210. Accidental Entrepreneurship, Success, and Owning Your Values with Amanda McKinney
Success Without Should
So often, our goals and the way we feel about success come from what we’re supposed to want, what we’re supposed to do, and how we’re supposed to act and feel once we achieve those goals.
But being truly satisfied with our achievements means defining success outside of the “shoulds.”
Amanda McKinney joins Erica for a replay from a live conversation within The Pause on the Play Community about success, accidental entrepreneurship, and maintaining a balance between your business and your life.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
Why it’s essential to pause and consider what you actually want from your business
Why you can’t separate your values from the way you do business
How to bring your values into the way you build your business
Accidental Entrepreneur
Amanda McKinney is a recognized thought leader and coach on Accidental Entrepreneurship, author of Amazon Best Seller, Why Not You? An Accidental Entrepreneur’s Guide To Success and host of The Unapologetic Entrepreneur Podcast. As a coach she can help any Accidental Entrepreneur navigate self-doubt so that they can take action and uncover their confidence through utilizing her Y.O.U. Promise framework.
An Evolving Concept of Success
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Erica Courdae (she/her) says that when she thinks about the concept of success, it is something that regularly evolves for her and that some of the things that are key to her idea of success now were not always part of her considerations.
Space and capacity are two things that are newer to her concept of success, where she once was more invested in hustling and constantly earning and achieving.
She acknowledges that she wasn’t always in a place where she had the privilege to access space and capacity, but she also notes that not finding even small ways to carve out space for herself wasn’t supportive to her wellbeing.
That’s part of the reason so many conversations on the podcast and within The Community come back to how we think and feel about success.
“It can be so easy to just go on autopilot and to never question it, to never think, ‘Is this right for me right now? Is this still what I thought it was?’...All of it really pulls us back into these ideas of success that might not necessarily align with our values.”
She says that many notions of success are extractive of resources and based on fear, but “You are so much more than what you can be comodified for, for someone else’s gain or consumption.”
Conscious Consideration
Erica introduces Amanda McKinney (she/her), who says that in addition to being an entrepreneur, she is a wife, a stepmom, a friend, a daughter, a sister, and more.
Erica says that for years she felt like an accidental entrepreneur, because it wasn’t something she had planned on, and she felt like she was “the only person that just happened to fall into this,” but she knows now that she is not alone.
Erica gives a prompt to consider “What is it that you actually want? Because if we don’t pause long enough to have conscious consideration of what it is that we want, and why we want that, we end up using the models of what we have around us…Our ideas of success end up being built with the LEGO blocks of other people’s success.”
Amanda says that her work addresses people who are accidental entrepreneurs, who didn’t start their businesses with the explicit intention of growing, scaling, and selling them as a typical entrepreneur might.
“A lot of us that are entering into the entrepreneurship space now, specifically after COVID, are the people who are like, ‘I want to create a business that integrates into my life instead of taking over it.’”
Erica says it can be difficult to separate your own ideas of success from the models around you, and that when we look to those stereotypical CEOs, it can lead to “comparison-itis.”
“It’s super important to have that moment to pause and to say to yourself, my own model of possibility, my own model of success is…”
She continues, “What we want for ourselves has to be the starting point for any conversation about the kind of business that we want to build, which influences the type of life that we want to live. Otherwise we just get sucked right back into the same old cycle.”
Defining Success
Amanda says that giving an honest answer to the question, what do you want, is really difficult.
Erica adds, “I think there’s the fear around what happens when it’s a yes and they’re like, okay, here you are.”
She asks, “Why else is knowing what you want hard? How else is it that you might think about what we believe or want to believe about success?...There are times where within you, you have this innate knowing, and it’s important to pause and figure out if you can still hear that knowing.”
Erica says that if we don’t pause to get clarity on what we really want, it’s all too easy for that to get covered up and co-opted by other narratives and systems that don’t take into consideration your individual wants and needs, and how those individual desires can create interdependence with others.
