The thing I love the most about entrepreneurship is the freedom to create your own rules. Nobody is standing around with a clipboard marking off the hours you work or counting whether you’ve reached your four week quota of holidays. As an entrepreneur, you can decide to not work weekends. You can decide to spend two uninterrupted hours with your family each day. You can decide to only sell vegan food or not to sell vegan food. You can run a corporation of 23 employees without renting facilities. You really can do whatever you want. But this flexibility also leaves business owners with a challenge. What are you going to do with this freedom? Will you design a business for your own financial and personal gain, or will you build a business that also impacts the lives of others?

I like to ask small business owners I coach these three questions to consider. Firstly, what are your non-negotiables? What are the things that you are just not willing to compromise on? Secondly, what is your definition of success? Forget about what the world is telling you is “success”, what is success to you? And, lastly, I ask them what their motivation is for starting their own business.

Non-Negotiables

When I started my floristry business I decided that I wouldn’t do Saturday weddings. I am a Seventh-day Adventist and we observe the Sabbath from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. This naturally became my non-negotiable. I wanted to design a business that meant I didn’t have to work on Saturdays. When I was setting out to build my wedding business I didn’t realise the extent to which Saturday weddings were the big money- makers. I was turning down 50% of all the enquiries that were coming in. There were times when I really wondered whether I could create a profitable business in the wedding industry. But I was determined to make it work and through determination, I began to be blessed with clients who were spending between $6000 to $8000 on their flowers during the week. It was unheard of for week day weddings. It is really amazing what happens when you decide not to compromise on your values.

I challenge all entrepreneurs now to think about what their non-negotiables are. We so often get caught up in what we think is the “normal” way of running a business and we don’t step back and design our businesses to suit our own personal needs and values. Your non-negotiables may look very different to mine, but I think it’s a great idea to identify what’s important to you and design your business around these things. If you put your life and values first, then your business second, the blessings will come.

Your own definition of success

The other thing I find entrepreneurs doing is comparing their success against the success of others. I find this to be the most discouraging and debilitating practice in business. If we compare our success to others, we will always feel dissatisfied, unsuccessful and unfulfilled. I think the best thing an entrepreneur or business owner can do for their business is to write down their own definition of success and use this as their only measure of success.

When I started my wedding business, I had just come from a stressful, full-time teaching job. I quit my job and started a business with the intention to have more time in my schedule. I wanted to work less but still maintain my teaching wage. I had no idea what other people in the wedding industry were making and, quite frankly, I didn’t care. All I knew is that I only wanted to do two to four weddings a month, while replacing my teaching wage.

It didn’t take me long to realise that other wedding businesses were doing several weddings every weekend. They’d spend their entire weekend racing from one event to the next, to the next. I was really impressed with their efforts, but this was just not for me. Success to me was running a business I loved, while living a life I loved, all at the same time. Success was replacing my teaching wage and having time to volunteer for my church and contribute to my community. This may not be a success to someone else, but for me, this was enough. I put my blinders on, didn’t focus on what others were doing and strived towards my own definition of success.

A motivation that’s more than money

And that leads me to the last thing I think all entrepreneurs should consider: the motivation behind their business. For me, my motivation was time - to make an impact on the world. I knew that my business wouldn’t necessarily be the thing that made an impact on people’s lives, but I dreamt of a business that would give me time to volunteer for organisations that I believed were making an impact on the world. The motivation of time became the driving force behind why I did business. I truly believe that passion, not money, fuels drive and success. Money might be a driving force for a little while, but it won’t be lasting. True business satisfaction only comes when the ultimate outcome of your business is fulfilling that soul-deep desire to make a difference in the world. If you’re an entrepreneur, I challenge you to think about how the resources you produce in your business could make an impact on your community or the world at large. If you want a deeply satisfying business and life, the best thing you can do is to dig deep and figure out, not what you can get from your business, but what your business can give to the world. Then, let this deep desire become the driving force behind what you do. Building something from the ground up is hard. Entrepreneurship is hard. But I think the bottom line is this: it’s your business, so why not pave your own path? Use the freedom and flexibility that you have to not compromise on your values and to design a business that works in perfectly with your own lifestyle ambitions. You’re on this planet for a reason. Whatever your dream, whatever fires you up, whatever satisfies your deep desire for more, do that! You can do whatever you want, that is the beauty of entrepreneurship. But most importantly, why not create something that can ultimately make a difference in the lives of others? That’s where you’ll find true life and business satisfaction. Remember: your business, your rules!

