0:01
I'm Finola Howard, Business Growth strategist with a joyful heart, and your host of the your truth shared podcast. I believe that every business has a story to tell, because that's how the market decides whether to buy or not, and your story has to resonate with who you are and with the people you want to serve, and this podcast is about helping you reach the market in a way that feels right to you. So if you're an entrepreneur with a dream you want to make real, then this is the podcast for you, because great marketing is your truth shared. Okay, let's strip it all back. What's the one thing that matters most in your business? Not the to do list now, not the five offers you've got or the shoulds or the strategies. I mean the one thing, the thing that infuses everything you make do or teach that you stand over, that you just can't do without.
1:04
It's your Cardinal belief, the belief so central to your work, it guides everything you do. This is the episode where we find it, where we name it, and where we give it permission to lead. About
1:19
20 years ago, I did a course with a past mentor of mine. We had to introduce ourselves at the start, and I went first. I said simply, I'm an intuitive marketer. Living in Ireland,
1:33
I immediately thought I'd done the exercise wrong, because everyone else gave long, detailed stories about who they were. They were mothers, daughters, partners, friends and so on. In another context, the lesson for me would have been that I'm more than what I do, and that's a very valuable lesson. But in this context, that wasn't the learning that my mentor had in mind. In this context, the challenge was to strip it back.
2:00
What's the part that matters most? Just choose one thing, the marketer or the intuitive. And I wrestled with that, and
2:11
I've told this story lots of times before, because I was surprised by it, and I was surprised by what I let go of. I let go of the word marketer, and yes, I am intuitive. I lean into it when I want to sense check whether something I'm working on feels right or not, or if what a client is trying to articulate feels right or not, if something is being left out of the conversation consciously or unconsciously, usually, it's because they've not realized how important it is. It's so much a part of them that they haven't realized it's the clue to their genius. I mean, I've done it myself,
2:51
and by tuning into this intuitive side of myself, I've been guided to my own genius, a journey, quite literally, to joy. And there's a rightness in listening to your own wisdom and an importance in listening to your own wisdom, and we've got to do that. It's the wisdom about where you need to be and what you need to do.
3:14
Our genius hides in plain sight. You know, it's usually the thing we do without thinking the thing others compliment us on and that we brush off, but when we finally name it, that's when things start to click.
3:30
The first real shift came for me on this in 2018 when my dad passed away, he was such a strong and gentle presence in my life, a grounding force around my beliefs and values. And that year, as part of my word of the year practice, I asked myself, What do I need most right now to get through this? The word at that time I heard was courage. I needed the courage to keep going without his steady influence in my life, and it helped me. So the following year, I asked again, and this time, the word that came through was joy. Joy felt like the natural antidote to those times when we need courage, where courage helped me survive, Joy helped me to thrive again, and I've followed it ever since. It's in my work, it's in my podcast, it's in my book. Guess how I build, how I teach, how I lead. And now I say that plainly, joy is my compass for growth.
4:31
It's the thing I can't do without.
4:34
It is the thread that weaves through everything I do. When I teach planning sessions, I make space for joy in the plan itself. When I speak about positioning, I ask you, is this the thing that you are most passionate or joyful about? When I speak about scaling, I ask you to lean into your genius, to let go of that which is not in your genius zone. That's for.
5:00
Someone else, because passion and genius are all indicators of joy in your business.
5:07
Let me share with you the genius that is Laura Doyle. She's at soulfully Laura on Instagram, and when she started my program soar a few months ago, her positioning was around embodied movement and yoga practices for bigger people.
5:24
Her work was rooted in deep values, but her messaging was generic. She was playing it safe, staying vague, and these are her words, not mine, playing it safe, staying vague, not naming the things that she truly stood for, like a body liberation and calling out diet culture in disguise.
5:45
The reality is, it's never safe to play safe. The only result you can hope for when you play it safe is actually generic.
