If you want to put a rocket under your ideas and ambition, start or grow your own business or revolutionise your current business, and make your own choices and your own money, then you need to meet Danielle LaPorte. She is one hot woman. She made me think differently about aspects of my own business, and I wanted to share some of her magic with you. ~ Beth
Image credit: Anastasia Photography
Danielle is the creator of www.daniellelaporte.com, and author of the inspiring digital books, The Fire Starter Sessions and the Desire Map, which helps entrepreneurs rock their career with integrity, audacity and their truest strengths. Danielle is a former news show commentator, and director of a Washington-DC think tank, where she managed a team of analysts studying global trends for the likes of the Pentagon and the World Bank. She is the lead author of the Amazon bestseller, Style Statement: Live By Your Own Design, and has been featured in Elle, VogueAustralia, Body + Soul, The National Post, Entertainment Tonight, and The Huffington Post.
Here’s her awesome advice on doing what you love…
1) At a time when we are starting to come out of a global recession, you are encouraging entrepreneurs everywhere to blaze their own trails and set the world on fire. Why is it important and how does it feel to you?
Because liberation and self reliance are amazing things. Because cubicles are hell. Because the system is broken. If you want to make lots of really good stuff happen, then that’s really exciting – for all of us. If you want to earn a living by doing meaningful things – then that’s exceptional. This truth is most evident: we entrepreneurs, artists, and change agents define ourselves on our own terms. Does it get better than that?!
2) What do you want to revolutionise with the Firestarter Sessions?
My intention is that people will start heeding the call of their core desires. “Revolutionary” is basing your strategic plans on how you truly want to feel, not chasing external things and hoping they’ll make you feel a certain way. “Revolutionary” is using grace as a measurement for success, and generosity as part of your bottom line.
3) What does it take to spark genius?
Hunger. An open heart. Flexibility.
4) What is your superpower?
Listening. I also have a knack for getting people just the right gift. But that goes back to listening…
5) What is the one piece of explosive advice you can give to entrepreneurs trying to transform their dream into a rocking business?
Let ease be your metric. Here’s what I mean by that: Using the “ease factor” as a metric for making right choices is counter-culture, of course. It’s been drilled in to us to work hard. Blue collar, white collar, dog collar – hard work pays off. Pay your dues. Put in your time. Prove yourself. Check the right box. Stay the course. Meet expectations. Train in pain, and then reap the rewards. Doing what comes easily to you isn’t about shortcuts or cleverness, and it’s certainly not about making mediocrity acceptable. It’s about leverage. It’s about casting your seeds on the most fertile soil. It’s about your best chances for success.
I don’t do it if it’s not easy. That simple. That fun. That rad.
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Danielle’s brilliant ‘Desire Map’ is a great way to help you map out what you really want from life. Check it out here.
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Now over to you…
What do you want to revolutionise?
What do you find toughest (or what are you most afraid of) about going it alone?
What do you love about it? Why is it right for you?
This is a guest post by Louise Armstrong. You can read more about Louise here.
In my last two posts I looked at how we can embrace our ever-changing world and evolve the way we live by adopting some simple techniques to help us survive and thrive in the future. Today, in my final post, I wanted to share with you the most powerful technique of all: it’s one that will help you to unlock your own potential and inspire you to make the most of the human experience. It’s the power of imagination.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”– Albert Einstein
We all know what it’s like to dream, even if we can’t remember what we actually dream about, and scientists have now proved that dreaming plays a central role in our emotional health, our memory, our learning and as a way to help us find creative solutions to our problems. They’ve also discovered that over half of our waking thoughts are daydreams and that this is when we ‘unthinkingly’ do our best thinking.
In fact some of the biggest inventions of our time came about through daydreams – the Internet, robots, rocketry, test tube babies, the list goes on. All these things were dreamed up by imaginative people; people who went beyond facts and thought globally and synthetically, made serendipitous associations and came up with surprising and novel solutions.
“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
Imagination really can change the world because new ideas can change the world and it takes imagination to have a new idea. Imagination fosters empathy – the ability to “walk in someone else’s shoes” – and it also enables us to find creative, innovative solutions to problems. By unlocking the power of imagination for ourselves we pave the way to a life of awareness, fulfilment, freedom and personal power. Imagination is not the product of a gene pool lottery; it’s inherent within us all.
Here are my top tips for developing your imagination:
1. Create space for your imaginationto roam free
“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” ― Philip José Farmer
Allowing yourself to dream is like making a statement of intent: you are giving yourself permission to explore the possibilities and opportunities that open up when you free your mind. In our hectic daily lives, we don’t always give ourselves the time or the freedom to dream and yet it’s one of the most valuable gifts we can give ourselves.
I make time to dream in the morning when I first wake up and I write my thoughts in a notebook – it’s fascinating to see what emerges. Sometimes I daydream while I’m cycling to work. It’s amazing what thoughts pop into my head and very often I’ll come up with the perfect solution to a problem I’ve been having.
