When Your Solo Entrepreneur Journey is a Hero Journey
When you made a decision to embark on the solo entrepreneur’s path, you embark on your own hero’s journey.
What counts on the hero’s journey is not only the performances and achievements we made but how the journey of becoming whom we want to be, finding our gift and sharing it with the world, and healing our wound. In living our hero’s journey, we are living our purpose, with meanings and being alive in the world. With the benefits of walking your hero’s journey, there will be light and darkness.
As I’m redefining my niche to embark on holistic business coaching because I want to stress the importance of work-life balance, envisioning, and personal development to business development, I’m reflecting on my hero’s journey.
The hero’s journey written by Josep Campbell has 3 main stages:
The 1st stage is to discover your calling
All ordinary people have an opportunity to be a hero. It’s up to them if they make a choice to step out of their comfort zone to discover their calling. From childhood, most of us received this question, “who do you want to be when you grow up?” We’re looking for heroes around us, who are our role models. Our career or business isn’t only the job we do, but we find what’s calling us to be in a certain profession or business. The calling isn’t just coming from our ego, whom we want to be in order to be rich, be accepted, or be loved. Our calling always comes from the part of us who want to grow and to contribute to the community.
There’s an event that triggers us such as a crisis, challenges, and a failure. We don’t always want to accept our calling because we are scared of the unknown and the challenges ahead. There’s a refusal of our calling. I doubted myself too when I started holistic business coaching because I had a limiting belief such as who I’m to be a holistic business coach, why not sticking to the common term, life/business coach.
The 2nd stage is the initiation
This stage is when we finally accept our calling and begin the hero’s journey. We may encounter challenges, and we need guardians, resources, and support along the journey. I’m thankful for peer coaches and mentors whom I see as my guardians in this journey. I find guardians not only in-person but also in the books that I read. I also find value in Mindvalley membership. They’re my source of motivation and inspiration to move forward. We also encounter challenges and if we are able to overcome them, we’ll become stronger.
Along the way, we meet interesting people, be allies, guardians, or demons. What makes us perceive that the other person a demon is because we are afraid or intimidated by them. The demons hold a mirror for us. It revealed our inner darkness – our reaction to them which we project internally: anger, frustration, guilt, fear and we can endure this for a long time. Joseph Campbel pointed out: What makes something a demon is your relationship with it. The solution to demons isn’t just to forget it but the wound still stays with us. There’s also a technique called, working with your enemy image to empathize with yourself and your enemy.
The 3rd stage is Unification or Transformation
This is a stage when we begin to develop our inner self and new resources. The journey of transformation is always an inner game to deal with failures, pressure, criticisms, and lack of confidence. In sports, the athletes need coaches who will help them master the inner game and the outer game as well. We all need guardians to help us go through these challenges to develop our inner self and new resources.
In entrepreneurship, you want to engage business coaches who will help you not only deal with business development but also with your personal and professional development.
As we develop our inner self and new resources, we learn to overcome the trials and challenges, and face demons. The transformation can take a long time. We notice a subtle change, small or big changes over the years, and we are getting stronger, develop our own resilience and patience. The hero is someone who responds to take up these challenges and create new resources.
The final stage of your hero’s journey is coming home when they finally want to retire and make an impact on the community. Most in our journey, we play double roles: we walk on a hero’s journey and we become a guardian for someone else. If you are parents, you become the guardian for your children. As I’m a coach, I walk on my hero’s journey and become the guardian for my clients too.
Overall, if we choose to walk on a hero’s journey, there will be something meaningful and deeper, and we want to discover it beyond what we are doing.