5:55
And in the SOAR community, for Laura, we could see the mismatch between her content online, and how she spoke in the source sessions, in that safe place, and it was like a different person speaking. We knew that there was a passionate belief that she was nervous about fully stepping into a cardinal belief around how destructive diet culture is and how that narrative needs to be disrupted, but she's disrupting it now, and she is showing you how you can rewrite your body story, see yourself clearly and feel yourself fully and be in your body with kindness. And the results are rolling in. She now has offers which are more fully aligned with her values, her content reflects her true voice, and it's all gaining traction. Her community sees her as a trusted guide. She has stopped hiding behind soft language and has started standing in her own truth. And again, these are her words. Again. Her programs are now feeling faster, and she is making the difference she wanted to make in the world because she is stepping into her Cardinal belief and owning her space.
7:07
The truth of this idea became even more vivid to me recently when I visited Fastnet lighthouse. It's the southernmost point of Ireland, a solitary tower in the Atlantic. It's an iconic image, one that many of us have seen across media for years. It's the image of a solitary tower in the Atlantic, an unshakable, clear, constant image. They call it Ireland's teardrop, the last thing emigrants saw as they left our shores a beacon in the middle of uncertainty, and as I stood on the boat looking at it, I thought, That's what your one thing is.
7:51
Your Cardinal belief is your lighthouse. It's not showy, not scattered, but solid and essential. Joy for me is that lighthouse. It's what I return to again and again.
8:07
Let me ask you to reflect on this. If you were to zoom out right now, out of your everyday, okay, what's your lighthouse? What do you keep coming back to time and again? If everything else fell away, what would remain as the one message you would want to leave someone with
8:32
that's important, you know.
8:34
So let's define what a cardinal belief is. Okay,
8:39
your Cardinal belief is the belief that shapes everything else. I think that's clear. It's the through line in your story, not just your story,
8:49
but also in your offers, your message, your values, everything,
8:55
every decision that you make.
8:58
And ask yourself, if someone only took one message away from a conversation with you.
9:05
It should be this, this Cardinal belief, the idea that your work is built on. For me, that belief is simple and clear. Joy isn't optional. It's foundational. When I'm in my joy, I'm in my genius when I'm not, something's off, that's my cue to delegate pivot or make space for something else. It's not just how I feel, it's how I grow.
9:29
That belief shapes how I design my offers.
9:33
Choose my collaborators, choose my customers say yes and no to opportunities. Help clients build their positioning around what lights them up and
9:44
everything else, your Cardinal belief becomes a truth that you can stand on a platform for decision making, marketing, client alignment and product design.
9:57
And yet there's resistance here.
10:00
Or choosing one thing scares people. I often ask clients or participants in my programs to choose one thing to focus on this year,
10:09
and I ask them, what's the one thing that if you really leaned into it, would move your business forward, really move your business forward? And suddenly it's like I've asked them to give up everything. There's fear in the room, a fear of choosing wrong, a fear of losing options, a fear that if they focus, they might be left with nothing.
10:33
That's what I see with brilliant women like Jane.
10:37
She wants to do it all, because if she doesn't, something might fall through the cracks. Here's the reality, she's spreading herself too thin. Nothing gets enough energy to grow. That's the trap. You see, it's not choosing the wrong thing. It's about never giving anything enough depth to make a difference. And this fear is normal. It's not laziness, it's protection. We've been taught that more options mean more freedom, but in business, freedom comes from commitment. If you're scared to choose one thing, it's probably cause that thing really matters. That's a good sign.
11:16
Here's a little exercise for you. I want you to think about the last three businesses decisions you've made, ask yourself, were they guided by your Cardinal belief that you're probably still just whispering, or by fear, scarcity or distraction? And let's be real here. Busyness and being really busy is often a disguise for fear scarcity or distraction.
11:45
But what if we reshaped the busyness into something else? What if you said no to anything that didn't just align with your Cardinal belief, but amplified it instead?
