“In every aspect of our lives, we are always asking ourselves, How am I of value? What is my worth? Yet I believe that worthiness is our birthright.” Oprah Winfrey

Breathe. One in. One out. Just breathe.

I stand on the precipice of everything I want. My desire for a purposeful, passion filled life, creating projects that are driven in social enterprise, grounded in solid business principals & extremely profitable. Planet, people, profits. Serving my mortgage clients in a way that takes care of them, building solutions that solve problems, strategizing financial structures & helping them build wealth.

Running both companies parallel & intertwined, both supporting & feeding the other. Building the right team of strong, committed individuals that serve a greater vision.

I was put on this planet to lead. Have been bossy since the day I was born. Can’t stand to be told what to do. Makes my skin crawl to hear someone tell me it can’t be done that way. See possibility everywhere, strategy everywhere, solutions everywhere. Build business models in my sleep.

So why do I feel like I’m standing at the precipice….but I’ve got my hand on the grenade? Isn’t this everything I wanted?

Worthiness is a funny thing. When does it get beaten out of us?

Who knows what stories we all have about whatever our pasts are, really in the end they don’t matter. What happens happens, it is what it is – it’s what we make it mean about ourselves that does the real damage. And we carry that damage with us, sometimes for our entire lives.

I have my hand on the grenade because everything I’ve worked so hard for is happening, is manifesting, after years of struggle & successes followed by failures & getting up & dusting off & going again & the hardest most arduous journey of my lifetime. Here it is. The next level. And I can almost not stand my own success.

It terrifies me. It rests above the pit of I’m-not-worth-it-ness that is hidden deep below. Will everyone see how unworthy I am if I step into the light?

How can I let that amount of love & abundance & connection into my heart & still stay in control? I can’t. My vulnerability is triggered, my terror to let it all in & then suffer loss, have my heart broken in two, have my dreams ripped to shreds & chewed up & spit back to me – I’m not sure I could take it. I’m not sure I would survive. Need to stay guarded, stay strong, stay impenetrable. And yet I know that I can’t either.

How can I possibly let myself receive the immensity, the vastness, the greatness, the awesomeness of everything my heart desires? Aren’t I supposed to struggle, aren’t dreams fulfilled for fairy tales & fiction & not for me?

Just breathe. Time to call in my support systems, get on the phone with my mentors. Give myself some time to be nurtured & filled up & take care of me. Gently now. Slowly. It might take a few days, in fact it has been almost a week of this energy that I haven’t broken free of. But I can’t rush it, if I do, the grenade drops.

Breathe in. Breathe out. What’s the purpose again? Why am I doing all of this again? Connect with the purpose – remember what it’s all for Krystine. For the family you want to build, for the life you want to live, for the God-given purpose you are here to fulfill. Breathe it in. Visualize. Connect. Calm…

Now, slowly. Ever…so…slowly. Put the pin back in. Gently now. Put it down.

Krystine McInnes is an accredited mortgage professional with over 10 years in the mortgage industry & a background in the legal field. She also stewards the vision for numerous boutique development projects between the Okanagan & Vancouver, British Columbia. Find more on her here: www.krystinemcinnes.ca

“I am a woman in process. I try to take every conflict, every experience, & learn from it. Life is never dull.” Oprah Winfrey.

Leadership skill: execution. It’s great to have a great idea, but if you don’t bring it across the line into being, it stays right there in idea-ville, where eventually it coughs & dies.  An idea is really just the first 10%, the rest is building team, solving problems, managing psychology & psyche & execution.

How many tries & fails? How many almosts but not quites? How many stories have you heard from friends or relatives or associates that tell you about their “great idea” that is “sure to make millions”.

Whenever I hear those ideas,that’s usually my queue to run.  Or turn on my polite & demure hat where I play stupid for 15 of the longest minutes of my life to listen, while every fibre of my being wants to poke bazooka sized holes in this idiotic rendition of an idea I’m painstakingly listening to.

The truth is, most people have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, what it takes to bring the seed through to fruition or how much they will be tested, trialed, chewed up & spit out in the process.  I definitely know I would have never signed up had I had any full knowledge of what the ride was going to look like.  Words like perseverance, iron stomach, tenacity, determination, responsibility, commitment, ownership – they don’t even begin to describe it.

Today, of all days, I have been tested in my development company on one of our projects.  Two deals live, then collapsed.  Two important deals.  Two extremely important deals. Two, holy bananas thank God these deals came through because I was feeling on my last legs to stand here, have collapsed.  And I’m back at the beginning, further behind then when I started no answers, no new deals in sight, no solution. Scared. Alone. Uncertain of what’s next.

It’s easy to shout hurrah when you’re winning, but what about when what shows up is a loss, followed by another loss & another & another, until you feel so beaten up you’re not sure you can stand again? In my experience, this is really where the rubber meets the pavement in creating what you want to create.  And it’s not easy.

