Getting In Touch With My Own Inner Samurai, Part Two

“Are you someone who has many interests? Do you like to read and write, fix and invent, design projects and start businesses, and many other things, all at once? Do you feel limited by the word ‘or,’ uncomfortable when you need to narrow down choices, and absolutely revolted by the command to ‘pick one?’ Is ‘and’ your favorite word?”

This is the paragraph that begins chapter five of Susan L Reid’s book Discovering Your Inner Samurai. The chapter is called Doing What You Love: Multiple-Streams-of-Passion (MSoP). Okay, raise your hand if Susan’s profile describes you. My hand is raised high in the air…and I’m tempted to throw the other one in the air for good measure.

The thing about Susan is that she really makes this characteristic sound great (and for the most part it is). But how many times are we made to feel not-normal, unfocused, and generally less-than because of it? And then we try hard to hide this inherent inclination by going the normal, focused route only to be met with unhappiness and frustration. Starting to sound familiar? Fantastic! This post, my fellow MSoP’ers, is dedicated to you. Actually, I’m hoping it’s going to be co-written by you. We all have experiences with the questions laid out here, experiences that can be shared as we help others like us use this characteristic as the awesome, empowering quality it is. So, come along…join the dialogue below and let’s show how we Renaissance Souls can kick mucho butt.

Jumping off questions:

What are the tell-tale signs of someone who is a multiple-streams-of-passion character?
Susan’s description above is pretty indicative of someone with MSoP. I’ll throw in another that I struggle with…not feeling like you have a home. That’s home in the figurative sense, particularly when it comes to professional identity. Ever wonder where you fit in exactly because your interests don’t fit neatly into one of the confining boxes most professions create? The last thing I want is a label or be confined to just one thing…and yet there are times when I pine for that kind of simplicity.

How can we best explain this characteristic to others, particular to those who don’t find it “normal?”
I’m not sure why it’s so difficult to explain the concept to others. Is it really that much of a foreign concept? Or do we MSoP’ers present some threat to those who believe that stability and consistency are absolutes?

How can we emphasize that our MSoP is an asset rather than a distraction?
This is sort of a related question to the last one. In this case, though, we have to ask ourselves how we can use our inherent gifts of curiosity and exploration for a stronger guiding purpose. How can we weave all of these different interests together to form a new niche that’s distinctly our own?

How do you know when running toward the next great thing is actually running from something else?
I’m leaving the question that I posed to Susan offline as my parting shot. It’s one that I struggle with in my own internal dialogue. When I get bored with something and want to move on to the next great thing, am I leaving that activity too soon? Or is this just the voice of all those non-MSoP folks in my life telling me that I’m doing something wrong?

As I wrote in The Dip, you’re either the best in the world (where ‘world’ can be a tiny slice of the environment) or you’re invisible. This means being Draconian in your choices. No, you can’t also do a little of this or a little of that. Best in your world means burning your other bridges and obsessing.

Wrong or right? If he’s right, what does this say for all of us MSoP’ers?

Getting In Touch With My Own Inner Samurai, Part One

Once upon a time, I left a well-paying job to start a business. It was a personal services business where I would provide coaching, consulting, writing, and speaking focused on careers. It had such wonderful potential and energy at the beginning. I loved the idea of working for me and working toward my own dream rather than someone else’s dream that was imposed upon me. It was liberating. Until I realized that I kind of sucked at it. Not the coaching, consulting, writing, and speaking parts…I was pretty good at. It was the entrepreneurial start-up business part. You know, the stuff any entrepreneur has to do like sell themselves and their business. My inability to do this surprised me because my work up to that point was marketing and membership development. How hard could it be to sell myself when I had sold my organizations for the past few years? That’s right…a hell of a lot harder. That’s when I learned that entrepreneurship isn’t for the meek or the timid (or the overly arrogant).

Before going any further, let me make a full confession: I fell flat on my ass and while it was painful and humiliating and the time I would not take back the experience for any amount of money. I learned way too much that will help me when I go back to working for myself again in the future. And until then, I’m making a point of reading and networking with folks who have made the transition from organizational employee to entrepreneur.

Enter Susan L. Reid and her new book called Discovering Your Inner Samurai. The subtitle is The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success, but if you’re a guy don’t let that scare you away. Even though she writes from a female perspective and often openly to a female reader, there’s plenty of great advice and insight for anyone.

As to what this whole Inner Samurai stuff is, here’s how Susan describes it on page 5:

I began calling [my inner voice] my Inner Samurai when I realized how strong, vast, and powerful my inner voice is. Inner because the voice is deep within my being (to distinguish it from the voice inside my head) and Samurai because of how strong and powerful it is.

That definition gives a pretty good indication of what’s to come. Bear in mind that this isn’t your typical “how to get started in business” tome. Susan is much more interested in helping her readers figure out who they truly are, how they can connect their identity to their passion, and how they can focus that passion in their entrepreneurial actions. She interlaces these lessons with her own personal experiences as an entrepreneur (or as she calls it, an Accidental Pren-her™) and the experiences of her clients.

Susan encourages any newly emerging entrepreneur to consider the process of starting up a business as an adventurous journey. Along the journey, it’s natural to ask questions like these:

• Is my business idea good enough?
• How do I get the money to start up my business?
• Will I be able to run a successful business and not be chained to it 24/7?
• Do I have all the learning, education, and experience needed to be successful?
• What if I fail?

From my own experience, I readily admit that I struggled with each of these questions. They’re the types that can gnaw at you - particularly that last one on failure. And for each of these questions, Susan offers real examples of how to deal with them and the underlying fears they represent.

