Imagine if you could build your business doing only what feels good to you, all the time. No more spending countless hours learning how to code, trying to become Instagram famous, hacking the SEO algorithm, or self-bookkeeping. Sound impossible?
Meet 28-year-old Jordan Gray, a relationship expert with five best-selling books on Amazon and an audience of over 20 million readers. He’s achieved all this in the three years since launching his personal website.
Gray’s secret to success is what I call the “Feel-Good Business Model,” the simple idea of operating your business exclusively around your core strengths–the things you enjoy doing and do well.
Gray details the Feel-Good approach to his business on this week’s podcast episode, “Why Being 100% Yourself is the #1 Life & Business Hack.”
On his entrepreneurial path, Gray witnessed many of his peers striving to adhere to the “correct method” for success. They believed in a “tried and true” path that involved doing things they didn’t actually want to do, but believed they had to do, in order to make it.
Gray shares, “There are so many things that were constantly being offered up to me, people saying you have to know this, you have to do this, you have to be at least self-sufficient in these things, etc.”
With so much advice out there, and the rise of a $9 billion coaching industry, it is easy to get overwhelmed in sorting information. Focusing on the next “big hit tactic” or the newest social media channel fosters “shiny object syndrome,” a type of thinking that can distract you from your own organic process, while wasting time and defeating passion.
Distinguishing your own set of criteria for what feels good to you and only spending time on the things that are aligned with your core strengths is a key to being successful.
For Gray, that criteria is a unique blend of “stubbornness and ignorance.” Stubbornness to only do what brings him the most joy, and ignorance to everything else. Gray shares, “There was a very conscious shrugging off of all the things that didn’t speak to me… For me, writing’s really easy, coaching’s really easy, so from day one I was like ‘What am I really good at?’ How do I basically only do that and stay as ignorant as possible about everything else that aren’t my core gifts?”
Once you start operating from this new “Feel-Good” criteria you can more easily say no to the things that don’t fit inside it. As Gray goes on to say, “I don’t want to learn how to point a domain name, or set up my WordPress site, or be my own bookkeeper. I don’t even consult, or send out polls and go ‘Hey, what do you guys want to hear about now?’”
His commitment to honoring what felt true for him in each moment helped him generate enough revenue to outsource the things he didn’t enjoy doing, so that he could continue to focus energy into his gifts and profit from what he loved.
With an audience of 20 million readers only three years since he started, Gray’s Feel-Good business model has undoubtedly worked out for him. Consider these three steps to implement the Feel-Good business model into your own life:
1. Hone in on your gifts. Your strengths are the access point to your contribution to the world. Identify what your top three gifts are and stick to them. You were born to do them, so be stubborn if you have to and financial success will follow.
2. Be authentic and you will attract the right group to support your mission. As Gray says, “if you are only willing to show up at 20%, then the best you can do is attract someone that is 20% aligned with you.” If you are willing to show up at 100%, even when it is uncomfortable, stretching, or scary, then you will be able to broadcast all of yourself to the world and attract a full match in line with your desire and intention.
3. Integrate your personal and professional lives. Life is no longer meant to be compartmentalized with strict lines between the personal and professional. The division between being “on/off work” is melting away as we are moving into greater autonomy with our self-expression. Allow yourself to bring play into your work life, and you will enjoy what you are doing and won’t feel burned out.
This article was originally published on Forbes