I could always, always, without exception, top her stories. Which leads me to the first rule of life:

1) Never compete with a paramedic on gross-out stories.

I’ve never really been squeamish. And while I hold progressive political values very strongly, it’s been decades since my young and foolish teen years, that I’ve shied away from talking to, or learning from, those with different viewpoints.

Which is why I’m always confused by what people say to me.

What People Say To Me

“I know you aren’t going to like this, but military-type efficiency is what I’m talking about.” “Uh, I know you’re heart-centered so let me know if I’m talking numbers and strategy too much.”

“Uh, but I need to make money.”

It seems at least once or twice a month I have to give someone the speech, “Listen, you don’t have to be careful talking with me. I want to hear the reality of what’s going on, what you see, what you think.”

I know, I get it. I’m a spiritual teacher. I’m studying for my Masters of Divinity. People may perceive me to be in the realm of a rabbi or a priest.

I just get a little confused. When did “heart-centered” become synonymous with squeamish, or fragile?

I read in Good to Great by Jim Collins that Winston Churchill had a similar problem at the outset of World War II. He was worried that, because of his strong personality, people would just want to feed him good news about the war, that somehow he couldn’t take what was really going on.

So he did something radical. He created the Statistical Office as a channel of information whose only job was to tell him ALL the news, good, bad and terrible. And there was a lot of terrible news early in the war.

What Heart-Centered Is Not

Being heart-centered does not necessarily mean you are:

• Afraid of talking about money or profit;

• Too squeamish to talk about power;

• Scared off by references to some of the things that the military and other hierarchical organizations do well;

• Morally unable to be inspired by or otherwise learn from people with different beliefs or points of view;

• Addicted to cute kitten videos;

Well, okay. That last one went too far. If you’re heart-centered, you might be at risk for CVA (cat video addiction). But let’s put that aside.

While someone who is heart-centered might have reactions to some of things on that bullet list there, the reactions aren’t there because of the heart-centeredness.

In fact, reactions block access to your heart. You may decide to tithe a portion of your income to those who are homeless. People in reaction will do it without thinking, carrying an unconscious belief that they have to get rid of all the money that comes their way because it’s dirty.

Heart-centered does it from a grounded, calm place of generosity and sense of responsibility to share what one is given. Heart-centered also finds a healthy, balanced sense of how much is okay to hold onto.

Despite differences in our convictions and world view, I’ve been inspired by Christian evangelical and author of The Purpose-Driven Church Rick Warren. His books became best-sellers in their genre, he was making a lot of money, much more than he needed.

So he decided to reverse tithe. That means he gives away 90% and keeps 10%. I would guess that he is still comfortably a millionaire.

What Heart-Centered Means

Heart-centered is simply a commitment to love being your compass.

• Love is courageous.

I get scared at times, same as you. Heart-centered means a commitment to stop and get our marching orders from love, not fear.

• Love is powerful.

Many times I feel weak and ineffectual. Heart-centered means a commitment to return to our own center of love before acting, instead of trying to grab power through control.

• Love is flexible.

A critical deadline is missed. A detail gets dropped. Something totally unforeseen happens. Heart-centered means instead of marching forward blindly we check back in to see if love holds the rudder steady into the storm, or if it turns us onto a new course.

Squeamish is reactionary. Love is not.

You don’t have to be able to out-gross me, or anyone else, to be heart-centered.

Stand With Me

With the way things are going in this world, now is not the time to be squeamish. Despite what we’re reading in the news, despite what the Statistical Office is telling us, now is the time to stand up.

Every act of business can be an act of love. Courageous, powerful, flexible.

Are you in?

p.s. The Leap: From Struggling to Really, Truly Making It

We’re about to open registration for a maximum of thirty seats in our year-long Opening the Moneyflow program. At the same time, starting early next week, we’re starting a no-cost series on leap from struggling to really, truly making it.

Which is precisely what the year-long program will be about.

I hope you join us for one or both.

Click here to take The Leap No Cost Series.

When is revealing too much, though? There seems to be a delicate balance wherein you want to know the person on the other side of the business is a human being, is real, isn’t a polished veneer of pseudo-perfection.