By the end of the book, be prepared to walk away with some essential tools that will help you build a business based on who you are. This is where the energy is and it’s what will get you through the lean times that are inevitable in any start-up venture. Trust yourself. Confront your fears. Enjoy the journey.

So if you’re thinking about starting a business, add Discovering Your Inner Samurai to your library. You can learn more about Susan and her coaching practice at http://www.alkamae.com/. And if you’re interested in what others are writing about the book, check out her virtual book tour page.

A final teaser: On Friday, I’ll be writing an additional post connected to Discovering Your Inner Samurai. One of the chapters in Susan’s book is on a subject that I’m intensely interested in - the concept of Multiple Streams of Passion. If you’re someone like me who has multiple interests and passions but don’t know how to harness the potential of all these options, make sure you come on back and join in the dialogue.

How Is Your Elevator Pitch Going Down?

It’s such a good idea it makes me wish that I thought of it first. We all know how important that 30 minute second elevator speech is when it comes to introducing our work or our company to a potentially interested person. We know how it has to grab that other person by the shirt collar and shake into them a clear recognition that you are just the individual to solve their problems. But how do you know whether your pitch is any good or not? You could always try it out on a friend or a family member and get feedback. Or you could try it out on a potential client and see how it lands.

Or you could submit it to Your Elevator Pitch, a website that allows you to post your pitch and receive ratings and feedback from others. In some ways, its kind of a self-help group for microentrepreneurs. One upside of the site is that it gives you access to others who are fine-tuning their pitch and you can gather ideas.

Right now, the site seems a bit new. For that reason, there are a few downsides. Your Elevator Pitch makes it easier to give quick, knee jerk ratings than actual comments to help you improve your message. I tried to add a message to one of the pitches and I’m not sure it actually posted. And there’s not a very good way to search all pitches which will be problem if the site scales too far beyond the 78 pitches there today.

With that said, the site has a lot of potential and here’s hoping that it can be a successful way for those of us working on selling our work or companies to craft a dynamic message. Give it a shot and let me know what happens. You’ll probably find my pitch there in a few weeks.

Is There Room For ‘We’ In Your Elevator?

Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity recently wrote a post referencing some familiar advice for crafting an effective elevator speech. The latest conventional wisdom would have us believe that the best elevator pitch is not about us, but about the other individual. The principal strategy is to set our needs to the side and focus exclusively on the needs of the potential customer, member, or client. After all, the reason we’re in business to service them, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. Arnie writes that this strategy misses a greater point:

Business relationships are as much about valuing and evincing our selves as they are about reaching and helping others. Both aspects (self and other) need to be expressed and honored to foster lasting connections for business success and satisfaction.

There seems to be this tacit understanding that relationships in business are different from those elsewhere in life. Perhaps it’s okay to screw over a vendor in your business, but it’s clearly not acceptable to do the same to a friend. Or maybe it’s fine to do everything to make a member happy but necessary to put conditions on making our spouses equally happy. It’s as if we are two individuals merely sharing the same skin, which might explain why we’re so damned unhappy at times.

Like Arnie, I believe there’s a different way…one that accepts that our core values define our relationships regardless if they are business or personal. There is no need for this artificial schism. What if, instead of making the elevator pitch primarily (or solely) about the other person or even selfishly about ourselves, we use the AND proposition and make it about us. The pitch then becomes one for a mutually respectful relationship where the needs of both sides have equal importance.

Not realistic? Think a customer or member is too self-interested, focused too much on what they gain? Maybe, but then, that’s the message they’ve been trained well to absorb. This is an invitation to propose a new type of relationship, one that addresses the client’s needs, but also honors our own goals, dreams, and possibilities. There’s no way to do any of this when the relationship becomes imbalanced and the customer’s needs are always put first. Actually, that’s not a relationship…it’s servitude.

And we have a choice.

Review Of “To Be Of Use” by Dave Smith

Rosa Say has given me just the nudge that I need to do something that’s been floating on my to-do list for a while. This is Talking Story’s 2nd Annual Love Affair with Books where folks in her Ho’ohana Community have been encouraged to submit a book review. Well, I’ve been meaning to write a little about a powerful book that was actually sent to me by a publisher’s rep who actually has a pretty neat blog herself (visit Kim and her blog, Skip On!).

In the fall of last year, I received To Be of Use: The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work, by Dave Smith. The title certainly was compelling and intimately related to my own philosophy toward work. The book is not only an autobiography of a man dedicated to making this world a better place, but a field guide for all of us to use to connect our work to something greater than ourselves. Dave Smith was the original founder of Smith & Hawken, a company dedicated to organic gardening (sadly, Smith & Hawken was bought up by Scott Seed and changed into the kind of empty Pottery Barn-like store that Dave fought against).

It has seven chapters with each one focused on a particular value or seed. And the chapters flow easily from one to the next: faith, hope, justice, temperance, prudence, courage, and love. In each, he offers his own personal experiences as a testament to what an individual can do with their life. He writes of how he left his high-paying job as a computer programmer to work for Cesar Chavez and five dollars a week. He speaks candidly about his spiritual wandering from a fundamentalist Christian upbringing toward Quakerism.

What I found most refreshing is his take on business and entrepreneurism. His story is an inspiring account of how business can be a force for good in the world and that a successful business can be measured by such ideals as responsibility, compassion, and service to the common good. At a time in our history when many companies are better known for their greed and maliciously competitive actions, we need more men and women to follow the path of Dave Smith.

A final quote, which I believe sums up the main theme of To Be of Use:

Meaning comes most naturally when we find and fulfill our purpose. This implies that there is an overall higher purpose, one beyond simply surviving and satisfying our own selves on what someone once called our separate little islands of commodities. We find our purpose in responsibility and service to others, living our values – making things better, fairer, happier for others.