sort of based on competition or more lack of sharing per se because people are just a little more insular. Coaching happens to not be one of those professions. So I spent an inordinate amount of time talking to my colleagues about what are you doing? How did you do that thing? Maybe I could do my thing like yours. Maybe we could do the thing together. It's kind of fun. So when I'm figuring out who my business is, like the soul of my business, part of how I know that is by brainstorming with the other people to see what theirs looks like. So it gives me an idea of what it might look like. Before I asked this question of myself, it never occurred to me that my business would be its own entity that have its own thing going on. And yet it's very clear to me now that it does. So I started doing these things to sort of look from the outside in as much as I could. And then I did another thing, which I would love for you to think about doing. And this is your exercise for home. We'll go back through those other slides for a minute in a minute. But this is your exercise for home, which is to take your business out for coffee. My business looks like a nebula. I watch a lot of Star Trek, can you tell? That's from the NASA website. They have the coolest pictures on that website. My business looks like an amorphous nebula. It's like a big gaseous cloud. It just hangs out right here and it kind of, you know, bobs along, doesn't actually touch the floor because it doesn't have to because it's gas. It just sort of like floats along like this. We go and we have coffee chats and it tells me things. You can picture it like, as though we're sitting in the chair, if you want to go for reals coffee, that's kind of nice, right? You go take yourself to Pete's or wherever, have an empty chair, talk to the chair. If that feels a little bit too much for you, you can do it in your head. So in my head, I picture a chair right in front of me. We're sitting straight on, so we're actually facing each other. And I say, business, how are you doing today? My business is named Moxie, Moxie Inc. Moxie, how's it going? And Moxie will tell me something. And sometimes it's with real words and sometimes it's with impressions. Sometimes it gives me a question to think about. Not to make this too esoteric, but this is not linear, right? We're not talking to that part of your brain that's super concrete sequential here. We're talking to that part of your brain that thinks nebulas are your business. Is everybody with me so far? Let's go back over here for a second. So getting to know your business means, let's pretend if you were drawing, I've got a client who's really a talented artist. If I asked him this question, who is your business? The first thing he would do is whip out the sketch pad. And he would know the answer after he had spent a period of time just playing around with the pencil. If you're a writer, maybe it makes more sense for you to do some writing. Just continually writing it out until all of a sudden something emerges as a picture. The meditators, same kind of thing. Keep the question in your mind, get still, see who shows up. And it's interesting because what shows up might look like this. It might look like an impressionist painting. It might look like the nebula. Maybe it looks like a Ferris wheel. Maybe it looks like your grandpa. I asked a client of mine the other day, what does their business look like? She said that it looked like a really irritated, curmudgeonly old man. I said, well, it sounds like you all might need to spend some quality time together. And she said the first thing that her business said to her was some version of what the hell? Where have you been? This has been a problem. We gotta do some stuff over here. And she was like, oh man, you're right. I'm so sorry. And this is the thing, as nebulous as this might sound, your business is really looking forward to talking to you. It's got things to say because your business is its own entity. It's not just you talking at it and passing it around and stuff. And if it's been like that because that's how most of us think business is, that's great, except that there's so much more to you available if you take a broader perspective. I'll give you an example of what happened to me. I was walking around mining my own business. Now I've been in business actually 14 years. It's, is that right? It's been over, it's almost 14 since I quit my day job. So that's nice. And what happened to me is my business was following me around and asking me questions, but I didn't know that that's what was happening because I couldn't tell because I wasn't really in touch with my business in that way. And it felt a little bit like a five year old when they tug your skirt or pant leg and they want something from you and you're like, what kid, you're bothering me. Not that you're being rude, but it's like you don't get what's going on. So if you stop and look, then it's like, oh, I need some water or I need a cookie or my business was basically doing that to me. And when I finally understood what was happening, I stopped and sort of metaphorically and also literally cause I was alone at home that day, turned around and felt like I was looking right at my business as though my business was literally standing right in front of me. And I was like, holy cow, how long have you been trying to get my attention? And it said about two months. Wow, did you need