DISCLAIMER: As you probably already know, this page may contain affiliate links. If you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. Thanks!
Ever found yourself stuck in your business doing something you absolutely hate? Guess what, that frustration might be your secret weapon to success. In the latest video on Ask Yvi YouTube, I dive into harnessing the power of knowing what you don’t want to build a business you truly love.
Building a fulfilling business isn’t just about dreaming big or setting lofty goals. It’s also about uncovering what you don’t want to do and using that knowledge to shape a path that truly lights you up.
Join me, Yvonne Heimann, as we delve into the crucial yet often overlooked aspect of entrepreneurship—knowing what you don’t want and how it can guide you toward creating the business of your dreams.
The Fundamental Role of Experimentation
Far too often, we’re inundated with advice telling us to focus on vision boards and big-picture goals. While these tools are invaluable, they don’t provide actionable data or reveal the practical aspects of business life. The first step in understanding what you don’t want begins with experimentation.
As a child, I had no clue I’d end up where I am today. Starting off as an electrician, I had a series of “this is not what I want” moments that steered me in different directions. Each endeavor, whether it succeeded or failed, taught me something invaluable about my preferences and aversions.
The key takeaway? Trying out different roles, jobs, and tasks provides concrete information that vision boards and planning can’t offer. These experiences will illuminate your dislikes and help you identify what genuinely excites you.
Learning from Experience
My entrepreneurial journey began with the need to fill a social media manager role in my late husband’s business. While I adored social media and being on camera, I quickly realized that creating posts and managing accounts for others was draining and unfulfilling. This realization steered me away from a path that seemed logical but wasn’t a great fit emotionally.
Shifting from social media management to web design was another step in my journey. Even though web design held some appeal, it didn’t provide the safety and excitement I craved. It was another valuable learning experience that helped me redefine my goals. Gradually, I moved towards helping women build sustainable businesses—a focus that aligned with my passions for teaching and empowering others.
The Importance of Action Over Planning
Taking action provides crucial insights into your preferences. Unlike planning, which can lead to planning paralysis, action gives you real-world feedback. Just as you wouldn’t know if you like shrimp without tasting it, you won’t know if you enjoy a particular business role without trying it out.
For example, my experience with ClickUp consultancy revealed my dislike for nitty-gritty integration tasks. I enjoy creating frameworks and connecting big-picture strategies but leave detailed implementation to others. Each role I tried helped me refine my vision and understand what I did and didn’t want to do, further clarifying my ideal career path.
Balancing Different Business Aspects
Understanding your dislikes helps you manage and balance different business aspects effectively. While working with corporate clients offers stability, it also comes with lengthy runways and complex planning. I balance this by running group coaching programs for female entrepreneurs, which provide immediate, energizing interaction.
By acknowledging what I don’t enjoy—such as the extensive runway and bureaucratic pace of corporate consulting—I crafted a schedule that combines both worlds. This blend ensures every aspect of my work contributes to my passion and excitement, essential for long-term satisfaction.
Reflecting on Failures and Struggles
Every failed project or task you dislike is an opportunity for growth. Reflecting on these experiences helps you understand the underlying issues and redirects you toward more fulfilling alternatives.
Look back on tasks or projects that didn’t work out. Identify the struggles and reasons behind them. Did a particular task make you feel drained or unmotivated? Understanding these elements helps you devise strategies and select roles that align better with your strengths and passions.
From Vision Boards to Action Plans
While vision boards and goal-setting are important, they should serve as starting points, not end goals. Too much planning can lead to a standstill. Transition from vision boards to actionable plans by testing scenarios and gathering data.
Your journey toward building a passionate, fulfilling business is a dynamic process. Every experiment and every role you discard empowers you with better clarity and an enriched vision. By doing, testing, and acting, you gain insights that static planning can’t provide.
Embrace the Path of Discovery
Building a business you love requires a blend of dreaming big and understanding the practicalities of what you don’t want to do. Embrace every role and experiment as invaluable lessons that shape your path. The secret to unlocking your success lies not only in envisioning what you desire but also in discarding what fails to light up your soul.
