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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These were points made by best-selling author Sonia Miller in a recent teleseminar, the first of a 3-part free series called the “Ultimate Manifestation”. Now I’ve explained them in my own words and if you are interested in the Law of Attraction and why it doesn’t always work, I recommend that you sign up for the recordings (and the next two classes).

She gave a lot of other good information in the first class alone, such as:

• 3 ways to overcome confusion, overwhelm and inertia
• 3 ways to get Universal energy on your side

Again, here’s my link to her free series.

Now you can’t all be like Will nor should you be. It’s all about being yourself and finding your way within the laws of the universe.

Actually, it was! Let’s be realistic, sometimes life is difficult and we really feel beaten down, or we have people in our life who are going through a bad time and find it hard to believe in positive thinking, law of attraction, create your own reality, or everything-happens-just-as-it-should philosophies.

So we talked about what we can do when that happens. What works, what doesn’t.

Paula’s first suggestion was to start by noticing how you feel and what you are thinking. This is the starting point for a couple of reasons:

• When you feel down and out, it’s often too much of a leap to try to change how you think, but most of us are able to at least observe.
• Besides, when you want to change anything, the first step is always to establish your starting point. This is the big red X that says; “You are here” on the map.

The next step is to deepen your observation, to make it more specific. For example, you could ask yourself:

• What have I tried, exactly?
• What has been the connection between my circumstances and my thoughts?

I’ll give you an example to illustrate this last point. It’s rather trivial, but that keeps it simple. I was trying to open this supplement bottle, and it had a child-proof cap.

The first time I tried to open it, I persisted for less than a minute and then left it for later. When I came back to it, I was frustrated in advance, wondering why they make it so hard, thinking the cap was probably defective.  Actually, it seemed like it had this everyone-except-for-mechanics-or-engineers-proof cap! It would not budge despite me trying the usual moves.

Then I took a breath, told myself it didn’t make sense for them to make it this hard and that it had to be easy. I tried again, and it opened in one smooth move!

I expected it to be hard and it was. I expected it to be easy and it was. It reminded me that life often lives up to my expectations.

So when life is quite difficult, it might serve us well to observe whether we are bracing ourselves in advance for trouble…and get it on cue.

Paula went on to talk about the tool she uses when she, or one of her clients, temporarily lost hope: Byron Katie’s “The Work”.

And she suggested we do 4 things when we are faced with lost hope:

• Be compassionate
• Listen (or observe, if it’s about yourself)
• Don’t deny or lecture
• Love yourself even when you’re down

You might enjoy listening to the interview; you can find it here.

This summer we’ve had a lot of daddy-long-legs (a type of spider) in the bathroom. Who knows why; maybe there was a nest in the laundry conduits.

I used to have major spider phobia and though I’m no longer as bad, I still find that they give me the creeps and I’d rather not share my indoor space with one.

I found a good way to get rid of them without having to kill them: I give them a ride outside on the bristle end of a broom.

Getting them to climb on the broom hasn’t always been easy. The spiders run for their lives, until they are cornered and then have to walk on the broom.

It’s been taking too long and out of desparation (killing them also gives me the creeps, and I prefer not to kill anyway if I can avoid it), I’ve taken to talking with them lately: “I’m not going to kill you; just get on the broom and you’ll be safe.” And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I say this, they hop on the bristles!

Hum…a few coincidences in a row.

Well the last couple of times I talked to them before extending the broom out and they didn’t run away but climbed on their ride pronto; a few seconds and we were done!

Wow; serial coincidences!

So why am I taking your time to tell you this?

Maybe the spider behavior is a coincidence that keeps happening, and maybe not. But it most certainly reminds me of the power of stating our intentions and directing goodwill at another person.

Dr. Srikumar Rao, a popular professor at some of the best business schools in the world, gives an exercise to students of his Personal Mastery course, asking them to silently direct goodwill to others as they interact with them during the day.

Many students have reported that this exercise has dramatically changed the quality of their relationships.

Remember, these weren’t new agers, coaches, or energy healers. They were business school students bent on climbing to the top of the establishment ladder.

Wish they had that course when I took my MBA!!

Here I’d like to cover three more reasons why coaches, holistic practitioners and spiritual entrepreneurs often have a hard time being as successful as they would like.

1. Heart-based service providers reject the money-grubbing, win-over-the-competition business world. They either suffered through years of soul-crushing corporate work or were allergic to that world from the onset.

   
   

   So what often happens is, they reject anything that smells of that world and they hate to talk about money, selling or business planning.

   And of course, both are necessary to success. That means that spiritual entrepreneurs need to heal their relationship with money and business if they want to make the kind of difference they dream of making.

2. Coaches love personal growth concepts, holistic practitioners love wellness topics, spiritual entrepreneurs could talk about spirituality for ever. And since many of them are uncomfortable about selling, they tend to write marketing copy, articles, and blog posts that are general discussions about their preferred topics rather than focused on selling their services and products. (Hey, I’m often guilty of that myself!)