something? And clearly it had a few things to tell me. I've done this exercise with plenty of clients and it's fascinating. I had one client said that his business was, this is San Francisco, so he said his business was a big ol' pissed off drag queen in some really high heels and a short skirt and had a lot of things to say, snap kind of thing. And that was a fascinating conversation, right? So we go from Star Trek Nebula to drag queen. Your business can look like whatever. The point is that you take the time to know. So let's go back a little bit then. Looking at who, what is the soul of your business? What does your business need and want? What's it about? What do you really, really do? And you wanna look on this fundamental level as well as the big picture level. So we're talking about nuts and bolts. If my business helps small business owners, where's the other example? Helps small business owners realize their dreams or my business is a training company or I help geniuses run good business. There's real nuts and bolts type of stuff that we can be doing here. If we're looking at the soul of your business, we're asking bigger picture questions. What does it really do? Does it do things like give people permission? That's not something that people are necessarily gonna pay for, quite frankly. But when they work with me, that's what I do. I'm like a professional permission giver. That's not great marketing copy. But this is great to know what the soul of my business does. And maybe you weave it into your marketing copy somewhere so people can get a feel for who you are and what you're bringing to the party. We've got things like if I'm a training company, then what's the soul of my business? Well, maybe the soul of my business is actually connection. Again, feeling that this might be sounding a little esoteric, if we look at this as a straight line to the money, how does that happen? It happens because there's a huge amount of clarity now about who you are because we just took some assessments and took ourselves on an artist's date to the beach and the museum and took notes about that. Then we've got a nice stronger sense of who your business is because we just went out to coffee with them. And now we're figuring out what our business does on that. No kidding, soul level, not just the nuts and bolts that makes the marketing copy work. Who is your business? What is the soul of your business? So this is an interesting exercise, you know? This is not how we normally think about these things. And so when you meet your business and you talk with your business, what's it say? What do you say to it? What's it say to you? How's the conversation go? It's kind of nice to think these things through a little bit. Go have this chance to set up the meeting with your business. Some of my clients literally do go and have coffee. Some of them go to the beach. Some of them just take a journal and go someplace. It's nice to be someplace where it isn't where you spend all of your time so that you've got a little bit more of this bigger picture of thinking that we were talking about a minute ago. So get out of an environment that's completely where you spend your time. And yet don't go someplace that's quite so foreign that it's distracting. Still want to feel comfortable because you have a conversation to have, which brings us to the point where we're looking at who you are together. We talked about who you are and who your business is. Who are you all together? Your partners. You're working together. You're making meaning. You're having a good time. You're making some money. Making an impact on the people. That's what's happening here. The two of you are getting to know each other and making sure you spend enough quality time together in this way that you do with any other relationship, any friendship, any marriage, any pet, any whatever, somebody who ever you know on the planet where you want to nurture the relationship you've got to spend time together. And the more time you spend together, the more you understand that you all are partners and you're creating something together that's quite different from either than anything either of you would do on your own, which I think is kind of part of the cool part. This is not linear. And most of the time, it's not uncommon for it to look like this in your head when you're thinking about talking to your business and what it might be telling you. This is an interesting concept in that the more you try to be super linear and step by step about it, the less it actually works. It's almost like catching something out of the corner of your eye. It's a little bit how it felt to me at the beginning. Now that I have a better grip on who my business is and how it talks to me, it doesn't feel like that so much anymore. We've gotten used to each other. But at the beginning, it really felt like something was streaking by and I was like, what? Trying to catch it. Loosen up your grip and your gaze a little bit and this tangly line will start to straighten out in a way that makes sense for you. The idea that you own your business, I mentioned this a little at the beginning. This is from dictionary.com, noun, the act, state, or right of possessing something, the ownership of land. I do not actually believe that we can own our businesses anymore that you can own your child or own some other thing that's not really ownable. You all have a relationship, your