Date Your Business

What if the secret to lasting success in your business had nothing to do with strategy, marketing, or hustle, and everything to do with relationship? In this episode, Jenna breaks down why the relationship you have with yourself and your business is the single most important foundation you can build. Using the analogy of a long-term romantic relationship, she explores what it really takes to stay committed, fall back in love, and keep showing up on the hard days.

In This Episode

• Why relationship is the #1 non-negotiable for a long and successful business career
• The dating analogy applied to your business: pre-dating, dating, and long-term commitment
• How to "re-date" your business when the passion fades
• Why failure is never really failure and what Jenna learned leaving her interior design degree halfway through
• Protecting your foundation from outside opinions, bad reviews, and hard days
• Simple, everyday ways to nurture your relationship with yourself

Key Takeaways

• Your relationship to yourself is the foundation of everything. It is non-negotiable.
• Treat your business like a long-term relationship: show up, make effort, and keep the love alive.
• When things feel stale, go back to the beginning. Ask: Why did I fall in love with this? What's my mission?
• Nothing on the outside can break down what you've built internally. Only you have that power.

"When you have this strong foundation and relationship to yourself and to your business, you can do anything."

"Be your own best friend. Take yourself out on dates. Have fun with this."

"That relationship that you build to yourself and to your business is unbreakable."

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Website: https://thedaringpress.com/

