Something I would have never learned if I didn’t start my own business.

Something I don’t think I would have learned about myself if I hadn’t started my own business is how I that I have a tendency to get stuck in one perspective or one dimension. When working for other people, I never seemed to run into this, maybe because I didn’t have the opportunity to be super creative in those jobs.

Anyway…

I saw this happen when I first started my business and wanted to teach but wasn’t clear on how that would look so I moved to a different gear and it took some time away from teaching to go back in my memory far enough to when I knew how I wanted to teach. I had to get some distance from being locked into what I had been working on, trying to revamp company sewing training, to remember the life before when I taught more freely.

This tendency to get stuck in one perspective came up again recently when I was trying to figure out how to share my sewing story. I’ve shared my beginnings which is pretty easy to do and it’s a story similar to a lot of other instructors out there. What I have struggled with though is sharing my more recent sewing stories. I worked at a place that was highly innovative in the sewing industry and as a result, I’ve felt like I would be spilling tea that I shouldn’t, were I to share any of my stories from my time there. I also felt, while sharing about my time in coorperate sewing would set me apart from the crowd, it would also make me less relatable. To be honest, I also fear being seen more as only an expert in the industrial sewing sphere which is not my goal.

Being stuck in this put me in a funk. I hard core despise the idea of being unrelatable because I feel like I grew up as the most unrelatable kid on the block. I’ve always felt set apart from all the other social groups I was a part of.

So, I talked to my business accountability gal and she pointed out a different perspective. She challenged me to not look at my resume as a series of events but more as a list of all my skills and character traits that I used and or learned. Folks, that has been huge for me. It means that my story no longer has to be focused around industrial sewing but around what exactly made me good at my job. These skills are way more relatable, more applicable, and more useful to others.

Doing the exercise of writing down all the reasons people liked to work with me was empowering and I highly recommend. What’s interesting is that I had put aside the fact that I’m a leader. In this journey of doing something new, on my own, I had forgotten that I’ve been tapped to be in manager positions before. I’ve been considered a mentor among the people I’ve worked with. I do things that other people are scared to do themselves. I am really good at finding new ways to communicate the same idea.

Does this set me apart from the crowd? I think it does. I think it also sets apart my ideal clients too. I want to work with people who have similar qualities to me. I want hard workers, creative drive, and the ability to take constructive advice well. So if you want to know if you would work well with me, go ahead and do the same exercise I did! List out all the soft skills and traits that makes you someone people like to work with. Maybe our lists will match up! But if they don’t, understand that if you feel like you’re missing some skills that you would like to add to your list, they are skills you can learn, and we can work on that.

Let me know if you resonated with any of this. I also want to know if you have or will be doing this exercise with me!