It’s Only Natural Gifts – Being the Change We Want to See

Just suppose you had the opportunity to create whatever business you wanted, to create an entity, a living embodiment of what would scream you, your passion, your way of contributing to the world, of doing what you love and supporting your family with it. Suppose you could entertain anything and everything as an idea—what would make you proud? This was the scenario, the gift we gave ourselves—the opportunity to explore any and every possibility, no expectations, no barriers, simply the chance to create what we would love.

My dear friend, Karen Edwards, and I gave ourselves that gift with the hopes of making it big by pursuing our dreams. The process resulted in months of cooking up ideas. Everyday was filled with sentences that began with “ What if ...,” “The world really needs ...”, “ I hate ... ”, and “Wouldn’t you love to ...” From services to products, from huge investments to cottage industries, we’d see ourselves wearing aprons one day or Armani suits or (gasp) absolutely nothing the next (that didn’t last long, but we had to go there.) We tried it all on for size, for fit, for feel, and to see what touched us. Call us crazy (go ahead, our husbands and friends did), we loved messing with reality and testing our limits by being completely unrestrained, by ignoring the “you shoulds” and by thinking as far out of the box as possible.

Each day we giggled at our flakiness and poked fun at our endless flip-flopping. Honestly, we were a bit nuts, but it was fun. Most of the ideas came and went quickly, being discarded because they were not true to who we are. In this frenetic process we quickly noticed reoccurring threads running through our endless ideas. We took notice of what it said about us and what we wanted to create. We began to get a clear sense of what made us tick. Those threads always involved offering nurturing on some level. We found that businesses involving giving love were tops. Being good to Mother Earth was a given in whatever we decided we’d do. We decided we needed to embrace being women, sisters, wives, mothers and to do good things, to walk the talk.