I've been playing with the concept of the Servant Entrepreneur, a phrase that I coined when looking for the entrepreneurial equivalent of Servant Leader (http://www.greenleaf.org/). I'll be speaking about it at a new seminar titled, THE SERVANT ENTREPRENEUR: How to Become Irresistibly Attractive to Money, Opportunities and People. In a previous post in the Coaching Blog, I wrote that the Servant Entrepreneur was probably the only business model that will bring sustainable success to coaches.
What is the Servant Entrepreneur business model?
1. Do service for others.
2. Leverage that service (and everything else) to grow your business and create value for your clients, yourself and the world.
In that order.
Simple, huh? Maybe you're already doing it. But maybe not.
Most coaches start out with this as their purpose, more or less, but it gets lost, easily. Especially while you're getting hyped by marketing programs that tell you how to make lots of money as a coach.
Are you making lots of money, yet?
If you're not, then you may be focusing on the wrong step. Most coaches either focus on doing service and leave out the leveraging piece, or they focus on the leveraging piece and only do service as an after thought, which comes across as manipulative to savvy potential clients. Or they flip back and forth, which doesn't work, either. Do you see yourself in here?
How do you consistently do service first and leverage second and become enormously successful (like say, Oprah Winfrey or Thomas Leonard)?
I don't pretend to have all the answers and yet, I've seen it in action and it works and I've seen coaches who don't get it, even "top" coaches, crash and burn.
Here's the tricky part: The Ego and the Greater Self need to kiss and make up.
If you've done your personal development, you know what I'm talking about. (If not, get to work!)
However, most PD programs encourage you to live only from the greater self and get the ego out of the picture. The ego is what has driven humankind for tens of thousands of years. Now some folks are giving it the boot; calling it "pathological" or "dysfunctional". Maybe it's neither. Maybe the greater self is just an upgrade, like from DOS to WindowsXP.
Ego is a source of energy, expensive energy maybe, like foreign oil, but useful at least for now. The Self runs cleaner, but it can use a boost in order to get things done in the temporal world - the one where business occurs. The ego can be placed in service of the greater self and visa versa, kind of like hybrid cars use two different energy sources and produce cleaner running cars. You're probably already doing that to some degree: It feels better to come from the Self and the ego likes to feel good, so it's willing to go there, right? That's why doing service feels good.
Why not let the Self support the ego, too? Having a greater voice in the world, having the power and money to do great good - wouldn't that serve the Self? So why not let the ego succeed at the things it wants, when those things can also serve the Self? For example, why not let the ego have all the money and success that it craves - as long as it's doing service?
If you ever visited thomasleonard.com while he was still alive (You can still go there by going to www.waybackmachine.org and typing in thomasleonard.com and choose the dates that you want to look at. Currently his URL just goes to a memorial site.), you know that his tagline was, "Ego is good." Ever wonder what he meant by that? He'd already discovered that ego can place the Self in service of the world. Without it, you may as well retire to your cave and meditate for the rest of your life. Not a bad thing, but if you're an entrepreneur, it's not your thing.
Thomas made SE work.
How can you start putting SE to work for you (and the world)?