Emma Lemke

Entrepreneur · Business Consultant · Florist

Emma is helping creatives build businesses that help them achieve their life dreams and make real money.

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Introducing Bec Peterson

Bec is a Lake Macquarie resident and mother of 2 and she shared with us her decision to eat better and take ownership of her family’s health. She loves experimenting in the kitchen with healthy raw deserts and today she shared with us 2 raw deserts - Apple Crumble and Cherry Ripes. The Change My Life team at the photo shoot found them delicious!

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I am a wife and a mother to a 6 year old girl and an 11 month old boy, and every other day I am a photographer.

Prior to children, I thought I was conscious of my health and actually considered myself to be a relatively healthy person. I lead a fairly active lifestyle and maintained enough physical fitness to lead scuba divers every weekend and swim 1-2kms a few times a week. However, I would require 10+ hours of sleep each night to feel refreshed and to be honest, my logic was, “If you ate less and exercised more, then that meant you were probably pretty healthy.” After my first child, I became more sedentary and slowly began to gain weight as I became less active.

What’s the most important thing for you?

The most important thing in my life is my family. First and foremost is my husband, because without him we could not have had our children, and with him, I hope to raise them to want to have a positive impact on the people and world around them.

So what started you on your health jouney?

My health journey began only 3 years ago. Maybe a year after having our daughter, my husband and I became so focussed on work that we got stuck in a really unhealthy cycle and we really let our physical and mental health deteriorate, but we never even noticed it happening. We often ordered take away because “That’s all we had time for,” and sadly we never even gave it a second thought. When we did actually have time to be together as a family, we would go to the movies and eat junk food, or stay home to watch movies and eat junk food because that’s all we had the energy for and we blamed our fatigue on a restless child and long working hours.

Often I would catch my husband snoring, even though he wasn’t sleeping or he would fall asleep mid-conversation. I knew he was unhealthy and I had no idea what to do about it. I would get so frustrated and yell at him to start exercising because he was gaining so much weight that I actually thought he would have a heart attack, or maybe not wake up one day (he would stop breathing for long periods while he was sleeping). I never thought that I could be at fault by preparing the wrong types of meals for him.

Then one day something just clicked and I decided to make the commitment to be a better wife and mother by taking care of my family’s health.

What are some of the daily challenges to eating healthy?

Strangely enough, I found the biggest challenge to eating healthy was the people we surrounded ourselves with. Like all things in life, when you surround yourself with like minded people, it’s easier to remain focused, but when you surround yourself with people who don’t hold the same values as you, it makes any change more challenging and you find it easy to make excuses and slip back into old habits.

Another challenge I found was brand influence. So many foods are branded as healthier options. I had no issues feeding my child a yoghurt that was packed with refined sugars each day, simply because the packaging made it look and sound healthy. It wasn’t until I learnt to read the ingredients that I realised just how toxic many packaged foods are.

What does it feel like to fuel your body with good healthy food?

It’s a feeling that can’t really be described until you’ve felt it for yourself. I thought I knew what it felt like to feel good, but in reality I had no idea! My family and I are not perfect and we still eat unhealthy from time to time, but my body really feels the repercussions. With a clean diet, I find I have so much more mental clarity and energy to work, play with my kids and also fit in a bit of regular exercise. My husband and I even ran the Raw Challenge and Spartan Race together which was something I never ever imagined we would do, especially since he was having issues recovering from the knee surgery he’d had 12 months prior to our lifestyle change! But the thing that surprised me the most was the fact that my daughter’s eczema finally cleared up and she actually began sleeping through the night. It was so amazing to see a kid that was used to eating packaged foods, actually enjoy spending time in the kitchen making and enjoying healthy, nutritious meals and treats.

How do you find the commitment to staying healthy?