11:58
Yes, alignment is critical for success, and I speak about that quite a lot, but amplification takes it to the next level. Amplification rewires how you think about that success. You can't hide when you amplify, and you can't play safe there either.
12:18
And for you to be truly successful,
12:21
your mindset has to change into one without limits, so that you can really build a business you are meant to have.
12:31
This raises the argument of friction versus focus. Okay, and let's call this what it is. It is friction, right? Trying to do everything creates drag. Your energy will Splinter, your message will dull, and your growth does stall, but
12:50
when you focus on your Cardinal belief, you get momentum.
12:55
Choose one product that matters most, one customer avatar that feels most aligned, and give it your all. Burn the boats lean in, you will see exponential growth, not because you worked harder, which you probably will anyway, but because you finally went deep enough to stand out.
13:17
It's like trying to like 10 matches at once. You'll get sparks, but no flame, but focus. Focus creates fire.
13:27
Alex hermosi talks about this idea of simplicity versus complexity, and he says why complexity is lazy thinking, and how the highest leverage growth comes from relentless focus. And it's true, complexity does kill clarity, and clarity drives results. This year, I made a public declaration to make a million euro business within two years, and immediately I'm thinking differently. Once I got over that initial nervousness, doubling my business has no is no longer enough that automatically feels small. And I know that might sound a little bit disingenuous right now, but what I've learned already is this, the mindset it takes to double your revenue is not enough of a stretch to make the effort matter. That's why so many falter when attempting to just double Conversely, the mindset it takes to 10x your business without burnout requires a deeper look at the realities of your business. You don't just multiply everything you do by two. You've got to shape everything differently so you can really extract the value in such a short time frame. And while previously, 10x thing was something I'd read in a book,
14:43
and I understood it's now something I seek actively in every initiative that I explore. If something I'm doing can't contribute substantially to the result I'm after, then I'm not doing it,
14:56
and I'm testing each piece for impact.
15:00
It. And learning from the results,
15:03
this summer, I launched a smaller cohort for SOAR, half the people, double the depth and double the price. And in this launch, I tested a lot of new things, and left out some of the tried and tested simply from time constraints, because I did resist launching this I have to admit, some of the stuff I tested, I bring back some of it, I let go off and I bring back other stuff. And that launch again, that I wasn't actually going to do this time, gave me another stream of consistent income and space to build better, because I focused on the one thing that matters, and that was soar,
15:44
and soar as a result, will be even stronger next year,
15:48
even deeper and with exponentially more value for anybody who takes part in it. And that's because I didn't try to do it all. I trusted my cardinal belief to guide me.
16:01
So let me ask you, what is your Cardinal belief, the belief that holds your business together, the one that everything else builds from, that's your lighthouse, that's your compass that will move you forward.
16:18
Write it down, say it out loud and build from there. And don't underestimate the value of saying the stuff out loud,
16:28
because it made me stop hiding from myself saying that stuff out loud, and it has repositioned my brain immediately. And yet, you share a lot more about this in the joyful million playbook. Don't underestimate the power of declaring it. And if you're not sure what your Cardinal belief is just yet, here's a starting point. Look at what you can't stop talking about what you keep circling back to write it down. Sit with it and see what else it reveals, because it will reveal more to you. And that's where the gold is, because once you anchor to that, everything else starts to fall into place.
17:11
So that's all for me for this week. And if this episode spoke to you, if you're ready to build your business around your one thing and finally, make the impact, you know you're here for and join the wait list for SOAR 2026, and keep listening to this podcast. And in soar, this is where we go deep on the strategy, the structure, the tactics and the mindset shifts that make it all possible. You'll find the link in the show notes, or just head to Finola howard.com/soar
17:38
SOAR is in all caps, and thank you for listening to your truth shared. If you enjoy this episode, please do rate and review it in your favorite app, at love the podcast.com/your,
17:49
truth shared, and remember you can build your growth boldly with a joyful heart. That's what I'm doing. See you next week. You you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
