Trusting Ourselves, Trusting Source, and Developing a Higher Consciousness in Entrepreneurship
Photo Credit: Angela Atelier NJ Branding Studio
Michele Parad is a co-author of the international bestseller Success with Source, a speaker, and an intuitive guide for conscious leaders. She’s known for her Your Brilliance Archetype™ guides and her S.E.L.L. method, a spiritual philosophy developed to empower her clients to build businesses that align with their path to self-actualization.
While her formal education is in public policy with a B.A. from the University of Chicago and an M.S. from the London School of Economics, she’s taken a different path to public service–serving businesses that help progress humanity. She founded S.E.L.L. Ventures co., an incubator for startups that help regenerate the earth, enhance our well-being, cultivate peace, and democratize prosperity. Her mission is to help current and aspiring entrepreneurs rise above their limiting beliefs, rewrite their old narratives, and release social constraints so they can innovate and empower a new world.
Going Above and Beyond
Who Parad focuses on serving isn’t the only way her path to public service differs from conventional routes. The way she serves her clients is also unique. Parad not only draws from her years of formal education and more than fifteen years of expertise in marketing for startups but also from her certifications and training in over six spiritual modalities as an advanced healer and mindset trainer.
Parad’s work with her clients goes beyond supporting their sales or marketing strategies. Sell Your Brilliance™, her flagship program, takes individuals through higher-conscious marketing strategies and activation processes to confidently launch their heart-centered business. In Parad’s words, “When you discover unique strategies for operating at a higher conscious level, you can become more resilient to anything that comes in your path,” (The Mystic’s Ultimate Quest, Success with Source.)
Parad started her own business because “I felt I came here innately with a mission and also to carve out a role for myself that I could not find in any organization.” Parad wanted to pair her business acumen with her intuitive and healing side “to help entrepreneurs release their subconscious blocks and build the right strategy for them.”
What is Working?
Determining how to blend her skill sets and the differing energy and mindsets of these two planes (business and intuition), was challenging. She recognized she had a unique way of working with clients but had difficulty describing and selling it.
Parad kept learning different ways she could bring about prosperity while also using her skills and gifts and enrolling in course after course–from alchemy to astrology to strategy–in search of more answers to how to design her business. Eventually, she found support through coaches and mentors, each promising something different. Yet none of them ever truly held the key to the proverbial castle. “I still gained many insights through studying with them,” Parad wrote in her chapter inside Success with Source. “I carefully observed what they did in their containers, integrating the approach and methods I felt were helpful, and omitting what I felt was wrong or counterproductive.”
Searching for the Answers Inside You
As someone who has moved 11 times in her lifetime (and across different countries), Parad is no stranger to transition and starting over. She saw every challenge as a cycle of birth and rebirth. Each setback was the beginning of something new.
Eventually, she determined the only person who had the answers about her business was her. To strengthen her inner guidance system and reignite her connection to a Higher Self, she practiced self-inquiry within deep meditative states, trusting the answers even if they didn’t make sense initially.
For over a year she incubated her ideas and sat in discomfort of not knowing if where she was heading would lead to success. Meanwhile, in learning how to self-trust and to surrender to Source and her higher self, she felt resistance and stress in her body physically. Her anxiety and frustration manifested into heartburn and a rare disorder. “I managed to overcome them with my sense of faith, meditation, and breathwork to calm my nervous system.”
Business and Best Self
During this intense incubation and reflection period the S.E.L.L. Method came to her. (S.E.L.L. is an acronym standing for Source, Expand, Liberate, and Light Up). This method isn’t about the old sales paradigm of outbound outreach or convincing but rather an inner journey of becoming our best selves (or self-actualized). And it’s now a method she’s known for, proving that when we trust ourselves we find our true North.
“I no longer try to control a certain outcome or predict my revenue, but I try to surrender, with awe to what ultimately plays out for me. I am more patient with how long things take to build, knowing that whatever I put my energy into, I will always receive something out of it.”
To connect and learn more about Michele Parad visit www.micheleparad.com.
This feature is a part of StartUp Stories: Celebrating 100 Female Entrepreneurs, a special portrait photography project founded by Angela Acosta, a New Jersey-based portrait and
personal branding photographer. To learn more about participating in StartUp Stories: Celebrating 100 Female Entrepreneurs, visit https://promo.angelaatelier.com/signupstartupstories/.
A. Y. Berthiaume is an award-winning author, international book coach and ghostwriter, and the founder/CEO of The Write Place, Right Time. She is also a proud sponsor of and creative collaborator with StartUp Stories. To learn more about A.Y. Berthiaume and The Write Place, Right Time visit https://thewriteplacerighttime.com.