There are still times when I get extremely busy between work and being a mother, so if I haven’t properly prepared meals and snacks for the week or for when we go away, it becomes rather easy to consume unhealthy foods simply because they are so quick, convenient and cheap. Although, these days it is easier to access a larger range of healthier options, it’s unfortunate that they are also generally so much more expensive, so being prepared really is key. Also sharing tasty, nutritious alternatives that I have made with my family and friends, and then watching them enjoy it really gives me great joy.

Have you ever been faced with a challenge that seemed impossible to overcome? No matter how much you tried to fix the problem, there just wasn’t any solutions? Well, life can be like that sometimes. Storms seem to come out of nowhere and all we can do is hope to survive, right? Well what if there was a solution, and anyone could access it? Would you be interested?

One of my favourite stories of Jesus is found in Mark 4:35-41. Jesus had been preaching all day. He is tired and weary from crowds pressing on Him. So He says to His disciples, “Let us cross over to the other side [of the sea].” The Bible says that as soon as the boat starts to move, Jesus fell asleep on a pillow. Then, without any warning, a great storm arose and threatened the life of the disciples. Now these guys were not your ordinary wimpy kind of guys, they were used to life at sea. After all they were fishermen, they had been on boats most of their lives.

The Sea of Galilee is known for its sudden violent storms. But on this particular day, this storm was beyond anything they had ever experienced before. They were way out of their comfort zone and didn’t know what to do. It’s safe to believe that they did everything they could in their own power to fight against this storm, but they were unsuccessful to gain control of the situation, until they called out to the Master, who was fast asleep on a pillow. When the Master heard their cry, He got up and said those three famous words, “Peace, Be Still!”

I love this story because it reminds me of the sudden storms that have come out of nowhere in my own life. I went through a divorce after seven years of a terrible marriage and I suddenly found myself as a single mom with a 3 year old son in a foreign country; without any support from the government, without a visa, without any qualifications, without any way to pay the bills, without a house to live in, without any food, and without a network of family to help. Just as the disciples in the storm, I tried to do everything I could to gain control of my life, but I was tossed back and forth, by the strength of the storm. And like the disciples, I also called out to Jesus to help me, and He heard my prayers and answered me. As soon as I called out to Jesus, I suddenly felt like I could handle the storm that was raging in my life, because I was now standing with the One who can speak to the storm.

I asked Jesus for a visa to stay in the country, and He answered by giving me a refugee visa, so that instead of paying $6000 dollars to become a permanent resident, I only paid $30 to become an Australian Citizen. I asked Jesus for a qualification to find work and He allowed me to study to become a Registered Nurse to minister to those who are weak and in need of a Saviour. I asked Jesus for a house and He sent an amazing friend named Sam who offered us a small caravan to live in at an affordable price, while she helped take care of my son as I studied. I asked Jesus for financial help with my school fees and he sent numerous, anonymous, donors to help cover the cost of college fees; out of a total of more than $30000 of tuition, I only paid a quarter of the total cost from the money I raised on my own. I asked Jesus for fuel to travel back and forth from school (which was over an hour drive each way) then one day when I ran out of fuel on the side of the freeway, He sent a man a few minutes later with 15 litres of fuel to help me get home safely. I was on my knees asking Jesus for food to help feed my son, and when I went to the front door there were bags of groceries waiting for me just outside. I fell down crying and thanking God for another miracle. For the next few years, while studying, I received a box of groceries every Friday afternoon until I graduated and could get my own. I asked Jesus for a network of friends to help me with my son while I studied during the day and worked at night and on the weekends, and several families offered to babysit. I asked Jesus for a man who would love me and my son, and a few years later He sent me an amazing husband who I have now been married to for over ten years and has blessed me with a beautiful daughter as well. I had no idea what was ahead when I was struggling through those storms, but Jesus knew.

Before Jesus crossed over to the other side of the lake, do you think He knew that a storm was coming? Of course He did. Yet, He still continued to go with the disciples into the approaching storm. Why would He do that? Because sometimes Jesus leads us to a place that is surrounded by deep struggles in order to teach us something. He takes us there to reveal to us that His power is greater than any storm we will ever come across.

