This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
On being my own roadblock
A week after the SVI Women Conference, I’m still trying to soak in what I learned about myself.
I didn’t really know what I wanted to work on when I arrived, but an exercise we did on the first day made me really think about how I’ve helped others accomplish, while standing in the way of my own success.
For example, I took our little student film festival in 2005-8 and steered the helm into rebranding it into the first Vancouver Short Film Festival, creating a Board of Directors and then Chairing it, and then stepping away from production and programming and letting others gain new skills and move our event forward as a team. It’s been amazing to see our baby grow up.
Now, on the other hand, I’ve been very stubborn to let Conscious PR out of the cradle. The new brand is still trying to stand on its two feet, but it’s getting stronger and more grounded every day. I realized that I lacked the same tenacity for growing this business as I had for my film festival. Maybe it’s suffered because of that, but at least I can start to change.
One of the amazing workshops I took was on Capacity Building. I learned that every business should ideally be running at a 40-80% run rate and when that capacity starts to overflow into 80%+, it’s time to grow. I still haven’t optimized Conscious PR enough to run itself, so I know I have a lot to work on creating efficiencies in my systems (database sharing, mostly) and within my team.
It’s a big challenge to accomplish, but I know I’ve got a lot of support, moral or otherwise.
Are you standing in the way of your own success? How do you see that and do you know how to get out of it?
