What if you believed that your primary business is to be your true, authentic self?  And what if you could then express that self by doing things you love to do?  What if you learned more about what makes a business successful and, like a commercial business person does, created a strategic plan for your life, put systems in place to execute that plan, got the help you needed to succeed at it and created a series of outcomes that could be measured and duplicated?

Does that sound sort of cold and too “business-like?”  Then let’s add in the more juicy ingredients:  fulfilling work, artistic or creative expression, time for family, friends, and fun activities.  All those could be integrated into your strategic plan.  What a concept!

Being a Life Entrepreneur starts with a sense of purpose, actually a higher purpose than performing daily activities or tasks, or even meeting short-term goals.  To be a true Life Entrepreneur, you take the time to search your soul, think about why you’re here on the planet, what it is you’re meant to do.  It helps to look back over your life and survey where you have spent your time, energy, money and put your attention on.

I figured out early on that I am an educator, a teacher, but actually a pretty unconventional one.  I taught Montessori for a few years, and when I moved into the business world again, I found that applying the principles I learned from my teaching helped me grow my business.  I continued to teach more formally on the side by studying metaphysics and offering classes, coaching people, then included business consulting by the mid-eighties.  These were all forms of teaching, but very unconventional.  As the owner of a sales agency, I saw my role of educator as a way to help my employees reach their highest potential.  As a coach and consultant, I helped others do that for themselves and their employees.

Now I’m teaching by writing, coaching and consulting, but have the luxury of spending more time thinking about how to share ideas with a broader audience.  When I look back at the last forty or so years, I can see that my time, energy, money and attention have been directed to molding me into the woman I am today, and that I was purposeful about it from the beginning.

The reason I talk about being strategic is that I learned from experience that when I create new strategies, I get closer to creating my chosen outcomes.  When I stay with old patterns and keep using old strategies somewhat unconsciously, I seem to keep repeating them and feel like I’m on a merry-go-round and can’t get off.  We call that “revolving” instead of “evolving.”  Just being purposeful wasn’t enough.  To feel my work and life are truly fulfilling, I found it was necessary to consistently examine and revise my strategies, both personally and professionally.

Some days I feel a little silly being 62 and learning how to Twitter, update my LinkedIn page and see what is up on Facebook.  Other days, I feel like those things are part of what keep me relevant and current and that I have a good thirty or forty years of productive, meaningful, purposeful living ahead of me, so it makes perfect sense to do those things.

What I’m really saying is that this is what makes me feel like a Life Entrepreneur.  I’m carving out my life, and enjoying what I’m learning along the way.  And it sure beats the alternative–waiting around for something to happen until one day I wake up and can’t figure out how to get up!
Not me!

Margery Miller, owner of PeopleBiz Inc. is a coach and business consultant and is currently writing a series of blogs encouraging people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs. For more information see margerymiller.com, or write to her at margery@peoplebiz.com.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those most responsive to change.”  This is a quote from Charles Darwin, and I found it striking because we usually think of him in relation to “survival of the fittest” and this statement puts an interesting slant on what is the fittest.  I also recall John Demartini saying that the amount of stress we experience is a direct correlation to our ability to adapt to change.  The greater the flexibility, the less stress.  The greater the rigidity, the more stress.

Being a Life Entrepreneur requires amazing agility.  As Demartini also points out, we grow on the border of chaos and order.  Balancing that precariousness is vital to being able to withstand and move with, actually appreciate and take advantage of, inevitable change.

So how do you “roll with it” when you feel up against insurmountable difficulties?  First, start with what you know.  I strongly believe in starting each day with a statement at least, preferably a fully expressed vision, of who you are ideally, what you would love to experience and how you would love to show up in the world.  That is about what you aspire to, not a reiteration of what you are currently experiencing.  Think big, think bold, expand your sense of what is possible.

Who would you love to be?  What would you love to do?  What would you love to have?  These are quality questions that help you map out your life in a new and different way.

Waking up each day affirming who you are and what your higher purpose is informs your day and sets the tone for what happens.  Isn’t that a welcome change from wondering if you have the strength to get up and deal with all the demands others place on you?  Or doing the same drudgery day after day?  This actually puts you in the driver’s seat in your mind, which translates to you directing your thoughts, thus how you manage your experiences each day.

Circling back to Darwin, this means you are centered within yourself, ready to respond to what comes at you rather than react, which puts you in the category of most responsive to change.