3. Heart-based business owners are generally fans of the law of attraction, especially the visualization and meditation part. Few incorporate the part about taking targeted action to bring about their visualization. Somehow, spending a lot of time making vision boards, doing affirmations, reading inspiring literature and meditating creates the impression of working on the business. It’s a start, but we live in a physical world that requires physical action as well. (Though don’t get me wrong, action without a deeper connection is an old paradigm we don’t want to go back to.)

As you can see, those reasons relate to mindset and changing a mindset isn’t as easy as just deciding to do so.

That decision is the first step but change involves having the awareness to keep making that same decisions over and over again until new habits have set in.

That’s a lot easier to do with a support structure that keeps you in line such as being part of a program, having a mastermind group or a coach that bridges spirit and business (hint hint ).

Now there is one more reason to talk about in the next post, and that one has nothing to do with marketing basics or mindset.

Most of us know that complaining is not the most evolved behavior we could have.

Yet it’s quite tempting to do because it provides some kind of emotional relief; it’s quite addictive actually.

I for one am committed to reforming my ways and refusing to give myself that kind of relief because it sends the wrong message to my subconscious, to the universe, and to people who hear my words.

I see complaining as a misguided creative act.

It’s stating what isn’t working for me, in the vague hope that by doing so, I will create a better situation.

The best I can hope for is to let off some steam and maybe get some sympathy.

The most likely outcome is that I’ll irritate people and dissipate my creative energy without getting any positive outcome.

Sure, I’ll fall off the wagon once in a while and banter about the humidity.

But my intention is to keep my complaint reflex on a short leash.

What are you thoughts about the subject? If you have an opinion or story to share, leave a comment!

I saw my cat panic all of a sudden and looked to see what triggered him. Running through the trees in the back yard was a flash of golden fur; a dog that was going full tilt.

So I made sure both cats were in and didn’t think much of it. A dog running through is not unusual since I live in an area that doesn’t allow fences in order to keep the look and feel of the native woods.

A few minutes later I went on the side deck to start the barbecue, and the dog was standing at the bottom of the deck looking bewildered.

We talked with him in a soft voice to communicate with him but his growl prevented us from trying to approach him to check his name tag; then he took off again like a rocket.

Very likely he had escaped the care of some vacationers in the area and was scared not only because he was away from his family, but also because he was disoriented in foreign territory.

I am still worried about him and would have loved to help him…but couldn’t. He was too aggressive in his fear and kept away from him the very people that could have saved him.

Now you and I may not growl at people when we’re worried about our future or can’t get our bearings, but we may still be keeping people away from us because we constrict our energy and emit the scent of fear.

After all, haven’t you always heard that dogs can “smell” fear in someone? We humans have the same capacity, but we might not be as conscious of it; we just know that we want to stay away from someone without knowing why.

So my furry marketing lesson this time is: Actively observe whether I’m being affected by fear and deal with it even if I think it’s minor. Otherwise I might keep people away from me, including clients.

A “lay person’s” definition, according to “thefreedictionary.com” is:

“The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity”, or “The inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society”

Ok, so…how is that relevant to your business and daily life?

Here’s how: Your business and your life will go to pot unless you give them suitable attention.

For example, your marriage will cool off, your clients will be less loyal, your body will deteriorate, your desk will drown in paper, etc.

You knew that through your life experience and common sense.

So did I. But the thing is, I often forget that I knew it. Meaning that I sometimes don’t give enough attention to what I say really matters to me.

For example, until recently, I’ve been starting my day with “getting rid of” e-mails so that I could clear my slate. The problem is, not only did I spend way too much time doing this, it was the wrong “tone” for the start of my day.

Now, I make sure I first do some Qigong, spend some time in spiritual reflection and play with the cats. That is a much truer reflection of who I am.

How about your life? Do you devote time to what is important to you?

And is your business day spent on relatively unimportant administrative tasks instead of strategizing, marketing and client care?

She had been to a number of other events in the past and hadn’t made the impact she had hoped, so she was finding herself a little anxious about it this time.

I’m happy to say that she had people lined up to talk with her and left the event with quite a few possibilities and likely clients.

What did she do different?

Actually, her main change was in her intention. She quite consciously rejected the needy “I must get clients from this” thoughts and instead walked in the conference room every day with the goal: “How can I serve?”

Having that mindset, she provided some expert advice to someone, no strings attached. He later raved about her in front of the entire audience, which started the stampede of interested parties.

Knowing her, I’m sure she had provided her advice to other people at past events but this time, her energy was different because she consciously set her intent to give rather than get.

I’ve talked about the power of intent in a previous post and I’m sure it will come up again. It’s the essential first step in marketing, which makes sense when you consider that humans connect through an exchange of energy.