The Happy Entrepreneur

Over the past 7 years of building the Happy Startup School I’ve met entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. Some are motivated by looking at the market and creating what’s wanted while others are motivated by an internal need to create what’s true to them. In my mind they’re at the opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end is the businessman and at the other end is the artist.In this episode of the podcast I talk to Max St. John who’s spent time at the busines end and is now transitioning to the artist way of living. He talks about the locus of evaluation. This is the place where we look to find out whether we’re doing the right work.For Max it’s less about understanding what moves the market but more about what feels true to him. While he accepts the need to make money he also believes that we can’t force work to come our way. Despite what marketers and sales people tell us we can’t control whether clients appear or not. What we can control is how we turn up in the world and where we place our energy, and where we place our energy is where things will grow.We explore these ideas through the lens of Max’s journey of entrepreneurship. If you’re a creative entrepreneur trying to understand how to straddle the two worlds of artist and businessman then you’ll appreciate this conversation and identify with Max’s story.

Learning about Non-Violent Communication has been a game changer for me. As a child I’d always struggled to deal with difficult emotions and so would either lash out in anger or, what was more often the case, would cry with frustration. I learned that expressing emotions was weak and so I decided to suppress them. However, in doing so I limited the development of my own emotional vocabulary and the ability to practice empathy. This was ironic since I had a deep need for connection and community.In a world that feels ever more divisive and disconnected the ability to practice deep empathy is fundamentally important.In this conversation with Beccie D’Cuhna, Happy Startup community member and professional mediator, we talk about the importance of empathy when helping others navigate periods of conflict and change. We discuss the difference between empathy and sympathy and how when we judge and try to fix other people’s emotions we end up invalidating their experience. We then lose the opportunity for deep connection and make it harder for them to process what they’re feeling and move forward with clarity.Sometimes we just need to sit in that turbulent space and feel what needs to be felt without judgement or resistance. This takes practice and requires us to learn more about why we feel what we feel.

Petra Smid is a consultant and facilitator who helps organisations and individuals navigate change. She believes that by living our values we’re able to overcome our fear of uncertainty and by trusting in ourselves we’re able to tackle all the challenges we’ll face.Petra joined us for Alptitude 2019 because she was looking to create space for herself. In our business lives and our personal lives we can find ourselves giving time to everyone else but not giving enough time to ourselves. By creating space for ourselves we create an opportunity to check in with what’s important to us and to reassess the direction we’re going in.Maybe you’re too busy climbing the corporate ladder or building your high growth startup but if you don’t take time to look up from the busy-ness how can you be sure that you’re doing the right thing. And if you believe you’re not doing the right thing where do you get the courage to change direction?One thing that’s in common with all the attendees of our retreats and events or members of our community is the need to live a life that’s true to what they believe. Defining our core values and believing that the work we must align with these is what binds our community together.During this episode Petra talks about her own journey to entrepreneurship. She shares how being clear about her core values has enabled her to make the jump and create work that aligns with who she really is. We discuss why she joined us at Alptitude and what she got out of being there.

Alan is a business coach and mentor on a mission to help and empower as many entrepreneurs as he can. His focus in on owner managed businesses that want to scale up and he’s been amazing support for myself an Laurence. On a previous episode Alan and I discussed the idea of building a minimum viable audience, essentially gathering people around you that love what you do. While many early stage entrepreneurs think of scaling up from the beginning the MVA approach is about first niching down and getting really focused on who you want to serve. One aspect of this is to think about demographics and targetting your audience based on traits like age, geography, education, gender and income. This helps you define who you want to appeal to. However, to understand what motivates and moves these people, you also need to think about psychographics and explore their needs, wants and behaviours. Understanding why people really want what you offer will help you communicate what you do in a much more effective and engaging way. By putting out the right messages you won’t want to have to go hunt for your customers they’ll be looking for you. Listen to find out more.