Transcript

The Number One Priority

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If you want to have a successful long career in your business, this is the number one thing to focus on. It is the relationship to yourself as number one priority, number one thing that you do all the time. This is a non-negotiable and also the relationship to your business. This is the best thing that you can do to have success. And it is that simple. It is like a relationship to somebody you love. If you write romance, it is like the relationship that you create in your books. That pre-dating phase, the dating phase, the long-term dating phase, it is all about dating you, yourself, as number one, and your business as well. The relationship that you have with your business and what you build is so important. Because on the days where things feel really hard, things aren't going the right way, coming up against contrast, coming up against edges, coming up against thoughts, and well, I should just give all this up. When you have this strong foundation and relationship to yourself and to your business, you can do anything. You can go through the darkest night of the soul and come out and be stronger than ever because you've built that foundation. You've built the foundation of your relationship to yourself, to your business, and nothing can bring that down. Not even a big bulldozer coming in and knocking it down. No. If you've been, I've been in a long-term relationship for 16 years, it's nearly 17 years this year, and a relationship isn't just oh, we're in a relationship, that's it. It is work every day. It is work every day that I get to learn and grow. And we've been together since we were 16. So we literally have grown up together and developed into different people, different interests, different things, and we have grown together in every day. And I will say this with hand on my heart, every day I fall even deeper in love with my partner, with my man, and it is a relationship that I'm committed to. 110% I am committed to this relationship, and that doesn't mean that every day is always good and happy and all of that. Like it is it is work, it is time, it is commitment. It is a relationship that we sometimes have fights, we sometimes have arguments, but at the end of the day, we learn and grow and always come back to one another and why we love each other so deeply, and we grow and we we make effort. We make effort to have conversations, make effort for open communication, to go out together, to do date nights, to be in each other's lives, be interested in one another. And you get where I'm going with this? This is like what we put into our business as well. That relationship to our business, how we grow it, the love, the passion, the drive that we have to our business, to what we do. It's like building those foundation blocks, and you can go back to the start all the time. Like go back, remember why you're doing this, why are you doing it, why do you love to do this? Is there desire still there? Maybe it's not, and that's okay. Because you can start again and build the foundations of this relationship. Go back and predate your business. Go on dates, dream, desire, have fun and see. Okay, we're just gonna have no attachments here and go back into that pre-dating, fall back in love with your business, desire. What do I want? What's my mission? Like, what am I really passionate about? What am I here to do? Ask the big questions, and you might not have the answer straight away, but just let it come through. It might come through when you're writing it out, it might come through later a voice, and it's like, or you might experience something and be like, oh, I actually really enjoy doing this. I I actually really love this, huh? And all these answers will drop in, and it's in that pre-like just going back to that, going back to dating your business again and finding out what you love, and then building on top of that, building on top of that, and building that relationship to and always going back to why you love doing this, and when you have that solid foundation, when you have that solid, I know what I'm here to do, my mission, my vision, my desires. Like, I love doing this. Like, if I didn't get paid to do this, I would still be doing this. It's like that gift that has been given to you from an early age or late age, like it doesn't even matter. But you once you've found it, there's no going back. You know what you're here to do. And if you don't, that's okay. Like the world is literally your oyster. There is so much out there, so much to experience, so much to do. Like, have fun. Don't put pressure on it of like I have to pick. You know, when you go to like it in school and you're picking your career for the going to university or college for LUS listeners, like you have to pick, oh, what am I gonna be? And what am I gonna study? And then you're studying it, and this happened to me like later on. I went back to university and I did a degree in interior design, and I thought that's what I was gonna be. And then I got halfway through it, and I'm like, I actually don't love this, like I actually don't enjoy this, and I knew I knew that I could have a really good career, like I was in the industry, I was working in the industry and I really loved it. But when I actually was in university and doing it, I was like, oh, I actually don't think that's for me anymore. And I was like, I didn't make that wrong, I didn't shame myself that I was a failure, that I didn't get the full bachelor degree, I got an associate degree because I'm like, oh, I don't want to even continue on and do the last modules of this. And it doesn't mean that I was a failure. It was like a step towards what I'm actually here to do and the impact I'm actually here to make in this lifetime. It was just not the right thing for me, and that's okay. It is nothing is ever a failure. Like failures are probably the best thing that we can go through because it teaches us to learn and grow and go further and deeper into actually what we want to do, how we want to live our life. It is like the best thing, like when things fail, it's not nothing to do with you, it's not about you or your abilities, or that you're not good enough. And I know those voices come through, and I know that that comes up. But when you've got yourself, when you're in that relationship with yourself, I've got you. I got you, and it's okay. It's like bestie vibes, right? It's like I'm your best friend. I'm in a relationship with you. I will do anything to make you feel like you are the best person in this entire world. And look at you, like you are talented, you're beautiful, you're amazing. Like when you're in your zone, when you are doing the thing that you absolutely love most, your eyes light up, your whole body, you are in it, you are in the zone, and my writers will know that when you're in the zone, when you're writing and your everything around you disappears, there's you, your book, your characters, their story, and you're in it. And everything disappears, and you're in the zone, time goes, and you're just fully in their story, and then you come back out, and someone was next to you trying to talk to you, or like things were happening, depending, like if you're in a cafe, like things are walking, people are walking around and things are happening, but you didn't even notice because you were just so fully immersed in your thing, and the everything disappeared, like that that feeling, that drive, that passion, you're in the zone. You are in the zone, and what some people like to call the god zone, and it doesn't mean that you're religious or believe in God or anything like that, they just call it the god zone, and it's like that when you're just having the time of your life, like, and that's what it's about, right? When we have this relationship with ourselves, and this relationship with our business, that no matter what happens, no matter what life throws at us, we've got that relationship to the to our business, and we won't let it down, and we'll learn and we'll grow and we'll develop, and what we did last week might not be what we do this week, and what we what we thought, or what we thought about a particular thing a month ago, a year ago is completely different today, and that's okay because that's growth. I even think about sometimes the stuff that I've recorded on my podcast, and I think about oh my god, I don't actually even believe that anymore. But in that time, in that moment, I believed that, and that's what I thought was true to myself and to my beliefs, and then the next day I'm grown, I'm remembering other stuff, I'm learning, I'm growing, and that's the point. Like, that's what we do here with our time. Isn't that true? So I want you to build this relationship with yourself first as a priority, be your own best friend, take yourself out on dates, date yourself, have fun with this, like honestly, just have fun, date yourself. What would it be like to take yourself out on a date? What do you want to do today? Do you want to go and buy a coffee and go for a walk down the beach, into the forest, into the bush, where wherever feels good for you? Or it might be you want to go to the spa, you want to go have a spa bath, or you want to go have a massage, or you want to go like it doesn't have to be big things, but it's just taking yourself on dates and like I actually desire to sit and listen to some music, or I desire to dance around the house, or I desire to go for a walk, or I desire to go get a coffee or take myself out for lunch, like whatever it is. Give yourself that. Say yes, date yourself because this foundation that you build and this relationship to yourself, then the relationship to your business and how you want to build this, this is your business. Like, how cool is that that you get to pick how this is designed, how you want to show up every single day, what you want to be doing. Like, you have that power, you have the keys to that. You have the keys to the car, baby. Let's go, jump in, let's go. Like you have the power, and that relationship that you build to yourself and to your business is unbreakable, it's an unbreakable bond. And why it's so important is when you have this relationship, nothing can break it down. Only you can. Only you can break it down if somebody comes and huffs and puffs and says something and it really hurts and it makes you feel this, and then you want to shut everything down and get the bulldozer out and knock your whole foundation down, like that's on you. And I know that sounds sometimes might sound a little harsh, but honestly, it's how you take things, it's how you perceive things, it's how you take on. Am I gonna let this one person ruin everything? Am I gonna let this one person ruin everything that I believe in, everything that I love, everything that I desire? No. When you've got that relationship to yourself and to your business, no, I wouldn't let it down. It's like saying, if you're in a relationship with somebody, it's like saying, Oh, would you go, would you break their heart and walk away because some in insignificant thing happened, like they burnt the toast or something? I don't know. They did something. Would you just walk out and be like, oh, I'm I'm breaking up. This is it, nah. That that that is just no go. I'm I'm not having that. Nah, can't burn the toast, that's it. I'm walking away, I'm done, that is it. Like, would you do that? It's like, would you walk away from everything that you love just because somebody said one thing or somebody left a review that doesn't that hurt you? It's like it doesn't matter. Like, honestly, other people's thoughts and things, like it has nothing to do with you. It's everything to do with them, whatever they're going through, and it doesn't make them wrong anything at all. It is literally how they feel, what they're going through in this time, in this moment, and that's okay. That is okay. It has nothing to do with you. You can walk away because you know your business, you're in relationship with it, and it matters more. And you go back to your mission, to your vision of your business and the desires, and you go back, and you know why you're here, and you move on, you get up level, and you play, and you have fun with it because that's what it's all about having fun with your business, taking everything so seriously, and being in a committed relationship and doing everything that you would to a loved one, and that's it. That is it.