Isn’t that the person you would love to be?

Margery Miller, owner of PeopleBiz Inc. is a coach and business consultant and is currently writing a series of blogs encouraging people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs. For more information see margerymiller.com, or write to her at margery@peoplebiz.com.

I just spent the last couple of days at the annual conference of Social Venture Partners International, held in Dallas.  SVPI is the largest individual donor network in the US, with over 2000 partners committed to capacity building for non-profit organizations in 24 cities in the US, Canada and Japan, and is growing each year, adding more chapter affiliates.  I would call each person I met a Life Entrepreneur, even if he or she isn’t aware of being one.

These amazing people have carved out time in their lives to focus on using a combination of business skills, life skills and money to ensure that organizations in their communities are able to fulfill their missions.  Each year a “grant cycle” is initiated, and local non-profits apply for “investee” status to gain the support of the SVP.  Once that happens, we partners volunteer to work with them to help solve the internal problems that are keeping them from growth.  I love this!  I get to bring my coaching skills, my business acumen, and am welcomed with open arms by people who are prepared to accept the help we offer and actually do something with it!  What a concept!

What inspired me about this conference is the variety of people I met, the wealth of experience they bring, and their willingness to share ideas, listen, and learn from each other.  The value of belonging was clearly expressed:  as individuals, we can do a little; as a group we become a force of nature.  We challenge each other along the way to bring our best to the table, to live up to our principles and continue to learn to work together.

So, after a little more than a year of being a member of the Dallas Social Venture Partners, I see even more reasons to stay involved, and do what it takes to make sure that our chapter fulfills its promise.  As a Life Entrepreneur, I thrive on new opportunities, new challenges and making new friends along the way.

That’s a lot to be grateful for!

Margery Miller, owner of PeopleBiz Inc. is a coach and business consultant and is currently writing a series of blogs encouraging people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs. For more information see margerymiller.com, or write to her at margery@peoplebiz.com.

I have often related a theory about the decades in our lives:  In our 20s, we try to figure out who we are; in our thirties, we work really hard to build our careers and fit into society (this is maximum people-pleasing time); we turn 40 and we start to wonder what it is all about, and if we really want to do this for the rest of our lives.  At that point, the questions start to become at least as important as the answers.  This is a decade of re-thinking, re-evaluating, and we start to realize around forty-five that it isn’t so important whether people like us, it is more important that we like ourselves.  At 50, we question whether we even like them (!), and how  they fit into our lives, and start getting much more serious about how we live and with whom.  At 55 and beyond, we care less about what others think at all and set about truly creating the life we would love to live.

These periods are not actually set in stone, just markers, because I have seen people move through them faster, based on the amount of self-work they are willing to do.  I’ve had clients in their thirties who were already well into the re-thinking and re-evaluating period, and some in their fifties who were just discovering that they had choices about how to live.  The point of this is that self-awareness is a process and the more aware we are, the more effectively we can move through the process.

So, being a Life Entrepreneur means consciously creating as we go.  My tag line, Master the Business of Life actually expresses the essence of this:  my primary business is the business of being Margery Miller, and the amount of time, energy, effort and strategic thinking I apply to that endeavor determines my success ratio.  If I walk around waiting for something to happen to me, if I worry about whether people like me, if I focus on what I don’t want instead of what I would love to experience–those are all ways that I could thwart my success as a Life Entrepreneur.

It means that in order to have a fulfilling life, I pay attention to all seven areas, Spiritual, Mental, Vocational, Financial, Familial, Social and Physical, and create my life with a goal of empowering ALL seven areas, not just succeeding at being a consultant, or coach, or making a lot of money, or having certain kinds of relationships.  The Demartini work focuses on breaking down the myths we carry in all aspects of our lives–not just the ones we think are most important at any moment.

I believe that being a Life Entrepreneur opens up myriad possibilities of how to get the most out of what is called the second half of life.  We have a lot of years ahead and “retirement” just isn’t attractive or even now possible for a majority of people.  So what do we do?

We can appreciate the synchronicity of having a global economic collapse occur at the same time a vast number of people on the planet wake up and realize there has to be more to life than getting by or making it through the day, or stepping on and abusing others to fulfill the hubris of greed and power.  We can thank technology and the internet for creating a global consciousness–and connecting people who may never meet but who are starting to think differently by being aware of each others’ existence.

We can start designing our lives and adapting to the constant changing world we live in by understanding that living life fully is an inside job.