When do you give yourself time and space to unlock your imagination and dream?
2. Share your future truths
We all have dreams – big and small – but all too we keep them to ourselves. When you put yourself out there and start to share you find that amazing things can happen. Often you realise that other people are dreaming the same thing too! Unlocking the collective imagination goes a long way to counter all the negativity and angst we face in the media.
This happened for me recently as a result of a little project that I started in my own community. The Peckham Coal Line began as a seed of an idea we had to turn a bit of disused railway into a park. The dream was shared on Facebook and then we built a simple website to raise awareness. Before we knew it 50 people in the local community had emailed me to show their support and offer up their time to help. It is still early days but the project is gathering momentum and this is allowing us to talk to the local stakeholders and ride out the collective imagination of the local community. It’s so exciting to see the dream come to life.
A forgotten space: view of the west part of the coal line route from the Bussey Building with the city skyline behind
What’s your dream? Where are you going to share it? It might be a conversation with someone you know, a stranger, or a post on social media – start small and be open to where it takes you.
3. Create a prototype: make your dream a reality one layer at a time
Have you ever noticed that the ‘hi-tech’ communication devices you used to see in Star Trek look just like the early Motorola phones? It’s a commonly held idea that fiction informs reality and film props add that element of believability by making ideas a little bit more tangible.
The idea of developing and prototyping future concepts is widely accepted in design circles – so why can’t we apply this same idea to our own lives by adding layers of reality to your dreams? By experimenting with our dreams and taking small steps to bring them to life, we stop feeling stuck or overwhelmed and instead start feeling excited and that we’re making progress.
One project I worked on this way is IoTA – a space to help non-techy people make use of the ‘internet of things’ technology that is set to grow massively in the future.
The first thing we did was to draw out the idea. Then we described it. And then we made a film about it. We didn’t think much would come of it but when we shared it on social media people loved it. Before we knew it we were running a session with teenagers at a school in Manchester to put the ideas into reality. Being open to possibilities has meant that the project has now won some funding to enable us to develop the ideas further and we’ve created a new company as a consequence. It sounds grand but in retrospect all we’ve done is kept adding more layers of reality to grow our idea.
What can you do to add a layer of reality to your dreams? Maybe you can draw it, paint it, or make a little model. Maybe you can act it out, or do something productive towards making it happen.
4. Be your future, today
We think about the future being far away, and so it’s easy to put things off and tell ourselves that we have all the time in the world to realize our dreams. The fact is the future will be here before we know it so we may as well start living it today!
“The future is radically open, and it is shaped by who we choose to be in the present” – Maureen O’Hara, Dancing on the Edge
You owe it to yourself and to the world to make your dreams come true and sometimes you have to think outside the box and be imaginative in order to help bring your dream to life.
For instance my dream for my future is to feel aligned in my mind and body. To get there, I know I need a better work/life balance. So today I decided to experiment with my work day. I worked in flow with my natural energy patterns and decided to go for a swim at noon, which boosted my creativity, motivation and productivity in the afternoon. Ok, I’m not making huge life changes, but starting small makes it manageable and when my goals are manageable I know I’ll stay committed. I’ll keep experimenting until I find what works best for me, and this will take me another step closer to the big dream of living more holistically.
The big question is: what will you do to unlock your imagination and realise your dreams today?
If I have learnt anything over these past few years, it’s that it takes a village to build anything worthwhile. And by that I don’t just mean having a team with you, or an active community around you, but I mean having people ahead of you, guiding you.
As a business owner, or a professional in any industry, one of the smartest decisions you can make is to find yourself a mentor. By ‘mentor’ I don’t necessarily mean someone you meet with regularly to discuss challenges and ideas, although that is incredibly valuable. I also mean people whose leadership you admire, whose values you share, and whose behaviour you want to model (without copying WHAT they actually do!)
Today I want to introduce a few of the key people who have played a mentoring role in my life, in the hope that it will inspire you to find mentors of your own.
The Oscar-Winning Film Producer
During the years I spent at UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) I worked very closely with film producer Lord David Puttnam, who was Chairman of UNICEF UK at the time.
David is an impressive man on so many levels – he spent thirty years as an independent producer of award-winning films including The Mission, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, Bugsy Malone and Memphis Belle. His films have won ten Oscars, 25 Baftas and the Palme D’Or at Cannes. From 1994 to 2004 he was Vice President and Chair of Trustees at the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) and was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship in 2006. He retired from film production in 1998 to focus on his work in public policy as it relates to education, the environment, and the creative and communications industries. In 1998 he founded the National Teaching Awards, and he is now the Republic of Ireland’s Digital Champion. He also has more honorary degrees than I can keep track of.