“If you know what it is that you really, really believe, let that be your truth…It is so important to have that permission-giving of, do you want a side hustle? Do you want something that you enjoy that feels like a hobby, but actually turn it into something? Is that the choice that you want to make for yourself? Because you made the choice. You get to decide, this is what I want.”
Amanda says that she had a “biz bestie” who asked her the question, “Amanda, what does success feel like for you? And it sent me on such a journey because I could not answer that dang question.”
She continues, “I had nothing except for the goal I was going after. And that’s why I realized, I had placed my definition of success as my goal. And because I’m a goal-driven person, I’m always setting a new one. So I’m always moving the marker.”
Amanda says, “It’s one of those things where if you don’t define success on your own terms…society does it for us by default…We will just start chasing someone else’s definition simply because we didn’t define it for ourselves.”
Making Your Values Explicit
Erica gives a second prompt to consider: “What is it that you actually value?”
She says, “You have to consider what are your wills and won’ts, dos and don’ts,” and you have to figure out how to make those clear and explicit for yourself and the people who interact with your business.
Amanda notes, “Values change as we learn more…My values have changed over time and I value different things and other things are important to me, especially when we’re talking about inclusion and learning…I had to learn quite a few things along the way and still will, and that informs my values.”
She continues, “When I’m learning and getting better as a human, it impacts my values and my definition of success, which bleeds into not only my business, but my life overall.”
Erica says that if you want to have a business that has a positive impact on yourself and those who interact with your business, “it’s really challenging to not ever evolve. It’s really challenging to not have moments where we question…is this what was prescribed to me or is this what I actually want to do? Is this part of the legacy I want to leave behind? Am I proud of what I am contributing?”
Building a Brand That Supports Your Values
Erica’s final prompt is: “How will you build a business to support those values?”
She recommends having guidance and support as you consider that question, even if it’s a friend or business partner to bounce ideas off of.
“That gives you an opportunity to pause and really get clear on, what’s my intention?”
Once you set your intentions, you can begin to consider how your business operates, what kind of offers you’ll have, etc. Without that consideration, it can be easy, she says, to get sucked back into old models for how to run a business, from how you market to how you grow your business.
“This is why knowing what you want and what you value is such a necessary springboard for making creative decisions about how you run your business.”
She adds that it’s also important to keep a delineation between yourself and your business. “You are not your business. You are a living, breathing human being. Your business is an entity that you created as an extension of something that you wanted to share with others.”
She also says that you have to understand that “businesses are not built with one individual alone, there is always a cast of supporting characters,” from the people you hire to the people your business will serve.
As an example, she says that even prior to marriage equality, in her beauty business, she made her support for LGTBQ+ couples explicit in her wedding service contracts, on her website, in blog posts, etc.
“I couldn’t fathom not reminding them that their love mattered and that getting married, not just the wedding, but a marriage, coupling with someone else, it can be a very vulnerable and stressful time, and I wanted to provide a soft spot for them to land in the middle of all of that…I knew the way that I was going to center love, humanity, and respect.”
Knowing what your brand will participate in and amplify can make all the difference, she says, in ways both large and small within how your business operates.
Amanda adds, “As this individual who’s running a business…when you’re the boss, when you’re the leader, your values are going to be included in that. There’s no way around it. It’s so important to recognize them.”
In her business, Amanda says that she often responds to questions by making Loom demonstration videos or using her voice on social media rather than relying solely on the caption, and she does that even though it takes more time, because she wants her audience to know that she appreciates and values their questions.
“No matter how big my business gets, that is going to be a core value of showing that appreciation.”
Finally, Erica says “It is tremendously easier to build a business that actually supports that vision of success, when you give yourself the permission and space to pause and figure it out. Building a business…is a set of creative choices that you can make that contribute to making the world more the type of place that you want to be a part of.”
Ready to dive deeper?
If you want to participate in live conversations like this one with Amanda, join us in The Pause on the Play Community.
Inside the Community, you’ll get access to live conversations, workshops, community conversations and Q&As, plus our whole library of evergreen resources.
Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/community
Connect with Amanda McKinney:
Instagram: @theamandamckinney