Develop your personal identity before that of your business

In this article: Knowing who you are and what you are here to do and say is identity. And in the shift from corporate employee to independent professional much of that evaporates. And you're faced with the challenging task of creating a new sense of identity complete with your own values and unique narrative.

Somebody else's or a corporate business provides us with structure, purpose, values and identity, even if we despise them. We come to work and we know, more or less, what we are supposed to do, our place within the organisation, and if someone asks who we are, it's easy enough to answer -- 'I'm a marketing manager or an IT sales director'

Most, if not all of that is lost when we make the transition to small business owner or independent professional. Our business has only the structure, values and identity we give it. And it's a shift we experience as traumatic.

A colleague and friend expressed it as a feeling of losing her spine, her backbone, her sense of knowing who she really was. For many the process of developing a more profound and authentic identity, and then the structures, systems and values of their business, can take anywhere between 3 to 5 years.

And it's a costly and time consuming to assume your business identity develops independently from, or even prior to, your personal identity,

As an independent professional and business owner with your heart set on earning a living by making a difference, your most important challenge lies in getting clear on and comfortable with; who you are, what you're doing, why you’re doing it and who you’re doing it for.

And a successful business is build around that, not instead of it.