Today we have the pleasure to interview Dr Morgana McCabe Allan, business coach.
Dr McCabe Allan believes embracing femininity is crucial for success and wants to see a world where love-based entrepreneurship and collaborative development take centre stage. Her work with female entrepreneurs and business owners centres on helping them redesign their lives for the better so they can find a purpose that will not only bring them financial success but will create positive ripples around the world.
So far so good, right? We couldn’t really pick anyone better to kick off our Mistake Edit.
Have a look below now:
A mistake I am not going to repeat in 2022 is…
One mistake I’ll never make again is playing small in the beginning of a new business. I was heavily pregnant with baby number three when I founded Morgana McCabe Allan Ltd in 2018. The intention was that I was going to focus on working with busy mamas, because that was the reality I was living myself. With a PhD and years of business experience, I was leaving all my best skills on the table. It was lack-lustre for everyone, including me. Thankfully, I rapidly realised it was because I wasn’t using the best parts of myself. By the time my baby was a few months old I had completely pivoted to focus entirely on the areas where I have the greatest expertise. Since then, I’ve co-founded two more businesses, and brought the lesson to play big with me.
A mistake I was almost too glad to make is…
Founding two extra businesses at the same time in 2020 is a mistake I’m so glad I made. I say mistake, because it took a lot of time and energy away from my main business which was also growing rapidly. Financially, we would have been better off focusing on serving more people and scaling my existing business. However, it put us on the most incredible learning curve, that’s given me so much insight into the complexities of balancing the projects, teams and financial needs of multiple businesses simultaneously in a very tricky economy. Those lessons are priceless.
A mistake that led to a positive outcome was…
Trusting too quickly was the mistake in my business that had the hardest lessons for me, though it did have a positive outcome. I contracted an ads company based on their social media without doing due diligence. They had a very compelling ad and a great sales rep. It turned out they were little more than scam artists, and the cost stung a fair bit.
However, the real lesson wasn’t in the lost money, or even in the fact that they got my Facebook and Instagram pages permanently banned from ever running ads. It was in the way the interaction triggered pre-existing fear, shame and trauma. As those feelings resurfaced and I worked through them, they reminded me how unique my values and skills are, as someone who has studied how shame, fear and trauma become manifest in the world around us and are culturally transmitted through places, things, words, ideas and social constructs. I started talking more about that and as a result, my business grew significantly. It was a challenging lesson, but well worth the money it cost me.
