This week, following an amazing lunch that we hold each month, Thomas and I heard the deep life stories from 12 business owners. This is a lunch we have held for four and a half years. We invite people we are connected with, mostly through LinkedIn, that we would like to get to know personally. It is called our ‘Business Is Personal lunch’.
The idea came after the launch of my book, “Business Is Personal”. Within the pages I share how personal business is, that each of us must lead the life and business that is right for us. It sounds so obvious, however, the access we now have to the way others run their businesses and lives can be very toxic on the choices we have made or the life we are living, we have to live the business life that is right for us personally.
Our lunches bring a kind and loving space to the world of business, away from traditional networking, enabling 12 people to hear the lives led and the ways each person has come through adversity at some stage in their lives and how, in many ways, it defined the direction they have been travelling and the person they have become.
As digital users, we all spend a great deal of time seeing the identity someone holds, and we tend to make assumptions that they must be finding life easier, or they have been lucky, or they are far better at business than us.
Human life is not like that, and why should it be? When you listen deeply to other people, you can see the similarities, but also how different we all are. We witness that we all have different needs, different starts in life, different personal lives, different educational experience, different family backgrounds. We are a cocktail of so many things and so how can we compare or choose to lead the same life as someone else.
Each of us grow through the way we face challenges and we make decisions that work for us, and sometimes they don’t. Some people are driven to be hugely wealthy, to take risks and make sacrifices to achieve it, others are driven to avoid risk, be safe and find a home and work balance.
By the end of the lunch we seek to ensure that everyone knows that each person should define their success personally and should be so proud of the lives they have led. We celebrate that they always have 11 new admirers, who know who they are, not just what they do. A rare moment that reminds everyone that we must take time to listen and create deep conversations. We also see that from these deep discoveries, trust grows and so do the connections they share and the work that they can do together.
We see a thirst in the world now for a return to community, and a return to in-person events, and that brings us great joy. It seems the USP in business is now the emotional connections we can make. Nourishing ourselves through a sense of belonging and reminding our souls that we do matter to others and others matter to us.
Thomas and I have deeply listened to over 600 personal stories since COVID, and people are remarkable, it is the personal way they have navigated their lives and the values they have upheld, despite life giving them painful twists and turns that defines a person.
Defining your own definition of success is about being you, who you are and leading the life you want, not the life we might see online that makes us think we have to do everything everyone else is doing, and be the same as everyone else.
It is a brave thing to chart your own course in life, it starts with knowing how you define your success, and when you do, respect that it is personal, not just about chasing the money. What is the life you want to lead? That is the ponder I will leave you with this week, have a great one.
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