Mean What You Do – Edie Varley (Entrepreneur, Instructor, and Inspiration)

Edie Varley is an instructor, successfully sold her former business – a multi-million dollar chemical manufacturing business, and is owner of The Varley Group Inc. Through The Varley Group, Edie works to transform human potential into constructive contribution. Human potential is very much at the heart of what Edie believes and that’s clearly reflected in the Paper Napkin Wisdom she shares with us.
Edie believes that we live in a marketplace of look-alikes, a place where it’s easy to copy and reproduce things, but the one thing that is always going to be completely unique is us as individuals. She says that as people we often get caught up in “group think” and start to believe that who we are doesn’t matter, but this is untrue. Edie stresses the importance of the power of one. We each have a unique calling, Edie says, and we have to use that.  We have to leverage what’s unique about us because that’s where value is. To do that, we have to identify our “Vital Yes”.
Edie defines our “Vital Yes” as that driving mechanism, the thing bigger than yourself that drives your every decision and all of the performance choices you make. It’s the thing at the center of your life, recognizing and understanding what that that thing is, is important to being authentic and having integrity. You can’t be true to yourself unless you know who you are.
This knowledge and understanding of self is important, it’s more than something to benefit from personally, it is something that makes us into a valuable asset to our businesses, our families and our communities. Through thinking in this type of philosophy, we make ourselves more authentic as people and we narrow our focus. People are hungry for an authentic leader, says Edie, be authentic in who you are and what you do. Say what you mean and mean what you do.
As entrepreneurs it’s easy to say that we’re too busy, that we don’t have time for this kind of introspection but it’s important for us to make sure ‘busy’ doesn’t become our defining feature. Busy, says Edie, is not a badge of honor; selective makes you more effective. She says that we as leaders have to distill from the sensory overload we find ourselves in every day, we have to figure out what the most important thing we need to focus on is and in directing ourselves that way we will find ourselves far more effective.
Ask yourself: Distilled, what do I stand for and who am I?
Listen to the conversation with Edie here: