Declare justice for your online business workflow.

tingey-injury-law-firm-yCdPU73kGSc-unsplash(1)

It’s about time, y’all! Legally Blonde is this week’s analogy for online entrepreneurship. No objections!

My favorite stories are the ones about the underdogs. The people who get typecast into some sort of role and they go through a hero’s journey to break free from the mold that other people have placed them into. They end up being the only ones who can see the creative solution. They change the way other people function in the world, too.

Meet Elle Woods. Sorority President. Fashion major. Groomed all the way down to her eyeballs. “Not serious.” Arm candy. Expected to fulfill a specific role for everyone else.

And you know what? She’s believed everyone else’s adjectives & nouns her whole life. It takes losing something she thought she wanted (hello, failed launches 🤦🏻‍♀️) to force her to change how she interacts with the world.

I love Legally Blonde because it’s about a mindset makeover and I feel like this is what we go through in entrepreneurship. For Elle, this journey is so much less about the actual Harvard law degree and so much more about the ability to believe in herself and… pay attention here… commit to her journey, all the way to the finish line.

Does it mean she has it easy? Oh, hellz no! There are plenty of times that Elle wants to give up and she has people around her to encourage her to do what she know she must do. Elle Woods is no lone wolf. She has a support system.

But change is hard. I feel you, Boo. 😘

People make fun of her. They ostracize her. Just because you were Sorority President on the West Coast, it does not auto-magically gift you the members only pass on the East Coast. Capiche?

You have to earn your spot and this is something so many entrepreneurs forget about. Forgetting this simple law of the entrepreneurial universe creates so much head trash and you fall down a slippery slope, feeling like you are owed something. No, you’re not owed one darn thing. Except to yourself. You owe yourself a commitment to work effectively on your biz baby.

One of Elle’s most endearing qualities is that she never expects someone else to do the work for her. She studies for her own LSATs. She qualifies through her own efforts. She doesn’t cheat. She has a generous spirit for others, even when they’re mean to her. She does The Work. Her character might be unrealistically naïve and she starts out feeling petty about a Harry Winston diamond on someone else’s bony, unpolished finger… but she doesn’t stay in that mindset.

I meet a lot of people in the online biz world and there’s a very wide spectrum of grit. Some call it “hustle” and some call it “perseverance.” I call it The Work. No one gets a free pass out of doing The Work. Not even a privileged blonde fashion major like Elle Woods.

Elle also believes in community over competition, which is a theme that has become especially near & dear to my heart during The Age of Corona. She forgives people who judged her harshly. She helps people who don’t have resources to empower themselves. She still loves the people in her life who haven’t woken up to their full potential yet. And she doesn’t judge others for their circumstances. She respects people and doesn’t gossip or reveal their secrets that aren’t hers to tell.

In the end, it’s not because the world owes her something that she gets to define her career by knowing about beauty routines and saving her client from revealing an embarrassing alibi. No, it’s because Elle has done The Work. She still moves forward, even when she’s learning to stretch and grow in to new and bigger roles in her life. She learns that she’s pretty AND she’s smart. Not one or the other. She can be both. Yes, AND. This is starting to sound like Miss Congeniality. 🤔

What Elle is doing is that she’s learning a process. In this case, a legal process. She already knows about beauty care processes. And this is something we must do as entrepreneurs. We must learn the care & maintenance for a beautiful business. It’s WORK, y’all.

Elle Woods doesn’t roll out of bed looking fabulous, she knows you have to go to the salon and keep up your regular appointments. She also knows you don’t wash you hair within 24 hours of a perm or you lose your curls… because you’ve deactivated the ammonium thioglycolate. Duh.