Love Consciousness in Business, with Elena Herdieckerhoff

Love Consciousness in Business

Elena Herdieckerhoff is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and consciousness coach. This is her story of how as a highly sensitive person, she founded multiple successful businesses.

From Service Based to Product Based and Back Again

Elena created her first business in Paris when she was 25. “I was working in HR as a headhunter. Many expats kept coming to me and asked how I managed to get such a great job as an expat. So I decided to switch sides of the table from headhunter to coach. I created this business out of a need I saw, and it went really well.”

Elena ran her first business for four years. During that time, she also co-founded an environmental business promoting wind energy in France. However, her big leap came when she decided to start another business in skin care. “I decided to launch this business together with a friend in Switzerland. There was a lot of upfront investment involved, and the risk was much higher. I would say the sleepless nights in a product-based business versus a service-based business basically are double.”

She decided to launch with just one product. “I’ve always been a fan of doing one thing well and doing it big. Most people in the skincare industry told me that I needed to launch my product with a range of other products, but I was interested in offering something iconic. I wanted to launch an iconic product to establish myself in this market space for offering one thing that does its job amazingly well.”

Elena was in the skincare business for five years before she moved back to Munich where she’s originally from and shifted gears. “I learned a tremendous amount about entrepreneurship working in the product based world, but it was also incredibly challenging to get it right. In the end, running a day-to-day cosmetic business wasn’t my pride and joy, so I decided to go back to having a service based business.”

Helping Highly Sensitive Entrepreneurs

That was seven years ago. ELena started to build up her coaching business, creating online courses and doing one-on-one coaching. “I moved into business coaching because so many people kept asking me how as a very sensitive person, I managed to become successful. I wanted to help other sensitive entrepreneurs succeed.”

Elena openly describes herself as a highly sensitive person, or HSP. “I think it's like with every label, you can use it to your advantage or disadvantage depending on if you're looking for an excuse to where you are or you're looking for a springboard to where you want to go. It's a genetic trait, you can't choose to have or not have it, and it’s your choice if you look on the sunny or the shadowy side of that trait. I just made it my mission to empower people to look at the sunny side because there is more than enough good stuff in being highly sensitive and more than enough that you can use to your advantage for entrepreneurship.”

Within that context of showing sensitive entrepreneurs that they’re here to make a difference, Elena did her first TEDx talk, which led to the idea for her next business.

Mistakes Are Part of the Journey

High Credibility
For her TEDx business, she came up with a whole new approach. “I started to personally reach out to my peers. I pre-selected possible candidates who already had a level of expertise that would work for the TEDx stage. My assistant contacted them and invited them to connect with us. This very old-school way of doing business has worked very well for me. I don't do email marketing or use Facebook, and I don't do webinars. I don’t do 90% of the things I used to do, and it feels incredibly light.”

A lot of people want to give TEDx talks. Elena tapped into an existing need that was there before she created her business. “Additionally, I have the credibility of my own talk. I have a high level of expertise that I can easily prove. Everyone can check it online, they can look at my talk right away. Like this, a high level of rust is built right away.”

From Fear to Love

At this point, Elena has a successful speaker coaching business, but as a true serial entrepreneur, she’s already tapping her toes into a new direction. “My TEDx business is my main squeeze, my main love. I’m helping wonderful people share wonderful messages. But I shouldn’t forget that I too still have messages to share. So I’m expanding my business and want to spend 10% of my time helping leaders step into the frequency of love consciousness.”

Love consciousness, Elena explains, is an awareness of the multidimensionality of our being. “It's an awareness that everything is energy and that everything is connected to each other. As a humanity, we have a consciousness where we all contribute our energy, our frequency to.”

The dominant frequency right now is fear, she says. “I think to move to our next level as human beings, we need to shift that lens from fear to love. In my opinion, love is truly the only frequency that has the answers that we're looking for. I love this quote by Einstein who said, ‘We cannot solve the problems in our world from the same level of consciousness that created them.’ For me, mindset work is not going to get us there. Just shifting our thoughts is not going to get us there. We need to really shift our being to get us there.”

Elena sees it as mindset 2.0. “If we take love as our lens, then we can shift into a place of trust, of intuition, of surrender, of the heart energy, of kindness, of joy. Love consciousness has many of the answers we're looking for.”

The Path to Love Consciousness

The process starts with accessing your self-love. “I think to radiate an energy of love consciousness, you need to radiate from a place of inner wholeness. The way to getthere is to love yourself. Acknowledge to yourself that you have love inside of you, that you are good enough, you are worthy enough, you are meant to be here, you wouldn't be here if there wasn't a purpose for your existence.”

Elena asks this simple question: if you love yourself, how would you start your morning? “What would you eat? Who would you call? What kind of clients would you take on? You quickly understand that there are so many things that you may be doing that you don't love and that don't make you feel good and yet you're doing them. These are all the ways where if you ask that question, you quickly understand what loving yourself would look like, and then you can start to take action.”

Listen to Your Body

The next step is acknowledging the wisdom of your body. “Most entrepreneurs, myself included, run the majority of their business from their head. It's about shifting from your head to your heart and shifting from that frequency of thinking about your problems and pushing through and controlling and acting out to moving into your intuition, into your alignment. Your body can be an amazing guide for you to see where you are going, right or wrong, in your life and in your business because your body has an instinctive reaction to almost everything.”

When Elena went to an Ayurvedic Panchakarma Cure a few years ago, the doctor said to her: “The problem with most Westerners is that you treat your brain like a Ferrari and your body like a bicycle.” She realized that he was right. “For me, my body really was a bicycle. That's an underdeveloped connection for me. I have a super developed mind, but I don't take the time to acknowledge the wisdom of my body.”

As a next step, Elena recommends to understand whether there are things in your business that feel bright or dark. “Look at the people who work for you. How do they make you feel? Your clients, how do they feel? Look at the regular tasks you do on a daily basis. Which ones are no longer feeling good to you? When you get a bad feeling or a good feeling, take a CEO day for yourself and do a love alignment check to see what really feels right and what feels wrong for you.”

Focus on People’s Dreams, Not Their Pains

Another thing to look at is client attraction and marketing. “A lot of client attraction comes from a place of lack and a place of fear. If you don’t get the clients or the money you want, look at yourself and understand if you’re in a frequency of fear or love. You magnetize clients through love, because they can sense that you're in it for them and not in it for you.”

Elena says that a lot of marketing gives off the wrong vibe. “Most marketing is pain-based. We point out people's problems and pains. To some extent, it's okay to share with your clients that you can understand where they're coming from. But you must make sure that your sales pages are not just speckled with pain points without giving enough room for a sense of possibility. Just selling to people because you successfully made them feel bad and presenting yourself as the only solution to their problem isn’t right because it attracts the wrong customers. It attracts the wrong energy to your business. Focus on people's dreams and desires. Are they coming to you because they’re scared into buying from you, or because they’re excited to buy from you?”

Whatever love answers to your question, Elena says, that is probably the way to go. “It’s not complicated. It's really tapping into that frequency that is ever-present for us, and it's just reminding ourselves that we can look at every problem from a higher plane of consciousness.”

“If you filter business through the lens of love, you are on your way to shifting things.” - Elena Herdieckerhoff

#362: Love Consciousness in Business with Elena Herdieckerhoff