#134 What does it mean to be EMPOWERED in business?
Today, I want to delve deep into the heart of my business ethos – empowerment. In this episode, I'm sharing what empowerment means to me, why it's so essential in the world of business, and how empowerment can transform your business.
Having spent the first 12 years of my legal career in litigation and dispute resolution, I've seen countless business owners entangled in disputes and legal battles that could have been avoided. These experiences ignited a passion within me to empower business owners with the knowledge and skills they need to steer clear of such pitfalls. And my mission is crystal clear - to empower and enrich the lives of other business owners to achieve long-term sustainable success.
Empowerment, as I see it, encompasses five essential pillars: trust, access to information, support, confidence, and innovation. In this episode, I’m breaking each of these down:
1. Trust: Trust is the cornerstone of all business relationships. When you have your clients’ trust, you can provide value and make a lasting impact. Developing thought leadership and being trusted in your field opens doors to opportunities to create real change.
2. Access to Information: Empowerment involves knowing where to find reliable, relevant information – not just relying on Google. It’s about having access to the right knowledge at the right time.
3. Support: Having a strong support network, whether it's a team of advisors, a reliable community, or a trusted client base, is crucial. The right support will equip you to reach your business goals.
4. Confidence: With trust, information, and support in place, confidence naturally follows. Confidence empowers you to make impactful decisions and drive change within your business and your wider community.
5. Innovation: Empowerment is inseparable from innovation. As a business owner, you need to adapt, grow, and identify trends.
Empowerment isn't just a buzzword; it's a game-changer in the world of business and it’s the key to long-term success. So, what does empowerment mean to you? After this episode, I hope you view it through a different lens and recognise the profound impact it can have on your business.
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[00:00:00] Tracey: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the rise up in business podcast. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, and that is the concept of empowerment in business. If you're a long time listener, you will know very well that my business is underpinned by an empowerment ethos, and that is very much part of my why in business.
[00:00:45] So I want to share with you today what empowerment means to me and why it is that my business is underpinned by an empowerment ethos. So if I were to say to you, what does empowerment mean to you? What do you ultimately want to achieve in your business? If we spend some time drilling into that and getting crystal clear clarity around what it means to you and what you want, I suspect the two will align at some point.
[00:01:11] The reason empowerment is important to me is twofold. Firstly, my mission, my driver, my why in business is to enrich lives. That simple, crystal clear. I've had that clarity for a very long time. But secondly, I spent the first 12 or more years of my career, my legal career, in litigation and dispute resolution.
[00:01:36] If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, if you know me, you know, this to be true. And you know, that I share a lot from those earlier years in my career. What this means is I spent so much of my time representing business owners who were involved in disputes, in court proceedings, in mediations and arbitrations.
[00:01:58] Over things that could have been avoided. I take much from those earlier years of my career, but part of what I take, and this is a big part of what I take is that much of what I saw and much of those situations that I supported business owners through could have been avoided if the business owners had have known how to do things differently.
[00:02:20] So I'm taking a lot of that knowledge and a lot of that experience from all of those years, and I'm flipping it to use it here in this business to educate and empower business owners on all the things they need to know so they don't end up like so many of those business owners that I've acted for. So that's the second prong to why it's so important to me.
[00:02:42] I genuinely think that if we are empowered with the knowledge that we need, and we have the support and the skills that we need, we can set ourselves up for success in a way that we otherwise couldn't. I talk a lot about my mission in this business being to educate and empower. It's part of the empowerment ethos.
[00:03:03] It's part of what underpins my business model. And now, you know, why. If you didn't know before, then, you know, now from listening to this episode, and it's because so much of what I saw earlier in my career could have been avoided. And I'm talking business owners who lost their business, whose marriages were impacted or destroyed, whose livelihoods were destroyed.
[00:03:26] People who lost their family homes, all because they found themselves in situations that the benefit of hindsight could have been avoided if they had have done things differently. It's the old concept of we don't know what we don't know. So my mission here is to share with you what you need to know so you don't end up there.
[00:03:44] When I say empowerment, it means a few things. It means trust. It means access to information. It means support. It means confidence and innovation. And when we've got those five pillars as business owners, I believe it's a game changer.
[00:04:04] So let's break it down. Trust. We are business owners and we want to be empowered so we can make a difference, so we can make an impact, whether it's clients, community, whether it's our team, whether it's at home. We can make an impact and enrich our own lives, but there's a lot there that's underpinned by trust.
[00:04:25] If our clients trust us, we can provide our services to our clients. We can support our clients. We can make an impact. if we're developing our thought leadership in that space, we need trust for people to listen to us and to hear what we've got to say so that we can make an impact.
[00:04:42] If we have a team, we need trust so that we can make an impact in our business and so we can enrich their lives. There's so much to be said when it comes to trust. And so for me, trust is a key element of being empowered. Access to information is vital. Being empowered means knowing where to get the information we need, where to get the right reliable information, i. e. not Google, where to go to get the answers. That's empowerment. We can't know everything about everything all of the time, but knowing where to go, knowing who to turn to, having a support network in place. That's empowerment.
