“What’s love got to do with it?” I said to her. I’d already tried everything else (consultants, seminars, books, podcasts, retreats), and I was still miserable in my business. So this time, I hired a coach. She had just dropped a truth bomb: “Decide on purpose to love your business again.” At first, this sounded ridiculous to me; after all, I owned a technical consulting company.
She told me, “If you don’t love your business, no one else will either. Not your clients, not your team, not the market.”
That’s when I had the epiphany: I was in a relationship with my business.
Like any relationship, our business reflects back to us what we put into it. In my case, I was putting in stress, frustration, and blame. So, of course, I was only getting negative results! Doubling down by using willpower and grit just made the situation worse.
The solution was to feel good about my business FIRST. That meant loving it like I did when I started. This was the beginning of a whole new relationship with my business. And here’s what they don’t tell you in business school: the most important thing about your business is the relationship you have with it.
For most of us as business owners, we have a belief that hard work = positive results = happiness. It’s time to flip the script and START with love.
What we didn’t realize when we started our business is that we weren’t just putting in work. We were also putting in love, in the form of energy, enthusiasm, and excitement! Most importantly, we actively WANTED our business. Do you remember those feelings? Jumping out of bed every day with new ideas, feeling like the future was PULLING you forward with possibility? I do. It’s awesome.
Here’s the secret:
You can create those feelings now – on purpose. And when you do, you’ll be able to create anything you want in your business.
This isn’t some new flavor of “woo.”
When you feel love for someone, you experience connection and appreciation. You feel committed and make them a priority. You want to spend time with them and be intimate. This is the same way you want to feel about your business because it’s so much easier to invest the time and energy when you love it. You stop trying to avoid it, blame it, and escape it.
Loving your business means loving yourself, your team, your clients, and your solutions. The byproduct is you build a business that scales because you nourish it with your attention. When you love your business, it’s easy to take action. It’s like running downhill with the wind at your back.
Best of all, you can decide ON PURPOSE to love your business no matter what situation you’re in now.
What does it mean to love your business?
Our relationship with our business consists of the thoughts and feelings we have about it. To create feelings of love:
- Think thoughts that create the feeling of love
- Use your brain’s natural filter, confirmation bias, to work looking for evidence to support those thoughts.
If you’re having trouble thinking thoughts that create the feeling of love for your business, questions are one of the best ways to create new thoughts. To help uncover positive feelings about your business that you’ve forgotten, take a moment to answer these questions:
- What do you appreciate about your business?
- What do you like about being a business owner?
- Why did you start your business?
- What value does your business add – how do you help clients?
- What is a positive possible future for your business?
HOW: Cognitive Bias
Brain science shows that we see more of what we expect to see – and what we look for. Because our brain receives so much sensory input from the world, it’s created a way to efficiently process it all. Here’s how it works:
- Using your beliefs as a filter, the brain decides what’s important and how to interpret the world.
- It actively looks for evidence to support what you already believe.
- It deletes, distorts, and generalizes anything that doesn’t match your current beliefs.
This meaning-making strategy doesn’t rely on accuracy or objectivity. We think we are seeing the world “as it is,” but we are seeing it the way we expect to see it. We usually talk about this in a negative light, but it can be an AMAZING tool for love.
Once you decide on purpose to love your business and train your brain to find evidence for why your business is awesome, the positive results will start to flow. You can literally leverage your brain to help you FEEL better and grow your company FASTER.
Since you can decide to feel any way you want about your business, why not decide to feel love? You can skip the stress, the frustration, and the drama and move directly into creating the life that you really want, and it all starts with the decision to intentionally love your business.
Because love not only feels amazing, it provides the fuel for your actions as you scale.