There are many reasons why you became a business owner. One of them is because you have many ideas and you had a desire to do something about it. But that can get a little complicated when you’re someone who’s multitalented, multipassionate; you could be doing this, or you could be doing that, and you don’t really know how to combine all your various passions.

Well, invariably at some point, you’ll choose a direction and you’ll go with that, once you’ve been doing it for awhile you may feel that you’re slightly out of line with your values because it’s a major passion of yours that you’re just not including into your work. Now the tricky part comes when some of your really big passions don’t necessarily need to be a part of your business. Your business can actually serve as a tool to support your other passions.

This is Caroline from CarolineCain.com and in today’s video, we’re going to talk about what happens, or how can you be okay, when some of your biggest passions just don’t become a part of your business.

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I’ll give you some examples here. For example, you might be a marketing strategist who’s really into health. That doesn’t mean that you need to do marketing strategy just for people in health, although that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea. It just means that perhaps you can share on social media pictures of you, so the part of your personal brand, when you’re out at a raw food café drinking a green juice or a green smoothie, for example. It doesn’t mean that you need to be talking about it all the time in your newsletter, in your marketing, even thought it may be one of your absolute core passions in life.

Another one could be if you’re a business coach who loves horse riding, and it’s really been a passion of yours, ever since you were a little girl and it’s something that you just absolutely love, it’s a major part of your life, maybe you bring your clients on VIP days horse riding, or maybe again it’s just something that you post about on social media as part of you.

Sometimes you can feel a bit out of alignment or inauthentic if there’s something that’s such a huge passion for you, even maybe more so than your business is—gasp! that does happen! —but it’s not a part of your business. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a strong personal brand or a lifestyle business just because you’re leaving that out. You’re using your business to support that passion, and by that I obviously mean your business is bringing in the funds for you to be able to pursue that passion.

I’ll bring another example for you here; maybe you’re a copywriter who’s really into yoga and spiritual retreats. Obviously the money for your business allows you to take the time off and to go on these retreats. It doesn’t mean you need to be talking about that all the time in your copy, or portray yourself as a yogi and you’re the ‘Yogi Copywriter’, or something like that. Of course you can make it a part of your brand, but you really don’t need to.

So what you need to do is get really clear about what lights you up and what your values are, and which part of that you actually want to integrate to bring in to share with your clients, and which part is just a part of your life and your business will help to fund that. It doesn’t all need to come together. You’ll often hear, “Oh, you can combine all your passions!” and that can get quite stressful. So really just look at, okay, it’s not just a business for business sake, but it’s also got to be heart-felt. That’s why you’re here, doing this. But don’t think that you need to include everything about you, all of your story into your business; you can also just pick certain parts and then keep the other parts for your private life and for your personal branding.

And the reason it’s so important to do this is that otherwise you can become quite scattered, and unclear, and too broad, and too bitty here and there, and then your message isn’t clear, and then of course you’re not reaching the right clients or enough of the right clients, and then your business suffers for it.

 

So if you’d like some help with this, contact me for a Discovery Session at www.carolinecain.com/discoverycall and we’ll figure out exactly what you need to do to find out which skills and passions and values need to come into your business so that you create a unique personal brand and really stand out for that, and which bits can be left out and perhaps just brought in by social media and to just reinforce that personal branding side of things.