What's your metaphor for your business?

As an entrepreneurial coach, you are in business. Yes, coaching may be your vocational calling. Yes, coaching may be the way you express your passion. Yes, coaching may be the work you love. However, at the end of the day, in order for you to continue being a coach, you must also earn a living from it. An entrepreneurial coach is a business owner.

As a business owner, how do you understand your business? How do you grasp your business as a whole enterprise (a funny word when it's just you)? Even a solopreneur business has lots of moving parts and pieces. What's your understanding of how your business works?

Historically, there have been many different ways of understanding businesses. Each of these ways can be encapsulated in a metaphor. In his book, The Invisible Powers: The Language of Business, John Clancy describes the most common business metaphors found in the business literature from the past two hundred years, including Fredrick Taylor, Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and Lee Iacocca. Here's what he found:

1. A business is a journey of renewal and wholeness
2. A business is a game with winners and losers
3. A business is a war with victors that survive and losers who are defeated or dead
4. A business is a machine for production
5. A business is a biological organism
6. A business is a society

(Of course, you aren't just limited to one of these metaphors. Perhaps your business is a machine for production in a war with victors and losers. And, of course, there are new metaphors being created all the time.)

Why is your metaphor important? Because metaphors create reality rather than reflect it. Metaphors simultaneously communicate to our conscious mind and our subconscious mind. They shape how we pay attention to things. They shape what we take as important and relevant and what we dismiss. They evoke a mood. They incite creativity. In short, they help us get a handle on our business as a whole and how to run it.

Of course, the danger of metaphors is that they bring a set of values, strategies, and approaches that may be totally broken for our business. For example, the metaphor of business as war. I don't know of any entrepreneurial coach who thinks their coaching business is a war zone. That just doesn't work.

And no metaphor will capture all the subtleties and nuances of your business. But your metaphor can help you avoid the overwhelm of juggling 

As an entrepreneurial coach, aka a business owner, what is your metaphor for your coaching business? 

Don't feel limited to the six options above. Maybe your business is a dance. Clancy wasn't researching entrepreneurial coaching businesses. And don't feel limited to just one metaphor.

Tomorrow's post will be about how to know if your metaphor will work for you or not. Stay tuned!

You can start think about this now. How does your metaphor help you run your business? What important parts of your business get left out of your metaphor?

Take care,

-Steve

P.S. - Here's a link to buy Clancy's book. It is one of the few books I know that explores the power of language to shape how we constitute and understand our businesses. A wee bit dated, but given there are so few books on business and language, it is highly recommended reading!