What is your drive?
Introduction
With The Drive, I hope to provide change-makers, solopreneurs, and impact-driven startups with insights on how to build a sustainable business from the heart. The Drive is my personal journey to learn more about “drive” through conversations I have with other people.
What drives us?
The inner drive of most entrepreneurs falls in one or more of the following categories:
Passion-driven: Doing this makes me feel alive.
Purpose-driven: I want to create the change I want to see in the world.
Value-driven: I need to do this.
Our values should always be the essence of our business. Because we experience values emotionally, they are what actually move us to act. Our values help us overcome emotions that inhibit us from action. Our shared values motivate our tribe to look beyond fear, selfdoubt, isolation, and apathy and act on feelings of urgency, hope, YCMAD (you can make a difference), solidarity, and anger to make a difference.
Passion-driven
Case example: Tina used to be a passionate yoga teacher. But lately she is getting tired from teaching yoga. Yoga is her passion, but her drive feels off. After a few long chats, we find out that her passion is not aligned with her values. Her drive comes from helping people connect with their inner self, to help people grow in confidence, to help them become more accepting towards themselves, to teach them to love themselves. You don’t necessarily need yoga to help people achieve this. You also can do it through coaching, through dance, or running. Any of these activities, or passions, can help you connect your values to your purpose. Her passion, yoga, helps her focus her energy, it creates a space where she can connect with her audience to bring the change you need to see in the world.
Working from your passion and values on fulfilling your purpose is what makes your business sustainable and unique. This helped Tina to connect emotionally with a very specific type of student, her tribe. Her student is on a path of looking deeper into herself through yoga. She is not just doing yoga to become more flexible or to live the cool yoga lifestyle. Understanding where her drive came from meant Tina aligned her values and purpose perfectly with that of her students.
I know there are a lot of people who lose sight of the connection between their values and their passion because they haven’t taken the time to dive a little deeper into what really drives them. It’s not your passion that is wrong. It’s the fact that you haven’t aligned that passion with your values that might make your business mentally unsustainable. You need clarity. Passion is a powerful driver when applied to purpose, especially when you understand how it aligns with your values. Building a sustainable business starts with understanding the strengths and vulnerabilities of your passion and knowing how to apply the best aspects of your passion to achieve the results you want to see.
Purpose-driven
Case example: Sam experienced a disconnected upbringing and a very dominant father. You can imagine that absence of love, intimacy, mental support, and feeling of safety can cause a disconnect and depression for Sam at a later age. Sam will very likely be confronted with her trauma through the relationships she forms in life. Some people will avoid these situations and feelings and hide them as deep as they can, never to have to face them ever again. Sam understands that these traumas are blocking her to feel love for others, and for herself. Sam went through a lot of hardships and pain, but she came out with a huge backpack full of self-knowledge. She has a very clear and strong sense of who she is. So much so that she now uses her knowledge to help others who have experienced similar traumas or feel stuck in life because they don’t know yet how to listen to themselves. People who might be at the start of this journey and are looking for guidance.
In this case, becoming a mental health coach makes perfect sense. It’s unlikely, though, that it’s your passion to coach people with mental problems. Still, your drive can be as strong as that of any other passionate person. In this case, being a mental health coach will be sustainable as long as you are rewarded with seeing the change in people who you are helping.
Being a mental health coach means you can better our society and directly help people create a life of love instead of fear (purpose). You are practicing what you feel you need to bring to this world (values), community, love, support, etc. Your unique mix of experience, values, and purpose, makes your service unique and helps you emotionally connect to your niche.
As you can see, a purpose-driven business can lack passion but still be sustainable.
Some people I have worked with live very close to their values or have a very clear sense of purpose, but they are stuck in turning it into a business (or connecting it to a passion).
Clarity in purpose is often the easiest one for people to recognize. Purpose is often motivated by experiencing injustice or trauma. It’s these peak moments in life that often define our purpose. We feel the need to create a change in the world because we want to better our community, society, or our planet. We want to show others another possible journey towards a better life. Seeing this change happen can be a substitute for a passion. The rewards of seeing this change happen can make all the other tasks manageable and make your work mentally sustainable.
“Do what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life.”
We have all heard this quote countless times. But even if you have the luck of finding a passion, it just means you have identified the path you want to build your business on. The next step is to find out how to make your passion financially and mentally sustainable, to actually start your journey. Frameworks such as The Business Model Canvas, Google Design Sprints, Design Thinking, will help you get a clear overview of your position within your market. With these frameworks, you can quickly experiment and validate different business models that can make your business financially sustainable. It’s an important first step in validating whether or not your business idea will be financially sustainable. So now you have identified a passion, you have found your position in the market, you know you can sell your product, and basically, you have a pretty good idea that your business will be financially sustainable. This is where a lot of people get to work and often forget to look deeper.
But looking deeper is what your brand strategy is all about.
For most people I work with nowadays we start with understanding their drive. It’s the reason they accept going through all the hardships of building their business to create the chance they need to see. Some call it the brand essence, the brand core, the Why, (the other day I talked to someone about finding the brand essence and she said she searched for the answer to the question: “What is the legacy you want to leave”. I thought that was quite interesting), but whatever you want to call it, for me, it boils down to, what is your drive? Finding the essence of your drive is what will define your company culture. Your drive creates action. Your drive is the energy that connects your story with your community.
So. What is your drive?
If you feel a drive, find out what you drive is. Where does it come from? How can you make it sustainable? Is it a passion? How does your drive connect to your values? Have you felt this drive at peak moments in your life? What is your legacy going to be?
In later articles, I will go more in-depth about how to answer these and many more questions. Hopefully, I will also talk with people who have been successful in building a sustainable business from a strong drive to learn from their personal journey. Thanks for reading. I hope something resonated with you. ❤️🙏🏼
By sharing these stories I hope to help change-makers find their own unique story. To help you craft your public narrative to build a financially and mentally sustainable business. An authentic narrative that evokes emotions and that moves people from inaction to action. Emotions of hope, anger, urgency, solidarity, and a sense that we can make a difference. Because that is what we change-makers and impact-driven entrepreneurs feel we need to do.