partners, but are you the complete overseer of every aspect of that entity? No. Your business, same thing. Thomas Leonard is the founder. He's one of the founders. A lot of people attribute him to being the founder of the modern coaching profession as we know it. And he used to say that thinking that you own your business is like trying to catch a tiger by the tail. Good luck with that. Yeah, it's an adventure. You're going to be chasing the cat around. You may or may not ever catch the tail. If you do, what's going to happen? You're going to be like one of those cartoons where the guy's hanging onto the tail and getting dragged behind and bounced around on the ground and all that stuff. You're not controlling the tiger. Wouldn't it be easier, more fun, more productive, more better in every way, to be partners with the tiger so that this is not the kind of tiger that's going to try to eat you? Let's say that this was what your business looked like. This tiger is on your side. And yet, if you don't know what the tiger needs and wants, who the tiger is, then it's not going to go so well for you. I'm not sure that you'll get eaten, necessarily. Although I'm sure some people do get eaten by their businesses. They certainly get swallowed up by them. Easily to do, yes. So much easier than if it's you and your business as partners. Figuring out who your business is is drawing a picture of you and your business working together and how it looks and feels, and then writing some things down about how the two of you can work together. This is your exercise for home. Spend some time again in this place that we've discovered now that you like to go. SF MoMA is about to open up again. That might be a fun place to go do an exercise like this. I was just at the Palace of Fine Arts. That place is stunning, as we know. Gorgeous water and grand architecture, lots of inspiration, Palace of Legion of Honor lens, and all these places that bring some sort of a grandeur to you where you can think bigger. The people who built them were thinking bigger. Picture you and your business working together and just jot down. You can do it verbally, too, with your little microphone. How does it look and feel to be with your business and the two of you doing the thing that you've set out to do? Now that we know what your business is about, it's about generosity. It's about being fun. Now that you know what it's like, describe it a little bit and write down three things that show how the two of you can do something together as partners. We could host a party. My business and I could host a party. It could be a literal party in your house. It could be an online party like Twitter. It could be a virtual party where people use the phone or I don't know what. Maybe it's actually a treasure hunt. What does it look like when you and your business are working together? And what kind of thing would you do so that you can see how you all are working together? There's some sort of physical thing you do like you hold a raffle. And I've had a couple of really big conversations with my business over the years. I don't know if this sounds familiar to any of you, but my business has definitely gone through certain stages and iterations because I've been around for long enough now. And at more than one point, it has stopped me and said, you can keep going in that direction if you want, but I'm not interested in going there. So if you're going to go there, I'm going to split. And that was really hard to hear because I thought I was going in the right direction. And thank God, really, that my business said, stop the train. And it didn't quite literally say it that way, but it was really, really close. I got this huge gut feeling. I knew there was something that wasn't right. I couldn't figure out what it was. But you know that feeling when something's off and it's frustrating because you can't identify what the off thing is? I felt like that for a couple of weeks. And then all of a sudden, one day, as if in a vision, not exactly quiet, but that's how it felt. I had this, la, holy cow, my business is trying to tell me not to do that, and that is why I'm not making any headway going in that direction. It's not where my business wants to go, and it's been trying to tell me that. And I've been too busy and stubborn to listen. Not ideal. But I finally heard it. And the direction of my business definitely changed. And now that I understand that, like I said earlier, that's how my business communicates, I have started listening a lot more carefully than I used to in the past, so that I don't go so far down the rabbit hole in the wrong direction that I and my business are both frustrated to the point where it would ever say to me again, I'm fixing a split if you don't knock it off. Because the last thing I want to go do is get another job-y job. I'm not good at that. Does that make sense to people? You guys understand that sort of sense? Have you had anything like that where your business might be trying to tell you something? How do you hear your business's voice? For me, it was a lot of trial and error. A lot of, usually for me, and I know it's different for everybody, but usually for me, it starts with this sort of gut reaction that something is not right. Just like an intuitive hit that something is going off in the wrong direction. At that point, I don't have a clue what that means. But it's a little bit like a black