On this episode of the podcast I talk to Ebonie Allard about self knowledge and creating more alignment in your life.“No matter where you go, you’ll be there too so it’s useful to know who you are.”If you’ve ever got to a period in your life when you’ve looked around and asked yourself the question “is this it?” then you’ll be interested in Ebonie’s journey of going from misfit to maven. This story is for anyone who’s felt like they didn’t know where they fit and is searching for their unique place of contribution in the world, a place of authentic success. During the conversation we discuss the process of adulting and the idea of shifting your perspective from life happening to you to life happening for you. Enjoy the episode!Ebonie will also be speaking at our Happy Startup Summercamp and if you haven’t signed up head over to the site (http://happystartupsummer.camp) to see if you can get one of the last few tickets.I put together some sketch notes of my conversation too. Download them at http://ahappy.link/adulting

In this episode I have a very honest conversation with Ed Barton, cofounder of Curiscope, about what it’s like to build a venture backed startup. What starts off as a classic tech startup story and a window into the world of venture capital evolves beautifully into a raw story of what it's like to be a leader at a personal level.We talk about the struggle and overwhelm that comes with investment and the need to grow. We also discuss how burnout can creep up on you and how difficult it is to recognise until you're on the cusp.Ed offers some very sage advice for any founder, whether you’re running a non-profit or a rocketship, about how to make business life less hard and less effortful. Following on from the last episode on coping with struggle Ed's story is a real world case study of what it's like in and what you can do to make sure you thrive rather than just barely survive.

In this episode of the podcast I’m joined by John Parkin author of the international best seller Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way. He’s also written other books in the Fuck It series as well as hosting retreats in Italy with his wife Gaia. John will be joining us at Summercamp this year to give a talk and I so I wanted to get to know him more as well as introduce him to our community. During our conversation we discuss the topic of struggling in business. While John is an optimist, he’s also aware that there will be times when things get tough. According to him, how we cope through struggle determines how quickly we bounce back and also how we develop our resilience. John shares some of the challenges he’s faced and what he does to cope with struggle.The three things that John does to help him when he's struggling are (listen from 55m 6s on the podcast):1. Look after himself by going for walks, eating well and doing stuff he enjoys2. Breaking down big jobs into small more manageable tasks and focussing on the task at hand3. Share the problem by talking to someone about itJohn will be talking at our Summercamp in September. I hope you can join us. You can find out more about the event at - http://happystartupsummer.camp

Phoebe is one of those true multipotentialite with a finger in many pies. She’s involved in many projects including being a member of the social change freelancer network Enspiral. She’s on a mission to understand what it means to be human in this technological age and sees life as an experiment with no 'wrong' answer. She believes that we could be offering a far richer, more holistic and innovative education to our young people and that we need to re-think business and work, and personal development.I found this to be a rich and at some points technical conversation but if you want to build a company but not use the outmoded hierarchical templates of the past then I recommend you have a listen. You’ll get some interesting insights and questions to ask yourself about the horizontal organisation you want to build.Seven questions to ask yourself if you’re interested in building a horizontal organisation (from Going Horizontal):Autonomy- how are you going to give people in your organisation autonomy?Purpose- what is the purpose of the company and how do you make it explicit in every interaction within the organisation?Meetings- how do you host, organise and manage meetings so that the right people are involved and everyone knows and accepts their role?Transparency- how will you create a culture of openess and fairness so that everyone has access to the necessary information so that they don’t feel manipulated? How will you encourage this?Decision Making- have you consciously chosen the models of decision making that are applicable to the decision at hand? Does everyone understand how this model works?Learning and Development- how do you empower people to take responsibility for their own learning and personal development? How do you make people feel accountable for their choices of what form that learning takes?Conflict and Relationships- which approaches and rituals will you put in place to help deal with conflict and foster deeper relationships?