But the thing that made him such a shining light for me wasn’t actually any of that. It was his deep-rooted commitment to furthering human potential. We worked together on one huge project which brought sporting opportunities to over 12 million children across the world. Together with David Bull, the inspirational Chief Executive of UNICEF UK, we pitched it to the government and a host of sporting bigwigs. We then spent several years building a complex partnership to make it happen, and its legacy lives on. Time and again in the process we came up against brick walls, but instead of banging his head against them, Lord Puttnam always kept the end in mind, and found a way round or over, or reconstructed the wall completely.
What I have learnt from this mentor: Keep your eye on the prize. Fight for what you believe in. Don’t let bureaucracy stand in the way of big, brilliant ideas.
If you have a business you want to grow, please take a moment out of your day to read this. It could be very important for you.
If someone told you it is possible to start a new business in a recession, grow it to seven figures in under five years, be cash-flow positive every step of the way, and have happy customers in 50+ countries around the world, you’d want to know the secret, right? If someone told you your work could make a real impact, and there was a way to massively grow your audience so you can make serious money whilst making a real difference, you’d want to know about that too, right?
Well that is exactly what we have done with Do What You Love and, in a nutshell, here’s how we did it:
Greetings from inside the Arctic Circle! Mr K and I have been digital nomads working at minus 15 this week, as we have spent an incredible few days in northern Finland. I’ll be sharing some of our experiences over the next couple of weeks, but first wanted to share a major lesson we have learnt on this trip.
I nearly didn’t book the tickets because I was worried about taking our daughter with us when she is still just a toddler. What if she screamed on every flight? What if she hated the cold? Or even worse, what if she was ill? But then I reasoned that they have toddlers in Finland too, and as long as we were well prepared with thermals and skiwear she’d be fine. So I stocked up on warm clothes and Calpol, and hoped for the best.
And guess what? She was a great little traveller on the flights, waving at everyone as they got on the plane like an air hostess in training. She coped with the weather brilliantly, proud of her new snow boots, and fascinated by the white world around her.
But then disaster struck and our worst case scenario came true – poor Sienna fell ill with chicken pox. Of all the places in the world to come out in a raging rash. We were a 100km round trip from the nearest hospital, and really worried about her.
This is a guest post by Louise Armstrong. Read more about Louise here.
In my first blog I talked about how quickly the world is changing and why we need to adapt and evolve in terms of how we live, work and connect in order to overcome the challenges the future holds.
As Albert Einstein recognised: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Of course, while we can never be sure of what lies ahead we can all adopt some simple techniques to help us navigate our way into the future. And the great news is that they don’t cost a penny!
These techniques are designed to unlock innate capabilities within each of us. All you’ll need to do is be brave, be willing to try new things, be ready to embrace new experiences and be disciplined enough to do them all regularly.
You can start today! Here are my five top tips for a flourishing future…
We seem to be getting more and more questions lately about how to create and run an online business, as people are increasingly seeing it as a fantastic way to do what you love on your own terms. We have learnt a huge amount over the past five years, always trying to push the boundaries and stay ahead of the game, and are happy to share that if it inspires even more of you to go for it.
We are working on some fantastic new business resources which we will share over the coming weeks and months, along with links to some of our favourite business websites, blogs, magazines and books. We will also be sharing a number of our most valuable lessons through this newsletter and dedicating the whole month of April to online business – the pros and cons, ups and downs, opportunities and how-tos – so if you are interested in finding your freedom through being your own boss, stay tuned! And even if you have never even contemplated running your own business, try to have an open mind and consider all the possibilities. You never know what might spring to mind…
One of the keys to our rapid growth over the past few years has been our commitment to collaborations. We have built some really strong partnerships with leaders in their field, which have enabled us to grow together, and make more of an impact than we could have made alone. We are grateful to be in the position where we turn down many more partnership opportunities than we take up, but when we do take a new partner on board, it is always from a place of real belief in their work, their approach, their expertise, and the relevance of their teaching for our audience.
And that is why we have chosen to partner with Marie Forleo in the promotion of her upcoming (awesome) online marketing course B-School. You may have heard a fair bit about B-School lately. That’ll be because Marie and her team are the best at what they do. But we have chosen to be a partner because the essence of what they teach – how to get your products and services in front of a huge audience of people who NEED them – is absolutely key to doing what you love in business.
Think about it for a minute – if you get clear on what doing what you love means to you, and you find a way to make that into a business, you have overcome the first hurdle. But if you don’t find the customers who want and need what you are offering, you have no business – certainly no long term sustainable business. And that will just leave you frustrated and sad. Great online marketing is a non-negotiable in this digital age, if you really want to carve out a place for yourself running a business doing what you love. You can have the best product or service in the world, but if no-one knows about it, your dream isn’t going to last.
If you want to find out more, here are two really useful free training videos from Marie, which explain a bit more about why this is so crucial to your long term success:
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