These past two weeks, I have come to reflect on my journey as an entrepreneur and how staying in my basic instincts as an Enneagram 2 didn’t help me at all in my entrepreneurship journey in the initial years.
The core motivation of the Enneagram Two is to be needed and wanted by people around them.
As part of the Dependant Stance (1, 2, 6), my actions as an Enneagram 2 is dependent on how safe I perceive the people around me (in terms of their actions, tonality, words used), which then determines what I say, do and how I act. Add on to the fact that my basic instinct is to not feel my feelings first (or at all) in any situation can cause some difficulties in my being an entrepreneur and how I even make decisions on what paths to take my business on.
Needing to be wanted and needed leads to bad decisions as an entrepreneur
No entrepreneur begins their business wanting to be like everyone else.
No entrepreneur begins their business to please others around them to feel needed and wanted.
If I am stuck in my basic core motivation to be needed and wanted, then I would not be building my business on my own terms. I will be building it according to what I feel people can accept about how I am doing the business, which makes the business their project, not mine.
I was told in the early days of Mind Evolve that I needed to be more ‘corporate’ and that my training methods were ‘not fun’ and that I needed to put some ‘showmanship’ into it.
The showmanship and not making the training dry, I came to understand that yes, that can be tweaked so that I can become a more versatile trainer (and even as a mindset coach to my 1:1 clients)
But what really did me in was when I went on the ‘corporate’ route by creating a program that was vetted by the person who gave me the feedback and made my presentation deck sound and look more corporate. Even when I knew for a fact, this wasn’t me. But I was desperate for clients and needing the approval of the person in front of me, which led me to totally giving control to him and let him just ‘mould’ me to his expectations.
I knew I was in trouble when I presented the deck in front of my existing clients who brought their friends along to support me, and one after another told me:
This presentation is totally not who you are.
And they were right. It was forced. There was a mismatch and I had not done myself any favours by not showing up as myself.
Just because I needed and wanted approval from the person who was vetting my deck.
Moving forward from that fiasco, I decided that I would always show up as who I am. And that if people gave me feedback as to ‘how I can do it better’, I filtered it through:
How well do they know me and my mission and my philosophy as an entrepreneur?
Have they experienced the same dilemma I am trying to solve and lived through similar conditions and obstacles I am facing right now?
And if both conditions are an immediate ‘No’, I would thank them for their feedback, see if there were any parts that does make sense to how I want to run my business (on my own terms), and then really throw away the rest because I knew they didn’t know any better than me.
Being an entrepreneur forces me to think about my own feelings and needs first.
At the basic instinctual level, because my personal worth is dependent on being needed and wanted (there’s that pesky core motivation again), I would feel other people’s feelings more readily than I would feel mine first.
In fact, at the basic instinctual level, I ‘think’ I am feeling my own feelings but it really is just me taking on the feelings of the people around me, and claiming it as my own.
Having run Mind Evolve for the past four years, I have learnt that no one is going to care about the business as much as I will. And because of this, I would need to know my feelings about how much Mind Evolve means to me first as a vehicle for me to impact lives in the way I want to, then have the courage to go out and make that personal vision come true, even if it means that no one understands me and approves of what I am doing. That matters less and less, the more I connect with myself and start asking ‘What do I want to do with the opportunities I have before me?’ and by saying to myself over and over,
‘My worth is not in what I do but in who I am. Mind Evolve is an extension of my own unique ways of being in the world, and I use it to help others by showing up as who I am, not who the world wants me to be.’
The bottomline is this ….
I cannot run away from the default settings of my core Enneagram instincts given to me at birth. But I can then accept that there are always there and still choose not to let it dominate the way I see myself as an entrepreneur, the way others see me as an entrepreneur and let that affect how I show up and run the business my way.
The instinctual struggles will always be there. It is whether I want to move beyond those instincts, learn how to tap into the other eight Enneagram types within me and move with courage knowing that no matter happens, I am still lovable and worthy of being loved by people who don’t expect me to do things their way, because they accept that I will do things differently from them, and that’s okay.
