Revisiting Abundance.
Apr11

Revisiting Abundance.

Opening your heart up, is painful. But so necessary. By Sarah-Jane Boden Whenever people ask me why I started SoulProviders, I always smile and say ‘for my sins.’ But we know that’s just posturing, because everyone that knows me knows how much I love being the founder and owner of young, flighty SoulProviders and that running a vibrant ‘couture content marketing’ agency is a dream I have long held. I remember in the good old hippy times doing a moodboard around 2004 visualising the kind of business I wanted to build one day and when I look around me, I know, and am incredibly grateful for the fact that we’ve somehow managed to actualise what seemed to be a mostly blurry, ethereal vision, into a real evolving, growing, exciting organisation. Not without a considerable amount of blood, sweat, tears, sacrifice and wine-fueled evenings, of course. And, let’s be real, growing a small business has not been tear-free either. Running SoulProviders has been and continues to be a roller-coaster ride of emotions, with every week knocking us about with new learnings, new highs and new lows that leave us battered, bruised, patched up and lop-sidedly grinning every Friday afternoon as we wander on home. The real reason for why I started the business is because I essentially wanted to have a ‘balanced lifestyle’ and importantly, as a new Mom and a ‘creative’, have the freedom to live the life I wanted to live and try to shape the kind of business I would want to work for. I have always been entrepreneurial and I wanted to do content better than I had ever seen it done; and to work with young talent in telling authentic, exciting African stories, online. And of course I had been enthusiastic about digital for a while and really wanted to be more of a future-forward ‘digital native’ as my dear friend Nkuli calls us. And as we approach three (ahhhsome!) years of our content business, I find that every now and then I have to revisit the inspiring and clean spirit in which we launched SoulProviders, which was, as I so often used to say ‘An Abundance Mentality’. I can’t remember where I learnt about it or read about it, but it was such a powerful notion that a few years ago it became infused in everything that I did or planned to do and I reshaped it to shape my own meanings — which is always easy to talk about in retrospect. But, as with any heyshoowow-ish, lofty aspirations, it’s not always easy to be 100% true to them – hence making sure we always try to ‘revisit abundance’. An abundance mentality for me starts with...

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