Alternate title: I am multi-passionate, just not necessarily in my business.

I started this business so that I can live a multi-passionate life – investing my time in the places that matter most.

In a mastermind program with Shanna Skidmore last year, she deposited a bit of insight [more like a shining beam of light from the heavens] into my struggle with priorities and direction in my business. We were going through an exercise to define the thing that motivates us most. She’s got this genius four core motivators framework that helped a lot, but I was struggling between the two. Oh, the tyranny of indecision.

After hearing me agonize through it on the call, she stopped me mid-monologue and said – I agree that you’re an impact-motivated person, but you need to run a time-motivated business that allows you the freedom to have margin in your life to pour into people outside of work.

Talk about a weight lifted off my shoulders in an instant – there was so much freedom in that idea for me.

To know that my business isn’t the only source of “impact” I will make in my world.

See for me, faith is a huge part of me that cannot be segregated. I regularly talk about Jesus in all conversations and what I don’t talk about a lot here online are the ministries I am part of directing on a normal basis. Alongside a few friends, I run two different young adult centered ministries that host gatherings regularly. Along with that, I help plan and direct my local church camp each summer. That all takes a lot of time apart from my business.

And for a long time, I fought to try and have a business model that prioritized someone else’s values. By taking advice and templates from here and there and piecemealing it together, I ended up with a business that didn’t actually allow me to live and give in the ways my heart longed to.

It was no one’s fault but my own, yet I can’t help but think it’s a problem not so isolated to me.

In an online culture where we’re bombarded with messages like “do this and get this” or “show up consistently and you’ll gain x amount of followers” it’s easy to think that hopping on the hamster wheel without a second thought will lead us down a yellow brick road to the business we always wanted.

Yet, did we stop to consider if that glorious Oz was the place or the life, or the business we were actually searching for? Or was the solution I picked up solving a problem that I didn’t want or even need an answer to?

The biggest dilemma we face as business owners isn’t follower-count or consistency or engagement or reels or anything outward, really. It’s a lack of awareness of what we really want, both in life and in business.

Bob Goff even says – “you don’t need a mission statement, you just have to know what you want.”

And I’m sure that idea can breed a bit of abrasion – like I’m slapping a generic statement on the very thing that’s been throwing you into a tailspin.

But – What if you don’t actually need an answer to a problem or the solution someone is really good at marketing to you?

What if you just needed to get quiet with yourself long enough to be reminded of why you started this, what actually matters to you, and where it’s all leading. . .

• What is the life you want to build?
• What role does your business play in that life?
• What’s its purpose?

Because I could hand you a marketing plan, I could create brand photos for you, I could sit with you and google solutions to all these seemingly urgent issues all day long but the real question is – what’s the point?

You have one life, my friend. And I’m assuming your goal isn’t to spend it living in a way someone else blueprinted for you.

There are people, relationships, places, passions, interests, and creativity all awaiting you outside the four walls of your business and if you slowed down long enough – you’d realize that the life you have to live is so much more valuable than anything you could ever create or accomplish solely for or in the eyes of the internet.

So as Mary Oliver says – “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Answering that question for myself led me to a shift in both my offerings and business mode. And that glorious beam of wisdom from Shanna came post-pivot. So, clearly, I was still shining up my own understanding of the point of all this – and there’s beauty in that.

As you begin this archaeological style dig into the things that really matter to you and how they inspire you to keep going and building in business, take heart in this – who you are today only shapes who you will be tomorrow. There is no arriving in life, only growing from one day to the next as we draw toward the end.

And in business? That means what you’ve built thus far doesn’t often determine where you’ll be tomorrow. Yes, there will be bumps and scrapes along the way and you’ll likely change your mind a few times.

But wouldn’t it be better to know the trail you blazed for yourself – whether it’s through wild, uncharted terrain or simply through a wildly familiar open plain – was one you’re proud of?

And you can reach the end of your days with a measure of peace, knowing you lived [at least mostly] the life you had hoped.