• My love of animals
• The fact that we need to be who we are rather than try to mold ourselves into what we “should” be, and that’s for our own happiness and because we’ll be much more successful that way.

It’s not possible to put the video on my site but you’ll see it if you click on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGODurRfVv4 .

You won’t regret taking the time! Actually you should do it especially if you feel overwhelmed right now.

You’ll take a breath, sink into yourself and reduce your overwhelm either by changing what you do or what you think.

Let me know what you think of it!

• The special gifts they bring to business
• And the pitfalls they have to avoid

One of those pitfalls is their vulnerability to burnout especially if they are in a helping profession such as healing or coaching. Here’s how they get setup:

They have grown up feeling unsafe from over-exposure and since they are usually caring, they have a need to make the world safer and better for some people.

A sensitive person is also usually highly conscientious, reliable and loyal and finds it hard to let other people down when her attempts to “save the world” fall short, as they inevitably must.

Couple that with a few of the sensitives’ less desirable traits such as perfectionism and wish to please, and you have a perfect storm for burnout.

The way out is to turn away from following idealism and instead turn in the direction of joy and creativity. The burnout candidate must ask himself what would please him and to find that, he must get out of his head and use his body as his spiritual guide and feeling barometer.

You can hear the rest of the conversation by going to this link ; a lot was packed in less than 40 minutes (I always try to keep my teleseminars as short as possible since we’re all so busy).

For some of us, it matters a lot because it changes how we make decisions. Let’s see if you recognize this pattern:

• You’ve been wanting to decide on something relatively important: your business niche or direction, whether to leave a job, accept a job, where to move, etc.
• You’re frustrated because you can’t seem to make a decision. You made lists of pros and cons, talked it over with others, asked for guidance…and you’re still hesitating
• Even worse, when you’re asked how you feel about it, or what you really want, you’re not sure which frustrates you even more; how can you not know?

The reason you don’t know how you feel about it is that you’re stuck going around in circles in your head. You’re thinking about the feelings which is no where near as accurate as experiencing them.

For some people, that works ok but for me and many others, it means being out of touch with our inner GPS system.

If you’ve been stuck lately, try reviving that inner guidance system first rather than spending time analyzing your options over and over again.

Ask yourself many times a day: what am I feeling and find the answer in your body. Where is it and what are the sensations? If you come up with a mental analysis of the feeling, stop and look again.

After a while, you’ll be reconnected to your feelings on a more primal level without all the rationalizing layers and that will help you identify what you really want and whether one option feels better than another.

Yes, it takes some time, but staying in your head hasn’t worked, has it, so maybe it’s time to try something different.

Traditionally, that trait is viewed as a negative, as something that must be overcome. But that point of view overlooks that being sensitive is also a gift.

Here are 5 of the ways in which sensitivity serves a business owner or manager well:

• A sensitive person tends to have a higher level of empathy, which means that he will treat people as he wants to be treated. As a result, he’ll be trusted by his employees, peers, and clients.

• Being highly attuned to other people’s reaction, the sensitive executive will be able to factor the human element in her decisions. For example, she would foresee that an announcement about the purchase of another company will create uncertainty amongst the staff about their jobs and take steps to reassure them while still being completely honest. As a result, she’ll improve both morale and productivity.

• Having their antenna up and naturally scanning their environment, sensitive people will see faster than others the undercurrents of situations. They make great advisors in negotiations for example.

• Sensitivity is a great asset for teachers, trainers, and coaches, because you will know what your clients think before they can verbalize for themselves, and will become renowned for their ability to help people clarify their confusion.

• Sensitive persons are tuned-in to other realms besides the action-oriented physical reality, so they tend to have high intuition and out-of-the-box thinking. Not bad traits in a quick-changing economy requiring creativity to survive.

Now we all know that sensitivity is not something that’s traditionally been prized in a resume. There are many reasons for this, some valid and some not, and I’ll go over five of the downsides of the trait in 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!

Not only that, we think that no one would pay us for doing such a simple thing.

