"Entrepreneurs need to have passion for what they do."
Ange de Lumiere Tweet
Ange de Lumiere is an online business mentor who teaches brilliant left brained entrepreneurs to use their right brain to make smart decisions in their business, in order to create success on their terms with ease, joy and a renewed sense of magic.
She draws upon her fifteen year experience as an international mergers and acquisitions lawyer followed by a fifteen year exploration of her right brain after the birth of her third child which led her to be a professional mosaicist, a hypnotherapist and a sought after tarot reader.
Author of a book called The Intuitive Revolution in Business and a podcast by the same name that ranked in the top 5% globally, Ange is on a mission to put intuition on the school curriculum all the way from primary school to Universities, starting with business schools.
Mother of four autistic kids, and in the process of being assessed herself, she wants to be the face of autism in business to break the prejudice against the autistic community as well as inspire parents of autistic children to create businesses that allow them to be there for their children the way they need to.
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Table of Contents
Thank you so much for giving us your time! Before we begin, could you introduce yourself to our readers and take us through what exactly your company does and what your vision is for its future?
Ange de Lumiere: I am a business mentor who helps entrepreneurs use their intuition to make smart decisions to create success on their terms.
My services help entrepreneurs from all walks of life get that je-ne-sais-quoi that Steve Jobs mentioned in his commencement address to Stanford students in 2005, that attracted over 40 million views on YouTube. Yes, we need to follow our hearts as entrepreneurs and C-suite executives. And yes we need to follow our intuition. But who actually teaches that stuff? No one because the ones who have become incredibly successful thanks to it have other pursuits.
Due to my profile as a former mergers and acquisitions lawyer, and the fifteen years exploring all psychic and healing modalities, I believe I offer the perfect blend to teach intuition to business people.
My vision is for intuition to become mainstream in business and for intuition to be on the school curriculum all the way from primary schools to universities. I believe, that revolution will start in business schools because budding entrepreneurs have enough of an open mind to pursue that brilliant idea.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO/entrepreneur when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get where you are at today?
Ange de Lumiere: I wanted to be an astronomer when I was a child. When I realised it would take me ten years of studies and I wouldn’t even be sure to get a job at the end of it, I reviewed my options. I became an entrepreneur out of necessity in 2006, when I lost my job as a lawyer whilst pregnant.
I was a single mum of two living in a country that wasn’t my native country, so I had no support system. I had to find a way to reconcile my work and the person I wanted to be as a mother. Entrepreneurship was the only way that allowed me to find the right balance.
Tell us something about yourself that others in your organization might be surprised to know.
Ange de Lumiere: Even though I have been labelled a brilliant medium and psychic, I still don’t consider myself intuitive. My upbringing in an intellect driven environment has geared me towards the mind and the intellect. In my job as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, I had to grasp complex ideas, which I found incredibly stimulating.
There was no space for the intuitive piece, but that is the case for everyone working in the corporate world at this stage, I believe. Because of that, I suffer from imposter syndrome in ways that seem inversely proportionate to my talent.
Many readers may wonder how to become an entrepreneur but what is an entrepreneur? How would you define it?
Ange de Lumiere: An entrepreneur is an individual who decides to set up a business, no matter the size, and take risks. It takes an entirely different mindset to be an entrepreneur than to be an employee, no matter what level in an organisation. Entrepreneurs need to have passion for what they do.
And to have a vision. Honing their intuition can be a powerful way to create a vision that is actually aligned to their values and to the business they are creating.
What is the importance of having a supportive and inclusive culture?
Ange de Lumiere: Most entrepreneurs have white privilege. Let’s face it. Most business books are written by white male. This needs to change. This can only happen if every person who benefits from white privilege takes ownership of that privilege and helps deconstruct it. This comes from realising how many benefits we receive from our skin colour.
And our role is to support and include marginalised communities as much as we can. One has to be very careful not to speak in the name of marginalised groups but instead to give them a platform. I believe entrepreneurs are agents of change and have a big role to play in this area.
How can a leader be disruptive in the post covid world?
Ange de Lumiere: By tuning into their intuition. Intuition enables leaders to find the right ideas in an ever changing world. Intuition is the antidote to VUCA. But Intuition takes a lot of learning and practice to be reliable. Intuition is always right. However our understanding of it, can be wrong. So the trick is to learn as much about how intuition works and understand that intuition works differently for everyone.
Some people use the word creativity or innovation for intuition. What we need to remember is that it’s an idea that comes to us without thinking. We receive intuition/innovation. We don’t create it. And that requires being able to quiet the mind and keep it open.
If a 5-year-old asked you to describe your job, what would you tell them?
Ange de Lumiere: I help grown ups trust how they feel so that they can do what is right for them in a fun and relaxed way, and then have more money to do the things they love and more time to be with their friends and family.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult, and what were the positive impacts?
Ange de Lumiere: I had to discontinue several lines of work that I loved doing because I needed to be known as an expert in my field and continuing these lines of work confused my audience and my customers. It’s only two years later that I read the book The One Thing by Gary Keller, which confirmed everything I did was right.
So I stopped helping people to lose weight even though I knew I was great at it. I also stopped offering training in healing modalities. I now focus exclusively in helping entrepreneurs hone their intuition. What made this decision difficult is that i knew I could help a lot of people with these services and I loved delivering them. That’s one of the challenges of being a multi passionate entrepreneur.
However, to raise to the top of your game, you need to become expert in one thing. My thing is intuition in business. Since focusing on that exclusively, my business has grown regularly. And I am about to enter discussion with a business school to deliver a masterclass on the four steps to tune into your intuition in business. This is the start of a very exciting phase in my business.
Leaders are usually asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is your most useless talent?
Ange de Lumiere: Mimicking accents. I used to make a perfect Italian accent in English. If I spend any amount of time with a community, I will start to speak like them without realising I am doing it. As a child, this got me to be mercilessly teased by my sister. My other useless talent is to be able to touch my nose with my tongue.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. If you wrote a book about your life untill today, what would the title be?
Ange de Lumiere: The Reluctant Business Akashic Records Reader (and I have actually written a first draft of it). And the reason is that I have fought off my intuition almost my entire life. My intuition saved my life in September 1986 in Paris, by making me avoid a bomb attempt that killed 7 people and injured 55 people.
And yet, the first thing I did after I found out on the evening news what happened, was to ignored my intuition and try my best to forget what had happened. My logical mind always wants to win the game against my intuition. My logical mind was convinced that admitting my psychic gifts and my intuition would immediately categorised me as a fraud. I have learnt that the secret of my success is to allow them to work in unison.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Ange de Lumiere for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Ange de Lumiere or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
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