Episode 403: Connecting the dots
In this episode, Fiona talks about the importance of mindset shifts. She also discusses the challenges faced by individuals transitioning from previous careers to entrepreneurship. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Reflecting on personal milestones and markers in life
Recognizing the value of diverse experiences in shaping one's business journey
Using exercises like "connecting the dots" to gain clarity and confidence in business endeavours
Encouragement to embrace non-linear career paths and unique stories
Sharing personal anecdotes and experiences to inspire others
Practical tips for implementing the "connecting the dots" exercise
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Welcome to episode 403 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is a quick tip episode and I have to shout out to one of my wonderful clients. I'm not going to name them because of the subject matter that we're getting into, but they know who they are and they have inspired today's podcast I think it's a deep one for many people and it will maybe have a huge impact on how you view yourself in relation to your business. Before we get stuck into that, I want to of course acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land on which I record this podcast, meet these wonderful clients and have these amazing discussions. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
I work with people all the time on their brands, on their marketing, on all sorts of things. One of the huge parts of being a business coach and having the privilege of walking on this journey with so many different business owners is the utter joy of seeing them make a mindset shift. Recently I was talking to one of my clients who has made a major career shift and I have a lot of people that I work with, I would say maybe the majority, at least half, are in a second stage of life and they may have had a career in something else and then they decided to start a business. Sometimes that business is related to what their career was in, but sometimes it's not. Many times over the last nine years, I have met with people who are trying to make that transition from who they were in their past life, in their past career, into who they are becoming in this business.
That doesn't mean that they're just starting a business. They might be 5 or 10 years in, but they did 20 years prior at a different career. They're still not at that same level of feeling confident in what they're doing. In this case, I was talking to this beautiful, wonderful client of mine and they got teary and just said, “Maybe I've stuffed up.” Maybe I should have just stayed where I was and had that stability, had that financial security. This person has a family. They were saying, have I risked my family and their welfare and everything else to run this business, which they've been running for a few years, but they're coming into the next level of that business? One of the exercises that we did was to connect the dots.
Sometimes we can see a real difference between our first career or the years that we spent doing something else and our business, instead of looking at the dots that connect and the skill sets that we are bringing from one to the other. I have a four-and-a-half-year-old, and one of the things that he's getting into now is those connect pictures. I love them too. I've always loved those. I always loved doing those when I was a kid because you're like, what's it going to present? What's the picture going to be? I think in business we don't do that enough. We don't look back on how far we've come and also the different things that we have learned in different jobs, in different careers, in different stages of our lives. Maybe we've lived in different places.
All of that adds to who we are and who we show up as of today in our business. I guess today's quick tip, is to spend, like I did with this client, we just spent 15 to 20 minutes looking at milestones or markers in their life. we went right back to when they finished high school. They didn't go to university straight away and they lived in different places and then they went to university a bit later in life and then had a very different type of career. I'm trying to keep this all very anonymous. We just looked at all the markets when they got married, when they had their first child, what was going through there, how they progressed through all these different important, sometimes challenging, sometimes incredible, sometimes both markers in their life. At the end of that discussion, which only took 20, maybe 30 minutes max, they just felt so much better.
They were like, I may not have started on this perfectly straight path in business, like some of the people that they were comparing themselves to. But the fact is most people haven't done one straight path. I know very few people who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their life financially, and from a work perspective when they were young, I would say my sister is one of the very few people that I know that was like, this is what I want to do. Studied it, became it, living it, loving it. But most people, including myself, have had so many different journeys. If somebody had told me that I would be writing two business books and that I would be working in marketing and brand and brand strategy, I would never have thought that, like when I started uni, I did a Bachelor of Arts.
I thought I was going to become a professor of sociology. I also thought that I'd write three fiction books that would become bestsellers and I'd be like mates with Oprah and I would have all this stuff. If somebody had said, I wouldn't have even known what marketing meant, I definitely wouldn't have known what brand strategy meant. I would not have thought that I'd be almost 10 years into a business that's been quite successful and have this podcast and have two books out there that are business books that have nothing to do with creative writing. Every one of us goes through different peaks and troughs in our lives, careers, and experiences. But it's those things that teach us and show us how we are different to our competitors and how we are sometimes different and better than our competitors.
How we can tap into that and tap into our storytelling our own origin story and our career path to influence and inspire our audiences. The way that you do it is you can go back as far as you want, you can go back to when you were a child, your earliest memory. What you want to do is even just get a sheet of paper that's got lines on it or a notebook and try and mark out 20 lines or 20 dots or whatever you want to do. Or if you're putting a digital version, you could just put 20 bullet points and then fill them in chronologically from whenever you want to start. If I were starting mine, for example, I would start thinking about probably in year 10, which for anyone outside of Australia, is two or three years before you finish high school.
That's when I had an incredible English teacher and he instilled in me, he was like, you've got a gift. He was incredible, like just wonderful and helped me look at English and writing and English literature as something that could help me in the future as opposed to just something that I enjoyed. that's when I started thinking about how could I use writing in a career. I looked at creative writing courses, I looked at sociology, and I was interested in society and people, he inspired that. I might start my 20 with year 10 and a little bit about that. Maybe year 12 or finishing high school and what I wanted to do then, then what was inspiring me then what I studied at uni and different things. You go through whatever the markers are.
You may not have gone to uni, you may not have finished high school, whatever it is. But those key markers, we all have key markers and they can be personal things. One of mine would be losing my mom when I was maybe thirties. Very suddenly. I've talked about it a lot. And that had a huge impact on the way I created this business. I talk about this a lot in my group coaching as well. When I go through exactly how I've built my business and the things that markers and the different things in my life that impacted how I would then change my offerings and change the way that I work and everything else. We all have it, but we don't often sit there and connect the dots.
You just get a piece of paper, get a notebook, get a digital form, mark out 20 dots and start looking at them. And with each of those, once you've listed them out, think about where you were before that thing happened and where you were after or where you were. when you were like, what was I thinking about in year 10 before I had this amazing English teacher? And then, and I should shout out in case anybody knows him, David McLean, he was such a good teacher, such a good teacher. Having that, like where was I before? What did I think of? And then how did that shift my identity and who I wanted to be? Same with when I got married, when I moved to London, like all of these things because we have so many experiences, we have so much life education and that can form how we then function in our business and how we offer things, how we talk about things, how we connect with people through marketing in our business.
All of those things add up. It's like connecting the dots like a child's drawing as I mentioned before. That is it for today. It's just you spending a bit of time to think about that. I've done this with so many clients, I've done it with myself and every time, every time the client feels so much better and can see how much of a journey they have gone on to get to this point and not taking for granted that journey and looking at the importance of all of those things. Often it's given them a lot more confidence to go forward with whatever they're working on in their business as opposed to what can happen just seeing somebody else on social media and thinking that they had just this easy path most people haven't and linear and then somehow feeling that you are behind because of that.
I would love to know what your connecting the Dots story looks like. You can always send us a message, I'm @mydailybusiness on TikTok or @mydailybusiness_ on Instagram. Or you can email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com. And of course, if you would like to do some one-on-one coaching, you can find all of our coaching packages over at mydailybusiness.com/shop. Again, if you've got any questions about them, you can always just email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com or even book a free consult call with me. If you found this exercise useful or you think you will find it useful or you found this podcast or any of the podcasts that you've ever listened to from our podcast useful, I would love it so much if you could hit subscribe and leave a review. It just helps other people find this and who knows, maybe they need to do the connecting the dots exercise themselves. Thank you so much for reading. I'll see you next time. Bye.
