So You Want To Be An entrePreNeUR
Post 2 in our series, Dance Entrepreneur Corner
So You Want to Be an entrepreneur…
The other day I was on a walk clearing my mind and warming up my muscles before a show when the idea for this article struck.
“How do I want to start my Blog series Dance Entrepreneur Corner?” I asked myself.
The answer came to me while wrestling with my own motivation to start my blog.
Cultivate your mindset first.
Mentally prepare yourself first. Strengthen your mental tool kit for dealing with all these new experiences and understand your motivation first before putting an action into the world to start your business.
Some may call it manifesting, tapping into your intuition, or alignment. Whatever you call it, it’s the essential first step in your journey.
Why should you do this?
You are going to need to know how to help yourself when you hit an obstacle (trust me - there will be a lot of them) and how you intrinsically motivate yourself to keep going but not at a burnout inducing pace and rhythm.
Let me tell you I would have been WAY better prepared if someone had told me this at the beginning.
School has rendered the entrepreneur mentally helpless in the wake of starting a business.
We’ve been taught to
Push through pain
Ignore our intuition
Answer to authority
And become workaholics among other things.
All of these lessons set the dance entrepreneur up for disaster. Your mental pathways will need to be rewired in order to Enjoy this journey, create Alignment with what you want to do, and ultimately set a healthy relationship with your motivation.
Too often we are told to start doing before we’ve even figured out the why?
So how do you start?
Start by tuning into your intuition.
Find what will get you there. Here are of few options
A) Sit in a quiet space and have a pen and paper in hand. Or listen to music while sitting.
B) Go on a walk and have a phone voice recorder at the ready.
C) Do some movement like yoga or cardio and have your journal out.
D) Talk to a friend and have your friend write notes on what you talked about.
Now ask yourself what a perfect day in the life of your dream business would look like? Where are you, who are you with, what are the sounds, tastes, smells of the scene, and what are you feeling? Go deep: even write the color of the walls, the style of music you are listening to, etc. Give yourself 10 minutes to envision, write, or talk this out.
Ask yourself why this was your perfect day?
-Did you get to create ideas for a dance in a group setting? So you enjoy collaboration?
- Did you work in silence or with music?
- What top 5 adjectives would you use to describe this day?
- What were you working on and why?
- How long did you work that day? Did you give yourself breaks? How did you give yourself breaks?
From this exercise you’ve already identified the following
If you like to work by yourself or alone or both.
How you like to work
How you’d like to feel.
The what and they why of your business
And the flow of your work
Keep your perfect day and your analysis somewhere you can refer to it. A place in your journal written out on a maker board, notes on your computer, etc. Refer to this when you hit a wall motivation-wise or an obstacle.
This is the first piece in your tool kit.
by Juliette Nieves-Becker
