Magnify Your Purpose

An Introvert's Guide to Creating a Coaching Business that Reflects Who You Are

Stacey Weckstein

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683506669
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Formazione e tutoraggio
• Index: Business

Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life—and with the help of this inspiring self-help guide, you can do just that! What's holding you back from doing what you love? Do you want to create a business that reflects who you are? And stop feeling guilty about what others think you "should" do with your life? In Magnify Your Purpose, creative business coach Stacey Weckstein, founder of Radiant Mind and Body LLC, will help you find your inner voice and the confidence to bring your authentic self out into the world. She will help you navigate around the pitfalls where too many creative professionals and new coaches get stuck trying to fit into traditional ways of doing business. Best of all, she will teach you?as she has taught herself and many others?how to turn your passions into a purposeful career. Join Stacey on the journey of reconnecting with yourself and manifesting your dreams.

CHAPTER 1

Turning Passion Into Possibility

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”

MAYA ANGELOU

Finding your passion and realizing it is your career purpose in life is an exhilarating feeling. It is like a breath of fresh air filling up every cell in your body. You have renewed interest and energy to re-create your life and discover more meaning in what you do every day. It’s that moment of bliss and delight that comes before you can even ask yourself, “How?” and allow self-doubt to come rushing in. As you will see from my client Rachel’s story, acknowledging your passions is one thing; putting them into action and overcoming life’s obstacles and other people’s expectations is quite another. If you don’t follow through, you deny yourself the opportunity to do the things you love.

Teenaged Rachel spent countless hours browsing fashion magazines and dreaming of how she would look in high-fashion outfits. She learned how to sew and modify the clothes in her closet to look more like the designer trends she loved so much. She dreamed that one day she would find her place in the fashion industry and build a career that would allow her to, not only wear the clothes she loved so much, but also to make her own contribution to the fashion world.

But it didn’t work out that way. The youngest of three girls whose immigrant parents had done well for themselves, Rachel had grown up with privilege, private schooling, and the advantages money could provide. With these advantages, however, came the expectation that Rachel and her sisters would go to college and choose a “proper” professional career rather than studying something creative that might not be as lucrative.

Rachel was expected to study the “right” things, marry a man who would be a good provider for the family, have a few children, and generally fulfill her family’s very traditional expectations, all intended to keep her safe and secure. Since Rachel respected her parents and wanted to please them, she made what seemed like the “right” choice: she gave up on her dream of a fashion career and majored in journalism. She told herself it was okay. This way, she could be somewhat creative without taking on the risk of doing what she really wanted to do, which sounded crazy: dress people for a living.

But this denial of her passions led Rachel down a few dark paths in college; she never felt like she fully fit in anywhere. While her sisters got married and started their families, she felt stalled by failure and dashed expectations. Even meeting and marrying Jack, a kind, hardworking, religious man who wanted to have kids right away, didn’t “fix” things. Why wasn’t she feeling completely satisfied? She ignored this question that lightly tugged on her, determined to keep everyone else’s dream for her intact.

Rachel loved being pregnant. She would find ways to dress herself in the styles she loved. When she dressed herself and her belly, she felt like the women in the magazines she adored. She adorned herself in accessories and styled her clothes in such ways that either concealed or revealed her baby bump, depending on what she wanted that day. She loved playing dress up with herself and her changing body. She was a highly fashionable pregnant woman, and her friends took notice, telling her that they, too, wanted to look put-together and stylish while pregnant.

Rachel started giving fashion advice and going shopping with friends, helping them find maternity clothes that looked like the everyday outfits they normally would wear, instead of the oversized and unflattering tents they’d been settling for. Then she’d go back to her friends’ houses and end up clearing space in their closets by explaining what was no longer in style and creating fresh, more contemporary outfits with what they already had.

When Rachel dressed her friends, she felt nourished by the experience. She loved not only how her friends looked in their new clothes, but also how they felt like their best selves when the clothes fit so well and highlighted their personalities. Helping her friends in this way reignited her passion for fashion and allowed her to be home with her two young boys.

She knew that staying in the life she’d created from making the “right” choices would continue to feel uninspired, and that she’d just be going through the motions to meet other people’s expectations. But she couldn’t figure out how to make money doing what she loved. Here she was, a creative professional and a budding fashion coach, and she didn’t know how to ask to get paid. How would she be able to explain her services and what she represented in a compelling way without coming across as pushy and scaring people off?

Like many new coaches, Rachel hid, at first, behind a blog she’d started for fun. She would highlight the fashion trends she was interested in, write about how the reader could save money putting the look together, and then invite them to hire her for help. But because the only people who read her blog were family and friends, she didn’t get paying clients.

Writing came easily, but the idea of getting out of the house and soliciting strangers to talk to about fashion was harrowing. How could she talk in front of groups of people? Did she have anything to say? Why would anyone take her seriously? Sure, she had experience dressing her friends – but they were her friends and they knew and trusted her. She felt selfish and guilty for wanting to follow her passion. Those feelings and insecurities got in the way of her bringing her passion for fashion out into the world and offering her expertise and services to those who would benefit greatly.

