The most common lesson I used to give my branding clients was “Consider this your first version, your brand will evolve.”

For new entrepreneurs, this didn’t make much sense. They almost had tunnel vision that they would launch with a perfectly created brand, attract the perfect clients right away, and everything would go on feeling perfect. After all, this was their pinnacle endeavour, all the prior years in corporate was the ‘training ground’.

It’s not unusual for us to create fantasies like this all over our life.

We hope maybe we can get it right the first time and we don’t have to learn what we don’t know.

Or we can ‘save’ ourselves failure, embarrassment, or ‘wasted effort.’

Or we simply think we’re done learning and figuring things out.

Did you know we’re the only species that can judge anything a ‘wasted effort’? And it’s this exact attitude that stands in the way of our ability to evolve for our highest good.

Effort and taking action always leads us to clarify what we didn’t know and what we couldn’t possibly know without trying.

This is why I really enjoyed working with established entrepreneurs coming back for a redesign. They’d gathered the wisdom through experience and knew what direction to head in next.

For the wisdom it delivers, experiential learning can’t be beat.

But you can let it beat you with the wrong attitude.

Personally, if I hadn’t been willing to explore and evolve from a communication strategist, to a health coach, to a mamma mentor, to Soulful Success Strategist, Five Sights Co. wouldn’t exist. Those three previous businesses weren’t ‘false starts’ or ‘wasted effort’,  they were necessary nesting places on my evolutionary journey.

I could never have predicted what I would learn before I started.

I couldn’t imagine all the ways I would evolve as a person, a coach, a wife, a mother, and a business owner.

All of these experiences made it possible for me to be the compassionate coach I am today and directly contributed to my lived experience of the five human geniuses Five Sights Co. works to unleash in others.

So if you’re in the middle of experiencing a mistake, perhaps a business experiment that’s not working out or a career that doesn’t seem to fit, ask yourself – is it really a mistake? Or is it part of my evolution?

To evolve means to gradually come into being. Being ok with that deeply connects you to a meaningful experience, not a ‘wasted’ one.

Want to continue the conversation about personal evolution?

Click below to become a member of The Bravery Lab where we’re cultivating courage & conviction to evolve our impact in the world.

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