ENTRETUDE

Living Your Life With Entretude: Action Step One – Know Your Core Skills And Tallents

The Eight Elements of Entretude help define the concept and link it to proven elements of successful entrepreneurship.  In the next series of blogs, I’ll introduce the three action steps to living your life with Entretude.  With each step, you’ll see how applying principles of successful entrepreneurship will ensure success for you too.

Entrepreneurship Principle 1 – Know what you and your management/ownership team do well based on its core skills and talents.

Entretude Step 1 – Use insight and awareness to know the things you do well and how they helped you develop  your core skills and talents, what you are really good at.

When launching an enterprise, assembling a team with a core set of skills and talents, and knowing how these skills and talents fit together is critical. You know what your team is good at by looking at what they’ve done successfully—either as individuals or as part of another team. Where the team has excelled indicates the business’s best opportunity for success.

The same holds true for you when you’re thinking and acting with Entretude. As a team of one, you’ve got to know the core set of skills and talents that have helped you do a variety of things well in your professional and personal life. When we think about our successes, most of us think about tasks or specific activities. Our linear thinking takes us from one task to the next and we evaluate our performance based on each separate task. I challenge you to see beyond your individual accomplishments—see what your accomplishments have in common. What is the common thread? Do you have the ability to connect with just about anyone on just about anything? Your common thread could be your ability to communicate persuasively and develop empathy with others quickly. Can you bring order to chaos? Is organization your innate skill?  Do you see the forest while everyone else is still looking at the trees? Are you a visionary?

“Past is prologue.”—William Shakespeare

When you know the core skills and talents you successfully use over and over again, you’ll know what you’re good at. What you do well is the successful application of what you’re good at. This is the foundation for an entrepreneurial life.  So, what are you good at?  Use the concepts of Entretude to find out.

Entretude Element II: STYLE

Style, or the way you work best, makes your personal and professional insight much more powerful and useful. Style is defined as the way you perform a task that is distinct, and is not directly related to the task itself. In other words, how you do things, not the things you do. Just as a business needs to be in the right market to be successful, you have to be in the right environment to be comfortable, productive and successful. That’s why style is a critically important element of thinking with Entretude. You’ve got to know what you’re good at, the things you have done well and the right environment for your personal and professional success. When you know all of these, you start to see professional and personal opportunities in terms of how well they play to your criteria for success. You’re able to stay focused on goals and objectives that are your best path to success in every part of your life.

The Eight Elements of Entretude

A lot has changed in our lifetime and there’s more change ahead. We came of age when you got an education with a certain career in mind, did that job and later retired. Now that notion of work and life is obsolete and the workplace will never be like that again, not for us and not for the generations to follow. The concept of retirement is no longer about when you stop working; it’s what you plan to do next. Success is now self-defined. You can’t expect someone else to tell you when or if you’re successful.

We’re experiencing a Cultural Change worldwide—what I call a “C-Change”^©. This C-Change is not something to be feared—our generation has never been one to back down from a challenge—it’s an opportunity for us to brand our future the same way we did our past. As Boomers, we’ve been entrepreneurial in our approach to everything from the beginning, and in our second act, in the midst of this C-Change, success and life require us to keep that mindset, with a little more attitude.

That is the essence of Entretude: Entrepreneurship combined with attitude. This way of thinking about life and work uses the principles of successful entrepreneurship to inform and transform your personal and professional life from reactive and protective, to proactive and empowered. Entretude is not a road map, a manual or a miracle. Entretude is a way of thinking that facilitates a personal process. This process challenges you to make assertive, conscious decisions about your future so you can challenge the usual approach to work and life, to better fit a world where the definitions of life and work have forever changed. It will propel you ahead of the crowd.

To put structure to this idea, I’ve developed eight elements that help you approach life with Entretude. The elements are listed below and are explored in more detail later. I’ve taken tested and true characteristics of entrepreneurial success and crafted them into specific elements that shape the way you approach the opportunities that will continue to present themselves in life. Entretude is not about the mechanics of starting a business; it is about getting the most out of what could be the best years of your life—while enjoying the process.

·                              You could sit back and let life wash over you.

·                              You could let the next generation put you out to pasture.

·                              You could let the media define who you are or ignore you altogether.

But that’s never been our style. We’re Boomers, the greatest repository of knowledge and experience in the world, and our continued success requires life with an entrepreneurial attitude. It requires Entretude.

THE ELEMENTS OF ENTRETUDE

·               Insight

·               Style

·               Focus

·               Awareness

·               Collaboration

·               Innovation

·               Consistency

·               Responsibility