I wish I could tell you my prayers were answered instantly whenever I asked. But the truth is, they were not. Jesus took me on a journey of faith, trust, and patience. Jesus knows that when we are up against the wind and the rain it is very hard to have faith. He knows that when we are struggling against the waves of life, it is difficult to trust Him fully. He knows that our patience is hindered when we are battling against the storm and struggling to survive. But let me assure you, that if you trust Jesus in the storm, you are guaranteed to come out of it a stronger survivor for Jesus.

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 9 verse 23, it says that “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up the cross daily, and follow me.” Many have mistaken the idea of following Jesus as being free from troubles and trials; of having a constant mountaintop experience without ever trudging through the valley. But the truth is quite the opposite. Following Jesus equals storms and struggles. But friends, I would rather be in the valleys with Jesus than on the mountaintops without Him.

What are the storms in your life? What have you been struggling with? Are you drowning in the depths of divorce? Are you barely afloat financially? Are you being pulled down by depression, fear, or anxiety? Are you struggling to navigate through the treacherous waters of guilt and shame? Are you being flooded with negative thoughts about how you don’t look like the people on magazine covers and feeling like you are not good enough? Are you sinking in loneliness, searching for someone to share your life with?

Call out to Jesus, He doesn’t only calm the physical seas, but He can also calm the seas within your mind and your heart. There are no mountains too high for Him to climb and no valleys too low for Him to reach. Don’t waste your time telling Jesus how big your storm is, tell your storm how big Jesus is. Put your faith and trust in the Master and let Him calm your raging storms, because He cares for you. Be still and know that He can give you peace.

Malvinas Penland

Mother, Wife, Follower of Jesus

“What’s happening in your life? What are the things that you’re actively pursuing with your time, energy and resources which aren’t actually going to bring you what it is you really want deep inside?”

In today’s world there are many different ways to measure success. One way of measuring success could be, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” or “He who climbs to the top of the corporate ladder is the most successful”. But actually very few people get to that point in their life and think, “Wow, I’ve accumulated great wealth, I have the respect of all my associates, look at me, I am the winner!” In actual fact on their death bed, they are thinking “Man, I wish I had spoken with my son more, I wish I had connected with my daughter, I wish I’d been able to leave a lasting legacy that isn’t with the stuff that I’ve accumulated, but with the people that I’ve invested in.”

Success is an interesting thing to try and measure and define for yourself. It is a good thing to reflect on because where you focus your energy is going to determine what future success you achieve. For instance if you say, “For me it’s getting the house, the car, the boat, the caravan, the budgie in the cage, the dog, the cat, the wife and the 3 kids” then that’s going to drive all of your actions towards fulfilling those things. Whereas if you understand that living in a spacious, modern house where everyone has plenty of room but don’t really see each other all day is not your idea of success; and if you let go of that dream and actually pursue a dream of relational closeness, then you are pursuing a very different idea of success and your actions will show that very clearly.

My wife’s family fondly remember a period of time when they lived together in a caravan for 2 years while they built their home. Those 2 years in a caravan caused relational closeness, because they were physically close to each other. The dream of the big house wasn’t the “thing” that would bring them close as a family, it was the unexpected time living in a caravan.

What’s happening in your life? What are the things that you’re actively pursuing with your time, energy and resources which aren’t actually going to bring you what it is you really want deep inside? Because here’s the thing, when you boil it down, what is it that you are really pushing for in life?

Is it riches? Meaning? Joy? Peace? Love? Or to experience the feeling of being known and understood? Or the warm intimacy and connection with someone special? Your honest answers to these questions and then aligning your actions to actively pursue these things is where your greatest happiness will come from.

The people I speak to, they’re not saying “How can I make more money so I can have more things?” They’re saying, “How can I make more money so that I can have more free time to connect with those that I really love?”

Money is just a gateway to relational closeness and connection with others. It gives us power to choose and freedom to act. And what if it wasn’t even about money? What if you could have that relational connectedness even without the stress of “do I have enough?” Because in Australia today, we have more than enough to survive and connect with others. It just comes down to the choices you make in pursuit of this thing that we call success.

Neil Thompson

Life Coach and Minister