Another obstacle was that Rachel, like many of us, was taught that business is conducted in one specific way, a series of policies and procedures that need to be precisely followed in order to be successful. But Rachel, also like many of us, is a creative; she isn’t her most productive inside a traditional and inflexible structure. Rachel had a short attention span, and she also needed to divide that scattered attention between many things, including being a stay-at-home mom. How was she ever going to make this work?

Many coaches and creative professionals find their passion careers later in life, when they are no longer able to ignore their calling. Because these passions aren’t commonly taught in a college setting, many don’t know that building a creative business is even an option. The traditional world doesn’t teach that you can create a business out of your hobbies. Instead, we’re taught that we must follow specific steps, in specific ways, and under specific circumstances in order to be successful, make money, and live a comfortable life.

This just isn’t true. There are ways to figure out your own working style so you can be the most productive version of yourself in your business. There is a business you can put together from all the things you love to do: a business that will make sense and be of benefit to others. Many new coaches start off their practices thinking they have to do things in a particular way, and often do not see that their other interests and passions can be a part of their businesses. Your puzzle pieces, just like mine, do fit together when you find the connecting thread that tells the story of how they all work together. The trick is finding that story and connecting all the dots in a way that makes sense to you – and then it will make sense to your clients too.

There are so many professionals, like Rachel, who followed the career path they thought they should for reasons of false security. And there are so many parents that pressure their kids onto a specific path because they just want the best for them. It’s really not your fault that you didn’t know there were other options and other, less traditional, ways of doing business and being of service to others. Even if there’d been an instruction manual somewhere on making a career out of doing what you love when it doesn’t fit a traditional business model, there still wasn’t a 101-level class at school.

Now that you understand why following your passion pays off, the next question becomes, “Where do I start?” The short answer is: with yourself! The process of starting a new business or coaching practice in any industry is tough. New coaches must take an inventory of their interests and life experiences to figure out how they will coach, who they want to work with, and on which topics. The process of starting a business that really speaks to who you are and how you want to work with others starts to bring up your patterns and self-doubt that will have you blocking yourself in so many ways that you will think these are legitimate reasons not to forge ahead. You may be reading this book because you have already started this process and you are stuck somewhere trying to figure out how to bring yourself and your creation into the world. There are so many places to hide in the process of reconfiguring ourselves and building our creative business! If you can cultivate the awareness that all that is simply resistance and keep moving along and observing what comes up in every step, it may be a smoother journey.

At this point you may be asking yourself, “What makes Stacey Weckstein (or however you pronounce her name) an expert in any of this?” Sometimes I ask myself the same question – that’s one of the places my insecurities come up. The definition of expert is a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area. What makes me an expert is having been through this process on which you are embarking. I understand how you feel. I know the places where you could potentially block yourself technically or emotionally, and I know how to guide you to the other side without getting stuck in all the places I did. By reading this book, you are allowing me to fulfill my full potential and passion in being a teacher and guide. In turn, I am supporting you as you learn to understand yourself better, gain the confidence to come into who you are, and serve others as the expert you are meant to be. It is truly my pleasure to be of service to you in this way, and I am deeply honored to have paved the way, every bump and heavy brick, to make this journey smoother for you.

CHAPTER 2

Possibility Into Purpose

“Soul work is not a high road. It’s a deep fall into an unforgiving darkness that won’t let you go until you find the song that sings you home.”

MCCALL ERICKSON

There are no coincidences, only synchronicities that do not always make sense until the story has fully revealed itself. I offer my story as an example of how life purpose can come together and make sense once you can identify the answers to a few key questions.

As I was growing up, there were lots of different sports, arts and crafts, music, and religious studies available to me. I would bounce around from one thing to the next, feeling excited about each new activity, until I quickly moved on to the next thing that caught my interest. It was fun to try new things, and to feel my body and mind used in different ways. But once I figured out the strategy behind the new interest, I would start to become bored because I felt I had mastered the activity. Mastery, in my mind, was gaining full understanding – as opposed to practicing it for long amounts of time to reach a certain degree of proficiency. My plan was to collect skills: as many as interested me.

There’s a saying: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” That was definitely me and I liked it that way. But my process of collecting skills and tools was seen to the outside world as the inability to commit and stick with one thing long enough to become a master. Instead of seeing my process for the creative exploration it was, I began to see it as a character flaw. I felt ashamed and forced myself to sit through things in boredom in order to prove to my parents that I could stay with something. It didn’t last. I realize now (and teach my clients) that there is no shame in having many tools. In fact, it’s a huge asset, this ability to combine many skills, interests, and trades into the perfect, personalized, right-fit business.

I pride myself on accomplishing tasks quickly. I do not feel I have to have them perfectly done, and most the time I won’t g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Turning Passion into Possibility
• Chapter 2: Possibility into Purpose
• Chapter 3: Leveraging Your Life Story
• Chapter 4: Find Your People, Find Yourself
• Chapter 5: Creating Your Signature Message to Manifest Clients
• Chapter 6: Confidently Asking for What You’re Worth
• Chapter 7: Pitfalls and Obstacles
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Thank You