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“Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup” is the first book to help professionals and entrepreneurs navigate the uncertain, post-pandemic world of work, while aligning personal purpose and professional advancement.

In this short-form series, Connie Steele shares tips from her #1 Amazon new release book, Building the Business of You. In this episode, Connie introduces the concept of “Fluidity,” the individual and operational mindset that is critical to building the business of you. What does it mean to be fluid? What are examples? And how can we use fluidity to create our career strategies?

Transcript

Connie Steele: Being fluid is a mindset and actually an approach. It's this ability to quickly shift and adapt between various States and roles. And at the end of the day, you're testing, learning, and adjusting to figure out what works because you know, the world that we're living in today.

It's in a state of constant change, you know, new things are happening all the time, which might cause you to recalibrate what you need when you need it. And why particularly given the state of pandemic, you know what certain now is uncertainty. So being able to dynamically flex off, down left, right, is what's ironically going to help you stay grounded.

So, you know, think about this shift from linearity to fluidity from this more siloed nature to being collaborative, which is the way that we're all working now. Being singularly threaded, which I think a lot of people don't want to be just singularly threaded, but you're now multi-threaded now it's not always just right and wrong things are relative, you know, and even think about from a personal perspective.

You know, my sons are, are 10 and 13 and the way they think is very different. But you know, if you think about their identity, they're biracial. So they are Chinese and they're white and they switch back and forth. You, you think about people's identity, you know non binary, gender neutral, gender fluid, you know, individuals want to define themselves in any way.

So this personal fluidity, you know, again, your gender race, your home role, your interests, or your professional fluidity, that job that you do, even the work environment that you're in, the tools that you use when you work, that's what it means to be fluid.

So how did this idea come about? Really, you know, I've, I've been in technology for most of my career and I've seen how technology has enabled a world of possibilities, where being able to learn new skills, try and simple new things, and even build a company, doesn't have the barriers and limitations that naturally occurred young 10 plus years ago.

So as a result, many young up and coming leaders, you know, don't even see boundaries and limits in terms of what they can do. It's no longer, or whereas in the world I grew up in, it was, or, but now it's, and, and I coupled that with general trends of products and services and even general way of life trends that I was seeing, like gender neutral toys, clothing, men's makeup, you know, this idea of constant optionality.

Again, where somebody works, what they do when they do it, how they do it, how they're defined, they don't want to have any limitations. Nobody really wants to be put in a box anymore. Everybody wants to bring their individualism and that breath of who they are to bear. And at the end of the day, Now it's about acquiring knowledge and experiences.

In addition to that, I was also seeing that many were doing side hustles, you know, some out of necessity, but some out of interest to fulfill a passion that they had or a burning desire to try something. And that also meant that has only been growing in nature. I see many people now parallel pathing, multiple roles, not just through one side hustle because.

Yeah, they're looking for something else, but it just fulfills a fundamental need. And now they can. And in fact, 63% of millennials have had a side hustle or have had one in the past based on a bank rate survey. And there's another study that had mentioned over 70% of Gen Zers have either started one or have been thinking about one. For the millennial generation, even Gen Zers, there is no delineation between work life and personal life. Because at the end of the day, they grew up with this personal and professional have always been intertwined.

So when you finally understand that, and they've been context switching and toggling, and I've had to toggle, you know, having to work in technology, that's just their state of mind. That's just the way of life. So there is an interesting, um, sort of rub and we're at an interesting inflection point where you have different mindsets, different styles of working.

Where it's really easy for those who are raised with technology to flex in every direction and try cause they can versus. Those who didn't necessarily have technology as a core foundation in the way that they worked and aren't as comfortable with being able to switch dynamically. But at the end of the day, you can't change demographic shifts.

You can't change time. So. In 10 years, it's going to be really different. And so the sooner you can understand what's happening, why it's happening, who is going to be driving those changes and why they're driving those changes the easier it will be for you to make that adjustment and realize that being fluid is not a bad thing.

And actually it's going to be table stakes.

So how have I been fluid? Well, professionally having worked in the technology space for much of my career, I had to learn to immediately shift course and take action. Given this, given that speed to market was critical. So I had to be fluid. I had to go from one situation to immediately another because of the circumstances of the business that we were in.

So my early years at AOL, which is where I started in technology taught me to build that skill and quickly adapt because I didn't have a choice, but now I'm a parent and you inevitably have to be fluid because your personal and professional life is intertwined. And now even more so in the pandemic.

But before the pandemic for me, I chose to do my own consulting business. So I had worked from home. I have been working from home. And so inevitably my work environment is also my home environment and your context switching every day between project managing my family's life and project managing my own professional life is something that I just have to do, uh, and even, you know, I think for many, your phone personal professional are intertwined. They're mixed. So you have to be switching, um, at any point in time. So now, and, and as anyone knows, um, who has kids, you know? Yeah. In general.

So as anyone for anyone who has children you know that it's incredibly unpredictable. You have to learn to go with the flow because what seems okay today can completely change by the minute by the hour. And you don't have the level of control that you used to. So, you know, from that perspective, I've had to almost adjust to a whole new level of fluidity.

First starting with a professional environment, then shifting to personnel situations, um, particularly being a parent. And then now during this pandemic, all that wrapped together, uh, is really how I've had to learn to be more fluid than it was before. And so why is this concept so important to leaders, to young professionals, to companies?

Well, you know, first for leaders, it's important to understand this concept because. Your workers of today and tomorrow, aren't going to give their full selves to work. If not passionate about what it is they do. And so you have to adjust to what their individual needs are. The end of the day, companies are made up of people.

And if you don't fundamentally understand what their desires and interests and goals are and align that to the goals of the company, then it's gonna be challenging for you to be able to create that traction. So knowing fluidity is sort of a broader dynamic that's happening, unto itself as a company to have to be fluid.

And so the way the book helps you be more fluid it's, it's helping you think and do in a more dynamic fashion. It's now all about realizing that life is in a constant beta. And you shouldn't be afraid to try and even fail because through failure, that's when you're actually going to learn the most. And what it is, it's about breaking down that big idea or task or initiative that's giving you the most fear or, or something that you really want to pursue.

Maybe it doesn't give you fear, but it's just, it's a big order. You want to break it down into its smallest parts, and then you tackle it little by little to build up your confidence, but it also helps you want to build that muscle of problem solving so that you can context switch more easily, more dynamically and not be paralyzed by the changes at home and at work that will inevitably come.

Resources

• Connect with Connie on LinkedIn 

• Get Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup

• Order the book on Amazon

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