When you start out, you ain’t got nothin’ moving yet. You might be scared, but you also tend to be more open to following the whims of your heart.
As your business grows, there is a real need to be more strategic. Simply following the whims of your heart moment to moment changes from being your best business plan to looking crazy and inconsistent to the people who are trying to trust you.
Plus, when your business gets beyond a certain point, you begin to depend on it. A certain number of clients, a certain amount of revenue. You begin to really count on the cash coming in.
Oh sigh, it gets so complicated. Too heart-whimmy, and you can’t truly build momentum. Yet if you get too focused on strategy, and you lose the juiciest and truest part of your business.
As you might imagine, our organizational chart here at Heart of Business, now that we are a team, isn’t very traditional. One of our most important positions is the Heart Monitor.
Holly, my wife, occupies this all-critical position. Over the years her sense of intuition, of being able to notice whether the heart of the company feels “off” or not, has been unerring. The only times we’ve gotten into trouble is when I haven’t followed her recommendations.
Recently she said to me, out of the blue, “I think we’ve gotten too strategic in how we’re planning what we do. We need to keep asking these questions: How are we truly being asked to serve? How are we truly being asked to give?”
I’ve learned the hard way, so when she says something like this, I take a moment, breathe it in, and most often end up saying, “You’re right.”
The fear of this approach can come up because we might worry that the Divine is asking us to throw away all of our hard work and to start from scratch. In my experience, though, this is rare. It happens, but it’s very rare.
Usually, for me, something will come into my heart that I don’t understand. Say, a green field. Or an image of a couple in relationship. If my mind tries to run with that, sure it looks like something completely different, “I’m supposed to be a farmer! Or relationship counselor!”
The trick? Sit in your heart longer. Don’t just grab the first thing that comes and run with it. Sit with it. Say Yes. Let it in. Get comfortable with it.
Then, and only then, ask “So… what does this look like in context with what’s already going on?”
Example: The “green field” I mentioned above came up for a client, who sat with it and realized that what she was yearning for was a day off in the woods. She went for a walk that day, spent some time in a green field, where some really critical insights landed for her. The clarity that came from the day in the green enabled her to implement the next strategy in her business, from the heart.
Here’s the simple formula: First ask the heart, then do strategic planning. Much better than being strategic, and trying to fit the heart piece in afterwards.
If you ask your heart how are you truly being asked to serve, what do you get? And how does it fit in with your current business?
With love and appreciation,
Mark
20 Responses
Dear Brother,
Thanks for this post. You basically described the process i have been going through in the last year where i became more focused on becoming sustainable and constantly evaluating and reassessing what is working on the financial side of things. In the process, the heart of the business felt like it was being lost a bit which led to me feeling burnt out and frustrated at times. In the last few months I shifted back to focusing more on being in service which is what has always been the reason for any success we have had in the past. This shift was dramatic and I now feel revived and renourished by this different direction. Love Always, Rob
Rob- What I’ve discovered is to be so gentle and compassionate with myself- going off-track at times when learning is, it seems inevitable. I think we can be aware and avoid the more extreme swings of pendulum- but you are doing such an amazing thing, I love to hear how you’ve come back to your heart and are flying.
Everyone in Toronto should know about http://www.theinnergarden.ca
thanks for your response brother.
i also discovered the importance of being gentle and compassionate with oneself and also acknowledging that everything happens perfectly i.e. in the right order at the right time orchestrated by the Divine.
For me I think it is sooo important to check in with my gut and my heart to see what my role is in service. The difficulty or biggest hesitation for me at times is I believe I often move towards doing things such as running a business in a way that (almost) nobody else I am aware of is doing for a community of people who’s hearts know a better world is possible yet do not fit into any specific organization or group that currently exists.
