EP31: Build a business around your true value (not capitalism’s version).
Capitalism has very clear ideas about what makes us valuable—to capitalism. When we consider doing our own thing or creating our own business, this is often where we start. It’s also where we get trapped, because when we focus our attention on those things, we continue to prop up the very system we want to step out of.
Why are we so attached to the things capitalism values? Because we get more than just money in return. Our jobs are deeply tied to our identities and our sense of self-worth. Our jobs make us feel worthy, important, needed, successful, safe, secure. That’s why so many people stay stuck in jobs they hate and in companies that aren’t aligned with their values.
We’re afraid of the emotional holes that will be left when we can no longer ask our jobs to give us those things. When I sold the business I built over the course of 15 years, I no longer knew who I was. I didn’t know where to find my sense of belonging, self-worth, or recognition. What I know for sure is that I cannot ask my new business to give me those things and still consider myself a regenerative entrepreneur.
A regenerative relationship with our work and businesses requires us to find those things within ourselves and to know that we are—and always have been—enough, exactly as we are. That’s when we can build a business around who we really are and experience true joy, satisfaction, and purpose in our work lives.
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Full Transcript
Alisa: Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Spring has definitely sprung here in the UK. It's a gorgeous, sunny day blue skies above me and couldn't resist being outside. So I hope you are get to enjoy some birdsong and the occasional bumblebee passing by. Today I am gonna talk about the fundamental transactional relationship between us and our work and what it means to build a business around our intrinsic value.
Simply what it means to build a business around who we are when we strip everything else away. So I'm gonna start by telling a story that I don't feel very good about telling but needs to be told. It does not show me in a very good light. I was on Instagram and I saw a post by a fellow coach and she was talking about being in nature, um, being in the woods, her daily practice with nature.
And I found myself thinking, how would someone be able to distinguish between us, because I'm much better than she is. She's just starting out as a coach, I have so much experience. I've been an entrepreneur for 15 years. I am a hard-nosed business-person.
I've built a successful company. I've done really long-term deep coach training. I've got a lot of hours behind me, and someone might look at this person and think we were just the same. I really need to show my value. This was the thought that came out of it. I really need to find a way to make my value clear so that people know that when we are working with me, they're getting all of this depth of business experience and deep coaching training and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth.
And then I realised, no, all of those things. Me being a founder, 15 years experience in business, selling a company, those things are my value as perceived by the capitalist system. They are not my intrinsic value. They are absolutely not who I am. So, let's, delve into this idea of the transactional relationship between us and our work, and I'll talk about what I have realised.
So many of you know, I founded my own company. I grew that company over the course of 15 years. And when I had my company, particularly as we became more established, more successful, we had a reputation. I got many things from my company beyond dividends or salary, I received a sense of value, a sense of self-worth, recognition, acceptance, importance, fulfilment, leverage.
And when I sold my company to my team two years ago, it left a kind of hole emotionally because it was no longer giving me those things for a while. Sure, I could kind of ride off the coattails of that story, but the more time went by, the less I could. The less I could take those things from that story of me being a founder and a businessperson, and as I embarked on my new venture, my new adventure with Regenerative Work Life, it was just me.
There was no brand, no network, no reputation, no team, just me. And it felt so naked, so exposing, my God, it's such a vulnerable place and it's just you.
And of course I began to ask that new business to fill the gaps left by my old business. I began to ask that new business to give me that sense of self-worth, of value, of acceptance, importance, success, security, and when I did that inevitably by extension, I was asking my clients to give me those things, my audience, to give me those things, even you my listeners, to give me those things because of this hangover of a transactional relationship in how we understand or how we interact with work.
And realising this has also given me a greater depth of appreciation for what I am asking of my clients when we do this work together, of leaving a corporatised world of work, often quitting a job and moving into regenerative work because when I talk about quitting, of course, I'm also asking them to not only give up a salary benefits, which is the thing that everyone is very focused on, understandably, but I'm also working with them to give up whatever those things are that they are getting from their work. Be it a sense of belonging, a sense of security, power perhaps, prestige, self-importance, recognition, acceptance. All of these things that I've been talking about.
If you are considering leaving a job or a career even if you've really come to hate that job. Even if you know all of the reasons very clearly why you want to do that, and you are still not taking that step, it may well be because that work is filling these emotional holes for you, and you don't know what it would mean if those things weren't being given to you by your work.
I didn't know. What it meant.
But to be a regenerative entrepreneur at whatever scale, whether you are a freelancer, you're self-employed, or you have your own business, or you want to start your own business.
To be a regenerative entrepreneur then is to fully divest from that transactional relationship. Your work will no longer be responsible for those things that you long for. It will no longer be responsible for quieting, quietening those fears. Am I enough? Do I deserve this? Will I ever be successful? What if I fail?
You know what this sounds like!
You and only you are responsible for finding those things within yourself.
And only when we fully understand that, only when we can find those things within ourselves can we truly play a part in protecting and restoring life, which is the purpose of regenerative work, as I understand it.
I see for myself what happens when I ask my work to carry that responsibility. It sounds like I, I need more clients, I need more income. I should be getting more listeners downloads. I should be getting more likes on these posts. I should be getting more engagement and I lose my way. And more than that, I fall into extractive, manipulative modes of business completely without realising that I'm doing it because I'm asking my business to give me those things.
And by contrast, when I am able to find those things within myself, when I can know that I am and always have been enough exactly the way that I am. Um, people feel that energy, they are attracted to it, and they somehow understand what I have to offer without me really needing to explain it.
When I find those things inside myself, I know what my work is. I don't get distracted by success strategies or needing to prove my value or somehow thinking that I could ever possibly be in any way better than any other coach. I trust myself implicitly and I connect to my power. I know my value and I know that it has absolutely nothing to do with my work.
Becoming a regenerative entrepreneur is inner work. It is, dare I say, revolutionary work. And I invite you to sit with this question. What emotional gaps are you asking your work to fill? Is there a transactional bargain that you have unwittingly entered into with your work? It's a tough question. It's a tough exploration.
Be gentle with yourself and go there. And if you would like help unraveling this, I am here for you. I would love to get to know you. If you visit regenerativeworklife.com/discovery, you can book in a free call with me and we can explore possibilities together. I'd like to end the podcast by thanking and honoring the work of Simone Seol, who inspired this line of inquiry for me. If you're not familiar with her work, you can find her on Instagram. She's absolutely wonderful. I highly recommend. So that's it for this week's podcast. Whatever the weather for you, whatever the season you are in, I hope that you can immerse yourself into it, and I'll see you back here soon.