And yet you want to trust that person. You don’t want to really know how often the ball almost gets dropped, or how they might look after a sleepless night, no shower, with a baseball cap jammed on their head to cover up the wild flora of their morning hair.

In my studies in child development and somatic-based therapy, and boy does that sound formal, I mean I’ve read a few books and know some experts I’ve talked to, we’re hard-wired to pay attention to danger. Hard-wired.

So, if you’ve ever wondered why every single rube needs to rubberneck past the accident, slowing down traffic for thousands of people, it’s because we’re genetically disposed to do so. If you wonder why it’s hard to pull your eyes away from action movies, it’s because it’s a survival trait.

It comes from our history as animals on this planet. Before manicured lawns and automatic weapons, human beings used to sometimes get eaten by other animals. We’re wanting to know how to survive that, so we watch.

Why get all grisly on a business blog? Because the same dynamic functions in the reveal/conceal cycle. People want to see the mess of you, they ask for it, they clamor for it, and yet while it might get their attention, it won’t necessarily build trust. The survival brain of the people watching your car accident will be saying to themselves, “Gee, how interesting! I wonder if I would survive that?”

So when and what do you reveal? Here’s how I do it.

• I don’t share messes when I feel completely forlorn or overwhelmed or stuck. I don’t show the gory details of the car wreck.
• I often share messes while I’m still feeling the pain of them, after most of the blood has been cleaned up.
• I do share messes once I’ve regained a sense of perspective on the situation, a sense of how to resolve/work through/be with it, and when I can present the situation in a way that serves others.

No, I don’t have to show up as perfect. But I want anything I share to be expressed consciously in service to others, and not as an emotional/situational vomiting up of a mess. You shouldn’t have to clean up after me, I have a support system who can help me with that. And then I can tell you how I got through the mess.

Exception: If the mess doesn’t have to do with my core competency, I’ll sometimes share more. For instance, when I changed out the kitchen sink a few months ago and included snippets of my experience, the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing, messed up the caulk job, and had to go back to the hardware store five times in the same afternoon is amusing, but doesn’t shake anyone’s confidence in my ability to deliver wisdom, insight and expertise in the realm of business-building.

Chris Brogan wrote about his flaws recently. Havi Brooks does it all the time. Best-selling author Jennifer Louden does, too. And notice how they reveal in a way that is educational, and maybe even inspirational.

Does this help? How do you do reveal/conceal in your own business?

At the end of the seminar, after helping folks learn how to handle their own neediness and to truly connect to the heart of the client, something emerged from the group.

If you study sales and selling, you know one of the big topics is on “overcoming objections.” I have sitting on my desk right now a well-known book that has dozens of answers to objections.

However, what we found is that there is only one answer needed for any objection, and you don’t even need to say anything. It’s your heart, shining in it’s brilliance and strength, bowing in complete service to your potential client.

In dyad after dyad around the room we saw potential clients who were wary, scared, suspicious literally couldn’t hold onto the contracted, judgmental feelings when their partner went through the exercise. And people tried. They reported trying to hold on to their skepticism… instead they involuntarily melted into a mushy ball of love and trust for the other person.

It’s an amazing exercise (which will also transform your love relationship if you try it with your partner), and is the essence of the sales conversation.

But it can be hard to get to it, to feeling like you can truly access your core strength and gifts and shine with them when you are facing a potential client, and then to bow into service from a place of strength, instead of collapsing into a doormat.

Luckily, there’s an answer. You can join in on the exercise, and all the preparation we did leading up to that, with the home study version of the seminar. And we have it for a special price now through the end of the month.

Click-> The Sacred Moment Home Study “During the Live Seminar” Special

Here’s Pace and Kyeli Smith, of Connection-Revolution.com, telling about their experience with the seminar yesterday:

(By the way, the video has their URL wrong- it’s http://www.connection-revolution.com. Sorry! I’ll fix it after I teach today!)

A Special “While the Seminar Is Happening” Price Through the End of the Month

If you need to finally start earning a living instead of just having a lot of people “interested” in what you do, I invite you to come get the Sacred Moment Home Study. It’s where the rubber meets the road and you get and paid, and it’s a profound heart-healing.

