I have another one: working with people I enjoy, respect and truly understand.

Many business people and entrepreneurs are “kind” and I love to interact with all of them. I have a special understanding of the gifts and challenges of those who are either introverts, intuitive, reserved, and/or sensitive (attuned to others’ feelings and thoughts).

If you’re wondering about the website title “Where Business Meets Spirit”, it came from a conversation with someone who described how I work, sensing a person’s true personality, wishes and spirit while always strategizing about  the practicality of getting results.

The details about what I do on this page . Glad you’re here!

My work helps you:

• Make sure your work is compatible with your true nature; your life purpose, your unique strengths and your blind spots; your values and your loves; your pet peeves and your deepest wishes. Why? Because then you have a much higher chance of succeeding financially, and of liking your life.
• Get in touch with your deep guidance and source of strength. Why? Because you have a much easier time knowing what to do and much more confidence doing it
• Create a work environment that is genuine and respectful
• De-program past failures and beliefs that get in the way of succeeding now
• Translate your yearnings to “make a difference” into profitable business practices
• Bring quality and meaning to a hard-driving professional life

How to tell if you would benefit from working with me:

• The easiest way is to join me on my free teleseminars, where you can ask any question you’d like and/or listen to the recordings. Sign up in the top right corner and you will get all the information you need to access them.
• You can also read a free report from my “Dealing with fear” page, which gives you novel ideas and techniques you can use right away.
• Scroll down this page and read my posts. I welcome your comments by the way.
• Just ask me; feel free to send me an e-mail at the address shown at the bottom of this page

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• Don’t think they can afford it
• Need the benefits
• Don’t have an idea for a business
• Don’t know what to do
• Are scared to fail
• Are worried about other people’s opinions (their families’, mainly)

Those are all valid reasons. I had the delightful opportunity to interview Valerie Young, an experienced “out-of-the-box” career counselor who has helped thousands of people transition out of employment to self-employment, and I asked her what she found mainly blocked people from making that transition. Here is what she said:

The main thing that blocks people from leaving their jobs and running their own business, is not believing it’s possible to do so.

You might think that this is saying the same thing as “I can’t afford it” and it is in a way, but Valerie is pointing out that it’s the belief that stops people in their tracks, not the actual facts.

Now how she has helped her clients over the years is  by brainstorming with them on the various ways they could make money, and that allows her clients to not only check the facts (is it really true they can’t make money?) but also to start believing in the possibility of entrepreneurship on their own terms.

And she is not a proponent of taking unwise risks, making me chuckle when she said; “I call my business “Changing Course”, not “Taking a flying leap”!”

Now she takes on very few clients nowadays, instead being busy training other people on how to do what she does and become brainstormers. If that intrigues you, you can check out her training program by clicking on my link to her site, “From passions to profits” .

Valerie’s program is a combination of self-study and personal assistance and since she is a never-ending source of stories and ideas, it should be totally fascinating to train with her!

Now back to the reason why most people who want to start a business never leave their job; how can you stop feeling it’s impossible to do it?

Well, you have to make a plan you can believe in. That involves first, identifying what the business might be. Some people know and most people don’t, not really. They may have an idea but it’s often too vague. Or they may have no clue.

Then you design the transitioning phase which preferably will be something different than quitting in disgust and having no income to support you!

And you plot how the beginnings of your business would look like. What you will offer, to whom, and how you will reach them.

If that sounds like a lot of work, it is but not nearly as much as starting in the wrong business or in the wrong way. I strongly believe it’s not something you should do on your own for three reasons:

• If you knew how to do it, you would have
• Even when you learn how to create a startup plan, you need to get someone else’s point of view on your ideas; hopefully someone who understands entrepreneurship (as opposed to someone who’s always been on a paycheck)
• The forces of inertia are too strong and life is so busy that you might never finish your plan.

In case you’re wondering; is that the kind of work I do? I can, if we’re the right fit, so if you’re wondering about that, send me an e-mail (helene “at” wherebusinessmeetsspirit.com).

There are a number of popular techniques designed to help you ground yourself which you’ve likely heard:

• Visualizing chords connecting the center of the earth with your spine and the bottom of your feet
• Just setting the intention of grounding yourself
• Walking barefoot on the ground
• Sitting against a tree
• Doing a walking meditation
• Walking in nature

Here’s a couple more that you might not have heard as often:

• Imagine spurs coming out of your heels, and visualize them grinding themselves in the soil while you take a sumo wrestler stance. (OK, you don’t have to exaggerate the posture that much, but it’s fun to visualize you doing it. The point is to get our gravity center lower to the ground.)
• Look around you and start counting how many kinds of shapes you can see. For example, the street light is one shape, a leaf is another, the tree trunk a third, the cloud a fourth, and so on. Doing this brings your mind back to the physical world while keeping it happy counting things.

