Sharing my WHY.

What is Your WHY?

At the Business Wealth Club (a business growth community that comes together twice a month to learn, connect and grow their businesses further)  one question that we raised was this: What is your WHY for being in Business?

It made me I realised I have not shared my WHY enough. 

My dream is simple:

I want brilliant people with brilliant ideas to share and express their brilliance through their chosen businesses and I want them to inspire others as they do so. I want to help driven business owners to grow and contribute to the welfare of the world and to create environments in which the people and the business thrives.

I want to help ANYONE with a great message and/or product to be easy to learn from and grow with.  My dream is born out of annoyance, irritation and frustration. 

Listening to everything and learning to act on it.

I love to learn. I value learning. I think it's the singular most important thing we can do as human beings. Learning evolves us. That's what I believe. As a great lover of new perspectives on old things or old perspectives on new-to-me-things, I put myself in the path of learning often and voraciously. I like to learn new things from new to me people, known things from new to me people, new things from known to me people...In short, I actually don't mind where my learning comes from, so long as it comes in a form that is palatable and honours me as an intelligent member of the audience.

Annoyance, irritation and frustration have a job.

What do you want to Inspire?

It's important to pay attention to the little feelings, grumbles and knawing irritations. They have their place these irritations, they are signposts. On my journeys of discovery and learning, I became aware that many brilliant people with many fantastic ideas are so ill-equipped to either run businesses that allow them the full stage to support the impact they COULD provide OR that they are so caught in their own message that they are not able to truly communicate it to their wider audience. As a result, they invite people to listen only to barrage, bully or bore them. That's not fair to themselves or others. It does not make for growth or learning.

The annoyance and frustration I experienced regularly has led me to now being  committed to helping people to get that brilliance out of YOUR heads and into shapes and structures that actually can increase your impact, influence and income as a result of being easy to listen to and act in line with. I want to help you communicate your vision and grow your business to it's full potential.

Give 'icky' emotions a little space and the dream will emerge.

My dream, founded on that frustration, came into being over the course of last year between July and November. I let it have it's time. I allowed myself to rage a little, rant a lot and then I allowed myself to build out of that.  As I sat with those feelings of irritation and frustration and gave them some space . I asked: 'how can I ease this?'  and the dream took hold.

Dreams need consistent attention and a little space...

I realised that I needed to shape the ideas into something that will continue to drive me as I set up a business around it and really allow myself to hold a space for people learning and growing through GREAT content and products, delivered well, that connects people and that contributes to the wellbeing of everyone it touches by creating communities that share and move forward together.  I've made a great start. I now run a Business Wealth Club in my local community (Croydon, England) and I also provide 'Structure for Stars'. Both businesses fulfil my ambition of inspiring entrepreneurs to really create sustainable, contributing businesses that support and grow themselves and the communities they are based in.

My dream is simple - if you have a great passion, if you have a great perspective, if you have a great product then I will do everything I can to help you get your message 'out there'.

Finally, Some things to Wonder and Share About:

Every post in Ways To Wonder has a little section like this - please share your thoughts in response to the questions or the post. :)

What is Your Dream?

1. What is your dream? (and is it big enough for you?)
2. What frustrates, annoys or irritates you (and how might these actually be signposts to what you could or should be delivering in the world?)
3. What do you need to give space to, let go of or ease into in helping you build the contribution you want to make to yourself and others?

Wonderstate Number 3: Get Curious

Wonderstate Number 3 or "A recipe for getting out of the 'lazies' and back in flow".

You know those mornings where everything is just moving along the way you want it to...the people you are call are there, the appointments are easy to set, the pace is moving along and you feeling effective and efficient and wonderful as a result?
 
Then you go and make a cup of tea. Just to be ready for the next 'chapter' of your day. You are on fire!