Having these insights revealed to me has been powerful and I have a clear direction of how to move forward. One life-changing ways this is manifesting is through Gift Circles which is providing me with so much nourishment, love and support. I STRONGLY encourage anyone reading this to start their own group. You can read more about this here – http://www.meetup.com/The-Gift-Circle-Cultivating-Community. I would love to right a blog on this subject in the future and look at the concept of are we treating our gifts as gifts or burdens. I think I too often have been doing the latter. I look forward to being more of service and treating my gifts as gifts and sharing them with others freely,
Love Always,
Rob
PS The Inner Garden (and I) would love to see you in the fall/autumn 🙂
That’s amazing, Rob. Very inspiring about the gift circles. And we’d love to come back to Toronto- we’ll have to figure out when that works! Thank you!
Hey Mark,
I’m totally in alignment with your words. What I’m finding in my current project
Leo- awesome to hear of your heart-centered success, especially with such an important issue. I bet it’s so much easier to follow the heart with strategy now that you’ve integrated the strategic learnings from before, even if they were painful and stressful. You think?
Hey Mark – I’m not sure. It’s true all that experience informs me. It certainly gives me a good idea of what not to do!
What comes is the memory of when I ran my first hypnotherapy course 20 years ago. I was studying NLP and wanted to train in Ericksonian language patterns. I found a teacher and intuitively knew he was the one I wanted to train with
Hi Leo- that’s awesome, and I’ve seen that, too! I’m curious if you had people you were guided to who did have the knowledge to support you in what you were doing. My teacher talks about the intersection of worldly knowledge and guidance- a brain surgeon can be brilliantly guided in her medicine, but she first has to become a doctor- and hopefully feel the guidance to become a doctor. Someone who hasn’t had medical training in neurosurgery- no amount of guidance will allow them to perform surgery. That’s what I was referring to.
Hey Mark – interesting point your raise that got me pondering.
What you say about brain surgery, and I guess any other profession that requires the development of specific knowledge and skills, is true. I wouldn’t want someone cutting off the top of my skull and “making it up as they go along”!
So what I see is that the areas I’ve succeeded in so quickly didn’t require that extensive background knowledge.
The only prior experience I had when I set up that first course was that of being a participant in a number of workshops. I seem to have the ability to learn rapidly from observations of what others are doing that works and does not work.
I’ve also noticed, and this seems to me to be an important part of the puzzle, is that when I step out into the world following my Heart
Exactly, Leo, and very inspiring. In our individualist culture, I just wanted to make it clear how important it is to have the support and guidance for yourself AND to receive help from other people who show up for you.
You crack me up, Mark Silver:
Erin- You mean I’m not supposed to be a relationship counselor? 🙂 I’ve seen that dynamic too- that to give it away usually means something far different from what we think- how cool about the person you know.
This is great, Mark. Heart-leads and strategy follows – it’s kind of an ebb and flow. I think when we start our businesses, we are often flying on instinct, but as we build up experience, the heart can get sidelined. Those are great questions from Holly about service – ultimately, that’s what it’s all about. I also clicked through to your post about how to receive guidance on business decisions – it rocks! I was in just such a situation last night – next time I’ll know what to do.
Leda- So glad you liked the other post, too! So glad you’re digging in.
My heart keeps saying love more, which is great, I want that too, but it’s also very vague. So I love the idea of thinking about it in terms with what’s already going on. Off to sit with that now. Thank you.
Elizabeth- perfect!
i as a wife supports ur comments about ur wife.
mark!u have said it rightly!
Tama Kieves, author of Inspired and Unstoppable, says you cannot plan an inspired life. That is a very freeing thought for me. I am prone to being overwhelmed by setting goals and not knowing how things will get done. I guess one can get unfocused and ineffective without a strategy but right now, when I check in with my heart, it tells me to get out there and offer myself/serve others with anything that feels good and right to me. The next step can be discerned after there are actions taken, results digested and emotions felt.
Paul- I think it’s so true that you can’t plan an inspired life. Sounds like a beautiful next step in your “strategy” to get out there and be of service.
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