Episode 82: An Entrepreneur and A Trapeze Artist!
Launching a business is a lot like being a trapeze artist. As a trapeze artist, you climb the ladder to the platform, stand ready to grab that first bar. Your timing is perfect as you leap from the platform and grab the first bar. You swing back and forth, waiting for the perfect time to move to the second bar. You watch, you feel and suddenly you let go… to launch your body to the next bar, momentarily flying in the space between, then grabbing on to the next bar for the next part of your routine.
In today’s episode, Sharri Harmel shares important insight about launching your business by looking at the steps a trapeze artist takes to hone their craft, all to help new entrepreneurs move forward into reaching their dreams.
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Welcome back to the Extraordinary Women Podcast. I’m Sharri Harmel, Founder and Editor of the Extraordinary Women Magazine – the must-have digital magazine for women looking for inspiration, tips, and support to create their fabulous next chapter… and make their dream ideas happen.
In both the Extraordinary Women Magazine and the podcast, I share stories of women who are not celebrities, but real women like you and me who have chosen to create and live lives of true authenticity and passion with a focus on doing, making, creating.
But the magazine has much more than interviews. Like this podcast, it also has coaching tips, ideas, insights and even a dose of inspiration to help you to create YOUR amazing and extraordinary next chapter, project, or business. Life is short so let’s get started in making this year our best ever.
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Episode 82: An Entrepreneur and A Trapeze Artist!
Today, I want you to imagine that you are a trapeze artist … you’ve launched out from one bar and are reaching for the next … the air between those trapeze bars is my metaphor for today’s conversation. Transitions, reinventions, action… all take place in that space between the bars. And how you handle that space, makes all the difference in how successfully you’ll grab the next bar.
That my dears, is how launching a business feels. Now before you switch channels and wonder if I’ve lost my mind, let’s talk about this.
Practice patience, and accept you won’t be successful in your first attempt
On a trapeze, you have to let go of one bar, then you’ll hang in the air a bit before you can grab the next bar. Starting a business is sort of like this… you probably have a very clear idea of what it is you want to start, but trust me, it will always, always change. Every single entrepreneur I know, began with one idea in mind and over time, it morphed into several different versions until finally it landed on what you see as today’s successful business.
But what about that air between one bar and the next? When you watch a trapeze artist, they make it look effortless. But…even if it doesn’t look like the trapeze artist is doing much, they are hard at work to make sure they gracefully and successfully grab the next bar.
The same for your business or the dream you’ve gotten start on. You too will find yourself in the air at certain points. You’ll be in that space between what you imagined and even planned for, and that next version of your business is going to be.
But just like the trapeze artist, to grab that next bar with grace, you have to be willing to practice patience, accept you won’t be successful in your first attempt. You’ll learn to be flexible to possibilities, be open to input or coaching and let yourself feel the fear because being up in the air or trying out a new business idea always has a nugget of fear within it.
Being a trapeze artist, like being an entrepreneur, means you have to take action.
You’re the woman in the arena to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt’s famous speech. You aren’t considered a trapeze artist if you only think about getting up on that platform … or you draw pictures or write journal entries of how you’ll feel when you’re up on the platform. You have to take action.
In fact, you have to take one action after another. You found the courage to climb up the ladder. Now you’re on the platform, and next you have to jump. You have to leave the platform, in order to grab a bar and swing. Action after action. And I promise you, the very first time you jump, you’ll be terrified. Everyone is. But like everything, it gets easier and more comfortable the more times you do it.
Now, you’re swinging in the air, and you have to let go of the first bar before you can grab the second bar…and to do that, you’ll be flying threw the air for a moment between those bars.
Same with starting a business. Once you’ve launched your first version of your business, you might have to let go of it, to try out your second…and you’ll have to learn to love flying high through the air.
You have to trust yourself implicitly.
You are the one who is swinging from a bar high above the ground and therefore to be a trapeze artist, you have to have absolute faith in your own abilities.
Same with starting a business. Part of my problem when I pivoted my coaching business was that I thought someone else has the magic, the secret and could tell me exactly how to do it successfully. I didn’t spend enough time letting myself work out the details and listening to my gut. Instead, I signed up for program after program for coaches, many of them names you know. One after another…until I finally realized, being one of a hundred or several hundred, wasn’t going to help me with my own self-confidence and self-trust. I also had to learn that no one else was going to do this for me, I needed to do for myself. I needed to believe in my idea and create my business the way I saw it. No more large groups for me. I get the most out of a very small group of likeminded entrepreneurs, led by a powerful coach.