And then you get back to the laptop or desk or laundry or hoover or book or whatever it is you have planned as your next thing to 'tackle' - and you just cannot find that spark of efficiency you seemed to have only moments ago. You sit, you stretch, you stand, you lift the metaphorical cushions of your couch to find all that energy, but it's just gone. Vanished! The tea gets colder as you resort to surfing or shuffling things around instead, and before you know it, you are another hour into the day and feeling grumpy because you are now being 'lazy', 'lacksadaisical', 'a wastrel', 'rubbish' (or whatever it is that your inner head voice is choosing to label you right now).

So how do we get back to that delicious feeling of flow? For me, it's wonder state number 3: Curiosity.

When I catch myself in that state, I have learned to get curious. I stop. I look around inside my head or on my desk for something, ONE thing, to get really really curious about. Now when I say curious, I am talking about the kind you see in children who have just found some new thing that they are just fascinated by. They become explorers of the microlevel. Wow, isn't this straw just the best thing ever? It's smooth, it's light, I can look through it, I can bang it on a table without getting shouted at, I can look through it, look! I can see you! I can push it into the floor and it squishes. It makes a sound when I rub it. It feels funny. It gets put in drinks...hmmm. Ooo, I can blow it and it makes your hair move! It's got stripes, I wonder what they do, it's red and white, and it bends, and it's hard to tear; I can blow through it; I can put it in my ear, hmmm that makes the bigger people laugh, I can see a small you - I can SEE you!!! wow....

Curiosity. Go find something to get curious about and get on in there, with full on absorbtion and fascination... before you know it, those questions and observations will be causing all sorts of things to happen inside your brain and your body. Almost instantly, you find you are back in flow, your creativity and drive are back and it's all because the chemicals in charge of that flow have been given a kick-start by your curiosity.

You see, curiosity is an emotion and all our emotions are connected to the body and the brain and the cool thing about that is that we can learn to  control those chemicals and choose, yes!, choose to get in flow whenever we want to. Just by kick-starting that curiosity cycle again.

Curiosity: Go ahead, roll the word over your tongue, say it out loud and move it around in your mouth. The word comes comes from the Latin; curiosus 'careful, diligent, curious' (akin to cura "care") and is an emotion linked to natural inquisitive behaviour such as exploration, investigation, and learning. Scientists observe that humans and animals alike have the quality; it's that old and that ground into us! It's just there, ready for us to use and we can choose it whenever we want to.

We use the term 'curious' to denote the behaviour itself, being caused by the emotion of curiosity. As this emotion represents a drive to know new things, curiosity is the fuel of study and one way to get in flow. So, start to wonder 'how long will it take me to Dyson up that staircase?'; say 'I wonder how long it might take for Bill to call me back?' or even 'what can I say in my message to make him call back sooner...?'; 'I wonder what Mary will say when she gets home and sees I've cleaned up the kitchen for her...?'; 'I wonder what I can write to make the board understand how important this is for our company...?'.

Here's my recipe for getting curious and back in flow:

Ingredients required for this recipe are:
An egg timer + focussed attention + a bit of playfulness + the words "I wonder..."

(If you don't have an egg timer that pings, maybe use your mobile phone's alarm or something like that - I just like egg timers because they are fun and make a noise!)

The best way I have found to get curious, to experience curiosity is simply to say 'I wonder...?' and then add whatever the best question is for me at the time. Right now, the 'I wonder...' questions that I am asking myself are:

• 'I wonder where do I make this blog entry end?!'
• 'I wonder how I can make the best of the next 5 minutes?' 
• 'I wonder how much more I can write in the next 5 minutes?',
• 'I wonder how I can make the instructions live inside you so you remember to take 3 or 5 or 7 minutes out to wonder?'.

You can make it fun too. When I am out of flow, I now use one of the cute little tea timers that I bought in a shop in Copenhagen: I have a 3 minute wonder (green tea), a 5 minute wonder (black tea) and when I am really going for it, a 7 minute wonder (herbal tea). You could just set your egg timer. For those of you that do, I can almost guarantee, it will make you jump when it pings! Flow does funny things to our perception of time.

Get absorbed, get curious and it won’t be long before you are making another well deserved cup of tea, feeling excited, happy, pleased with yourself, and probably full of curiosity about the next thing...

Yours with wonder,

Helena