897. The Accidental Entrepreneur

When Lenka was 19 she was supposed to start university to study economics, banking and finance. Instead, this is the year she “ran away.” She heard of an opportunity in England to become an au pair and decided to do that. She admits she was a terrible au pair and only lasted three weeks, but that got her to England. The reason she did this was because she knew that she would never find fulfillment in banking, finance, or anything remotely related. That was what her family wanted for her, not what she wanted, and she simply refused to go down the academic path that she did not want.

1. “When I finished my studies on NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), I resigned from my job and just dove into teaching people on NLP, running accreditation courses, my life coaching practice, and I became like an accidental entrepreneur. My business took off. I was running plenty of courses, whether it was accreditation courses or courses in corporate environments. And the life coaching practice was thriving, too, to the point where I couldn’t physically take any more clients. And then roughly six years into it, guess what? I managed to run my business into the ground because I trusted a psychopath and I let him take advantage of me.”

2. “I’ll always tell my clients, and this is a little bit philosophical, but ‘trust the calling’ And what I mean by that is we all have snippets of who we could become, who we could be, what we could do. People call it our potential. The thing is that when we think about it as a potential, as it might be or might not be, we don’t trust it. I think the first step is to go beyond the mind, go beyond what is, what we consider possible or not. Go beyond that and ask ourselves: if I could create anything, what I would want to create, who would I want to be in this world? You can tap into what we call potential, but then you should trust the potential as if it is something real.”

3. “It’s just not easy to find what we love, let alone do what we love and being financially rewarded for that. It does require a ton of courage. It takes us out of our safety zone. A job is giving us the most basic need on the hierarchy of needs, which is to feel safe, to survive. For a successful entrepreneurship or doing what we truly love, we just have to get okay with uncertainty and going out of that safety zone. Our brain is not designed to do that. The change is not easy.”

4. “I have this saying that if I truly feel something is calling me, then this is how life wants to express itself through me at that time, and I’ve got to honor it. I’ve got to trust that even though it will make me uncomfortable to go after it, I will be supported along the way.”

5. “It gives me a very, very good feeling to be touching many people’s lives. I’m always looking to how I can grow my impact, how can I serve more people. That’s what switches me on. And I see there are lots of unknowns, but I’m fine with that.”

Energetic Selling and Marketing, by Lenka Lutonska