Do you recognize yourself here? Spend a few minutes thinking of what you’re known for. What are you a “natural” at? Recall not only your present work life but also your past careers and accomplishments.

You might not even see them as accomplishments until you remember the compliments you’ve received about your work or abilities. Even if you thought they were only being nice or supportive, write them down.

Now let that list sit for at least a few hours. Later, come back to it with fresh eyes and ask yourself what on that list could be valuable to someone.

If you have a history of downplaying your value, or if you’re in a phase where you’re confused about your business direction, don’t trust only your own opinion. Ask someone else who understands your ideal vision (such as being a successful coach or conscious entrepreneur) to read your list and flag the most valuable abilities.

Then brainstorm on how you could package these abilities into a process, information product, or program. Don’t worry yet about how you would teach what you do. Just ask yourself: what problems would it solve and for what kind of person?

And…is there a market for solving this problem; are those people willing to pay for this? (How you do that is beyond the scope of this post, but you could start by googling).

Once you’ve narrowed it down to your top possibility, then you can reverse engineer what you do to design your teaching program. Once again, you’ll make much better progress if you involve someone else in your exploration.

After all, you’ve been unconscious about how you do what you do for a long time, so a fresh perspective would go a long way toward ferreting it out.

This has been a mile-high, fast-forward view of one of the many processes I use in helping you figure out your business offerings, but it’s enough to get you started.

Your unconscious competence is a gold mine; don’t pass it by looking for the pot at the end of the rainbow.

Have you ever had the experience of being really busy all day and at the end of it, wondering what the heck you accomplished?

Or of getting the job done by being really focused for days/weeks/months or even years, then taking a step back at the end of it all and realizing that you would have been better off devoting your time to something else?

That last one is particularly poignant when decades have gone down the tubes working hard in a career or environment that doesn’t really suit you. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen retirees’ eyes reflect deep regret.

All of these are examples of what can happen when you’re too short-term oriented in your goals.

Sometimes being “too short-term oriented” can mean that you’re hopping from one urgency to another, or spend weeks on a project without giving sufficient thought to how it fits in with your ultimate goals.

But sometimes, it can be disguised as an apparently well-thought out career or business plan, as illustrated by retired executives who have deep regrets about their work life.

What was missing in that case was a larger picture of what they wanted their life to be about.

Too long

Do you know anyone who can’t figure out what he/she wants to do with his life and never gets started with anything?

Or someone who only wants to focus on the big picture and long term vision, never stopping to figure out the steps to get there and how to get them done?

Or someone who does the daily/weekly tasks but you can really feel how he/she resents doing them?

Those are symptoms of being too long-term oriented. These people are often accused of being “dreamers”, or in the last case, bitter dreamers.

On which side of the short-long continuum do you usually live?

Just right

Since just about everything in life is about getting the right balance, it comes as no surprise that the answer is to have a long-term vision for your life and your work, and keep it in mind when you decide on your shorter-term projects and tasks.

The trick is, how do you do that in real life?

The first step is to get a life vision and that’s not easy for many of us. To find it, you need to ask yourself what you value and get a sense of what you’re here to do (and in my experience, that’s always bigger than a specific career but often isn’t about saving the world).

There are many books and workshops on the subject. In my case, I found that, before my thoughts could become clear, I needed to process them with other people and my breakthrough happened when I found my life purpose with the help of a mentor (Baeth Davis).

Ironically, my purpose involves helping others to find theirs, which is now part of what I do. And another mentor, Connie Ragen Green, was the one to identify my business essence and website name.

Finding your purpose is just step one though. You then need to know how to reflect it in your work and in your life so that you make money doing something meaningful to you, taking action while keeping the stress low and the joy level high. That’s when the shorter-term goals come in.

So if you have a tendency to focus on the immediate priorities, you’re able to decide on which short-term project or task to do that will help fulfill your overall purpose.

