Being True To Yourself Through Your Business

By Lauren Fleiser

Are business methods killing your dreams?

Entrepreneurs are always told to do what they love, but being passionate about the product or service you are offering through your business is not enough. Passions and dreams are easily diluted and distorted by the many harsh realities and requirements of running a successful business.

Lifelong entrepreneur Lauren Fleiser teaches strategies that will minimize these dilutions and distortions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780620561693

Book preview

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PREFACE

This book is for entrepreneurs who want more than just freedom from a boss. This book is for entrepreneurs who want to explore more deeply than just doing something they are good at or passionate about. It is written for entrepreneurs who want to use their business as a vehicle to express their full human potential.

You can use your business as the path to shape your destiny, to express your individuality, to live out all your dreams, your chosen achievements, and to live your life more consciously. Your business can reflect and even become the life journey you always wanted. But you have to choose this.

If you are on a different entrepreneurial journey, this book may not be for you. There are many types of entrepreneurial journeys. There are entrepreneurs who enjoy business irrespective of what form it takes. There are entrepreneurs who want to use the money made to explore passions outside of their business, and there are those whose choice of business is influenced first and foremost by its ability to generate a lot of revenue. There is no right or wrong; there is only choice.

However, if you have chosen this particular entrepreneurial journey, then you are the type of entrepreneur who is governed by your dreams. Your instincts guide you through your life, and your business is no exception. You see your business and your life journeys as inseparable.

This makes things more interesting for you as an entrepreneur, but it also makes things more challenging. It’s a lot easier to make a lot of money doing something that makes pure business sense than it is to incorporate your life journey and dreams into creating something that also happens to make you money.

Compromise always seems to creep in. In the struggle to balance business and life goals, you end up sacrificing profits, achieving things you didn’t really want to achieve, delaying your dreams, and allowing elements of yourself to become something you are not.

Not only this, but you have the added problems of having to do business-like things that have very little to do with the way you wanted your life journey to feel, such as the slog of marketing, selling, and accounting, or dealing with difficult staff and customers.

If you are expressing your life journey through the path of your business, you also have to be aware that, by its very nature, this life journey shifts and changes. Your business is often not flexible enough to accommodate this, over and above having to accommodate changes in the business environment. You end up limiting your personal potential for the sake of staying in business.

With nearly 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, I have made just about every compromise. Until one day I decided that I was not going to compromise anymore. I was going to find a way to achieve everything I ever wanted, become all that I can be, and express all that I am through the path of my own successful business.

It was then that I realized the underlying reason for the ongoing compromises. When it came to my dreams and my personal self-expression in this world, I was applying a lot of life coaching methods to create, attract, and manifest the things that I wanted. When I worked on improving my business, I was applying a lot of business methods to increase sales, improve the functioning of my business operation, and grow profits. The problem was, when I focused on creating the right life journey for myself, my business revenue suffered. Then, when I focused on practical ways to improve my business, these methods moved me away from what I was authentically trying to create.

The solution lies in learning how to synchronize your life journey and your business journey on every level and in every aspect. The practical, proven methods and principles in this book do just that. The methods help to infuse the fluid nature of your dreams, your life journey, and your individuality into the harsh, structured realities of building a successful business. I call this being true to yourself through your business.

To benefit most, you should read this book from beginning to end, as it is written. If you need to reference a specific section thereafter, you can.

You will come across two key principles throughout this book that will serve you well:

First, you need to break your business down into its key components and create what I term mini combined life/business strategies for each component. In this way, you infuse the added dimensions of what you want to achieve and who you are into sound business strategies.

Secondly, you need to achieve what I term flexibility within a framework. You need to learn how to use the fluid concepts of attracting, manifesting, and creating within the framework of your business structures. You also need to learn how to make your business structures themselves more flexible.

If you have inherited a business, been forced into a business, purchased a franchise, or been enticed into a business opportunity, and you would prefer not to take the ultimate journey of being true to yourself through your business right now, you can still use these methods to soften your business journey and make it feel more authentic.

If you choose to maximize this journey of being true to yourself through your business, you will live a life of no regret and maximum reward.

INTRODUCTION

This is the best time in history to be the kind of entrepreneur who chooses to synchronize their life journey and their business journey. People are more aware than ever of living life consciously. There is greater understanding and acceptance of the laws of attraction and the possibilities around manifesting things in our lives. People are also more aware than ever as to what it really takes to build a truly successful business. The age of technology allows anyone to do this without being burdened by heavy costs and infrastructure.

The more you are able to smoothly combine the soft fluidity of manifesting in your life with the harsh structures of business, the more likely you are to maximize the journey of being true to yourself through your business.

It has been a long journey for me to get to this point where I am able to help you to achieve this, while having achieved the same for myself in the process.

Each point in my own entrepreneurial story awoke key realizations about a combined life and business journey that formed the basis of my methods. These methods have since been documented, applied, and tested on many other entrepreneurs in different situations.

As I share my story with you, you will see why each realization dawned on me, and hopefully I can shorten your own journey to combined life and business success by many months or years.

I was involved in my first successful business when I was 12. I was in a business partnership with a friend of mine of the same age. We did party entertainment for nursery school children. We had so much fun inventing our own songs and creating our own games that the children had never seen or heard of before. We were fully booked every single weekend. The love of the limelight,