cloud hanging over me, dread kind of feeling. It's not great, I have to tell you. Not a great feeling. Have you had days where you're not feeling so hot, and you may or may not know why? Talking to your business is exactly like that. It's the same kind of thing. The trick is to try and identify your business a little bit in the beginning so that you can understand when that feeling is happening. Where is that feeling coming from? Because that's what we need to do. There's a feeling happening. Where is it being generated from? Am I generating it? Is it coming from the person I'm dealing with? If there's no person in front of you, where is it coming from? If it's not you and there's no literal person, there's a good chance it's coming from your business. Because it's coming from someplace, right? So you do a double check. Internally check. If there's another human present, check with them, which means flat out asking the question, how's it going over there? Are you feeling this weird energy? Is this coming from me? Is this coming from you? Let's just say they say, no, it's not coming from them. What if you then turned around and said, hey, is there a third entity in the room? In coaching, they talk a lot about a morphic field. It's a potentially controversial idea, but the idea is that when two people, two entities, even two plants, when two entities, living entities are together, there is a third thing that is created with the two of them bringing their energetic fields together. And that thing in the center is called a morphic field. It's a completely third entity. They don't talk about it exactly in that same language, but in martial arts a lot, when you're pushing against the space, like if you and I were pushing against each other, but we weren't actually pushing that hard and you weren't pushing me over and I wasn't pushing you over, it would be because the energy was going into the space in the middle. Does that make sense? That's what the morphic field is. It's like you're putting your energy towards a thing that is not tangible and yet it is very real. So when you and your business are working together, you're creating this third entity that is quite extraordinary. You've probably felt it as being in the flow when you're with someone else or when you're riding or when you're playing with your dog and all sense of time goes away. And you're just like, wow, how did three hours go by? And as business owners, the more that we understand this, the better off we're going to be. So we could do all kinds of spreadsheets about who the business is and what our unique selling proposition is and all this kind of stuff and still not understand who we are and who our business is on this sole level such that we make something new and different, which is actually the secret sauce that attracts clients to you. That's why I say this is a straight path to the money. So the exercise for now is just to play around on your paper for a second and to draw two circles, one circle is you, one circle is your business, and then play with how they overlap. Because if you looked here, on our example, we've got two circles. And I sort of had them overlap. What is that, like maybe a quarter? But that could overlap a lot different. It could be almost completely overlapping or just barely not even hardly at all overlapping or overlapping up and down or kind of sideways. So just take a couple of minutes and draw a few circles to see what it might look like on your paper if you have you and your business overlapping in a way that looks like a Venn diagram of partnership. How's it going with the Venn? Did you come up with any ideas of what the circles, how the circles might relate to each other of you and your business? The thing that's interesting about this, and it is a little tricky because you're sort of trying it on a visual way because so many times we come at these things from our head. I like the idea of drawing it because it lands differently. You look at it differently. Your hand is doing something. It uses different parts of your brain. At home, I have a big, you know, it's San Francisco. So I have a window inside my house that doesn't look at anything. So I put, or of course I do, so I put white paper behind it so that it's like a whiteboard basically. It's where I use all my little magic markers. And so I got my markers out and I got a little glass and I just made circles overlapping in various sizes and overlapping various amounts of overlap. And I just drew them all over this glass. And at some point, one of the set of circles that I drew made sense to me. They overlapped X amount, not Y amount or Z amount, but like just this certain amount. And I was like, that is what my business looks like. And I couldn't have really thought it through because it didn't, I mean, I had tried to think it through, but it just didn't make a lot of sense to me. But when I drew it out, it landed differently. That's why I like this drawing thing because it uses a different part of your brain. How much of an overlap is there between your two circles with your business here? Is it like a little tiny overlap or does it feel like a bigger overlap that the circle isn't quite complete yet? So there's a little piece of the circle that hasn't joined. So there's something that belongs in there. And you get to chat with your business about what fills in that blank, what would make the circle complete. Because