What Michael Gerber told me about leaving a corporate job

As surreal as it feels at times I am in the middle of a six-week telesummit of my own creation and am having fabulous, inspiring conversations with very successful “corporate fugitives” as part of the Entrepreneurs Unplugged Telesummit I am producing with my friend Marcia Hoeck.

Our friendship, and this joint venture, developed quickly – which is fitting, as they say the “universe likes speed.”

So – what began as a casual conversation when we met in November, grew to an idea in mid December, which led to lining up speakers for an event we launched the first week of February.

Last week, I had the great honour of interviewing Michael Gerber, the world’s foremost small business guru. This one fascinating man has worked directly providing advice to hundreds of thousands of business owners over the past 35 years. I asked him if he noticed if people who left the corporate world to start a business face unique challenges. Here’s a bit of what he said:

 …their expectations are so completely inconsistent with what it’s truly going to require for them to do this thing on their own. They have resources that they’ve grown to expect that simply don’t exist when you go out on your own. So understand when you go out on your own in the cruel, cruel world, you suddenly come face to face with a completely different reality than the reality you experienced in your corporate world, in your corporate cubicle, in your corporate office, in your corporate environment where there was finance, where there was HR, where there was this, where there were budgets, and on and on and on and on and where there’s a political reality that shaped the kind of decisions that you made. 

Once you go out on your own, all of that’s gone. Every bit of it is gone. None of it is true. None of it exists and all of it has got to come from you. So when they leave the job, the corporate environment, that strange world that is so unlike this world, they are suddenly a stranger waking up in a strange world. And they have no idea how to do what they’re actually called to do…and you suddenly have to learn a whole new set of skills, capabilities but more important, you have to begin to come to a relationship with yourself in a completely new way.

He said so much more than that… which left me speechless at times! The truth of it is, we are ill equipped by academic and corporate backgrounds, to deal with the sheer and awesome power of what being a true entrepreneur is.

The fact is, we don’t allow ourselves the permission or capacity to truly explore and dream. And what’s more, most of us simply create a job of our own making, when what we secretly desire is SO much bigger.

So I leave with a quote from a very special person who is inspiring me to look at things from an entirely new perspective:

Sometimes the amount of my personal power scares me and I dim my light so I don’t scare others around me…but I think it’s time for those people to put on their sunglasses! – Kelly O’Neil UpLevel Strategies