We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shawn Fink a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Shawn, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
My first career was working as a journalist for newspapers and I was put into challenging situations at a young age and I learned a lot about the world — and fast. As a result, I developed fast confidence and self-esteem that led to great interviews, solid writing and fearless mindset to get the story. I believe confidence is something we build over time through taking brave action and that career gave me an early start into being brave and doing courageous things.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am a business strategist and brave leadership/courage coach for mission-driven, female founders. I help build stand-out businesses no matter what industry you are in and we do that by making sure you have what I call The Brave YES Advantage™ — a set of strong foundations that every business can have in place to ensure you stand apart from your competition and truly find your most aligned client and customers.
My work is rooted in brave business strategy that encourages finding your Brave YES Edge™ as well as daring leadership. which means I help my clients have the courage and the audacity to dream bigger and make a deeper impact by taking risks.
Being a business owner in a saturated market — and it’s all saturated these days — requires courage to do things differently and not being afraid to let your most stand-out ideas and offers shine.
My Design Your Bravest Business Year Yet program is intended to help you dream bigger and play deeper by first choosing a core focus for the year.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three most important skills I have used in my 10+ years as an entrepreneur and coach are gratitude, connections and generosity.
I would never call a potential client a lead and that speaks to how I see the entrepreneurs I work with. I have practiced the skill of Radical Gratitude for the past decade, being grateful and offering thanks to every single client, even if it didn’t work out in the end. I have learned as much from failure as I have success and I’m always grateful for it all.
Additionally, connections have served me very well. I have never met a single person I didn’t want to know more deeply and understand. Those relationships have supported my businesses over the years and truly keep showing up and creating more connections.
Finally, generosity has been a huge skillset in my online entrepreneur journey. I am generous at every turn, with every potential client, connection and in every interaction and I am not afraid to trust the power of giving a lot of value to people for absolutely nothing in return.
If I could offer any wisdom for another entrepreneur right now it would be to practice the skill of patience. Everything in business takes longer than you think and as long as you understand that you’ll always be right where you need to be.
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
I am someone who wakes up and has a mind that goes into idea generation mode almost instantly. As a result I often have a dozen ideas flowing through my head by breakfast. This means if I am not careful I will easily get trapped in overwhelm. Because I have learned to manage this, I now help my clients — who often have way more on their to-do list than they have time for — in this area as well.
The first strategy I offer is to stop doing long-running to-do lists. Instead break everything down into projects. By doing this you are able to see where you can make progress and get things done in larger chunks of time.
The second strategy I offer is to plan out on Sundays what you will be doing each day during the week when you have spaces in your calendar to do deeper work. By going into Mondays ready, you can hit the ground running rather than try to figure it out as you go.
The third and final strategy I offer here is to do a lot of self-reflection and talk to a coach or mentor or keep a journal to track your progress, needs and to help break down bigger ideas. Self-reflection helps us to understand ourselves and it’s vital to making sure you do not stay in overwhelm. Coaching sessions are often the best time for my clients to work through the blind spots and areas of overwhelm that they hadn’t even realized they were trapped in.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://shawnfink.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shawn_braveyes/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebraveyes/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnfink/
Image Credits
https://www.reneewtaylor.com/
