My Lane

There’s a funny attitude towards the idea of opportunity in my line of work. As someone with a unique experience and story, I get approached to do all sorts of things and whether I agree or not often depends on a number of factors with the main one being if it aligns with my purpose. It sounds like a simple enough proposition but when presented with these ‘opportunities’, it’s important to note that the driving factor isn’t always the idea along the lines of “The more I get myself and my story out there, the more exposure I get which will lead to more work”. Don’t get me wrong, exposure is definitely helpful but you want it to be the right exposure.

This is the reason I recently turned down appearing on ‘The Voice’. Yes, it would be great to have the opportunity to be seen by a million people and to get my story out there but that wasn’t the way I’d like people to discover me, what I stand for and what I care about. There’s also the doubts in my own singing talents but that’s not exactly a necessary detail for the purposes of this example.

The reason for bringing this up is because I recently came across a video of me speaking on a business panel at an event I was invited to last year and it reminded me of the ‘opportunity conflict’ I experienced in the lead up to it. I call it opportunity conflict because it’s a situation that forces you to have an internal debate about what committing to the opportunity can give to you and everyone involved in such an event.

To me, that debate consisted of doubts where I felt that speaking on a business panel was outside of what I would typically consider my range of expertise and I was sure that there must be someone more ‘successful’ that could fill my spot. These thoughts led to a serious consideration of turning down the opportunity.

The flip side of those negatives forced me to think critically about what I could bring to the event if I did speak and share a bit about my experience in the context of business. Where I landed was an interesting place. Although I have experience in starting, owning and running businesses, I could have easily gone down the '“fake it till you make it” route but I didn’t want to pretend that I knew more than I did, that didn’t feel genuine to me. So I looked at how I could contribute on more of a human level, and this brought me much closer to what I would now consider my area of ‘expertise’

So much of the time, being in business comes down to organisational and individual purpose. Knowing why you're doing what you're doing with your business or in your role can have huge impacts in not only how you go about your job, but the level of satisfaction you can draw from it.

Reframing this opportunity conflict and finding a way to participate in a way I was more comfortable with helped me arrive at a destination where I was both stepping out of my comfort zone, all while speaking to my own purpose. As I look back on some of the videos, I'm glad I was able to use this opportunity as a platform to speak about some important themes and challenges like mental health which brought something different to the event.

I hope by taking this approach I was not only able to share my own knowledge and experience in a business context but could help people realise that it is possible to consider all available opportunities when you evaluate what they can mean for you, the organiser and most importantly, everyone who’s willing to share their time in listening to what you have to say.