Small Business Talk

The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster

How to Run a Business You Really Enjoy with Emma and Carla Papas

Background

Emma and Carla are bliss followers, they quit their full time government desk jobs in July 2014 to pursue their passion of bringing health and happiness to the lives of others.

Since then they’ve they’ve created the #1 mobile recipe App Get Merry, published the healthy cookbooks Make It Merry and Get Merry, host the #GetMerry podcast as well as created MerryBody (their true business love): an online yoga, pilates and mindset studio.
Every month they reach over 200 000 people through their products and programs, with a mission to live in a world where everyone finally accepts, loves and respects their bodies.

Making the move up to Australia’s sunny Gold Coast from their hometown of Canberra, the real life sisters and business partners love all that nature has to offer, a great cup of coffee, yoga, pilates and good conversation.

Show Notes

How to Run a Business You Really Enjoy

It’s all in the way do things. It’s about bringing the joy to everything you do. “It’s not always doing something you love. It’s all about being mindful and thinking about how you can have joy doing that task.” Emma and Carla said.

There are three things that we should always be quite focused on, and that is:

  1. Presence
  2. Acceptance
  3. Gratitude

Presence

Not just in our business, but every moment of our lives. We are always aiming to come back to this moment, the only moment where life itself exists.

We are always looking forward into the future and thinking of the million things on the to-do list and getting to the next big goal. When you get there you are now thinking about the past.

I’m thinking about, “Ooh, that was a mistake. Well, maybe I could have done that better. What else? Oh, yeah. I didn’t really like that and how that turned out.” There’s a lot of future living, and there’s a lot of past living. There’s very limited present living, which is the only moment where life is happening. It’s the here and the now.

Experience life, we can experience the journey. What this does is it takes a weight off your shoulders. It makes you realise, “Oh, okay, if now is the only moment that I have, then when I look around in this moment, I actually have everything that I need right now.”  So rather than grasping and reaching, and forever going for that next thing, which is over there and not here, it kind of makes sense why we want to bring in presence, because it alleviates the stress of thinking we’ve got to go, go, go, and get, get, get. It releases that hustle mindset of that we have to rush, that we have to do things faster.  When we bring in presence, an email for example, an email response back to someone is done in a very calm and kind way. It’s not done in like, “I’m so annoyed,” like, “I shouldn’t be doing this, I want to be doing something else.”

Eckhart Tolle, who is one of the leaders in living present, says that, “All stress comes from wanting to be over there when we are actually here.”  If we can welcome in more presence, then this will also alleviate stress. This is one thing that we can do to bring in more joy.

Acceptance

It always links so perfectly, because when you’re present, you’re here in the moment. We can choose to see this moment and accept it for what it is. You know, we might be wanting to go over there, we might have our big list of crazy amazing goals, and when you have a business, yeah, we need to think big. We need to have those big audacious goals that seem unrealistic. We can do it and get excited about it, but we need to accept our current situation. When we do accept our current situation, we are able to move forward with more ease, less stress, more grace, and more presence, and more gratitude. More, “Yes, here I am, I’m going to be here in this moment. And I’m not only going to accept it, I’m going to be freaking grateful for it.” Therefore, you can have this attitude of like, “Yes, life.”

What do you do when you are in that kind of attitude, that kind of thinking mind and feeling body, you create amazing work? You’re inspired, you could work, and work, and work, until you’re like, “Whoa! I need to look after my health and stop work.” I mean, that is when we do our best work, when we’re in that grateful, that grateful mindset. When it’s just like, yes, opportunities are all around, you’re more likely to put yourself out there. You’re less likely to listen to that fear voice. Your less likely to listen to all that self-doubt that we’re human right? We all have self-doubt and self-doubt and fear kills our business. When we’re more joyful, when we’re more grateful, when we accept more, when we are present, we step forward and we don’t care about what others might judge us by. We don’t care that we don’t have the best logo or the best blog post… We create the best we can with what we have, with our inspired self. And we put it out there, and know that the right people, the right customers, the right clients, the right whatever, will come our way. They’ll cross our paths; they’ll potentially buy our product. And then we can step forward again, and again, and again, and create that momentum.

Gratitude

The most important thing is gratitude, gratitude for all that you have right now. Because a lot of the time with goals, it’s like well, for example, it might be like, “Okay, I want to make $10,000 monthly recurring revenue.” And then you get that goal and then, “Great, I’m going to do $15,000, that’s what I’ve got to do now, because that’s what they said.” We get these ideas that it has to look a certain way.

When we welcome in gratitude, we welcome in the abundance mindset, which is that we have enough right now, that we have all that we need right now. If you can compare that to a lacking mindset, which is like, “I don’t have enough, I need to make more, more, more, more, more, more.” Then that’s a lacking mindset. When we think about lacking and abundance, what’s going to be welcomed in, with those two different mindsets?

If we’re in a lacking, then that will be that forever reaching, forever uphill battle of getting to the goal. You might reach it, but the journey there wasn’t so enjoyable. Then with the abundance mindset, it’s like, “Oh, thank you so much, I’m so grateful for this number,” or “I am so grateful for this income that has entered my bank account.”

How to Run a Business You Really Enjoy

Listen to Small Business Talk Episode 55 for the full episode and many more tips on how to bring the joy into your business and your life. Thank you Emma and Carla for bringing the SBT Community joy today.

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