At least, that’s what a personality test told me when I was preparing to start my business.
These days, I’m often invited to speak about leadership, mental health, women’s brain health and changing working lives.
But last week, for the first time, I was invited to talk about how I ended up working with these topics in the first place.
My entrepreneurial journey.
Although “entrepreneur” has always sounded a little too foreign and pompous to me. I much prefer the Finnish word yrittäjä, from yrittää: to try, to attempt.
So, a “tryer”, if you will.
And that probably captures my approach rather well.
Not exactly the entrepreneurial type
Not exactly the entrepreneurial “type”
When I was preparing to start my business, I took a course in entrepreneurship that included a personality test.
According to the test, I absolutely did not have the profile of an entrepreneur.
With my modest ego and terrible maths skills, I was initially inclined to agree. The thought of blowing my own horn and taking care of all the accounting gave me nightmares.
I had never dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur either. My career had been anything but linear: political science and international relations, international high-tech, more than a decade in IP licensing, corporate life, and eventually coach training alongside my job.
But over time, I became increasingly clear about what I was good at, what interested me and what mattered to me.
When my corporate chapter came to an end, I couldn’t find many roles that brought those things together in the way I wanted.
So I started building the job myself.
And then Covid happened.
Trying, learning, adjusting
Trying, Learning, Adjusting
I didn’t start with a perfect business plan – but I had a hypothesis and a lot of background work; an idea, a qualification, some experience, a growing network and a willingness to learn.
And I tried.
Some things worked. Some didn’t. Some changed completely along the way.
The business I have today is not the business I imagined when I started. But somehow, despite all the reasons why I apparently wasn’t the entrepreneurial type, I have built something that has grown to the point where people now ask me to share the story.
That has reinforced something I believe strongly:
There isn’t one personality type, career history or life story that qualifies someone to build their own work.
Sometimes you simply start trying and shape and build it as you go.
The perfect career does not have to be linear
My own path has also shaped the work I do today.
In the middle of building a career, raising a family and retraining as a coach, my mother was living with Alzheimer’s disease. At the same time, I was experiencing my own questions about work, identity, changing priorities and midlife.
Today, much of my work sits at that intersection: leadership, mental health, changing working lives and the realities of midlife, particularly for women.
Looking back, the connections are clearer than they were at the time.
Not because there was a grand master plan, but because the different chapters, bumps, detours and U-turns gradually became part of my “why”.
An unconventional path doesn’t necessarily mean you are off track. Sometimes it is simply the path.
And perhaps we need to get better at challenging the boxes we put people into: what a career should look like, what an entrepreneur should look like, when it is “too late” to change direction, and what success is supposed to mean.
Careers can be built and redesigned.
They can be changed at 35, 45 or 55. They can move between employment and self-employment. They can combine different professional identities.
A can evolve with the life you actually have.
An yrittäjä
I like the Finnish word because it leaves room for uncertainty, inevitable vulnerability, and the growth-mindset in requires.
You try something, learn, adjust. You try again. That is probably a better description of my journey than any personality test could have given me.
And sometimes, somewhere along the way, the thing you were trying becomes something real – real enough for others to invite you to share your story.
Sharing the story the storyI really enjoyed sharing this story, in my Swedish mother tongue, over breakfast with SWEA Luxembourg.
Sharing my story
I really enjoyed sharing this story, in my Swedish mother tongue, over breakfast with SWEA Luxembourg.
Thank you to the SWEA board for the invitation, to The Little Bakery for hosting us, and to everyone who joined the conversation.
I also want to highlight Union des Indépendants Luxembourg and their work to shine a light on the diversity and working conditions of Luxembourg’s growing community of independent professionals.
Because there is no single typical way to be self-employed.
Just as there is no single path to getting there.
Sometimes, you just have to be willing to try.