Margery Miller, owner of PeopleBiz Inc. is a coach and business consultant and is currently writing a series of blogs encouraging people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs. For more information see margerymiller.com, or write to her at margery@peoplebiz.com.

I was visiting a friend in Florida feeling so grateful that I have people all around the world that I love and appreciate who are genuinely glad to see me and share some of their lives with me.  I hadn’t actually seen this friend face to face for four and a half years, but we picked up right where we left off and have spent the last day and a half filling each other in on major events, recounting challenges we’ve faced, how we’ve grown through them, what we’ve learned, where we see ourselves going from here.

In some ways our lives have paralleled, in other ways we are very different.  We do have one common thread–in our early sixties, we are both re-evaluating who we are as women, how we show up in the world, and what we want to do with our time and energy from this point forward.  This is right in line with what I realized when I was in Greece last month.  We are becoming Life Entrepreneurs, which I’m now seeing as the next step from being a business entrepreneur, as I have been for the last 30 years or so.

Life Entrepreneurship doesn’t only apply to women or business entrepreneurs.  I think this is a new wave of thinking that is germane to mid-life and beyond for both men and women, from all walks of life, from a variety of past experiences.  People want their lives to mean something–and if you watch Mad Men on TV, you will realize that having a meaningful life was only a remote possibility in the early 60s.  We’ve come a long way from the stereotypical roles of men and women in the workplace–and thinking that men knew best, that the government was to be obeyed, that working for pay was more important than working for something you believed in.

So I’m really just putting a label on something that I’ve been doing for a while:  being a Life Entrepreneur.  I look around and see I’m in good company.  There are millions around me doing this in one form or another.  I plan to spend some time over the next few months exploring, learning more about what it takes to succeed at this, and sharing my insights.

I’m also going to encourage people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs, and tap into the creative energy that can allow them to blossom into more authentic lives.  After all, a lot of us will still be here well into our nineties.  That means we have twenty, thirty, maybe forty years to be productive, engaging contributors to the world we live in.  Let’s make it meaningful!

Margery Miller, owner of PeopleBiz Inc. is a coach and business consultant and is currently writing a series of blogs encouraging people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs. For more information see margerymiller.com, or write to her at margery@peoplebiz.com.

As human beings, safety and security are high on our values.  From the time we first walked on the planet, we took shelter, foraged for food and secured our positions in our communities.  Our lives, when we get down to it, are very oriented toward those basic needs.

And when we take a job, we have a strong tendency to secure ourselves in the position.  This takes myriad forms, depending on what other factors are affecting our psyches.  The most conservative among us will tend to not rock the boat, keep on keeping on, so to speak, and may not advance very high on the career ladder, but keeping the job, the regular paycheck and the order they’ve established us usually paramount.  Others are more risk oriented, and will take bigger chances, challenge themselves and the status quo to keep moving up in the organization.  Most of us are somewhere in between those two extremes.

But one thing we all have in common is that we tend to not take action when we need a break.  Sure we may talk about it, dream about it, may even have a well thought-out plan secretly held in our wishful thinking folder of what we could do if we didn’t have to work.  But, especially in an era of job losses and less job security, we hold back and just keep on plugging along.

What if we worked for a company that encouraged taking time away?  What if it didn’t put our jobs at risk?  What if we understood the benefits of taking a step back, doing a mental and emotional re-group, then returned to our jobs renewed of mind and spirit?

I’ve been writing a series on what it means to be a Life Entrepreneur, and I’m revising some of the blogs to be posted here on the yourSABBATICAL.com site.  The purpose is to help people see themselves a little differently, to get inspired to consciously carve out the life they would love to be living instead of settling for less—slogging along feeling somewhat stymied and less fulfilled.

Part of my life purpose is to bring alchemy (the science of turning lead into gold) into practical daily life experience.  The lead that we carry around is more about self-limiting beliefs and lack of conscious life purpose.  It keeps us trapped on our own little merry-go-rounds, revolving through life instead of evolving in our awareness and abilities.  Taking a sabbatical, stepping back and out into more can give you a new lease on your life, bring that refreshed, energized self back into the workplace and give you an opportunity to bring more of your authentic self into your work.

Margery Miller, owner of PeopleBiz Inc. is a coach and business consultant and is currently writing a series of blogs encouraging people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs. For more information see margerymiller.com, or write to her at margery@peoplebiz.com.