The Sacred Moment Home Study “During the Live Seminar” Special

If you have any questions, please ask. Okay, time for me to get going. I get to hang with everyone for Day Two!

Peace to you.

It gets harder when what you’re teaching has a bad reputation, and so you need to help people shift their perspective on it, to find the good, as Jen says.

It gets even more challenging when survival is at stake, when people are worried about making just making it. Survival causes people to tighten up, to want to rest into what’s already known instead of learning something new.

This is why teaching business skills to people who really care about their work can be so challenging. I’ve been teaching for more than twenty years in a variety of fields, including emergency medicine, computer science, nonprofit fundraising, spiritual healing and for the last ten years business skills for the self-employed and micro businesses. That spans practical hands-on knowledge, theoretical knowledge, and emotional/spiritual experiences.

Labels and Teaching

Charlie Gilkey, his partner Angela Wheeler, my collaborator and our operations chief Kate Wiliams and her partner Nancy were over our place for dinner the other night, and a topic that surfaced was labels. Specifically what people in our field of work call ourselves.

Charlie bounces back and forth between consultant, coach, and philosopher depending on the audience, among other things.

I’ve been avoiding using a label for years, because it doesn’t always feel useful. People often call me a “coach” even though I have no formal coach training, and my friend Molly Gordon who certifies coaches for ICF tells me I would pass their master coach certification with flying colors.

I’ve had extensive training in spiritual healing, but there’s trouble with calling yourself a “healer” when truly healing originates within. One can be a catalyst for healing, I can facilitate a healing process, but I can’t actually heal anyone.

The label I know that Kate, my wife Holly and I all resonate with strongly resonate with is “teacher.” Kate has been a director at the National College of Natural Medicine. Jason Stein, one of our practitioners, is a dean at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. We are all about education.

But because of my paramedic past, because of our team’s past history with medicine, the education we’re into is practical, hands-on, implementable, usable stuff. Before almost anything else, I was a paramedic Field Training Officer and preceptor- which means I took brand-spanking new paramedics out of school, and mentored, “precepted” them into become street-wise medics who could actually perform on the job.

This is a tremendous strength of ours at Heart of Business. And yet, there are things that have been learned about the human brain that continue to amaze us.

For instance, the human brain has a really hard time learning and thinking. We want to learn, we love learning, but we can only do it well under certain conditions. Change those conditions and we can’t learn. For instance, make a goal a little bit too hard, a little bit out of reach and the brain shuts down and wants to do something easier.

But make it too easy? We get bored and give up.

Enter Instructional Design

One of our team members, Judy Murdoch, the insightful Dick Carlson of Techherding.com, @juliemargretta at Harvard, among others, have helped us learn about instructional design. What I’ve gathered from a lot of reading and conversations is that instructional design is a simple concept: pay attention to how you design your trainings and people can learn. It involves being clear about what you want people to learn and assessing whether they learn it. It involves designing environments, exercises and interactions that facilitate learning.

It’s incredibly important and it’s something that is nearly entirely ignored in the field of small business training. We’re getting on board ourselves.

Changes to Opening the Moneyflow 2011

This is the major reason we’re changing the format of Opening the Moneyflow 2011. Yes, many of the participants were overjoyed at what they learned this past year. And some weren’t as happy.

The reason? We followed the pack and made a large training. We had three trainers and sixty students, so we figured we had a good ratio of one person to twenty students, and as a group we could back each other up.

It worked. And there were challenges. One big challenge is that in a group of sixty people, there were many different needs. We were trying to catch a balance between caring for people and making it affordable.

This leads to the changes we’re making.

Change Number One: Three different levels.
People need different things, so we’re created different levels. One level is a DIY level with a bare-budget price. One level is small group work, no more than six people, with one of our practitioners. And one level is intensive combination of individual one-on-one work and group work in a small group of no more than eight with me, Mark.

