What is an Enlightened Entrepreneur?

Our society has turned hustle culture into a badge of honor….

The problem isn’t working hard—the problem is what’s motivating your hard work. It’s become normalized to work to the point of burn-out and depletion.

I remember when I hired one of my very first coaches. My business was successful on the outside. My clients included Google, Chanel, Christian Dior, Facebook, and Popsugar. My work focused on helping companies like these navigate the intersection of innovation and brand heritage. My hard work paid off and my business grew. But I was sacrificing my own inner peace to get this. I was constantly over-thinking, over-working and over-delivering. I thought this was what made me successful, because it made my clients happy. But on the inside, I was paying the price. On the first call with my coach, she asked me to tell her about my business. I told her all about the work my company did, the clients we served, the type of offerings we had. At the end she looked at me and said, “Elizabeth, you just spoke about your business for ten straight minutes, and you know what word you didn’t say once? Love. Where is the love in what you’re doing?”

Her comment hit me like a ton of bricks. She was right. Where was the love for what I was doing? I spent more time working than I did doing anything else in my life at that time, and yet, I couldnt’ truthfully say I loved it. I loved being an entrepreneur, I loved calling the shots and having agency over my own life. But the actual work I was doing…no, I didn’t love that. And yet, because I was focused on being successful on the outside I kept giving so much to it.

I was stuck in a cycle of over-working, giving more than I had to give to my company, my clients, while not having enough to give to myself, my friends, my family. The things that I valued the most were getting the worst version of me.

And that’s because my definition of success was more clients, big name clients, more money and business growth. When I oriented myself to these goals at all costs, I did whatever I could to get the yes and succeed. But at a certain point, I became depleted because of two things: I didn’t actually care about the industry I was working in. I didn’t believe it was making any real difference in the world, and two, my own people-pleasing and needing to be liked was getting in the way of me setting any real boundaries or parameters in my work. It was unsustainable.

Often, on the surface most highly successful and ambitious women exude confidence, but underneath lies a deeply seeded fear of inadequacy which keeps people in the cycle of over-working, while feeling depleted instead of invigorated by their work. This is exactly why many successful entrepreneurs have succeeded in business at the expense of the things they value most in their lives.

Enlightened Entrepreneurs are committed to growing their businesses in alignment with the lives they want to lead. They are willing to use their businesses as catalysts for their own personal growth. They recognize that they themselves are their company’s biggest asset and they take a stand for growing in ways that are self-honoring, that actually feel good on a soul level, and they know this can lead to even greater success.