you know what happens when you draw an incomplete circle is your site only goes to the piece that isn't there. It's almost literally not possible for a human to look at a circle that has a gap and not just stare at the gap. We're wired to look at the gap. What we're trying to do is again get a feel for who your business is and how you two work as partners. So I know this is a little bit of an esoteric concept. I teach a class about getting your next client. It's all like do this and then do that. This is not that kind of conversation because I know that we need both pieces of the equation for our business to truly be successful. And this is the piece that I see people talking about the least, probably because it's not that easy to talk about and explain. So the idea of the different circles is that one circle is you, one circle is your business. And if you all are going to work together in a partnership where the business brings the things that it does, it helps the people, it makes the income, you bring the things that you do, a level of vision, a level of getting things done. And then you guys are working together, but I've met business owners where they are so into their business that this circle of their business and this circle of you is almost collapsed on top of each other. It's almost exactly the same circle. You almost can't see a difference between them and their business. I actually don't think that's healthy because there's no space for you or your business to breathe. I've also seen it where there's you and then there's your business and almost no touchy. Also not helpful or helpful because then you and your business are so divorced from each other that you can't produce anything because there's no communication. And that shows up literally like, are you talking to your assistant? Do your suppliers know what you do? Do people pay your bills on time? That's how this stuff shows up in physical reality. The concept of how it shows up though is in a little picture. And so for me, my overlap is actually quite a bit. It probably comes like way over here, like close to the halfway mark. And yet I still have a healthy distance where I get to be my own person. My business has its own ideas. And then we have these coffees regularly to China. Make sure we're on the same page with each other. In my experience, you ignore this conversation esoteric though it may be at your peril. Without taking some time to understand who you really are and what your business is about in that nuts and bolts way and who your business is, which is really what we're talking about. Who are you? Who is your business? If you don't take time to figure that stuff out, it's not that you can't be successful, you're just making it really, really hard on yourself. And I have had this experience, like I mentioned, more than once where my business followed me around and it felt like being followed by a five-year-old who was demanding a cookie every five minutes. If you've been around a small kid that wants something that you haven't given to them yet and how insistent they can be, I've had that experience with my business. It started off as this amorphous, I don't know, something doesn't feel right. Once I finally got a grip on what was happening, it really started to manifest in this small child following me around type of feeling. So I have changed my business model. I have changed my clients. I have changed how I work. I've changed when I work. I've changed how much I've charged. I changed how I collect my money. Who I charge what and how. I've changed all of that as a result of conversations with my business. I've changed where my office is. I don't even have an office anymore. I used to think that I needed an office because I'm a trained professional and I see a lot of clients on the telephone via Skype and I also see a handful of people in person and I'm not gonna invite them to my house so where am I gonna see them? Well, professionals have offices so I got an office. I hated it. I didn't just hate it for me but it turns out my business hated it and what a fascinating thing to find out because I was really sure that I was doing my business a favor by giving it a place where it could go do the business and my business was like, I don't want that kind of place. That place doesn't make me feel alive. Any kind of office as it turns out does not make me feel alive. So I have a home office where I do my work and if I wanna work in an office-y sort of way I even tried those co-working spaces. Too much, too office-y for me. Not just for me but for my business. Fascinating. So the assumptions I was making about what would make my business happy turned out to not make my business happy at all. So I let the whole thing going. Of course it's much nicer on the bank account because I'm not paying rent and I'm not commuting downtown and I do have places where I meet people in public and it's not an office office, not anymore. So whatever you're thinking, whatever assumptions you're making about your business that may not be right for your business and how else are you gonna know if you and your business don't chat about it. So the review is that by knowing who you are and knowing who your business is and then who you guys are together you have a much better shot at getting what it is you're trying to put out into the world. The soul of your business, that connection and permission and the fun, the what of