Self-awareness and being a solopreneur
This year I committed myself to being 1000% Terry and helping you discover your 1000%. I’ve chosen to simplify and consolidate my communications, taking three sites to one, moving all communications to one site (this one), and seeing how much I can simplify in how I meet and work with amazing solopreneurs and businesses. I’m really enjoying the process because, although it’s a consolidation/reduction/simplification, it’s creative.
One thing that I’ve always criticized about how I conduct myself in business is that I don’t stick with things. I don’t see them through all the way to the original vision that I may have had for them. A dear friend, Andrea Stein, once said to me that I “wasn’t patient enough and gave up too early on things.” She demonstrated her sentiment in how she doggedly kept at her lifelong passion of writing historical romance. She’s now published twelve books and is an award-winning author. Andrea has not only discovered her passion, but she’s stuck with it year after year and is a prolific, happy writer celebrated by many (including me!).
I always thought it was a weakness of mine, not being able to stick with things. But I’ve come to realize that what I enjoy most about projects or these “things” I’m referring to, is that I love the creative process. Once it becomes rote, repetitive, or not as creative as I’d like, I lose interest and lose the driving force (or structural tension) to sustain it and so I move onto creating a new idea.
Here are a few examples
I wanted to be a fine artist and sell paintings at outdoor festivals. I was hoping I could earn enough income to do it full time. I painted, showed and sold my art on weekends from 1991 to about 1995 and then stopped. I’d met and married Chuck, and no longer wanted to give up my weekends to art shows, but the real reason was that I’d never found a way to earn enough income to support myself where I could give up my full time job.
Same thing with my greeting cards—I left my first job out of college to start Pappycards (yes, it’s true). I was not feeling creative enough through my typesetting job even though I was successful at it, and always loved writing and drawing so I took to cards. It was an early experience into selling, as a naive then 23-year-old, going door to door of retailers in Pittsburgh pimping my line of Pappycards. Three years in, I realized I couldn’t sell enough greeting cards to create a sustainable income and went back to the workforce. I blamed it on Hallmark introducing their Gold Crown store branding to retailers which shut out all independents, but alas, I had to sell a crap ton of cards to eat.
In the last decade, it was The Confident Entrepreneur and Compass Playbook. Each started as books with the intention to take them into multiple revenue streams. The Confident Entrepreneur was meant to be a series of multiple guidebooks and potentially training on marketing, sales and communications—the areas I excelled and had experience. I wrote two. Compass Playbook also started as a book, expanded to workshops and online courses. I had real hope for that one and worked hard at it for a few years. Finally, a venture into selling ads on Facebook to a webinar to sell the online course on relationships was an expensive and unsuccessful experience that turned into the last effort to make it viable.
More recently, it was PappyClub, which is still flowin’ and blowin’, however, it too has morphed into a simpler consolidation of what you’re consuming right now. Initially meant to be a pure membership site containing a braintrust of my knowledge and teachings, and is still that today, but not via a paid-for membership. I’ve moved all of the content into this site, kept the brand, but shifted it to be free to subscribers of the Journal, hence the name, “PappyClub Journal.”
One thing that I have stuck with, however, is what I love to do most and that’s serving clients one-on-one. I have had the pleasure of working with a diverse group of people to help them achieve their business goals with better strategies, content, marketing materials, branding, communications and confidence. I’ve done this all through my business, Better3, since 2006. I’m proud of what I’ve been able to sustain—and stick with—because it inherently has creativity built right into it.
With every new client comes a new project or projects. With every new client I get to work with someone unique who has their own desires and I can help them realize their desires through my creativity, insight and skills.
So what I’ve come to self-awareness about is that it’s not the project or initiative, it’s the creative process that I adore. That gives me life. That’s my jam. So launching and forwarding a new creative adventure is who I am. The process of ideation, inspiration, excitement, research, experimentation, writing, designing, building, sharing—all of it—is what I love.
For you to reflect upon:
Self awareness comes from understanding exactly what makes you you, but also what makes you happy. Where you are most yourself, most fulfilled, most stimulated, most energized and most satisfied. Doing it as a means to an end can become tiresome, laborious and take your luster away. We see it on the faces of people walking around half dead every day. They’re not living their jam because they haven’t done the self examination to discover what it is for themselves.
I invite you to explore what that is for you. Use my examples here to reflect on your past experiences and decipher your jam. It’s all about being 1000% and letting YOU shine. (Click here for the entire content related to this video)
