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BOLD BY DESIGN | SUMMER 2021
LEADING FROM THE
By Laura Martin Bovard
I
am an expert at transformation of self and home. Shepherding people through transformation is my jam… I have spent 30 years relentlessly hunting my own shadows, so I can show up to my Interior Design business courageous, boundaried, and bold. Building this business has forced me to confront the beliefs and strategies that were holding me back in life and in the process, rewrite many of the stories I started out with as a young designer, what I thought I knew about how to be a successful businessperson. And one of the most powerful realizations I have had, the most effective reinventions, something that completely changed how I do business, how I feel in my life, and how much success I create, is leading my business from The Feminine.
What is Feminine energy? It’s about looking not for what is right or wrong; but rather seeing where the opportunity is to learn and grow. It’s always handling situations from the perspective of being a creatrix: What did we do to co-create the situation we are in? — even if, clearly, it’s someone else’s fault; because that person
is in our lives for a reason or that situation has something to show us about what we need to do to learn and grow. Here are some tips for you, based on how I lead my business from the Feminine
Treat your business like a lover I have come to see LMB Interiors as its own separate being. I revere it. I treat it as a lover. I ask, “What do you want, business?” “What do you need to grow?” “How may I thank you for all of the resources and abundance you have given me, the homes that have benefited from you, the clients, my employees, and their families that have benefited?” This practice has been a revelation.
Share what you have learned At this stage in my career, I want to share what I have learned. I want to teach younger designers how to revere their businesses as a beloved, yes, and also as a reflection of the level of their own spiritual and emotional well-being. Because seeing this, and then using the tools that this perspective makes possible, is a revolution. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Personal development is an act of radical business development I’ve had to overcome my own limiting self-talk. My childhood traumas taught me to minimize myself in order to make others feel comfortable. A few years ago, I stumbled on an elegant solution to this; I created an alter-ego (my “Divine Hustler”) who was more deserving, more articulate, more powerful than the insecure version of myself that my parents raised. For many years in my adult life, I felt like a fraud. I had to overcome all of the programming of a culture that had all these stories about wealth, what it was, who deserved it, and what quality was, and what beauty was. Essentially I had to overcome the social conditioning of my upbringing in an uneducated, poor family, not to mention the patriarchy that surrounds us so completely that we don’t even see it, that we breathe like air. Growing and leading your business from the Feminine doesn’t necessarily mean female-bodied, though it can. All of us have essences of Masculine and Feminine in ourselves that we can identify and develop.
