My reflections on my first half year as a neuro-inclusion entrepreneur
Published on 27 June 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
It is almost a year since I learnt that my corporate role was redundant, and committed to the entrepreneurial venture that I’d been thinking about for a while: to help leadership improve their organizational innovation, talent management, and business performance by modifying their culture to become a true cognitive mix.
Six months into full-time focus on my new business, this double milestone seemed like the perfect chance to reflect on my journey so far. In this article I share five insights as a new solo business owner, and someone who has newly discovered their Ikigai.
Three key takeaways
Entrepreneurialism isn’t lonely.Or doesn’t have to be. People are lovely, supportive and enthusiastic, and want to help. You need to be proactive to create your team because they’re not conveniently made available to you, as in your corporate environment. It’s a great chance to meet people you otherwise wouldn’t get to know.
Entrepreneurial and corproate mindsets represent different ways of achieving the same goal: to provide as much value to clients as quickly as possible. Working alone allows you to be more informal in how you test and learn, and to make decisions more quickly. This wouldn’t work in a corporate environment where it is so important to take the time to communicate and keep the team aligned. It is wonderful to be able to work with both mindsets, and choose the right one for the task I’m focusing on.
As a solo entrepreneur, my service is myself. I need to be confident in making all of my experience available. It is critical to me to be authentic in what I am sharing with the people who choose to join my network. But the absence of any layers of protection between me and the client, as in corporate life, is scary. I realized that I needed to build my confidence in myself, and made myself into a behavioral change project that exemplifies how I work with clients.
It is almost a year since my manager told me that my role being made redundant: June 30th. It had mixed feelings about that news. I felt sad when I thought about the many positives of my 22 years at Elsevier: achievements, friendships, and travelling to so many different cultures around the world. And I also felt relieved that the last few years were over. I was starting to become cynical and frustrated, and I always seemed to be tired. It was an easy decision not to apply for another role, and to take the opportunity to work full-time on an idea I’d been nurturing.
The idea had jumped into my head while I was relaxing on holiday by a swimming pool in Tuscany. I had been deep-diving into inclusion programs, and experimenting with practical steps to drive neurodiversity inclusion, but I didn’t agree with some of the typical strategies. I was also struggling with organizations targeting each diversity dimension separately when there were obviously significant overlaps, and people usually identified with more than one dimension. In the Tuscan sun, the key elements of my approach fell into place. After a few minutes more, I knew that what I had was too impactful not to share beyond one organization.
I had just decided to become an entrepreneur. I would help leadership to improve their organizational innovation, talent management, and business performance by modifying their culture to become a true cognitive mix: inspired by the best practise to attract, empower, and engage neurodivergent talent. And a year ago, my manager handed me my business’ launch date.
I didn’t know what being an entrepreneur would mean for me personally. It wasn’t something I had ever expected to become. But I aim to live without regrets, and so I had to be true to myself and follow through with my idea. I re-energized, put the foundations in place in Q4 2023, and have been focused full time on my business since New Year.
It has been a tremendous first 6 months and here I share 5 insights about entrepreneurialism, people, and myself.
People are genuinely nice and want to help
When I ‘came out’ as the mother of an autistic child at Elsevier, I found the most wonderful community. People, many of whom I hadn’t known before, encouraged me to apply my knowledge and experience to improve neurodiversity inclusion, welcomed my perspective, and trusted me to lead them. The members of this community were vulnerable and often struggling, but courageous in their optimism, generous in sharing tips, and, above all, warm. They made a real and significant difference to me. In leaving Elsevier, the most difficult thing to step away from was the people.
I didn’t expect to find a community like that as an entrepreneur, but I was wrong. I need to put a bit more effort into building my community since it’s not conveniently collected in a corporate organization, but people still connect and share openly when you create the chance and reach out.
Your team is the same, but different
I often share content about how sustainable business success depends on attracting people with a mix of thinking styles and enabling them to work effectively together. I am aware of the apparent irony of saying this, as a one-woman business, but I do still have a team of people around me whom I can ask for help. My team now is not my direct reports, or people in the department I lead, or members of cross-functional project teams. It is not my manager, or my peers. It isn’t any of my sponsors.