[00:05:23] Let's talk about support. Having the right support in the right places when we need it. That is classic empowerment to me. So whether it's a team of advisors, support at home, a client base or a community that trust us, that we've got the support that we need so that we are fulfilling our purpose so that we are able to make an impact, knowing that we've got the right team around us so we can do what it is that we want to do in our business.
[00:05:51] That's all classic empowerment. This all then naturally leads, in my mind, to confidence. Once we know where to go, once we're trusted, once we've got the support and the right team around us, how can you not feel confident with that? That's what I ask of my clients. How does that not lead to confidence? Of course it does. Underpins confidence and with confidence, we can make so much impact. We can make so much change. We can make a real difference.
[00:06:23] And then innovation. I just don't see that we can talk about empowerment without talking about innovation. As business owners, our purpose is clear to us. We're driven by our why, but we need to grow and we need to be adaptable. So with confidence comes the ability to be innovative. We can identify the trends, we can identify what's working and what's not. We've got the confidence to be flexible, to grow, to be adaptive. I know I feel like I'm just throwing some keywords at you, but these words are really considered words that I use every day in my business when I'm talking to my team, when I'm talking to my clients, when I'm talking to my community.
[00:07:04] So empowerment to me embodies all of those things. So when I talk about my business Being underpinned by an empowerment ethos, it's because I want to achieve all of these things for you. I want to develop your trust. I want to position you so that you are in a position of trust with your clients. I want to position you so that when you go out and you are speaking to communities and groups that you're developing your thought leadership and you're trusted. I want to give you the support that you need and I want to give you the information you need or a safe place to come to know that you're going to get the right information and the right support at the right time when you need it.
[00:07:44] With that will build your confidence and then you can go forward and conquer in your business and you can be innovative along the way. That's what it means to me. So let me ask you, what does empowerment mean to you? And after listening to this very short and sharp episode, do you now have a different perspective or a different lens that you can use when you think about empowered? I genuinely believe that if we work together to support each other in business, we can do amazing things.
[00:08:16] This is why I do what I do. I take my years of experience in acting for business owners. I take my vast experience in acting for business owners in disputes and litigation and court proceedings and mediations. And I use all of that and I draw on that to give really full and frank advice and perspectives to business owners to help them drive their business forward in a really sustainable way with solid foundations so that you feel empowered and so that you can go forward with confidence in your business.
[00:08:50] When I listen to myself talk, and when I visualise these words, I'm a very visual person, I just see gold stars everywhere here because all of these phrases, all of these terms, this concept of empowerment means so many things to so many business owners. And it really can be the difference between long term sustainable success and a short lived business journey. No one wants a short lived business journey. We all want long term sustainable success. And I believe that by being empowered, business owners are well placed to go forward and conquer and achieve all of those things.
[00:09:28] The way I do this in my business, there's several ways I do it in my business. The first and foremost and most obvious is this podcast. This is where I share information. This is where I share knowledge. This is where I share stories with an intention to educate and empower business owners. So you with an intention to share knowledge with you so that after listening to each episode, you're just that little better off.
[00:09:53] I have a series of masterclasses on my website. I recorded those. I designed those to again, share with you specific knowledge that you need to know to educate yourself and set yourself up for success in your business, very easily accessible targeted information for business owners who don't necessarily have the time to reach out and book in for a strategy session or to work with somebody closely, but a really easy way to go and get the answers to some questions that you have in a really reliable platform so you don't go to Google and get a ton of information and you don't trust it because you don't know if it's right. You can go straight over to my website and access any of the masterclasses at any time and dive straight in and hear what I've got to say about those topics.
[00:10:42] Then there are my strategy sessions. If you want targeted time with me to obtain specific advice and answers to your questions and to help develop a way forward with a certain focus in your business, my strategy sessions are designed for this reason. You can book in for those directly on the website. And the fourth way that I work with my clients to empower them is my one on one work. I tailor proposals for every single client based on what they need in their business right now.
[00:11:12] So that one on one work gives my clients access to the information and the knowledge and the support so that they can go forward, build their knowledge, build their confidence, be empowered on their business journey. So that's how you can work with me if you want to experience my empowerment ethos that underpins my business.
[00:11:35] Continue listening to the podcast and if you, if this is resonating with you, I would love it if you would share it with a business friend, because that's how we get into the ease of even more business owners. Jump over to the website, have a look at the masterclasses, it might be just what you need. If you want some one on one time book in for a strategy session, if you want to do a lot more together, we can do on one work with a bespoke proposal for you.
[00:11:56] I hope that's been helpful. I really hope this resonates with you and I hope we're on the same page and I'm sure we are when it comes to all things empowerment in business. As always, thank you so much for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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