If you enjoyed today’s insights, share your stories and entrepreneurial journey in the comments. And for more on building a sustainable and passion-filled business, check out my video on the eight pillars of strong business growth. Until next time, keep exploring, innovating, and chasing what sets your soul on fire.
Video Transcription:
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]:
You know how everybody tells you to focus on the things you want, your goal, the big picture, and then you suddenly find yourself stuck doing something in your business that you absolutely hate? It turns out these moments of frustration where you know what you don’t want, but you might not know what you do want are the secret to unlocking your success. Today, I want to dive with you into the power of knowing what you don’t want to do in your business and how you can actually use that to help you build the business you love. Hey, if you’re new here and don’t know me yet, I’m Yvonne Heimann, aka Yvi, from AskYvi, a business alignment and efficiency strategist. And seeing what you don’t want to do can be quite a habit and a repeatable process. So let’s start in the beginning. Little Yvi had no idea I’m going to be doing what I’m doing today. I started out as an electrician. Yep.
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:56]:
I was a daddy’s girl and I wanted to be an electrician. And, oh, my God. On this journey to today, little Yvi becoming big Yvi, she is today. I went through so many this is not what I want. This is not what I thought this is going to be. Now I have to rebuild again. Let’s talk about the first point here that we should pay attention to. It’s the importance of experimentation.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:25]:
When everybody tells us, oh, you need to picture and you need to vision board and you need to do all of this visualization of what. What you want to do and where you want to be and who you want to become. And so often I had this whole, yeah, but I don’t freaking know. I don’t even know. I didn’t know as a kid what I wanted to be. Heck, if you know what you are going to be, and you are that today. I don’t think you’re going to need my YouTube video. But what it comes down to is all of this vision boarding, all of this envisioning what you are going to be and what you’re going to do is great, but it doesn’t help you get actual data because till you do, till you experiment, till you try on this person you think you might want to be or this business or how you want to offer your services, till you actually experiment with all of this, it’s just that pictures on the wall and some vision that you have no idea is going to be in reality just like you want it to be.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:31]:
And that’s what happens. Reality can hit you over the head where back in the day, I loved social media. I love being on camera. I love being out there. So when I started this journey of Ask Yvi, initially there was a need for social media manager in my late husband’s business. So I did it. I love social media. Why wouldn’t I want to do this? To realize really, really, really fast I don’t want to. Creating engaging posts and constantly writing and constantly selling, not just for me, but for other people, not my thing.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:07]:
So doing this, trying on this social media manager position told me, yeah, I love being on camera. I love teaching, I love doing YouTube videos. If you watched my latest I’m done video, you know how I do love being on video. If it’s the right content. And with clients and being a social media manager, you can’t always choose that. So I learned, yes, I love this piece, but I don’t like that piece. Which then shaped the picture of what do I want? Again, for somebody like me that often doesn’t know what the hell I actually want, I need to try things on to figure out what I don’t want, but also learn what I do want. And with that, my business just changed from social media management to web design.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:56]:
At some point with that, then realizing, yeah, but that doesn’t give me the safety and the excitement that I want. Yes, that is possible. Feeling safe in your life and your business and still having excitement which then shaped to I actually want to do more. I don’t just want to build websites, I want to help women build sustainable businesses that give them freedom of choice. So there is this lesson. Realizing what you don’t want only comes by doing. It doesn’t come by set these major goals and paint the picture of who you want to be. You need to do.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:38]:
You need to go out there and discover the things you don’t want to do, to be able to wash out the things that do light you up, that allow you to find your passion. Yeah, I’m a passionate person. That doesn’t mean I know all the things I’m really passionate about. So diving into this path of just trying things on and uncovering things that you might not have known, just testing and getting uncomfortable and doing something new and just going for it, rather than just planning and planning and planning and planning, helps you wash this out of who are you? What do you want to do? What lights you up? What keeps you going? Simply by uncovering what you don’t want to do. So for example, having done ClickUp consultancy for, oh my God, how many years now since 2019. I love ClickUp. I love processes. I love systems.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:33]:
I love automating things. But there’s pieces to that ClickUp consultant position that doesn’t align. I am not an integrator. That’s the interesting thing. A lot of people are like, yeah, but Yvi, can you just integrate all of this for me? No, I am not the nitty gritty. I see all the connections, I see how it all fits. But I don’t want to build out all of your processes and systems. That’s what you have a online business manager for or project manager.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:00]:
They love this implementation and integration stuff and all the nitty gritty. That’s where I lose my passion. My passion is in that upper layer of finding those processes and systems. How do things connect, how do things work? Building that framework and then handing it off and go run with it, which in that phase of exploration, of playing with that ClickUp consultant position, I always realized that yes, I love ClickUp and ClickUp will always be part of my business. But because I connect all of the pieces from big picture, from goals, your subconscious values, and bringing that down into a specific use case, but also pay attention how it fits with other use cases, I am not happy just working in the silo of ClickUp. So again, I found out, and I discovered that I do not want to just work in that realm of ClickUp. And not only that, figuring out what you don’t want also means figuring out who you don’t want to work with. I love my corporate consulting clients.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:08]:
I love them. I have such amazing clientele in the corporate sector. If that is my national sports association, if that is locally here Everbowl, the team is amazing. But corporate consulting also means you have a Runway of three to six months. Once you have that contract signed and you actually start working, it’s entirely possible that you have a three or six month contract and then you need to get back into budgeting. And does corporate budgeting have it? Are they going to go? So it is not a hey, let’s get things done. It works completely different. Again, it has a way longer Runway, which is great as long as you plan for it.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:48]:
But with that, it fuels me different. So that’s one part of my business. However, for me to be excited and to get up in the morning, there’s a couple of other pieces I need, which is why we have at AskYvi the group coaching programs, where I get to play, where I get to be on calls and with voice messages and video messages and trainings and all different modalities for me to be able to help female entrepreneurs build a profitable business out of their passion. So now I have two different target markets that combined do all the things that I want to do that excites me, that I’m passionate about and take care of doing things I might not want to do. I don’t care much about the long Runway with corporate. However, once we get there, I’m really excited working with them now I can way easier deal and manage that long Runway for corporate clients by running my group coaching program and my schedule is built in a way that they don’t interfere with each other. So again, having found out the things I don’t want in my business and my life allowed me to figure out ways how I do want them. And I could have never imagined sitting here and trying to figure these things out on pen and paper and just writing it down or putting it on a vision board.
Yvonne Heimann [00:09:18]:
So go out there and actually test it. And that’s where the benefits of doing the thing comes from. Taking action is key to all of this and to figuring out what you don’t want in your business. It’s just like trying new food. You’re not gonna know if you like shrimp if you haven’t tasted them. And let me tell you, I did not like shrimp as a kid. You might once in a while want to re-taste things too, because tastes can change and so can values. So every experience you go through, good or bad, gives you useful insight and helps you shape your path, your journey, and your business.
Yvonne Heimann [00:10:02]:
Go look back at the tasks or projects that didn’t work out. Look at the things you didn’t like. The things that were like, oh my God, I don’t want to do that. Leave me alone. The things you were fighting, the things that seem to create scope creep, where are those struggles? Dig deep into that. Why were you struggling with that? To get the answers of okay, cool. This is why I didn’t like this. Now let’s try this because that’s the opposite.
Yvonne Heimann [00:10:31]:
That might solve the problem. So go dive in. Yes, I do vision boards, too. Yes, I do goal setting too. But you can also get into planning paralysis. You need to do to do means you are testing things out and you’re getting data back so you can get really clear on your vision and your goals and what this passion filled business looks like that supports the life you want. And if you enjoyed this video, please feel free and share your insights and stories down in the comments. I look forward to hearing about your entrepreneurial adventures.
Yvonne Heimann [00:11:06]:
If you follow the podcast, you know, my favorite is how did you get here? Because I get to hear all of these journeys that you went through to get to today. And speaking of building a business, go check out this video over here where I talk about the eight pillar of strong business growth. And until next time, keep exploring, keep innovating, and keep pursuing what sets your soul on fire.