your business, the more literal nuts and bolts stuff about, I help clients grow businesses or whatever. Who you are, you're more self-actualized, more in the world being who you are doing your thing which is empowering to everybody around you. My appeal to you then is to actually give yourself an opportunity to know who you are and to know who your business is because what the world needs, it's Howard Thurman who said, go and be paraphrasing, be who you are because what the world needs are people who have come alive. I want you to go and be alive. Have your business be alive. That allows everyone around us to be alive. We're more empowered. You don't own your business, your partners. Take time to get to know each other so that the two of you can do something amazing in the world. If you're willing to expect something of yourself, if you're willing to bring it, whatever it is for you, if you're willing to bring it and expect something, that's when the miracles can start to happen. Things absolutely will shift for the better for you and for your business. And it starts with asking a few fundamental questions, giving yourself a little bit of time and space to see what the questions, to see how those questions are answered. Simon Sinek is the start with why guy. I love this man. And he says, by the way, it wasn't the called the I have a plan speech, it was called the I have a dream speech. And we're not pretending like there's not a lot of nuts and bolts that go around making the dream stuff happen and yet if you don't start with the why and the who you are, the task is just, they're just tasks. And I don't want, owning a business is way too much work for you to not be invested in it in this why, who am I, who is it kind of way. It might just be easier actually to go get a regular job. And I don't mean that disparagingly. I mean, the best business owners are the people who are attached to it in some capacity. They know who they are and they know who their business is so that they can produce the stuff. Otherwise, it's just too much damn work, quite frankly. What it looks like when things are working then. I told you what it looks like when things aren't working. You're drained, you're grumpy. Feels like your car isn't working, the hood's up, you're hanging out by the side of the road. When it is working, it looks more like this. Calm, serene, things are going well. You feel like you're in the flow, in the zone. The flow is when your skills and the challenge that's in front of you actually match rather than you being bored or overstimulated. When you're in the flow, all things are possible. So when things are working, it means you've done what you can to set yourself up for success and be in this zone where your skills and talents are being used for the challenges in front of you. I have a client named Mary who came to me because she wanted to write a children's book and you would think, well, she's a professional writer and she writes for all kinds of people. Children's books are pretty small. We'll just carve a couple hours off that on the calendar in BAMO, Instant Book. Okay, two and a half years later, no book, right? She wrote a book literally on the last day that we worked together. On the last day we worked together, she said, I wrote a book last week. Two and a half years. What happened in the middle there is she figured out who she was. She learned how to figure out who her business was and what her business wanted. She started having regular conversations with her business. She figured out what her superpowers were. She changed, and then she did a bunch of nuts and bolts stuff too, right? She changed her business model. She revamped her ideal client. She revamped her marketing and her elevator pitch. She hired an assistant. She hired a guy who was so far out of her comfort zone that she ended up letting him go eventually, and yet his ideas infused the business with something completely new and different, which helped transform everything she did after that. All of that stuff started though from the perspective of who am I and who is my business? Because once she started to answer those questions, then she realized that her business wanted something quite bigger from her than she was actually ever thinking about doing and, quite frankly, was not prepared to do. And so Flat Out didn't do it for about a year, and it became the conversation that wouldn't go away, like that five-year-old tugging on your slacks. So when she finally acknowledged that and turned around and said, okay, what is it that you want from me? The business said, I need to be bigger, and you need to learn how to do that, whatever skill sets or books you need to read or people you need to hang out with. And so she spent the next six months doing those things, and I'm very proud to report that her business is doing very well today. She was a solo entrepreneur, making 150 grand on her own as a writer. It's not a decent living, pretty decent living, right? She now makes more than triple that, does almost zero amount of the work herself, has a full-time employee, a part-time employee, and she said, Chris, I've got a man who loves me and a woman who does my laundry. What else does a girl need? This is what's possible when we start with the tiny fundamental start with why and the who. Who am I? Who's my business? That's what's possible. That's what it looks and feels like when it's working. Thank you.