In the Beginning
Hi there, I'm glad you are here. I've been a business coach and consultant for quite a while now. As a professional, I've helped organizations implement company-wide projects in addition to holding a variety of engineering roles to either ship product or implement new hardware.
As a business consultant, I have helped small firms identify new markets, build business plans, create processes, and translate vision statements into measurable actions. As a business coach, I've helped entrepreneurs and small business owners remove limiting beliefs and other personal roadblocks that kept them stuck in unproductive cycles of inaction and action.
Business is something I've been fascinated about since middle school. I was tickled as a child to learn my great-grandfather had owned a small store in downtown El Paso. He was frail and sick by the time I met him so I never got the chance to ask him how and why he went into business for himself. But that didn't stop me from imagining having a business experience of my own.
As an adult, I've read a lot about business and taken oh, so many courses on running a business, sales, and finding a niche. Like my clients, it wasn't the structure of the business that I didn't understand. There were plenty of people who could help me with things like marketing, credit card processing, accounting, and vision statements.
I seemed to have a different problem. As a creative, my question was more about how I could express myself in business not how to run a business. It seemed to be an unspoken value of mine to have the business express something uniquely me. And when I was settling for something else, there was a little voice inside that stopped me from going any further.
It kept telling me I was missing the mark. I got the message. It seemed regardless of what I chose to do as a business owner, if it didn't somehow represent what was important to me as a human being, it was going to fail in my eyes.
Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any books written to help someone like me go beyond simply finding my passion, so I embarked on a very long journey to get to know myself better. I thought maybe there was something wrong I could fix.
During my journey of discovery, I kept doing business. As I got more aligned, I was able to get enough traction and satisfaction that I started helping friends and peers get aligned, too. In those early days of coaching, I simply shared what I learned from my studies of NLP, hypnosis, and all the personality and career test acronyms to help them get to know their business selves at a deeper level.
Over the years I've learned that it's not so much what we do that leaves us unsatisfied but how we're doing it and how we feel about its impact on others is what makes our heart and business sing. So if our external world doesn't match the internal value-based picture we have, we'll run out of energy regardless of how much money, referrals, or clients we have.
These days I am using one of the best technologies we have to help people align the inside of themselves with the outside world - mindfulness. It's powerful when these two experiences merge and continue to inform each other. Business activity just seems to happen. What we've struggled with in the past becomes less effortful and more rewarding for us and our clients.
My clients now get the benefit of not only getting up and running quicker but find themselves building a sustainable business attuned to both the inner and outer worlds of their experience.
I believe business is simply an expression of the individual's innermost creativity. It's time to express yours.