Now when asking you to be more grounded, some people are really talking about wishing that your ideas were more practical. That’s not quite the same as what I’m talking about, though it is often an outcome of grounding yourself.

First, you have to bring your attention back to your body because that is the vehicle through which you experience the world. When your thoughts and your body work together, you have a much better chance of being an entrepreneur that makes good decisions, practical plans, and successful actions.

And if you don’t implement something it either means that you haven’t made it a priority or you don’t know how. That’s certainly been the case with me.

So why haven’t I always made it a priority?

• Sometimes it’s because I’ve overwhelmed with so many things on my plate, which is precisely the time when I would benefit the most from grounding myself.
• Sometimes it’s because my monkey mind just forgets how important being grounded is so maybe it would be useful for me (and you) to explore that one a bit.

Grounding, by definition, helps me get out of my head and into my body. It helps me land my ideals into physical reality. It gives me a better perspective on my priorities, on how to get things done. It’s a reality check on whether I really want something or whether it’s meant to remain in fantasy-land.

If I don’t ground myself, I’m much more likely to:

• Not accomplish things because I’m too much in theory, not enough in practical steps
• Deny reality
• Be vulnerable to others’ opinions because I’m not solid in my own
• Be overwhelmed as I’m not sure what’s a priority, and I don’t have a clear picture of what must be done to get to where I want to go
• Not know what I want
• Be indecisive

It’s a paradox; being grounded means paying more attention to my physical world, which sounds more superficial than my deeper thoughts. Yet if I’m not grounded, I’m much more likely to circle around “frothy thoughts” that are not solid enough to allow the creation of what I want (or think I want).

Hum…these are great reasons for an entrepreneur to remember to ground him or herself; practical, having a direct impact on business success, and well, grounded!

Most sensitives would tell you that it’s been difficult functioning in our mainly action-oriented, fast-paced and attention-seeking culture and business world. For example, sensitive persons would tend to:

• Find confrontations difficult since they feel their impact many more times than another person, and since business often involves negotiating, that places them at a disadvantage
• Take on a protective role as leaders which is a great quality unless the leader ends up sacrificing too much in the process. That happened when a manager allocated himself a 0% salary increase 5 years in a row because he felt his staff was underpaid and wanted to do what he could to remedy the injustice.
• Misread other people’s meanings since a sensitive spots small changes in facial expressions and voice intonations. The customer may not be as angry as you think…or angry at all!
• Undersell because they think they portray emotion or enthusiasm but the listener may not “get it” because the communication is too subtle for the average person.
• Be drained because their nervous system is on constant alert, and because they have to deal with not only their own emotions but also the ones they pick up from people around them.

As you can see, sensitive people need tools to handle these challenges and maximize the unique opportunities their nature provides.

And I mean something else besides being told to “get a thicker skin”, or “not care as much” or “get a less responsible job”.

Hum….as I said in my reply to a comment to September 3rd’s post, I feel a personal mission brewing and am considering creating something to support sensitive people in business. What do you think; do you see a need for it?

• The apparent reasons that may be true enough but aren’t the real cause of coaches’ lack of success.
• Three related reasons that relate to marketing fundamentals
• Three mindset reasons

Now it’s time to talk about the seventh and last reason why coaches and other spiritual entrepreneurs don’t make enough money.

Coaches’ work is quite personalized and often intuitive, and many coaches can’t translate what they do in their one-on-one work to a step-by-step system which they could then turn into group coaching programs and products. That prevents them from leveraging their time and creating multiple streams of income.

Even if they were happy with doing strictly private coaching, not being to explain clearly what they do limits the effectiveness of their marketing copy.

I see such a need there that I’m offering to a limited number of coaches (or even holistic practitioners and consultants who are in the same boat) a 4-hour program where we work together to create their coaching system. I intend to make that a group program but until then, the selected few will get private coaching at the group rate: 4 hours for only $197!!

E-mail me (info “at” WhereBusinessMeetsSpirit.com) with “coaching system pilot program” in the subject line if you’d like to create products and leverage your income but find it hard to describe what you do.

One of them was that people aren’t willing to spend on coaching in this economy, considering it personal development that can wait for easier cash-flow times.

