Cornelia Shipley
Are you living the life you really want to live, or are you living the life you “should” be living? We all encounter so many shoulds in life. You should go to this college, you should study this, you should get that job, you should do whatever you can to make the most money, to buy the house you should have, and acquire most stuff to win the race on towards death. Right? Let’s slow down a minute and take a good hard look at our lives. What is really working and what do you really want? What gives you true fulfillment and what only gives you temporary satisfaction?
Cornelia Shipley had it all. She had the right job. She was climbing the right corporate ladder. And in the phrasing of the great Stephen Covey, it was even leaned up against the right building. Or so she thought. Until her mother was diagnosed with cancer and her father suffered a stroke in quick succession. As their only child, there was nowhere in the world Cornelia wanted to be more than with her parents as they worked through this difficult time in their collective family life.
The commute between her job in Albuquerque, NM and her family home in Detroit, MI was not an easy straight shot between airline hubs. It was hard enough that she quickly decided to negotiate an exit from the job she worked so hard to land so she could work for herself, on her own schedule and be able to support her family in the way that was true to her at her deepest core.
“The greatest gift you can give anyone is your presence.” For Cornelia this isn’t just a quotable quote, she lived by this when she moved back home to support her parents. She also lives this every day with her husband and the career she has designed.
Here are a few highlights from my conversation with Cornelia:
- Do you own a business or a job? Even if you think you are in the business of providing a service, you are actually in the business of marketing that service. You may also provide service delivery, but your real job is marketing and selling what you do. Most people who own a job don’t understand that and are scared of having marketing conversations.
- If you hate sales and wish someone else would do it for you (like me!), you can eventually outsource even that by hiring a business development manager and focus on your area of genius.
- Most entrepreneurs get their business from networking and getting in front of people. Stop hiding behind your computer! Get in front of people and have conversations with them.
- When you get to capacity in terms of using all of the hours you have to do the work you are doing, it is time to leverage your time. If you’re a copywriter, it’s time to bring on another copywriter under you to ease your load. Eventually you oversee a team of copywriters instead of doing the writing yourself.
- You need to understand your numbers in a way that drives your behavior.
- Does your business own you, or do you own it? If it owns you, then it is time to streamline your processes so it can exist independent of your input of time.
Cornelia once again is walking her talk in writing her second book by using a resource called 90minutebook.com. She is not an affiliate for this site, but has used it to write her second book.
Cornelia Shipley is the author of the International Best Seller Design Your Life: How to Create a Meaningful Life, Advance Your Career and Live Your Dreams and will release her second book Empowered: Strategies for Executive Level Success in 2017.