It’s not easy to run your own business.
Your business can take over your life. If you work from home, there’s no clear line between working and resting. To reach more people, you can find yourself undervaluing what you do. Not to mention the challenge of marketing yourself in a way that sells and feels authentic.
Lisa Fitzpatrick knows these struggles intimately.
She built her business as a struggling single mother. Now, she helps female coaches and consultants organize their business in a way that’s sustainable on all levels: financially, emotionally, and energetically.
In this YBTV interview, she shares with us the first step to starting your own business, the best way to approach marketing, how to get past the fear of failure, and the 4 poles that need to be in balance for your business to be sustainable.
What You’ll Learn
Lisa started her business journey back in 2005 as a single parent.
She didn’t have business mentors that she could turn to. She had no idea how she was going to support her boys or survive the journey. But she knew one thing:
I thought that if I ever get back on my feet, I will make it my life’s work to support other women to rise into what they’re here to do with their lives.”
“We all have a burning dream inside us,” Lisa says, “but some of us believe it’s possible, and some of us doubt that.
“And I think if you’re given that self-belief, or you’re supported and facilitated by someone who really sees you, it can go a long, long way towards actually realizing that dream or dying with your music left inside you, which to me would be the worst possible outcome for a woman on this planet today.”
But if you’re currently in business, you know how difficult it can be.
Your business can drain you. As a mentor once told Lisa, “Your business will take up 24-7 if you allow it to.” It can morph into something nowhere near the vision you began with.
Lisa wants you to know that it doesn’t have to be that way. Your business can support you, much like a supportive partner. But first you must form an alliance with it.
I like to think—for a single parent especially—your business becomes like a really supportive solid husband might. It wants to look after you. It wants to protect you. It doesn’t want to dominate your life and make your life a misery and have you as a slave. It’s an equal partner in this process with you. It has a soul of its own.”
To get your business to that place, Lisa urges you to enlist the help of a mentor. A mentor can save you time, money and energy by pointing out pitfalls and guiding you towards your strengths.
A mentor can also help you work through any concerns you might have about building your business.
Striking out on your own can bring up a lot of fears: fears of not being good enough, of failing, of not being able to support yourself or your family.
“It’s common to get stuck in the fear of, ‘What if’s,'” Lisa says. “But I love to ask my clients that question, ‘What if it works out? What have you got to gain here?’
“What we focus on expands. And if we focus on what we’ve got to gain and not what we’ve got to lose, the whole universe moves with us into that place of gain.”
Lisa offers her own business mentoring program, Sacred Women’s Business, which “tailors a business support system for the service-based woman who is usually a very high-achieving spiritual woman who wanting to create both online and offline presence.”
But she also offers a book that can get anyone started.
Healing the Heart of Your Business is her “love letter to clients, potential clients, or clients who fit that category of being a sensitive in business.”
She created the book after noticing that a lot of her coaching clients were “overly generous and were working themselves into the ground creating these service-based businesses.”
Women face unique challenges in business. Lisa explains, “The women I serve are very high achievers… They think they need another degree before they give themselves permission to step into the ‘expert’ status. And they really feel that over-delivering is the only way that they can provide value.”
When she looked for resources that could help her clients, she “couldn’t find anything out there that was going to support that tendency to be quite a sensitive person in business, very heart-centered.” She was already at capacity in her coaching practice. So she decided to write a book in hopes of sharing her insights with a wider audience.
“The dance we have between receiving and giving is something that I think women are still mastering,” she says. Women in business is a fairly new thing, historically speaking. Most businesses are structured in a more masculine way.
And female business leaders need that masculine structure, to a certain extent.
Women can often go around in circles, working on mindset, working on heart-set, being in alignment with their life’s purpose. But unless we take those critical brave steps into the pragmatics of implementation—which is a very masculine thing to do—we can’t expect those little baby ducks to line up behind us and follow us towards that freedom and that victory we’re looking for. The mother duck always moves first!”
She shares the 4 poles of a business that you must have in balance to remain sustainable.
The North pole represents how well your business is aligned with your life’s purpose. The South pole represents how well your business supports your physical health and wellbeing.
The West pole represents the masculine energy of your business, all the structures and plans that keep it ticking along. And the East pole represents the feminine energy of your business, space for spontaneity, playfulness, intuition and creativity.
You don’t have to run your business like everyone else. You can run your business in a way that feed your soul and makes you feel great about the energy you’re putting out into the world.
“That dream inside you wants to look after you,” Lisa says.
Are you ready to allow it?
Jump to Topics of Interest
03:10 Why Lisa focuses on female entrepreneurs
04:57 What unique challenges women face in business
07:05 How Lisa got started in business as a single parent
09:42 How to overcome the fear of stepping out on a limb and starting a business
12:02 How a mentor can help you take that first step
13:31 How heart-centered women can learn to market themselves effectively
15:29 How can you achieve a work-life balance and not burn out?
17:26 The 4 poles you need to balance for your business to survive
19:16 Lisa’s Sacred Women’s Business coaching program
About Lisa Fitzpatrick
Lisa is an intuitive business coach for smart, conscious female coaches and consultants. She’s the bestselling author of Healing the Heart of Your Business: Sustainable Success for Heart-Centered Women. She’s also the founder of Sacred Women’s Business, a coaching and training organization supporting conscious women leaders who have a legacy to leave. Find out how you can work with Lisa.
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