Growth within contentment

I like to think of running my business from a place of contentment, instead of from a place of growth for growth’s sake. But sometimes we can confuse the idea of contentment with that of stagnancy. Business contentment isn’t perfection, or a finish line, or any sort of achievement. Instead, for me, business contentment is approaching my work from a perspective of curiosity, with the understanding that what I’ve created is already enough. It’s a place of openness, experimentation and grounding.

It also means that my business isn’t stagnant, that I still have goals I want to pursue and trails I want to follow, but all with intention and alignment to my values. This year, I’ve been starting to work on some big secret goals, and I’ve noticed how differently it feels to pursue these goals with that underlying stability of contentment. It’s a goal-setting approach that encompasses curiosity, intuition and the question of “why not now?”

Approaching growth and goal setting with a perspective of curiosity allows me to take a more experimental and playful approach, instead of working from a place of desperation or scarcity.

Curiosity helps me to analyze what’s working and what’s not working in my business and making changes based on that. It lets me ask the question of “what if?” and then observe what happens.

After developing a system for nurturing my current wholesale customers, what if I try handing that job over to a virtual assistant? I have a bunch of illustrations that I painted for art prints, what if I turn them into stickers as well? I can test out these solutions, start with a trial period or order a smaller quantity of a new product and see how it goes.

Curiosity helps me to try things out without being worried about failing, because as an experiment, I’m going to learn something either way.

Although I love looking at the numbers in my business and analyzing data and trends, some of the biggest decisions I’ve made in both my work and life started with gut instinct. This intuition is a feeling of openness, excitement and a little fear when I have a spark of inspiration that I can’t seem to stop thinking about. It’s a feeling of stepping just enough out of my comfort zone and crossing a new threshold.

This is how I decided to quit my day job to start working in my business full time. It was a sudden spark of inspiration, a very quick gut feeling. However, after that initial hit of intuition, I then planned the very practical steps. I looked at my finances and began to set a little extra money aside while I was still in my job so that once I took Yardia full time, I’d have a bit more of a cushion in those early months while I got settled in my new work routine.

Making the gut decision first then allowed me to formulate a plan for what I’d already decided, instead of going back and forth on the pros and cons of whether or not I should make that decision in the first place. I used my initial intuition and excitement as momentum to get myself started on the practical path forward.

There’s a goal I’ve had for years, something I’ve always told myself that “when I retire I’ll do this.” This year I started to ask myself the question, “well, why not now?” Why wait until retirement? Could I make this happen within the next year instead, and still keep Yardia running smoothly?

That question has been driving me forward as I take baby steps to make the big life goal happen. And having that dream in mind has made it easier to work through the messy middle once reality began to set in.

That’s where I find myself right now, a couple months into working on a new dream that won’t come to fruition for about a year from now. It’s causing me to evolve just about every aspect of my business, from manufacturing to design to fulfillment, but taking it one small step at a time has kept me motivated to continue to travel along this path.

So what I’m doing now, that first tiny step, is decluttering my product line and deciding what needs to stay and what can be discontinued. That’s the first of many steps. And really, whether or not this life goal comes to fruition, my business will be stronger for the steps I’m taking now.

Because my goal is intrinsic to how I want to live my life, it keeps me inspired to keep working at it even when complications arise. I have a core reason, instead of making changes because I think I “should” or because it seems “professional.” And at the same time, starting with the question of “why not now?” allows me to maintain a playful relationship with the goal. If it doesn’t happen now, well, maybe it can happen later when I originally imagined it. I’d rather have it not work out than to have the regret of not trying.

Here are some ways you can practice setting goals from a perspective of business contentment.

Curiosity:

• Write a list of all of the tasks that you work on in your business. What tasks could you experiment with letting go, outsourcing, creating a system or trying in a new way?

• Take a break from a business task for a week or a month and experiment with a different tactic instead. Evaluate your results. This is how I ended up quitting social media in favor of email marketing!

• While you’re working on a repeated task, write down the steps you take as a future to-do list for yourself. This is your new system. Can you experiment with automating or simplifying any of the steps? Or is it something you could hand off to an assistant or contractor?

• Ask yourself “what if?” and “what if I try…?”

Intuition:

• I’m a big fan of the Inner Mentor meditation found in Tara Mohr’s book, Playing Big, to get in touch with what you imagine for your future self and to get a better understanding of what really matters to you.

• Ask yourself: How is your business currently serving that future self vision? What small changes could you make to serve your future self even better?

Why not now?

• What’s a goal you have for your future, or a bucket list dream you think you’ll do someday? Ask yourself, why not try to make that dream happen now instead of later?

• Consider what changes you’d have to make to your business and life to make that dream a reality.

• Take the smallest first step you can on the path to that dream.

Take care,