By Zoë Foster, zoekmfoster.com
We’ve been taught that focussing on productivity in our business will equate to more growth, faster. But what if we’ve tried all of these big-business blueprints and they keep failing us? What is the missing piece here? Could it be that we have glorified an imposter in our model of “success”, and thrown the real hero out into the cold?
Success is a buzz-word in entrepreneurship. It is touted as our raisin-d’etre, and typically assumed to be the primary goal of our business.
And yet, success means so many very different things, to different people, and at different times. In my early 20s, success to me was getting a distinction on an academic paper, and praise or recommendation from my university peers. In my early 30s, I was already on my 2nd solo business and juggling small children in a haze of permanent exhaustion: success to me at that point was keeping all my plates in the air without falling off the tightrope. And maybe landing a book deal.
Now I’m in my early 40s. I’ve been through a decade of high-intensity healing from chronic illness, reached the 5th (and most soul-aligned) iteration of my solopreneurship, am currently experiencing the bipolar delights of 2 young teens and a sometimes-too-comfortable marriage, and have been living nomadically by necessity for the last year. Success is a word that feels archaic and patriarchal to me now. And that’s not because I don’t have goals, by any means. But crucially, I’ve come to truly understand, accept and embody my core values and how these relate to and feed my goals. This is completely at odds with the external-validation model of “success” our social climate feeds us, with capitalist-led productivity as its combined driver, force and destination.
Money. Products. More.
This is the message we have ingrained into us, over and over and over. But as a business model – especially in a post-pandemic world where we have all (I believe) done some major soul-searching and life-reassessment – it is doomed to failure. The machine is never satisfied; the success never arrives. We live in a perpetual cycle of “not enough” and “not there yet” (especially within the ghoulish hall of mirrors that is social media). All the while still dazzled by the dangling, glittery promise of more, higher, better, yet without ever pausing to acknowledge and celebrate all the myriad successes already accumulated. Producing more content, more offers, covering more platforms, and all for the goal of more sales… Doesn’t it feel dispiriting and exhausting?
So what’s the alternative? What will make you feel successful?
Burnout vs Making YOU Your Business.
Being so ultra-focussed on productivity can very quickly lead to burnout, and especially so in women who tend to be more heart-and-soul led (even if unconsciously so). Fascinatingly, I’ve noticed on my own journey that the more distance I put between myself and my business, the easier it was to sell (for example, selling 3rd party products). But the cost of this distance ensured that I was not happy making money in this way, and I’d quickly become bored and start looking for a new business model. Rinse and repeat!
When we close the gap between ourselves and our businesses, we must be prepared for some personally challenging and in-depth self-work. Yet the emotional ‘cost’ of this is far outweighed by the benefits of feeling like your business is truly making an impact – and one that you can be justifiably proud of on all levels.
Core Values are the Heart & Soul of Success.
Real core values are rarely concerned with making more money. Rather, they relate to your deeply held sense of justice and vision for yourself and the world around you. For example, one of my biggest core values is fully embodied expression – and in that, an allowance of taking up space: physically, emotionally and energetically. As someone who grew up feeling excruciatingly shy and never wanted to stand out, you can understand that reaching this core value took a fair bit of unpacking (and in my case, decades of compounding chronic illness).
A simple way of uncovering your core values is by looking for patterns of frustration which keep surfacing for you. One of mine was feeling perpetually unheard, unseen and under-valued. Digging into this, I realised this was (quite obviously) because I wasn’t allowing myself those rewards in a full and integral way. And of course, there were myriad reasons for this, but the solution remained the same – give what I most desired to myself. This is when I really started to feel the thrill of success, in all parts of me. And it’s also when I chose to focus on creativity over productivity. Suddenly, all of the goals I’d been trying to reach for years – my own signature program, amazing collaborations, writing and publishing my first book, and setting up my own large art studio – all came to fruition rapidly and relatively effortlessly.
Align Your Goals with Your Values
If your goals are not aligned with your values it will always be an uphill struggle to achieve them. And even more so if you aren’t clear on your values, or perhaps have never even considered them.
For years I tried to make money because I felt that this was the answer to all my problems, and that I deserved it! But what came in was sporadic at best, and always inconsistent. A recurrent lesson for me is the more I focus on creating what I love and what wants to come through me, the easier it is for me to make money. The other way is like dragging my nails down a blackboard repeatedly. I am certain you can relate!
Shifting from Productivity to Creativity.
As we surrender into being led more by our values than extrinsic rewards, so we naturally shift away from the metric of productivity to the incalculable experience of creativity. This means allowing for more processing space, to ensure we are using our whole brains and not just lazing in our analytical lobes. Utilising meditation, visualisation, daydreaming, and imagination breaks alongside holistic movement and anything which increases communication across the corpus callosum (the pathway between the left and right hemispheres) will result in an abundance of creative ideas, notions and possibilities.
Creativity fuels our fire, to keep going, and to keep feeling inspired as well as really dialling into what it is we’re here to offer. It shifts us from the drudgery of production-line mentality to so much more.
Creativity Creates Space for More.
Creativity allows for infinite space around our ideas – whether they are fully formed or just a spark. This in turn leads inevitably to content, offers, connections and products we have never have otherwise considered!
Imagine a business where you truly are the boss, in every way. Nothing outside of you gets to dictate how much or what you spend your time on; instead, that wisdom is sourced from within, and you get to play, to explore, to wonder, to process ‘out-there’ ideas and possibilities.
This, to me, is where real success begins. And it is the most fruitful, satisfying and fulfilling success of all. Do you agree?