My frightened parts, emotionally immature self wants to vacate. Push the eject button, go on a 3 day bender, go hang out in pity party-ville, ignore the pink elephant in the room charging for me, pretend it’s all ok, sink down into a depression & give up because it’s just too hard.  And I won’t lie, I’m certain I spent quite a bit of time there for at least a day or 2, sometimes you just need a little permission to go on a pity party….as long as it has an expiry…

My empowered feminine self is quieter today, rocked a little, uncertain a lot. But as my pity party timeline expires (12am Sunday – clock runs out Krystine, pick up bootstraps now), I slowly start to hear her voice again.  Time to get it done. I don’t know the answer, I don’t have a solution, I don’t even really know where to start, I’m overwhelmed & understaffed, but I will pick up my ownership, my responsibility, my clarity, my supports, I will ask for help, I will seek out solutions & I will engage my team to help me find answers & get results.  I’ll go deep in my psyche & transform what need be, I won’t be afraid to face myself, even if what I see is ugly & dark & hard to look at.  I will move forward, I will summon my Warrior Goddess to bring these battled & bruised & weakened soldiers across the line & cry tears of joy when we do…or I will die trying.

Maybe that’s a little over dramatic, but for those who have faced the harsh realities of their own shortcomings, their own failures, their own compromised integrity or biggest fears, they’ll know it’s not far from truth.

No one tells you that success is an inner game first, that having a great idea is really the easy part, that, for some of us, crossing the line in succeeding will mean confronting the darkest parts of our nature, our deepest fears & insecurities, again & again & again. Most don’t survive.  This is where ideas die on the vine.  Do you really have what it takes?

Krystine McInnes is an accredited mortgage professional with over 10 years in the mortgage industry & a background in the legal field. She also stewards the vision for numerous boutique development projects between the Okanagan & Vancouver, British Columbia. Find more on her here: www.krystinemcinnes.ca

Leadership Skill – Building team

“I’ve learned that you can’t have everything and do everything at the same time.”
Oprah Winfrey

Leadership skill – Building team.  Strategically hiring the right talent to support the vision.

One of my worst qualities as a business leader is my emotional hanging-on-ness.  My gut says I need to fire, my business mind says it’s not aligned, I can’t get a result there and if I don’t make a change, it’s going to sink me.  But my compassionate, bit of a martyr heart always has trouble letting them go.  Then, when inevitably I have to because they’re failing & that failure is now compromising the project success or the deal success…always, without fail, some emotional backfire.  Hire an emotional hanger-on who can’t produce results, get a childish, entitled, response when they’re fired for that inability.  Right.  Don’t I know better by now?  How many projects have I built, multi-millions in mortgage deals have I funded & I’m still learning this one.  Ugh….this might have some roots – time to get the mirror up and see where it is inside of me that I create this kind of gross emotional hanging-on-ness, so I can transform it fully.  Men are so much better at this – they’ll get in a fist fight at the boardroom table & be chumming it up over beers on the golf course afterwards.  I admire men for that – business is business, cut & dry, nothing personal.

Ok, focus, back to team – if they don’t support where I want to go next & I can’t support them to get the results, then they need to be let go.  Write that down Krystine, write it down in big, black ink, maybe tape it to your forehead for a while.

So what do I see today in my evolution of Oprah Winfrey-inizing my business model?  My entire team is wrong.  Some of them have been fading away over the last while, some more abruptly.  But what I became acutely aware of is that I’ve hired based on emotional dependence & not results orientation & that the team I have really don’t support me & that makes everything feel heavy.  And, the deeper truth, there is absolutely no way I can create what I want to create unless my team are solid, strong, results oriented & willing to lay down on the tracks for the success of the project, the deal or the client.  It is impossible for me to hold it all on my own, I need other pillars and I need them fast.

Good managers, good contractors produce results they are responsible for.  And you hire them to support the results you want to produce.  No results – no position.  No excuses or explanations or people who just want a pay cheque and to send me a bill, regardless of whether we’re successful.  I need alignment and movement forward, not co-dependence.  Part of the learning curve of evolving my business includes facing some hard truths about my leadership qualities & dealing with some difficult decisions moving forward to the next level.

So What Would Oprah Do?  Well, I don’t want to speak for the gal, but I think that she’d forgive herself for those mistakes, pick up her bootstraps & make the hard decisions because they are the right decisions.  The vision is what comes above all else – and if I don’t make these changes, the vision is compromised.  If I don’t fire fast, the deals collapse.

New team – starting at the baseline & working my way up.  Hire right.  Fire faster.  It all feels so entirely overwhelming.  So…many…changes.  New accountant, new lawyer, new bookkeeper, new support staff for mortgage processing, new project managers, new engineers, new marketing, new sales team, new everything….deep breath.  Where’s the wine?

Ok, state change time – where’s my glass half-full-ness?  Let’s get this checked in before I pass out from overwhelm.  Well I do have at least a few in the team who are amazing champions and supporters and get the job done, my architect is brilliant, I have a new sales team that is powerful and results oriented, a new mortgage processing division that still needs some support, but it’s getting better every day and every day I’m meeting more and more contacts and my power of discernment is getting more refined and I’m willing to have the tough conversations, even when they’re uncomfortable (especially when they’re uncomfortable), even when I feel like it’s all falling apart and I don’t know what to do.  The black & white, yes or no is clearer.  Ok, a little light in a seemingly endlessly dark tunnel, maybe we can put the wine away for now……well, since it’s already opened….

 

Krystine McInnes is an accredited mortgage professional with over 10 years in the mortgage industry.  She also stewards the vision for numerous boutique development projects between the Okanagan & Vancouver, British Columbia.  Find more on her here: http://www.didyouknowmortgage.ca