This month’s Purpose Driven Woman is Maya Elious. She is a follower of Christ and as she puts it “a follower of the WORD, not the world.” She’s an Online Business & Branding Strategist, Coach, and Speaker; through her Content Prep Academy, she’s helping Bloggers, brands, and experts strategize, organize, and monetize their content so they can stand out in their industry and make an impact in the online space.
You’re quite busy running a successful business. How do you keep God at the forefront?
I start my day with devotion and try to read my bible even if I don’t feel like it. I’ve tried to get more so into a habit of asking HIS advice before I move forward on anything in business to make him the Lord of all aspects of my life. Like God if I’m gonna launch this, is this a good date to do it? Is this a good name for my YouTube channel? Making Him involved in every aspect of what I do makes it easy to prioritize Him so now he’s not a last minute thought, He’s my first priority in everything I do. I’m also very heavily involved in my church and my small groups – my closest friends now are the women in my small groups and I’m very intentional about putting things regarding God in my life to ensure that He remains at the forefront.
How do you remain motivated?
I really just enjoy what I do…the hard work is just part of the process so I don’t let that deter me from what I’m supposed to be doing because I know what the overall vision is, I know what the end goal looks like. I think a lot of people lose motivation because they haven’t seen what success on the other side of hard work looks like. Once you put yourself into the habit of doing the hard work and pushing yourself out of the comfort zone you’ll see that the results will come.
So it’s not hard for me to stay motivated or disciplined because I believe in the work that I do and a lot of times God blesses the hard work that I put in so I’m able to see the results.
What’s the most valuable investment you’ve made in business and for yourself?
The most valuable financial investments I’ve made have been those that helped with personal development; just being a better person helps you to become a better business-person in general. And there are some people who have really bad attitudes and run successful businesses but they are not happier, they don’t feel complete, they’re not whole. And I’ve definitely invested in five figure coaching programs and I feel like those were worth the investments but anything that has helped me to become more of myself and draw me closer to God has been the best investment because you make decisions much more clearly. If you’re not aware of who you are, and unsure of your values or what you want do, if you hire a business coach to give you strategy you’re not going to be able to use that investment to make money because you’re still unclear about who you are.
What was the tipping point for your business?
There are a lot of different tipping points. Every single time I get myself out of a comfort zone, something great happens.
The first was when I dropped out of college and decided I wanted work for myself full-time, that was a good thing for my business. And when I decided to stop designing and to create informational products and coach full-time, that was a transformative point in my business and every single time I did something that would scare me, that was a huge transformational point…I think that when we start a new project, it scares us and causes us to leave our comfort zone but once we do it consistently it becomes our new comfort zone and then we get into the habit of falling complacent in that space because we don’t want to continuing moving forward doing the next scary thing…so there’s always a tipping point in my business when I think to myself ‘what’s next?” and act on that.
How important has it been for you to surrender and how did you overcome the difficulty?
When we don’t surrender something to God, He’s going to take it from us anyway. And in a way that will humble us and lead us to Him anyway. I know that when I put something before Him, He takes it away and then I’m like “you know what, that was something I was putting before God.” I came to a point where I was like “Number 1, I’m tired of God humbling me because He loves to do it” [she laughs] and Number 2, I know His decisions are better than mine. Anything that God wants for me exceeds anything that I could ever dream of for myself. So just realizing that there is someone that cares for you and they want more for you than you could do for yourself and they’re more capable of giving that thing to you, made it more simple to make the decision to take everything to Him, and to just make Him the lord of everything over my life. It’s not always an easy decision but it makes decision making so much more simple: “Would God want me to do this, yes or no?” So at least I know the answer and now it’s just a matter of being obedient.
What scripture are you leaning on right now?
1st Peter 5:7. This scripture speaks to me because I was chatting with a friend recently who pointed out that sometimes we think that God only cares about the big picture but he cares about all the tiny details of our life. He cares about what we name our podcast, when we launch our programs, the t-shirt we’re going to wear, whether we buy the shoes; He wants us to give everything to Him. He wants us to seek Him for every little thing because He does care for us.
Connect with Maya