Inner leadership qualities: commitment and self-compassion

In today’s Musings on Marketing and Magic I talk about an aspect of inner leadership that we need to develop as conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, or healing professionals in order to build a successful business, which is commitment.

One way of defining commitment is “a state or quality of being dedicated to a cause or activity,” which in this case might be your vision, your mission, the “for the sake of what” that you are working with clients and building a business.

When we run our own business, we are not just responsible for delivering our best services to clients and working on our business with activities such as marketing and bookkeeping, but we also need to develop qualities of self-management to keep us going when things don’t turn out the way we wanted them to.

It requires strength to keep at it at times. Sometimes, we need to re-evaluate what we have been doing and determine that we need a different approach; we need to look at our business from a different perspective.

Staying connected to your for the sake of what in difficult times

And in those times, it can be really hard to stay connected to our own soul’s essence and our “for the sake of what” that informs our actions and why we are actually building a business. But the clarity of the for the sake of what is what keeps us going.

When we have a clear picture of what it is that we want to create in this world, the change we want to be a part of, we are no longer focused on individual activities and how we can “push” them through to success, but rather we can take a 30,000 feet point of view and discover what would be the next obvious step to take.

Self-compassion as a critical component of inner leadership

Aside from our connection to our “for the sake of what”, I believe the ability for self-compassion is critical here. There have been many times these last few years where things didn’t work out for me – people couldn’t hear my message, because I hadn’t clearly defined my niche, my program offerings weren’t compelling, my marketing activities didn’t generate the desired results… you name it, I experienced it.

And whenever I had to admit to myself that this wasn’t working, there was a moment of self-criticality “I should have known…”, “I should have done more…”, “I should have, I should have…” – until I would realize that this self-criticality didn’t help me and I would shift myself into self-compassion.

That would be the point where I would be able to shift my point of view: what had I learned from the experience? What part of it HAD worked? What could I be doing differently? And how could I look at my ultimate goal and go for it in a completely new way, was there an “out of the box” way of approaching this?

My commitment to my larger “for the sake of what” and self-compassion has help me several times already to keep going with building my business.

How do you stay connected with your for the sake of what when you hit a rough spot?

Until next time – be magical!