Building a business usually starts out with a great idea, some research and then you take all of the necessary steps involved to get the business off the ground. These steps might take you months or years to accomplish. If you’re truly in the cultivating and creating process, as you go about doing the tasks you eventually reach an interesting barricade. That barricade is you. You meet YOU somewhere on the business building journey and all of a sudden things take a wild and crazy twist. I have a strange feeling that everyone eventually hits this barricade if they stay at it long enough.
When I think of the concept of substance vs essence in my life or my business, I picture the substance concept of my business as the mind of the business. I see all the details, mechanical, technical processes and actions that need to take place in order for my business or “substance” to become what it is intended to be. I set those things in place and do the proper physical and technical tasks to make other things happen and then ideally it does what it’s supposed to do.
Yet essence is the core nature of my business, Though not as visible it is actually the most important quality. It’s fluid and always growing. I like to think of it as the heart and soul of my business. The essence of my business is the expression of who I am and that expression flows from me into the business that I create and cultivate. That’s a heavy reality and no wonder one’s personal life often interferes with the substance part in the business building process.
It is my very essence that makes my business unique and it’s what my people depend on when they seek me out over other coaches. The same is true for you and your business.
You’re working hard and making strides when suddenly you realize that you are not exclusively working with just the physical aspects of your business. Some of your “essence” is beginning to get in the way of all of this “creating and cultivating.’ You THOUGHT you were working on all the necessary EXTERNAL components for your business only to be suddenly distracted by the INTERNAL and more personal ones.
For any late bloomers like me who took a little longer to catch on to the rules of the game called life you too may have racked up quite a lot of internal personal points to work through. No problem, right? Not until you start to become a bit untethered.
Each time you conquer one obstacle and breathe a sigh of relief, you find that there is another one right behind it. All of a sudden your persevering attitude changes and you start to feel unclear, exposed and your confidence meter hits an all time low. Fear and apathy creep in and hang around hoping to derail you. They can be pretty successful before we catch on to what is happening. At this point you start to question things, You consider waving the white flag of surrender and bailing. Maybe your idea wasn’t so great. Maybe you don’t have all of the needed skills. Maybe this and maybe that.
It’s sink or swim time.
You can try to ignore the tandem chaos or you can lean into it and see what might be going on. And if and when you do lean in and sit with it, you often find the internal inquiry to be well worth your consideration.
I’ve had this experience a few times in my professional endeavors and none of them were easy. All were painful yet each and every one was and was an extremely ordained and necessary part of my emergence journey. While you’re going through it you find it’s unbearably uncomfortable. It’s frustrating, humbling and a vital part of this beautifully difficult building a business process.
You don’t have to do this journey alone. As a matter of fact I highly recommend that you don’t.
I have learned the hard way and am still learning that you need a mirror to do life effectively. You need to lean on the strength of others who are ahead of you on this journey and who are willing to reach back and extend a hand. I have been extremely blessed to find people like that when I needed them the most. I often wonder if they even know just how impactful and life sustaining they are. I don’t think it matters too much because they are essence minded people too.
As we go through this journey we don’t walk unscathed. We observe, absorb and learn things along our way. We meet people who make impressions on our souls both good and bad. Then we spend the next several years unlearning what we just learned and building some tenacity muscles.
If we keep on moving forward we discover that life is a little bit sweeter when we step back and breathe and let our essense show up more.
We then get back on the journey and start to take care of the external and the internal processes. We go on further still to pursue love and righteousness in all that we strive to accomplish and it’s there that we discover at the end of the day that…Your Essence of your business is far more rewarding than your Substance any day.
Don’t run from this part. Hang in there. The best is yet to come…
I am here if you need someone to walk the journey with you.