…but you don’t need to build resilience or walk around believing that without big and sustained efforts you can’t have resilience at all.
I believe so much in innate resilience (in humans and maybe even gorillas too!) that much of my work these days that has #ReclaimResilience as a theme.
I go to those. Heck. I run a women’s networking group of my own. The whole point of these events is to create connection, community, and support for each other in business.
Last time I failed miserably; instead of making a deep connection, I alienated someone. Nice. Another opportunity to connect kinda sorta blown.
The Wheel has turned, and we have passed through the Solstice. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the light is beginning to return. I am beginning to see/feel the angle of the light rising and the day incrementally lengthening, which for me is always a relief, a loosening, an opening. [Read more…]
I realized at the end of 2015 that I wasn’t attracting my just-right clients, and my revenue proved it. ? With support, I used the best of what I’ve learned to uplevel the Magnolias West brand. Along the way, I compiled and curated and simmered together many of the heart-centered branding tools I’ve been taught and everything I learned from my own rebranding experience into my Priestess Your Brand offer.
The Facebook Challenge I put together was an opportunity to share powerful pieces of this wisdom in a free weeklong experience. [Read more…]
Social media resources can make your life easier. They can help you keep track of topics for your posts, schedule publishing in advance (such a time-saver!), even remind you to return to online conversations.
I have a blogging schedule. I have a marketing plan. Today’s regularly scheduled
programmingpost was planned to be about engagement and marketing and choosing the right words (from the billion-plus we have in our language) that speak to the heart of the people I am here to serve and support.Then Orlando happened. With a heavy heart I marched candle in hand on Sunday night with other grieving friends and community members. On that day, and since then, I’ve noticed my reaction to the normal sort of marketing emails and posts that have landed up in my inbox and feeds — they feel dissonant to me and haven’t held my attention as usual. The emails and posts that I read and responded to were the ones that were speaking to and about this tragedy.
Sometimes it’s good to step off the regular agenda and take time to stand in and speak to the moment. Today I know in my heart that it’s the right time for me to talk to you from my heart about gratitude even if, and gratitude no matter what.
Which I’m doing with you today.
I will resume talking about engagement, marketing, and business copy writing next time. Today let’s just get grateful together. Please.
I’ve had a gratitude practice for a long time. It’s a key part of my spiritual practice. I started writing fifteen items for which I was grateful every day in a journal almost fifteen years ago. Then I started sending my gratitude list in an email to my coach each morning. The circle expanded and I was sending that email to six or seven people every day.
When I started this blog, 800-ish posts ago, it began as a gratitude journal. I shared my daily gratitudes with the world. The blog has evolved in the nearly ten years of its life to be much more about living and being of service in a fully expressed way — integrating your passion, purpose, and prosperity into a seamless, sacred wholeness. But my gratitude practice has never stopped.
The practice has circled around again to a private one. I write my gratitudes on a piece of paper (varieties of brightly colored origami paper these days) and crumple it up into a little ball and put it in my seemingly bottomless gratitude vase. Today I’m sharing my gratitude with you.
It’s easy to be grateful when things are easy, less challenging, less tragic. When you can tap into your gratitude no matter what is happening to and around you and your business, when you can tap into your gratitude through your tears and your grief, you’ll find a new ability to experience and act from a place of radical acceptance and love.
What gratitude can you find in your heart? Let’s talk in the comments.
Yes, I am connecting scented baths and massages and similar yummy events to the care and nurturing of your business.
Because this: You love your business. It’s your passion and your calling. And this: Every action you take to feed and nurture your business reflects and manifests (and maybe even multiplies) the way you take care of yourself.
Exquisite self-care for your business starts with you. Exquisite self-care opportunities show up in many ways, some teeny and some huge. You get to choose and commit to self-care every day — in your work, in your life, in your relationships.
It’s an inside job. All the best external successes grow, thrive, and sustain because they have a strong inner foundation.
It’s pretty simple: It’s about having and keeping a sacred commitment to practices that let you establish and maintain a state of being resourced, restored, and in balance so that you attract the clients, revenue, friends, satisfaction, and joy you desire.
Eat, move, and rest like a boss.
Grow a loving relationship with your body and with food, and keep expanding and improving that relationship as you can. A juicy add-on: grow some food, even a pot or two of herbs in a sunny spot if you’re a beginner (it’s nearly impossible to kill a pot of peppermint).
Move your beautiful body — I love my daily walk. Take breaks and get away from the computer.
Prepare good meals and eat them away from your desk.
Absolutely do not forget the scented baths and massages.
A strong connection to the divine — to a power bigger than you — helps you stay grounded through the hectic busyness of each day, even in the scary and unwelcome moments. Grounded, peaceful, and motivated. Grateful. Happy.
These days my daily practice looks like something like this: two rounds of tai chi, a journal entry, gratitudes written on colorful paper and added to my gratitude vase, and a guided meditation. I take a walk and I do a workout or a stretching routine as well.
