Unlock Vision’s 1st birthday :-)
Exactly a year ago was my last day at work. After 20 years as a product person, startup executive and entrepreneur, at the age of 48, I decided it’s time to move on and pursue a new calling. I started Unlock Vision.
I was scared shitless and I had zero guarantees it would work but somehow I stepped out of that door and somehow it worked… Better than I imagined :-)
I’m writing this post as a note to myself to capture the main lessons I learned in the past 365 days… Mainly so I can gather the courage to set my goals for the next 365 days.
Lesson 1: Courage isn’t the opposite of fear
A year ago, the day I quit my job, I found myself sitting in my bedroom repeating to myself over and over “what the #%@ have you done!…. What the #%@ have you done!”… I was supporting my wife and three kids with my startup executive income and I had no proof that the startup coaching business I started was going to provide my family.
I was looking for courage, hoping it would take away the fear. But what I learned is that there is no such thing. If fear is peeing your pants, then courage, as I discovered, is the ability to keep pushing forward with wet pants.
Fear doesn’t go away!
Courage wasn’t the superpower I was hoping for, I learned that courage is nothing more than the ability to ignore the voices in my head and make myself take the next tiny step toward my vision.
Lesson 2: I am my first client
The founders I coach and me are in the same boat.
I learned that each time I enter the room to coach a startup founder there are actually 2 people being coached. My coachee and me. This humility, this “unknowing” and endless curiosity to grow TOGETHER with my coachees is what I think makes me me.
Coaching myself was how I came up with my focus board format, which I since used to help multiple companies, teams, and individuals create extreme clarity, focus and alignment around what matters to them most and identify the keys to unlocking their vision. I was and still am my first “user”.
Coaching myself gave me the integrity to sit with founders and talk to them about maintaining focus and course toward their vision within this “storm” called a startup.
I learned that eating your own dog food is a great way to test if you’re delivering any value and keeps you real.
Lesson 3: Price value not time
Remember that scared dude sitting on that bed? Part of the anxiety came because the numbers simply didn’t add up. I was conditioned to think in terms of a wage. I spent 20 years in a world where you basically “sell” your time in bulk. So using the same paradigms I asked myself questions like:
- What do coaches charge?
- How much should I charge?
- How many coachees would I need to make a living?
And no matter how I tried to play with the numbers they didn’t add up.
So in that moment of desperation, I asked myself what any good coach would ask: “What do you want?”
“No really, Avi, what do you want? If you could work as much as you wanted, doing exactly what you loved and earning exactly what you wanted… WHAT WOULD YOU WANT?’
The second I asked the right question and let my vision insgead of my present lead me the fog cleared and where I saw limitations just minutes ago options and paths appeared.
It dawned on me that I wasn’t selling my coaching. I was selling a product: An aligned and focused, vision-driven team. That was my product.
I asked myself, how much does an aligned and focused vision-driven team worth to me as CEO or investor? Gazillion was the answer :-)
And this paradigm shift gave me the courage I needed to create my “vision formula”: an image of the world where what I love doing most, meets what people need, in a way that fuels my economic engine and enables me to bring more and more of the value I want to bring to the world.
It’s my Person Mankind Fit :-)
I just need to keep at it for the next 25 years and great things will happen…