Trusting yourself isn’t a given. Trust is like a muscle that needs to be built up.
I’m sure even the trapeze artists have to learn to build up their self-trust muscles. That space between the bars, is where you could question every decision and every little mistake you’ve ever made. That space between the bars can knock out your self-confidence and self-trust unless you work on it.
Think about it…. I’m sure that as every single trapeze artist is learning their craft, falls numerous times, to the net below them. But do they give up? No. They climb the ladder and begin again.
You too. Sometimes, you will fall to the net. The idea didn’t work. No one bought your product or services. You realized you’re getting different clients than who you targeted.
Have faith that you are on the right path. Brush yourself off, evaluate what you could do different, climb the ladder, and grab the bar. Trust that you’re onto an ever better version of your business.
Be open and flexible to different ways or different ideations of your business.
It’s so interesting to me that many of us think the entrepreneurs who are successful, were successful from the start. I did too. It wasn’t until I began to interview people for the EW magazine and this podcast that I saw there was this common thread of change, pivot, re-direction, ideation running through every single successful entrepreneur’s early path.
So, if you fall to the net, look at it as an opportunity. Falling to the net gives you the time you’ll need to be curious to analyze why the release and subsequent grab wasn’t successful. You’ll have the time to poke around and observe other ways your business could be successful.
Start with something small and begin to build it.
The rookie trapeze artist begins with one bar and probably not all that far off the ground. They practice by leaving the platform holding onto the bar, so their body learns what hanging in the air is like. Gradually, they build up to platform jumps to a bar, and then much later … going from bar to bar and higher and higher platforms.
You too. Start small. Remember, I talked about how the first version of your business is most likely not going to be what is your successful version? All the more reason to start small. You’ll then be more flexible to changing it, shifting it. Some of the entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed tell me that they started their businesses on weekends and nights, while they kept their fulltime jobs. Every entrepreneur told me that when they started, they wore all the hats their business needed. But they didn’t put their financial stability at risk until they had confidence in the results of the business and that takes a bit of time. Give yourself the time to practice.
Think about it… if this was your first time out, you would climb up a really high ladder to a platform, and jump. Of course, you’d miss the bar. If that was it, do you think you’d keep being a trapeze artist on your bucket list? Gosh no. One try, and we’d all say never again.
That is exactly why you want to start small when you start your business. I don’t want you to give up. Finding the right business, communicating the right message, targeting the right clients, is like being on a treasure hunt. You’ll hit some roadblocks, you’ll go down a few wrong paths, but if you keep at it, and you don’t mortgage your financial security, you’ll find your treasure.
And like the trapeze artist, you’ll slowly build your entrepreneurial self-confidence, you’ll better understand how to do it and what your market wants, you’ll begin to value the time in the air between the bars as you prepare for the next version of your business, and most importantly, you’ll learn to trust your own ideas and instincts.
That, my dear friends, is YOUR dream blueprint.
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Thank you for joining me today. If you liked our conversation, please give me a review, and do come back for more!
Now let me ask you… How is your year going? Are you ready to do it different this year? Well… The Extraordinary Women Magazine Circle is just what you need IF …
You are committed to making this THE year you get started on your dream, the business, the project.
Yes, we always highlight two Extraordinary Women in each issue. Not the famous or the celebrity but real women like you, who have stepped into their big dreams by creating something special. I say we are all Extraordinary Women who are doing what might be called ordinary things. What makes you extraordinary though, is you’re working hard to make your dreams come true.
At the request of our fabulous magazine subscribers, in our April magazine issue, I added a whole lot more coaching tips into the magazine. I love that our subscribers tell us what they want, and their feedback was give them more of what they can apply and use in their own life and career.
As you know, I’ve been a coach for over 20 years, and I’ve now added into the magazine some of my best actionable steps, strategies and even exercises that you can use today as you create the life you want. I’d love to hear your takeaways from these tips, tools and exercises.
So, if you are a woman ready to get moving on your big, audacious dream, go to extraordinarywomenmagazine.com and join us.
Thank you for your precious time today…. your time is your most important resource in creating your dream life. I am currently in Paris, so I’ll say à bientôt, and to everyone back in the states, See you soon!
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