Dress for work, even if you work at home.
Don’t wear the clothes that you slept in. (What? You wear PJs? Me, I keep it simple. I just ditch the bra layer and sleep in the shirt I wore all day — works 90% of the time because I wear comfy cotton knit t-shirts 90% of the time — and slip into yoga pants if I’m not wearing them already.)
Doing errands around town? Dress in something you wouldn’t mind wearing when you are meeting a new prospective client.
You never know when a stranger you encounter will end up becoming your next prospective client.*
Want a successful and sustainable business that has you doing your inspired best work for your ideal clients? Then nurture and sustain yourself.
Work/life balance is a thing. When you’re out of balance and working so much you can’t make time to play and restore, your good health and positive attitudes take a hit. Over time those hits can suck the life, and love, and success right out of your business.
Working at home on your own? It’s so easy to slip into feeling alone and worried. Take an action that fits your needs and your financial reality: Find a mastermind group. Hire a coach. Set up an accountability buddy system with a friend whose business is in a similar reality to yours.
These days I am in a paid small group for coaching, I have a buddy I meet with every other week for content development and heartstorming, and I have a no-fee peer-led mastermind where we talk through business questions and do content creation separately together.
I use the tools that allow me to schedule my life and live my schedule and be accountable when things change.
What’s working for me these days is a powerful combination of mostly cloud-based systems that allow me access from anywhere with internet. The three main ones are Evernote, Apple’s calendar, and Google docs and sheets.
Put on your big-girl panties and find out what it feels like to have a grown-up relationship with money.
When you know what’s going out and what’s coming in, you’re in clarity (not vagueness) and you’re in much better shape to be present and take the next right action.
Drop me a line in the comments.
*That sentence about not knowing if a stranger will end up considering hiring you? Taking actions consistent with these words is a formula for an increased-happiness and decreased-regret life. The concept applies not only to your appearance — what you’re wearing and that you’re clean and smell healthy and alive. It applies to every interaction with every human.
Not knowing whether this or any other stranger might be your next client may not be the most selfless motive for changing and improving your behavior. But like many things, it’s a really good way to convert a wish into a behavior into a habit that can and will improve your business and your life.
Especially if you’re starting out, or building (or re-building) your business, you may often find yourself taking on roles that are challenging, unfamiliar, and sometimes downright scary!
This is certainly true in my case.
For me, with my business in a rebranding and rebuilding phase, I am doing much of the work on my own. I’ve cut down on paid help for now. Which means I get to do just about everything for Magnolias West.
Lucky for me I love learning new things.
In the process I got to learn some new and way cool stuff. You might want to file these resources for you and your team; they can come in very handy. I love sharing what I’ve learned!
But since I am wearing that particular hat right now, I’m saved by the fact that I love learning, and love troubleshooting (as long as the trouble doesn’t last too long!). Now that I’m back to wearing almost all of the hats, I’m enjoying learning, successfully implementing what I’ve learned, and sharing the info with you.
What are your favorite resources? What would you like to share? Let’s talk in the comments.
For now, I will be changing my blogging and newsletter schedule to something like every other week (instead of weekly). I promise to keep delivering consistently true, slightly audacious, and always juicy content. I will use the freed-up time to move my business development and rebrand along quickly and beautifully.
I want to thank Steve Lesnick for allowing me to use this wonderful photo.
Practicing tai chi can be a lifetime journey. No lie, it nearly is in my case; it’s been over 40 years now. They call it “practice” for good reason.
Every single repetition, every single practice, invites you to focus on the moment, on what you are doing right now. Not on what you can’t do. Not on yesterday’s form or tomorrow’s challenge. But This.Now.Moment.
When you focus on and practice what’s in front of you, you move toward mastery with every breath. Mastery of the movement. Mastery of the interaction. Mastery in your work. Mastery in your business. Reminder: It’s moving toward mastery I’m talking about here, not necessarily achieving mastery. How would you know you got there, anyway? And then what would you do for fun?
How do you win in tai chi?When you step with an empty foot, you can feel through your foot to the ground below. You can feel stability or the lack of stability. You can feel safety or not-so-safe. If the ground isn’t stable or safe, you can place your foot elsewhere before you commit. The tai chi form when you see it practiced is fluid with no stops. It’s beautiful. Guess how it gets that way? A zillion or so hours of practice. I wonder how many hours I personally have drilled this in practice.
Sink.
Rotate.
Step empty.
Pick the foot up — did you rock with a weight shift or are you steady, stable, supported?
Put the foot down again.
Pick it up — count to …three-four-five, sinking all the while; okay.
Step empty, then shift your weight.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
And repeat some more.
Think about your business. Compare the times you have moved hastily to get something done, or launched, with the times you have slowed down, and taken time with each step of the process. Some examples of empty steps in business might be:
What empty steps have you taken in your business? What heavy off-balance steps? What have you noticed? I’d love to know; please leave a comment.