My new team is members of that community of nice people who want to help. Some take the time to read my thought leadership content, and share their own experiences and insights. Other consultants share advice and introduce me to their contacts. People get on a call with me to brainstorm when I ask them to help me think something through. People invite me to contribute to their podcasts and projects, so I can share my message with their network. I have hired people to upskill me to be an entrepreneur (I highly recommend Jaime Gennaro) and to build an engaging, valuable website (you can’t do better than Merina Burda).
The way that I find my team is different now. But my team is still a group of wonderful people who have my back.
Lightbulb moment: the entrepreneurial and corporate mindsets are different
The focus on providing maximum value to clients as quickly as possible is the same whether you’re working as an entrepreneur or in a coporate role. Everything that I learnt about co-creating value, active listening, and reducing risk, holds, but I can apply it differently when I don’t need to bring a project team along.
I can test and learn more informally. In my corporate role, it was important to have some scripting to interactions so that they would be consistent across geographies, seniorities, and other segmentations, but now if I see a chance I just take it. This flexible approach provides me with more opportunities to learn, and the free-flow of the discussions often results in unexpected but highly relevant insights.
Decision making is also different. For my business, I only need to convince myself. Experimenting and iterating is more rapid because I don’t need to create a slide deck of comprehensive research to enable the associated discussion. I am still rigorous in how I test, and my decisions remain evidence-based, but now I can choose to pivot based on one input if it feels right.
This way of building business would be a disaster in a corporate environment, just as the corporate way is not suited to a start-up venture. For a corporate team, the comprehesive research, slide decks, and discussions are essential to keep everyone aligned and motivated.
My lightbulb moment is that now I can navigate between the 2 mindsets, choosing the one that is right for the goal I am working on.
You can learn to trust yourself
I encountered a couple of situations early in the year when I let people talk me out of something, and yet a few weeks later my testing and learning told me that I should have trusted my instinct. I realized that the work and personal challenges of the last few years had made me doubt myself, and that I needed to find a way to build my confidence so that I am always be authentic as I build my business.
One way of describing the value I provide is creating changes in behavior to deliver better outcomes. Learning to trust yourself is a change project like any other, and I put my change management skills into practise on myself. I looked for ways to have small successes to build my confidence: I am an experienced thought leader, so within that framework that is comfortable to me I tried out sharing views that were different from the norm. The result? People discussed, connected, and built on the comment. Wow!! And so I took another small step, and another. It is a conscious process, and I write the successes down to keep myself motivated and on track. It’s working.
It’s not about always being right, or everyone agreeing with me. It’s about having the confidence to be authentic in the views I am sharing so that the people who feel a connection and join my network trust that they are in safe, experienced hands and that I am not telling them anything I don’t fully believe myself.
My husband (possibly having just watched Spiderman) summarized this beautifully,
“With great flexibilty comes great responsibility. You need to find the right balance between having the balls to stick to your convictions, while also having the balls to pivot when needed.”
Everything until now brought me to here
My experience as a researcher and in my corporate life was varied. It could be difficult for others to make sense of when they were trying to understand it as a coherent whole. The reason was that I have never had a career plan. I was always true to my heart and followed what I was most interested in. My career journey doesn’t reveal a plan; it reflects my passions.
In building my business, all of this eclectic experience finally makes sense. I don’t need to try to force it into a story that makes sense to others because it forms a natural foundation for what I am building.
When I was leaving Elsevier, I wrote about three lessons learned and finished by referring to Ikigai, a Japanese framework to help us find meaning and purpose. When we find the sweet spot at the center of what we love, what we are good at, what the world needs, and what we can be paid for, then we find meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Six months into my new venture, I still think that this is where I am.
A final thought
I have achieved Ikigai before, and lost it. But now I know that although Ikigai is something that comes from within, that doesn’t mean it is a constant. You can learn to find it, and then have to safeguard and cherish it. Perhaps that is the ultimate lesson from my entirepreneurial journey to date.
I'm Lisa, and I help leaders create inclusive cultures that embrace all neurostyles. By empowering every team member to contribute at their best, while fostering mental well-being, you will boost innovation, retention, and talent acquisition—leading to enhanced business performance.
Click here to learn more about how my services can transform your team.