That’s true enough, but only if the following 3 conditions:

1. Coaches are offering their services to everyone rather than narrowing it down to a specific group or people they serve.
2. Coaches aren’t explaining concretely enough what they do
3. And specifically, they aren’t highlighting the specific problems they solve and the tangible benefits people get from working with them.

Let’s look at some examples.

A business coach’s website says that she helps business owners achieve their goals. That might get some takers. But I bet many business owners will think that they can do that without paying for a coach.

But what if she instead specified that she helps women entrepreneurs who have children at home organize her business systems and schedules so that she has time to enjoy her life with her children and her husband while still running a business that’s profitable rather than being just a hobby? Wouldn’t that motivate some of those moms to invest in coaching even in these uncertain times?

How about a wellness coach that says that he helps people feel their best and vibrant selves? We all pay lip service to the fact that without our health, we have nothing but we keep under-exercising and over-eating, so obviously, lots of us choose to postpone our investment in becoming vibrant.

What if the coach specialized in helping executives age 50+ increase their level of energy so that they can be as productive as they were in their early 40s and have a life after work as well?  Hum…I can hear them think: “Forget budget cuts, I need to feel that way otherwise I might be axed for a younger version of myself unless I can keep up with them.”

The first 3 real reasons heart-based entrepreneurs often have a hard time making enough money have to do with filling a real need within a specific niche. Business basics that aren’t so easy to apply in real life.

The next 4 reasons are a different kettle of fish, and that will have to wait for the next post.

She marveled at how clutter-free my desk was and asked that I write a blog post on how I kept it that way.

Well…I don’t. I cleaned it up in order to give her a nicer experience.

In the process of doing so, I went through the piles of papers on my desk and looked at them enough to know whether to toss or file them. And it was amazing what I found: full outlines of proposed workshops, a phone number that I thought I’d lost, underlined reports, etc.

Now I’m happier sitting at my desk; I feel freer from time pressures and enjoy writing more.

The $64,000 question is; why don’t I keep my desk cleaner since I know how good it makes me feel? Even more so since I’m an energy person and know that clutter tends to block our progress; I even wrote a blog post about it a while ago!

Two answers:

• I have a creative mind
• I need to work with my nature rather than against it

My creative mind jumps between projects like a frog from one lily-pad to another at times. Knowing this, I do write down notes about what I’ve just done to allow me to pick up where I left off. Unfortunately, those notes can get buried. Sort of like writing a shopping list and forgetting it at home.

Having fully acknowledged the pleasure of an organized desk before, I thought that I’d learned my lesson; that I would file things away as I wrote them or at least at the end of each day.

Not!

So what works for me? Cleaning up in anticipation of a guest does. So here’s what I should do: I should pretend every week that a guest is about to sleep in my office and prepare for it. After all, having a creative mind means that my imagination is a powerful part of my day so I may as well use it to motivate me.

This is similar to what I do when I design a business structure; match it to a person’s preferences and natural patterns. It works!

We were doing an exercise that was designed to open up our hip joints. First, we went through a movement that contracted the same muscles that we would stretch a moment later.

The instructor said that the joints would be willing to loosen up more after they felt their strength.

When you start a business, you are called upon to stretch your comfort zones quite a bit, especially if you came from a more structured environment such as a corporate job or a professional service.

A lot of entrepreneurship is about experimentation: finding your “winning formula” in business involves experimenting and testing to find the market you are meant to serve, the products or services that they want, and the marketing that does the best job at reaching them.

Any scientist will tell you that you need to have an open mind when you test, so entrepreneurs need to be willing to loosen up and be flexible.

That’s hard to do if you’re full of rigid assumptions, expectations, or fear of failing.

According to the yoga exercise, you’ll be much more able to relax into finding your success formula if you first feel your strength. So how do you do that?

One way is to give yourself an opportunity to experience some small successes instead of banking exclusively on a grandiose project.

Another is finding ways to have some cash flow coming in during your start-up to keep having the experience of receiving money. That might mean keep the job for a while or finding contract work.

Yet another is to interact with at least one person who will remind you how competent you are when you start doubting yourself, and do it in such a way that you believe it rather than think they’re just saying it because they love you. That often means that it’s best to not rely solely on family or close friends, but to have a mastermind buddy, mentor or coach.

Finally, helping others is a surefire way of feeling better about your value to the world. That might mean being involved in community work, or just lending a hand to friends.

What does that have to do with you business? Lots, because as an entrepreneur, you are your business and if you feel better, you’ll do much better.