I’m officially on maternity leave, and one of the most beautiful things about it is all the space.
Space to think.
Space to make notes.
Space to ponder, learn, muse about things.
I decided to go out on leave on 11 September, which coincidentally was the 7th birthday of my company. I didn’t have to go on leave then - but decided that taking a month ahead of things just for me would be a great idea.
And it is! Except that winding down out of stuff is proving difficult.
In any case, one of the things that I’ve been doing is watching and re-watching many of the videos sent through to me by one of my mentors.
One of those was about net worth.
To cut a long story off at the knees, the ultimate point of the video was about goal setting and how everybody gets it wrong.
He pointed out a specific: That instead of building goals based on notions of success, everyone builds them based on what they did last year.
It’s a backwards-looking, unhelpful method of doing anything.
Instead, he asked:
What would you do if you had to start again?
While I am super happy to be in a situation in which I won’t have to ‘start again’ when I return to work - most of my clients will be on leave over the summer anyway, six months isn’t very long, and my clients are happy to wait - it’s a strong question.
What would you do if you had to start again?
What would success look like?
What types of capabilities would you need, activities would you do, actions would you take?
The thing that’s so incredibly important about the question is this:
Once your business is up and running, all you think about is keeping it running. You rarely go back to the beginning and ask what you’d do. Yet, when you do, you realise that you’d do things wildly differently. What you know now is a vastly different thing from what you knew when you first started out on this journey.
And if it isn’t, then you haven’t developed as a person.
Right? It makes sense, doesn’t it?
So, at this seven-year mark, I’m taking the opportunity to rethink everything from the baseline upwards.
If you were forced to start again, what would YOU do differently?
Leave a comment and let me know.
~ Leticia