Depression & Loss Of Focus, becoming an entrepreneur CHANGED his life

I want you to think about this for a second. Imagine if your business, your career, your life’s purpose ended in an instant right now and you have to start all over again. The thing that you have dedicated your life to is no longer an option. What would you do?

This is an incredible story about new beginnings and the abundance you attract when you are in total alignment. I’ve mentioned this before but this whole channel is dedicated to making entrepreneurship available to everyone so a small thing you can do to help me out is give this video a like so more people see it in the algorithm.

All right, meet Jelani. Jelani Jenkins trained his entire life to make it to the NFL. In 2013, Jelani was selected in the fourth round of the NFL draft by the Miami Dolphins and went on to play five years in the league, ending his career with the Raiders and the Texans. But when it was over, Jelani was faced with a question that a lot of people face, which is what’s next? I sat down with Jelani recently to find out just how challenging that transition was.

It’s tough. It’s interesting. I trained my whole life to be in the NFL, the whole time I was surrounded by support, coaches, nutritionists telling me what to eat, where to be, where to go and when I stopped playing in the NFL, all of that left.

In totally unknown territory, Jelani used that work ethic that he had in football and used it to try to create a business.

I think I compared it to the immediate gratification of being in the NFL. I make a tackle, the crowd goes crazy. I leave the game knowing that I had a win. It was easy metrics for success, sports. I can compare my stats with everyone else’s stats in the league, being a good linebacker if I had better stats than that linebacker. But in this phase, I was kind of in it in my own and I was running my own race thinking people were way ahead of me. And so I would just over work, work, work, work, work and not know that I was moving forward and not know that I was having success.

All that hard work wasn’t paying off as an entrepreneur and I know you could relate to that. It’s that feeling of running on a treadmill but you don’t know where you’re going or if you’re making any progress at all.

During the athlete phase, although we had coaches, although we had teammates, all the support and I still was at home doing ladder drills by myself getting it in. And I know that if I put the work in, I can get to wherever I need to go. I took that approach in the next phase but I was burning out, feeling like I was all over the place and didn’t have that support. And so I felt like I had the work ethic of a professional athlete without the structure and without the understanding and the know how and so that’s really what was driving me to really, really frustration, slight depression and all those different things.

If working your face off is only leading to more frustration, what’s the alternative? Well, the irony is the direction that we’re meant to head in generally is the path of least resistance. Remember that I always say that, “Your best business idea comes from within, it comes from your own story, your own experience.” When Jelani and I started working together in the Authority Accelerator, he was out of alignment and it was leading to so much unnecessary friction.

There are really two ways to pick a niche when you’re an entrepreneur. There’s the old way, the not so great way and then there’s the new way. If I go through them, old really means that it is broad and opportunity based, which means that Jelani was originally thinking mindset coach, career coach because there’s tons of that out in the world and proof of success but it’s really broad and hard to actually break through and be seen. The new way of discovering your niche, which is what we do is we call it micro-niching. And what this means is that yes, it might still be in a category but it is aligned with your own story and experience, which makes it completely uncopyable and it makes you the immediate magnetic go to authority.

Basically after Jelani and I spoke, he took the pivot, aligned with his story and decided to go all in on athletes and the friction just started to melt away. We have this saying on our team, that alignment is the absence of friction. Think about all of the places that you’re creating way more friction than is necessary. Maybe you’re trying to build a business on a thing that you really don’t know much about. That’s creating way more friction than is necessary for you. What’s your story? What’s your experience? What can you uniquely teach and bring to the world to create your business around? Or what’s a problem that you’ve solved for yourself that you can support other people with? It makes it way easier to find the right clients and to make a really deep impact.

Jelani finds his first five clients, all athletes, all super excited about what he’s creating but that really was just the start. All of a sudden this idea and this online course turns into a digital platform and app and Jelani is leading the charge and becoming known as the authority for supporting athletes off the field.

And athletes especially are leading really this whole mental health conversation. You saw what’s happening in the 2021 Olympics with Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, you see Michael Phelps talking about mental health. And so what’s happening in this industry is a lot of these institutions collegiately, professional organizations are feeling a whole lot of pressure to add more resources and support to these athletes as they move on into the regular world.

From niching down and getting super clear on his ideal client and the transformation that he was providing, Jelani’s business blew up and it even landed him a feature in Forbes for the work that he’s doing.

Since Forbes made that story, it’s just been an abundance of support and it was credibility. It was reinforcing to me of how much of a demand that this is and how many people in this world have something that they want to add to this mission. It’s way bigger than me at this point.

And that’s the goal. When I talk about building a legacy business, it means that you’re creating something so much bigger than just you and something that can outlast you and continue to make an impact long after you’re gone and to get to wake up every single day and see stories like Jelani’s and be a part of that journey and also see the rest of our clients creating these legacy businesses for themselves, it’s created this incredible incubator and community of growth.

I may not be a professional athlete but I do know how to coach entrepreneurs to win. And I could not be happier for Jelani and his success and I know that this is just the beginning. And I hope that what you take from this story is that when you show up authentically and in alignment with who you are and your unique experience, abundance is inevitable and the most amazing opportunities await you. Are you with me? If you’re trying to figure out what your unique genius is, I want you to click the link below and apply to book a call with a real human being on my team to see if you’re a fit to work with me and join Jelani and the rest of the amazing humans inside of our Authority Accelerator program.

 Thank you so much for reading and watching!.