How I Found my “Thing” (aka Purpose)

A few years ago I felt inspired to create a series of blog posts and videos about my first few years in business, partly to show that slow and uncertain starts are more the norm than the exception, and to show that things are often very different behind the scenes to how they look from the outside.

This particular post was inspired by a question that I’m still very frequently asked:

“How did you come to be doing what you do in the first place?”

In other words how I found my “thing.”  So, I’ve decided to share this “pre-business” story with you to show you that successful businesses don’t always come on the breath of an “aha” moment. An instant epiphany may happen, but sometimes discovering your true purpose is a journey that can’t be rushed – having patience and surrendering to a coach’s suggestion that I didn’t actually think I wanted, actually turned out to be my life’s passion!

And let me start by saying – that journey wasn’t easy.

It wasn’t easy because actually there is no step by step formula you can follow for this sort of thing.   There is no “one” book you can read or one workshop you can attend – I know because I tried a lot of those things. In the end I mostly got there through trial and error, though I now definitely know that I could have shortcutted much of the journey if I’d got more help (and been willing to listen!)

It also wasn’t as simple as picking my greatest passion and turning it into a business, which is what I was so often told I should do.   One of my biggest passions back when I started my business was dancing (ceroc & lindy hop) so of course I should open a dance school, right?  But no,  the last thing I wanted to do was turn the thing I did to relax and have fun into my work!  In fact, thinking I was “supposed” to turn my passion into a business was partly what prompted me to train as a yoga teacher, which was another wrong path I wandered down for a while.

Lesson 1:  Don’t assume that you have to turn your passion into your business.  It is important that you love what you do enough to want to do it for many years and to push through the hardest parts of the early stage of being in business.  But your passion might be best kept as a hobby.  And not all passions can easily be turned into a viable and profitable businesses.

I didn’t want to get paid to do my passion.  What I really wanted to do was to help people and get paid for it.  I just couldn’t seem to find the thing I was going to help them with.

In my case, the journey to finding my thing took me just under 6 years of concentrated seeking – and much of it wasn’t fun, even though it all looked from the outside as if I was living an exotic life, much of it abroad.

I’m not saying that finding your “thing” has to take a long time.  But you do need to be patient.  It’s not something you can force.

Escaping the City

The journey started in my mid-30’s when I left a city job working in recruitment.

For about 7 years I’d navigated a world of cut-throat sales environments, job dependent targets, and soul-destroying work, where I had to leave everything of myself at the door in order to perform and “fit in” the way my company said I needed to. The whole thing felt entirely meaningless to me – my work seemed to have no greater purpose than churning money for other people.

I knew within a matter of months that this was the wrong work and wrong environment for me. Yet I stayed for about 7 years and worked for 2 different companies.  I was the first person in the history of one of those companies to bring in £1 million in sales.  In the other I was one of their top 2 salespeople – so the sales I made directly contributed to my two bosses being able to sell their company for a cool £18 million.  So I was good at what I did which was satisfying in itself.  I felt challenged most of the time and I earned a lot of money!

But I was very unhappy.

During those years I completely lost touch with who I really was.  So much so that when I look back I can see that there was probably no chance at all I could have figured out my next steps from within that very wrong life that I’d created for myself. I started reading books about life coaching and personal development, but I was so disconnected with who I really was that none of it left me any the wiser.

Lesson 2:  Sometimes you can end up doing something so out of alignment with who you are that you can’t get in touch with what feels true for you anymore. In those cases it might be better to leave and do anything at all (I often thought about leaving to work in a coffee shop) for a while that reconnects you with yourself so that you can start to find yourself and your passions again.

Eventually, the company was sold and I had an amazing opportunity. I could stay on for 5 years as part of a management buy-out and receive a payment at the end that would set me up financially for life.

But instinctively I knew how dangerous that would be for me.  It was tempting – I knew that I could easily end up with a mortgage paid off and money in the bank, but I knew I would also be 5 years further away from finding what I was really meant to be doing with my life, and 5 years further away from feeling fulfilled.

So I did what all my colleagues at the time thought was completely insane.  I left.

I left to at least give myself a fighting chance of finally finding out what it was that I should be doing with my life.

What my “Thing” was NOT

By the time I took the leap I had a list of all the things I “thought” I might like to do with my life.  They included teaching, working in international development, becoming a nutritional therapist, and youth work.  And, (although this wasn’t what I’d intended) I ended up spending the next 5 years working my way through that list as I realised that “Nope, this isn’t it either.”

While it was as frustrating as hell, it also wasn’t a waste of time. I found that the more things I tried, the more new things I discovered.  For example, running the type of online expert business I have now wasn’t even on the original list – I had no idea a business like this even existed!  (And I did have to navigate myself through plenty of hypey “get-rich-quick-make-passive-income-from-a sunbed-in-Bali” type internet marketing courses and seminars before I got here).

Lesson 3:   Getting in motion and trying something is better than sitting around trying to figure out that “perfect” thing.   It’s only by being in motion that you will learn – about yourself, and about other possibilities you wouldn’t even have known existed.

