Key Ingredients - Scale Your Impact
“What you genuinely want to express, experience, and create is what the world most benefits in receiving from you or experiencing with you.”
Earlier this year, I hired a business coach named Ellen. Our primary goal in working together was to clarify who I serve, how I help them, and to hone my Authority in that area. Like many business owners, I had struggled to “niche down” because I didn’t want to give up variety or pick one lane over another. Ellen’s response was this, “You don’t have to pick. You just have to find one cohesive way of talking about the work that you do.” That cohesive way is what Ellen refers to as a “one big idea” around which all components of a business orbit.
Through our work together, as I reflected on both my experience and the experiences of the clients I’ve coached over these past few years, we determined that my one big idea is this…
Your Ideas can be catalysts for both personal and societal evolution (if you let them).
So, when we talk about this fifth and final key ingredient, Scaling Your Impact, we’re talking about scaling two components: the personal impact and the societal.
I tend to believe that we are microcosms of the macrocosm, so any change we want to see in the world has to begin within. From both my personal experience and based on what I’ve seen in clients, your Ideas have the capacity to change you in three ways:
By building incremental courage & confidence (aka self-trust)
By stretching your identity & your perception of what’s possible
By honing your authenticity
These changes are incredibly liberating. You won’t find them in your comfort zone. (Trust me, I’ve tried.) And as you lean into your authenticity in this way, you’ll give others permission to do the same. The liberation you’ll experience will not be one-way.
And because such liberation is not one-way, your Ideas can never be selfish. In last week’s newsletter, I shared three common things that stand in the way of discovering new Ideas – one of which is the onslaught of opinions we face. What I didn’t mention is that those opinions (read: judgements) can also come from within. We tell ourselves our Ideas are selfish, that wanting more will make us ungrateful for what we already have. But when you allow your Ideas to be catalysts for change, this simply is not true.
Please forgive the grandiose thinking here but imagine a world where more and more people built incremental courage, stretched their perception of possibility, and honed their authenticity all in pursuit of the things they genuinely wanted to create, experience, and achieve in their lifetime. If this were the case, I imagine a world filled with people who are more fulfilled, calm, grateful, gracious, empathetic, compassionate, and purpose driven.
In his beautiful book, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse, Charlie Mackesy writes, “You bring to this world things that no one else can.” Charlie is certainly not the first person to make such a statement because, deep down, we all know this to be true. Your unique gifts, your Ideas (and the authentic way in which you offer them) are things this world desperately needs right now.
But in case you didn’t notice, there is an “IF” at the end of my one big idea. Your Ideas can be catalysts for both personal and societal evolution (if you let them).
These changes don’t happen automatically. You have to be willing to allow your Ideas to be catalysts for change internally before they can create evolution externally.
And you do that by slowing down, getting curious, reconnecting to creativity, discovering new Ideas, scaling your impact, and cycling through these key ingredients time and time again until you find yourself cooking up a new, anomalous way of life.