And if you tend to be on the “dreamer” end, you can plant your vision into a conscious purpose-driven action plan. Then you won’t mind doing the short-term or mundane work so much since it becomes so much more meaningful, and you’ll have a much higher likelihood of success.

I’ll say it again, if you’re like most people, you can’t do this by yourself. You need some structure and someone who can bring out your vision and has the business sense to help you make concrete plans.

Then maybe you’re a better self-study than I was and reading books or internet material will work for you. Just make sure you don’t let too much of your life slip away trying it on your own before realizing it won’t do the trick. You won’t get that time back.

And, of course you want it to make money. Let’s drill down a bit on that: how much?

Actually scratch that question because anyone interested in business and personal growth has been to a seminar or read books that say that you should feel worthy, aim high, feel everything is possible, and quote a big number.

So let me re-phrase the question: Would you be happier if:

• you earned a lot of money and put a lot of energy in your business, or
• you earned just enough to give you security and a bit of freedom, and had a lot more free time.

Yes, this is the old “work hard” paradigm which isn’t necessarily true. You could work like the devil and still go bankrupt, or do really well on a surprisingly few hours of work a week. And I haven’t even addressed the Law of Attraction and Science of Getting Rich concepts.

I just thought it would be a useful starting point to uncover your current true feelings instead of the belief you know you “should” have if you’re an evolved person.

So, if you were condemned to live in a magic kingdom where the old work-hard paradigm could not be broken, what kind of life would you want?

Some people love what they do so much that it’s no sacrifice to put in tons of hours and energy into their work. Others backed into entrepreneurship because they felt unemployable or couldn’t find a work environment that suited them so they decided to create their own. What’s your truth?

Make sure you let your real answer bubble up. After all, no one will hear it, and how can you start making decisions about your business if you don’t start from your deepest truth?

Sure, we needed to do some tweaking and planning, but their desires were pointing them in the right direction.

So why did they feel the need for my input?

• For some of them, their desires meant a fairly radical life change and they knew that it was unwise to proceed without getting an opinion outside of their usual circles from a person that could objectively advise both on business and personal issues
• Others, interestingly enough, just didn’t know that they knew what they wanted to do. Until they were asked the right kinds of questions that is. Then it all came spurting out ready to be shaped into a workable plan.
• Still some others had an inkling that their proposed direction was right for them but needed to bounce it off a competent third party and especially needed help in sorting out the implications of their choices, as well as in making a plan (is there a theme forming here ?)

As I said in a recent post about using human mirrors to help with decision-making, our thoughts seem to become concrete only when they are externalized. Writing helps because of the alchemy that happens when thought energy turns into written words. Brainstorming with another human being brings another level of transformation to our ideas.

Given the impact that life direction decisions have on our finances, our time, our energy and our life, it’s amazing that we would even consider making them on our own or with the help of just our immediate circle of friends and family.

If you don’t want to or feel you can’t afford the services of a coach or advisor, find other ways to get a new perspective such as:

• Brainstorming with mastermind group buddies
• Reading books and doing exercises that come from a different angle than you’ve previously tried
• Listening to free or low-cost teleseminars on the topic and joining their group programs.

Whatever you do, make sure you’re not being penny-wise and pound foolish. You know how costly it would be to choose an unwise direction. That’s one of the reasons why you might have been stuck in the first place.

The penalties for being different were many: our life would be made darn uncomfortable if we stood out from our peers.

Even if you weren’t one of the “different” kids, you were a witness to what happened to them, and wouldn’t have traded places in a million years.

So how do you react today when I (or others) recommend that you to design your business around your uniqueness; any chance that part of you wants to make sure you’re not too unique?

That would be a shame, both for your success and your happiness.

“Blanding” yourself down may not be such a good strategy since it’s so hard to be memorable in this crowded marketplace. Being genuine, on the other hand, is the best way to attract and connect with your clients.

Besides, aren’t you getting tired of trying to conform to what others expect (or what you think they do)?

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” I think that’s from Mae West who, come to think of it, was a pretty good marketer (for anyone old enough to remember her or old movie trivia buffs).