If These Heels Could Talk

Creativity is a way of thinking - a brain muscle that anyone can develop. To access our creative selves, we need to be focused. For some, that means calm. For others, that means chaos. For some it means working ahead. For others, it means procrastination. And while we all access and experience creativity differently, for most of us, creativity is about work.  

Listen in as Michelle and JoyGenea discuss how they access creativity and help their teams trust their creative processes.

Flowers are amazing. Getting flowers can make anyone’s day. But what about making and delivering them? Rhoda Paurushas owned St. Cloud Floral for more than a decade. The industry has changed tremendously in that time. Listen in as she talks with Michelle and JoyGenea about what it takes to continue to be the premier floral shop in central MN.

YOUTUBE

https://youtu.be/rRuRfPXxy9I

EPS 119 When it comes to marketing sometimes we can overlook the things right under our noses and spend tons of money on stuff that gets us nowhere. Listen as JoyGenea and Michelle talk about the biggest opportunities you might be missing.

Tara is a business and leadership coach with seventeen years of experience in leadership development and small business operations.  She has leveraged her experience into ALIGN, a business consulting company focused on utilizing individual strengths to grow teams and leaders. 

Listen in as Michelle and JoyGenea have a frank and open conversation with Tara Gronhovd.

Guest Notes:

Tara Gronhovd

Name of your Company:  ALIGN

Links to your website and 2-3 social media platforms:

https://aligntransform.com/

https://www.facebook.com/aligntransform

https://www.instagram.com/aligntransform/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/align-transform/?viewAsMember=true

hy away from our competitiveness? Avoiding losing by dropping out of the competition may or may not be the best thing you can do, depending on your intentions. And owning your competitiveness will help you use the behaviors it gives you to your advantage, while helping you see how you can avoid hurting others with behaviors that might not serve.

We all lose. Michelle and JoyGenea lose every day.  It is how you lose, how you treat other people in the process and what you learn from it.

Is it generational? Leadership is becoming more focused on mental health, authenticity, and transparency and less focused on authority and the mystique of infallibility. 

In conversations between business owners, this becomes very clear along generational (and sometimes gender) lines. Different styles of leadership are trending, largely due to employee demand. The additional pressures of Covid have brought many of these conversations out in the open. 

Michelle and JoyGenea question adding more transparency to your leadership.  Why not include more transparency in your company?  Why not push back on decades of beliefs that no longer fit and have been disproven.  Change is uncomfortable and it is refreshing.

We can all think of times when a system was so flawed that it was totally broken.  As owners of growing small businesses, Michelle and JoyGenea are working to add systems, processes and procedures. Can we overdo it at times and leave no room for the randomness that is required in business?

Listen in as JoyGenea and Michelle talk about the differences between processes that are built around solopreneurs and pivoting those processes to support and engage teams. Turns out, flexibility is key.

Imagine you’re a doctor. A patient walks in and says, “I need this medicine.” Do you prescribe the medicine? Or do you ask some questions first? How about, what are your symptoms? What are you experiencing that makes you feel you need that medicine? What do you think the medicine will do for you?

Now pull back to the last time someone called up your business and said, “I need a website. How much?” Or “I heard a business coach can help my sales. How much revenue do you add for your clients?” Or “Can you teleport me?” There’s no good way to answer these questions without more information.

Sometimes strong communication requires you to hear what others aren’t able to say. Sometimes sales means you have to think around the request that people are making and to the goal they actually have. 

Michelle and JoyGenea talk about answering the questions your client doesn’t know how to ask. The best way is to drive the conversation toward their goals, what Brene Brown calls ‘painting done.’ Turns out, a teleportation request might be as simple as calling a car service.

Or manage your calendar. Or take out your trash. Or create meeting agendas.

Why? Because your time is better spent running your business. Paying attention to the things that only you can pay attention to. Creating new products, developing your leaders, dreaming about what's next - that's your job description. And it doesn't mean that you can't answer email. But it does mean that every hour you're doing what someone else could do, you're costing your business money.

What's stopping you? Likely a belief about those tasks. Does one of these sound familiar?

It's not a full-time job!

No one could do it as well as me.

It will take me longer to explain than to just do it myself.

No one wants to clean up after me.

You might have your own version. Listen in as JoyGenea and Michelle talk about how they overcame the beliefs that were no longer serving them and developed job descriptions that would help run their businesses and keep their focus where it belonged.

Michelle and JoyGenea know a little about pushing the boundaries between ‘able to handle whatever comes up’ and ‘more than can ever be handled at one time’.  This book is a great place to stop and check in on if you are managing your life or if your life is managing you.

Written in the context of modern feminism, Burnout is about completing the stress cycle and recognizing how the Human Giver Syndrome and our conditioning within the context of a patriarchal society to be all things to all people prevents us from doing just that. The idea of doing it all ultimately means we’re doing it badly.

Complete the cycle of stress. Recognize your worth. Celebrate being instead of giving.

https://youtu.be/5Q-rJ9wDODQ