This is a touching and illuminating conversation with Jerome Ribot, founder of Coglode. Coglode is a startup with a mission to help people make better decisions by making sense of behavioural research. Laurence and I have known Jerome and his brother Anthony for many years.They actually ran a workshop at our Happy Startup Summercamp nearly 5 years ago, which is coming up again this September and we still have a few places left. At that time we were still all running digital agencies and to be honest Laurence and I looked up to the Ribot brothers and what they had achieved with their agency.During this episode we talk about Jerome’s journey to launching and growing Coglode and what it meant to his relationship with his old agency, his brother and his now cofounder (and long time friend) Roxy. If you’ve ever shut down or left a company you’ve helped create, or cofounded a business with a close friends or family I think that you’ll definitely get something out of this episode.Some extracts from this episode:- Some of the biggest challenges we face are the greatest acts of kindness for our personal development.- It’s liberating to understand that while you’re not in control of the adverse situations we face we are in control of how respond to them.- How to sit with discomfort and use that as an opportunity for learning.- Coglode started off as a website that was built over just a couple of days. It was a marketing tool for the agency.- I grew an agency with my brother for 10 years and the name of the agency was our surname.- As a design agency you eventually become a digital surrogate mother constantly pumping out these children (products) that come back to you a little bit damaged.- I wanted to feel the discomfort of creating a product that we were responsible for.- As a creative director who’s responsible for creating ideas being detached from your creations is only something you can do for so long.- And so agency life can only satisfy your needs to a certain level.- With discomfort comes growth, and so if you have a need to grow as a person you need to seek discomfort It takes a strong mind to distinguish between walking away from your own company from walking a way from your own family.- When running a startup with a friend your friendship will be put under strain and so you have to protect as much as you can your friendship.- If you’re very good friends there’s a danger of bringing too much of your personal life to work.- You need to be honest about why you’re both doing it.- Knowing that you may, in the short term, lose some aspect of your friendship by tying it to your financial survival.- You implicitly trust each other You get a closeness that you would’t have otherwise.- You get to play, explore and be curious together.- You would never make a decision that would do undue harm to the other.- Be aware if you start seeing your cofounder friend just as a work colleague.- Be aware of any creeping resentment to your cofounder. Notice any drops in motivation.- Are you not being honest about your true feelings?- Sort out any conflicts about ambiguity of roles as soon as possible.- Make sure you have time away together away from the business.Find out more about Coglode here - http://coglode.com

 For much of my life I’ve been a worrier. I’ve worried about whether I was making the right decision or whether people thought I was doing the right thing. My mind fills with thoughts and judgements that can turn into a cacophony. This stops me from being able to listen to my body and therefore be able to follow my intuition. As Max St. John, founder of Being Wild Things, tells me in this episode the body will whisper to us what we should do, and then nudge us and then at some point shout. Recently I’ve been crippled by back pain which I guess is my body shouting. I guess I haven’t been listening well enough. I haven’t been creating enough space to be still. I hope you enjoy this podcast as I hear about how we can lead more autonomous lives by listening more to our bodies.Extracts from this episode:When you’re really listening to the body you’re just responding to intuition and instinctive self.One of the myths of meditation is that you should be able to clear your mind.But the mind will just do what it’s going to do.Don’t push the thoughts down with judgment.Young children live in the moment and aren’t conscious of what they should or shouldn’t do.The conscious conditioned self is the self that worries about the future, past and present.The subconscious is the awareness of being alive in the body. It’s always there but drowned out by the conscious self.Worry, stress and anxiety is the tension between what your conscious self is telling you and what your subconscious self knows what you need.The conscious self needs conceptuallise and put stuff in boxes.The fears of the future and the shackles of the past are stopping us from working well in the present.The moment we try too hard to listen to the body so that it can tell us what to do next is the moment that we lose the point.We need to let go of the expectation that listening will get us some where - “Abandon all hope of progress” Charles DaviesBy feeling into our bodies we can stop ourselves from jumping onto the train of bad thoughts and remain on the platform of presence.The judging, planning, plotting and scheming mind are just a reflection of tension in the body. If we focus on them we just reinforce the tension.If you experience tension, don’t focus on it, just focus on the possibility of letting go.The things you give attention to will grow.Rather than chase each urge to respond to everything that comes your way just, let go and then trust that you can deal with whatever comes up in the way you need to.You can’t control how other people behave, the only thing that you can control is how you respond.We should strive to live a autonomous life and stop listening to the chatter and doing what people say you should do.Get in touch with Max via email on max@beingwildthings.com.Max will be talking at Summercamp and he’ll be leading a morning neigong session to help get us more in our bodies.Find out more about Summercamp at http://happystartupsummer.camp.