Change your environment

10 years ago, Angie was working in early childhood education in England. Disillusioned by the system, she made the decision to relocate to New Zealand. Arriving there in 2007, Angie got a job as a PA for Property Investor and Action Coach, Kevin Heppleston. She was making just enough to survive - at red level - but was out of her flow. Angie remembers: “I didn’t know myself well enough to really understand and appreciate where my talents lay and to see that what I saw as my faults were actually my greatest strengths.”

Then, Kevin joined a team to bring Roger Hamilton out to New Zealand. Angie helped organize the event, and remembers the first time she met Roger: “It was a turning point in my life - I finally felt that, as a creator profile, I had met my tribe and I realized I wasn’t stupid – I just had a different way of thinking. When we align our values with the way we think and what we do, success follows. I then understood that early years education was actually where I had to be.”

Roger remembers meeting Angie at a time when he had partnered up with an early childcare center to create a new vision for pre-school education: “Angie lit up at the idea of transforming the way young children learn, and I didn’t know it at the time, but that became the spark for her new mission in life.”

Angie and Kevin used their complementary skills in education and business coaching and offered their services to other early learning centers. Their immediate success in helping centers grow their enrolments and profits led to Angie starting on her own and opening her first center by 2011.

Connect to the Flow of Resources

Starting your own school is costly. But while many will use it as an excuse not to get started, Angie followed the flow to the resources: “It was magical how it came about. I had no money to open a center – I was probably at the red level then, just surviving. But I believed I could do it because I had turned many other businesses around and an opportunity had come up to buy a badly performing center. I was able to negotiate a good price and investors, whom I’d been working with along the way, offered to support me. So I purchased that center and the building without having to use any of my own money.”

Angie offered her investors 10% interest until their funds were repaid, so it was a loan without her needing to give away any of the equity in the center or in the property. She was then able to repay them all in just two and a half years.

Using the same process, Angie then opened her second center, called Magic Sparks. This has since become her main brand name, which she has now built her reputation on. Throughout the three years from her first to her second center, Angie learned how to build and motivate teams so she could focus on each new project. But, personally, she was still operating at the red level, and that’s when she reconnected with Roger to upgrade again.

Keep Upgrading to the Next Level

Angie flew from New Zealand to Australia to attend Fast Forward Your Business in 2014, seeing Roger again for the first time in six years. As Roger remembers: “I was amazed, and really happy, to see Angie again. Especially when she told me she was now living her dream of running her own childcare centers.”

Angie joined Roger’s Crystal Circle mentoring on the trip: “I found that, as a business owner, I didn’t have the right people around me. There were no people that could give me the level of support and mentorship that Roger could. Also, being part of the entrepreneurial community was what appealed to me. Roger is magic and his community adds even more.”

During mentoring, Roger’s priority was to move Angie up the wealth spectrum. Within a matter of months, Angie became cash flow positive personally, and had moved up to yellow level, where she became much more aware of her personal brand and learned how to leverage it. Within the first year, Angie had moved to green level and had set a rhythm for her teams in her two centers.

Roger said Angie’s challenge moving from controlling everything to orchestrating everything was what most self-employed entrepreneurs at yellow level have to go through: “When you’re controlling everything, you’re trying to get everyone to meet your expectations, which is almost always impossible. When you’re orchestrating everything, you’re finding out what your team members’ expectations are and then you help them to exceed their own expectations of themselves.”

Angie remembers the change in pace when she made the transition: “Although it was a bit slower, it was in many ways better: they were connected with their peers, the team and families. I also found that the team had become more inspired by what I was doing: I was no longer interfering or just solving problems for them – I was providing inspiration and motivation.”

This allowed Angie to start two more centers in the two years she has now been working with Roger - as many as she had created in the six years before starting the mentoring. Again, this was down to the people more than herself. “One of the best pieces of advice that Roger gave me was not to leave your business until there’s someone there who cares about it more than you do. In each of my centers, I have a person who does just that, and I have an area manager, who supports them all as well.”

Look Out for Luck

Freeing up her own time has allowed Angie to give herself more time in the magic space all green and blue level entrepreneurs need: the land of synchronicity. That’s when you meet with customers, other entrepreneurs or investors, and let luck happen. That took Angie on her next big step at the end of 2015.

“We were in Bali for the Crystal Circle Conference. Rustica Lamb, who is also a Crystal Circle member from New Zealand and part of this wonderful community, was also there. I’ve known her for many years but not that well. On the last evening, Rustica shared with me that she felt disheartened because her dream of starting a Green School in New Zealand would never happen. I suggested we do it together and we were very enthusiastic that evening. Probably also something to do with the bubbles we were drinking.”

Then a volcano erupted near Bali. “My flight was the next day but when I got to the airport my flight had been cancelled. So I went back to the resort and arrived at exactly the same time that Rustica was sharing with a group what she was going to do with me, and I turned up to this huge applause. And, basically, we spent the day round the pool, planning what we were going to do to launch our own Green School. Later that week, we went to see the Green School in Bali, connected with the person who worked on the curriculum and the Green School teacher in Bali, who could help us in opening the school.”

Make a Difference

Angie has now joined Rustica in a separate Crystal Circle with Roger to launch the Green School in New Zealand, and is already collecting a waiting list of children who will be graduating from her early education centers to join Green School, which will begin with a Grade 1 in 2017. In the circle they are also working with Kyron Gosse, who is sourcing eco-buildings to bring into New Zealand.

Roger observed: “What I love about Angie is how she takes each thing she learns and then applies it at increasingly higher levels and at accelerated speed. I was the Chairman of the Green School for three years, so to see their vision of natural education now expanding to New Zealand through our entrepreneur community (with the help of nature and a volcano) is just fantastic.”

Angie is now moving from green to blue level and sees that setting up new centers and schools is where she can make the biggest difference to the future of children’s education: “There’s a general lack of awareness of the sensitivity of children and their need to be nurtured spiritually and emotionally. Children are natural born learners. We just need to provide them with a nurturing environment, where people are sensitive to the energy and the tone as children soak that all up. It’s in those first seven years when their beliefs about themselves and the people around them are formed. If we get that wrong, we spend a lifetime trying to fix ourselves.”

What can you do today, to change your environment, get into you flow, upgrade to the next level and then let luck happen?