Finding Your Why
with Michelle Coe
This week, Samantha talks with Michelle Coe. Michelle is the owner of Blue Sky Phoenix, a marketing strategy company. Michelle begins by walking us through her 10 year journey as an entrepreneur. She moved from Western New York to Virginia and thought that if she’s going to move this far away from her family, she was going to make it worth it. The move forced her to start learning about herself and how to do things on her own terms.
When she started out in entrepreneurship, she quit being a business owner twice a week because it was really hard and got tired of dealing with the crap. Eventually, it turned into once a week, then once a month, then a couple of times a year. Now, she describes owning her own business as simply a feeling of “I’m really doing this.” The imposter syndrome is still there, but she gets to share her journey with her clients and guide them through similar journeys.
Michelle talks about finding your why with beginning entrepreneurs at the “Be The Change” foundation. The entrepreneurial journey is not straight. She talks about the freedom that she has being an entrepreneur and the flexibility found in setting your own limits and goals. She talks about a book that she read a while back she was reminded of. It was "Just Enough Light for the Step I'm On" by Stormie Omartian. Michelle was reminded of this book when talking about the overwhelming thoughts of finding your “why” especially when you’re just getting started. The idea is that if you could see the end and everything that you’ll have to go through to get there, you’ll be so overwhelmed that you’ll want to quit before you get started. She talks about childbirth as an example of this.
She continues by explaining what it means to go with the flow or get dragged through the hedge backwards. When you go through something hard in life, do you go with the flow, or do you dig your heels in? The questions she asks herself are, "is this going to matter in 6 months or a year? Am I even going to remember this in a few years?" Probably not. It’s important to acknowledge both the dark and the light times in life. We get the opportunity to look at the bad days and think about what we can learn from those. We can look back at our experiences and get resilience.
Should business and personal life be completely separate? Not according to Michelle. She says that it depends on the motivation for being an entrepreneur, but for her personally, who she is is who you get. That’s how she wants to do business and so for her, separating who she is as a person from who she is as a businesswoman is impossible. Some people, she finds, are a mile wide, but only 3 inches deep, but she’s interested in going a mile deep with people if she’s passionate about it.
Michelle understands that everybody is an individual and each person will have their own experiences and realities. One person’s most important business advice won’t necessarily translate to another person, and in her case, “being in business to make money” wasn’t her main goal. She ignored advice and still is in business and still pays her bills, so she has been successful without having money as her main motivation. Her main motivation is “love,” and her motto in life and in business is “choose love.” We all have a choice of whether or not to love each other. We can’t control other people’s reactions, but we do have control over our own reactions. We can choose to love.
She ends by explaining that she never wants to stop growing as a person. Whatever life throws her way, she just wants to try her best to go with the flow and not get dragged through the hedge.
Michelle Coe can be found at:
blueskyphoenix.com
Head to the contact page and shoot her an email.
Michelle Coe is an Entrepreneur, Creative Director, Brand/Marketing Strategist and the owner of BlueSkyPhoenix LLC, a creative firm based in Warrenton VA focused on brand strategy, web design & development, and marketing strategy. She has over 25 years of experience providing elegant design and technology solutions for small to mid-size businesses. She also currently contracts with the Be the Change Foundation as their Program Director and is tasked with expanding their current women's entrepreneurship programming to the online space. She is the incoming Vice-chair of the Fauquier Chamber and Co-chair of the Micro Enterprise Council and enjoys sharing her expertise with the local and regional business community. She moved to Virginia in 2011 and has two brilliant adult children, both of whom are her greatest joy.
