Business Casual: How a career coach found her business idea — right under her nose

In this episode of our YouTube series Business Casual, Heather Giannone talks to Janice Chaka, career coach and founder of The Career Introvert.

People love to talk about inspiration in terms of lightning bolts striking and ideas falling from the sky — but that’s not how finding an online business idea actually works. Finding your idea isn’t a scavenger hunt.

The answer isn’t “out there” in the world somewhere waiting for you to trip over it. It’s a jigsaw puzzle — and the pieces are all in your head, waiting for you to put them together in the right order.

Take Janice, for example. Start with her background in HR.Add an introverted personality, and an intuitive understanding of the challenges that introverts face when navigating work environments designed to favor extroverts.

Top it off with her own personal experiencewith changing careers and searching for career fulfillment, and you get The Career Introvert: a consultancy service “for introverted women who want to flourish, triumph, and thrive in their career.”

It’s advice that Janice gives the people she works with:

“Think about what you can already do, and then build on that. Don’t try to learn a new thing, and then try to get people to pay you to do this new thing that you are learning. Some people will pay you, but that’s not what you’re looking for. Find the sweet spot that you already are good at, and then do that thing.”  

Also in the episode, Janice shares with us:

• How she turned one of the biggest challenges facing introverts — anxiety around speaking in public — into a piece of free content that solves her audience’s problem, whileintroducing them to her unique style at the same time
• How she repurposes and repackages content into different formats to make sure that, however her audience wants to get their information, she has something that will work for them
• How the fact that she’s still figuring out her own business and what she wants to do with it makes her more valuable to her audience, not less

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Business Casual is our YouTube series featuring real entrepreneurs sharing how they built their online business from the ground up. New episodes every Friday.

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