So I set off and over the following 5 years I:

• Lived in a caravan in Cornwall where I sold ice-cream from a beach buggy on sunny days and learned to surf on rainy days.
• Worked in remote regions of Ghana as a project manager leading young people on development and environmental projects.
• Lived in ashrams and yoga centres in India studying yoga, meditation and reiki, and became qualified as a yoga teacher.
• Studied acupuncture under a leading doctor in Sri Lanka.
• Returned to the UK and enrolled in a Masters degree in Nutritional Therapy.
• Quit the Masters degree part-way through – one of the landmark courageous decisions of my life – when I came to the conclusion that “this wasn’t it either”.
• Worked as a cover supervisor at a secondary school (nope, teaching definitely wasn’t it!)
• Trained as a hypnotherapist, then as an NLP Practitioner & Master Practitioner, and then as a Life Coach.
• Started up businesses as a yoga teacher, as an NLP practitioner & hypnotherapist and as a life coach.
• Attended property investment and internet marketing seminars, took several internet marketing courses, and explored “multi-level marketing” opportunities.

After I did my life coach training in late 2010 I was the closest I’d been yet to finding the thing I really should be doing.   I was good at it, I could work from anywhere, and I was helping people to change their lives.

But I cycled through 4 different niches in one year as I tried to find the thing that felt “just right”:   helping women around the age of 40 who are unfulfilled, helping corporate women escape the 9-5, a chronic fatigue/ME recovery coach and business coaching.

None of it was “it”.

So what WAS “it”?

I simply couldn’t find the thing I was really meant to do. However,  I was very clear on what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t ever want to work in a corporate environment again. I didn’t ever want to wear a suit again.  And I absolutely most definitely did not want to do anything connected with sales (ha!).

Finally, I was desperate.  I’d worked so hard, tried so many things, and invested so much money in all this training, and yet none of it really felt any more “right” than my old recruitment job – plus now I was earning just a fraction of the money.

I concluded that my block to making my business work must be a block to earning money and signed up to work with a money coach.  The first thing she did after putting me through a multiple page assessment was to tell me I had a very healthy relationship with money.  “Your problem”, she announced. “is that you just haven’t figured out how you are going to make any”.

Tell me something I don’t know (sigh).

She also challenged me to not be so determined to discount all of my previous experience and threw me a big challenge (as some good coaches do).  She challenged me to speak to the founder of the coaching school where I had trained and offer to run a day for his coaches called “Sales Success for Coaches”.

The conversation that went on in my head went:   “You’re not listening to me.  I’ve told you I don’t want to teach sales.  Which part of that don’t you understand?”

What I actually said was: “Yes, but…”

But I then had a good old talk to myself: “Well, It’s not like anything I’ve tried has exactly worked out – and at least I’d be doing something…. I know she’s wrong, but I’m willing to give it a go….”

Which saw me on the 27^th of November 2011 travelling into a training venue in Pimlico, London, with a busy narrative running in my brain: “Why would anyone want to learn from me?  I’ve got nothing at all to tell them that isn’t just common sense.  They are all going to feel I’ve wasted their time and their money”.   I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.

On that day I taught the sorts of thing that I now cover in my flagship Get More Clients Saying Yes! course (although it was a much less finessed version).   To my amazement, none of them knew this stuff!  It wasn’t common sense at all!  There was not one single question I was unable to answer!  I was making a difference!

When I’d finished I went to meet the founder of the coaching school to tell him how it had gone.  I practically flew in the door and gushed “This is it!  This is the thing I’m going to do!  I’m going to teach small business owners how to sell and I’m calling it Selling from the Heart!”

Lesson 4:  Other people can see what’s obvious even when we can’t. Trust them and be willing to give different things a go – even if you are not convinced.

The rest, as they say, is history…

Except it wasn’t quite. There were still a couple more roadblocks to navigate and I think they are worth sharing too so that the story is complete.

Navigating the Roadblocks

First of all, I still didn’t believe in myself enough. Even with my (by that point) 17 years of sales experience, I still didn’t believe that there was enough value in what I knew to be able to create a business from it. I doubted myself so much that I spent a few weeks reading every decent looking sales book I could get my hands on, and even took a couple of online training courses. What I learned from that process was just how much I did know. It also helped me to really clarify what I had to offer – because so much of what I came across felt so uncomfortable for me and I knew it would be for other small busines owners too.

Lesson 5:  Self-doubt is normal.  We all have it.   Sometimes there are knowledge gaps to be filled in order to get you ready to launch your idea, but most of the time you probably already know most of what you need to know – you just need a few successes to prove it to yourself.  Do don’t wait for self-doubt to go away as a pre-requisite for getting started – because it probably won’t oblige.

Secondly, people who knew much more than I did and were way more successful in business kept telling me that my idea wasn’t going to work.   In fact I heard the same thing from 3 very established business mentors “that’s not going to work as a business.   You should go and do sales training for corporates instead, you’d be great at that and you’ll make great money”.

I probably don’t need to point out that, while this advice definitely wobbled me for a while,  coming from people I so looked up to, I trusted my own instincts on this one.

The rest really is history…

Lesson 6: Sometimes you “just know” and you need to trust your instincts. Yes, you need to be willing to be challenged and to try out new stuff even when you’re not sure, and there is a lot to be gained from learning from people with more experience than you.   But sometimes you just need to trust your gut – don’t change your vision and direction completely just because someone else who “knows more than you” tells you to.  If you follow your heart the worst thing that can happen is it won’t work – but you’ll probably never regret that you tried.

Over to you…

I’d love to hear from you. Have you found your purpose?  Or are you still on the journey of figuring out exactly what “it” is for you? Do let me know in the comments below. I always love to hear from you.

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