Change Number Two: Class Time is For Transformation and Learning
Instead of me teaching the content in the classes, we’re going to be offering the content in a combination of recorded audio and PDFs. Group time won’t be lectures, it will be discussion, strategizing, healing, implementation.

Change Number Three: Assessments and Study Plans
Each person who joins will take a detailed assessment of their business, so we can create a personalized study plan with you. You won’t just follow a curriculum as part of a group. Instead we’ll take a look at where your business is, your strengths and weakenesses, your struggles and successes, and we’ll plot a plan for you to move forward.

Change Number Four: Understanding Personality Differences
We’re a big fan of the Enneagram over here, and Kate Williams is undergoing an intense training to learn even more than she already knows. If you’re not familiar with it, the Enneagram is a typing system, like Myers-Briggs for instance, and it is very subtle and complex, with many nuances to it. It doesn’t put anyone in a box, but it does help us identify how we relate to the world around us.

Each participant, if they choose, will get an understanding of themselves through the Enneagram system, which will help further personalize the learning experience, help us as teachers work with you in ways that you learn best, and even help you understand your relationship to spirituality at a deeper level.

What Won’t Change: The Heart and Spirit of What We Do

We’re dedicated to implementing these practical pieces around learning and instructional design so that we can help people totally transform their businesses.

And we’re going to be delivering it in the same heart-felt container we always do. I am personally involved in a Masters of Divinity program in Spiritual Ministry and Sufi Studies with my Sufi teachers, deepening my understanding of our relationship between the Divine and the physical world. At the same time that we’re heightening our educational efforts, we’re deepening our spiritual presence.

Our goal? To have you know deeply that every act of business can be an act of love, and that your business can thrive in making a difference and being effective.

Although the total number of spots won’t be any less, there will still be room for about sixty participants, more than half of those will be at the bare-bones level.

If you want one of the interactive, small group spots, there will only be 26 of those. 18 in three small groups of six with our practitioners, and eight more spots in a small group with me.

I wanted to be open about our learning process and some of the changes. And I wanted to collect my thoughts as I start this second day of organizing the sales page. I hope it’s helpful.

Now, how to get all of this information, and more, available on an easy-to-read sales page. Hmmm…

Today was my day to experiment with B roll. If you don’t know what b roll is, watch this video that BrantC showed me.

Today I dug into strategy, spirituality, living in the moment, and planning. In other words… is strategy spiritual or not?

Enjoy. Any of you inspired enough to do a video challenge too?

I must admit that there’s only one thing I like about this video: I filmed it in the rain. I enjoyed the heck out of that. Everything else… eh. The message seems a little banal, my presence seems a little lackluster, and I’m squinting. Squinting! In the rain!

But I did it, and I don’t have it in me to do another.

Well, folks, what do you think? You don’t need to butter me up. I’ve done lots of stuff I’m very happy with.

This was the most challenging day yet of my two week video challenge (to get the big picture, and for a list of all the videos, check out day one). Today I had to prep for and teach a class, and I had to keep my word to myself about this video challenge. The narrow window of time I had to get it done means that I basically turned on the camera, sat down, and on camera rejected the first idea that came to my mind…

…which sparked what has been an important insight and understanding I’ve gained around making a business. Simple, yes. Fun, not always. Check it out:

What’s your relationship to this message?

Today the whole family slept late. The boys and my wife Holly didn’t wake up until almost 9am, and even I slept close to 7am. (I had a blissful hour of lying on a couch reading a novel.) So, I’m a feeling a little foggy, not so sharp and creative.

And yet, it’s the video challenge. So I asked my heart, made three piles of books, from three different authors, and just added one learning experiement- a different camera angle.

The big question: how do some people write so many books, when there just isn’t that much to say?

What do you think? Are you writing enough?

Today I had a hankering to work the whiteboard in, and had to figure out how to light it without creating a monstrous glare. I did it moderately well, although it’s not the brightest. I may need to get a couple of additional lights to really make it work well.

I also realize I could have made the presentation cleaner, but I opted to just do this in one take, since my intention is to learn and get it done, not create perfect video.

Today I elected to jump into a juicy Sufi topic, Transmission. You know, when you have an experience of something profound or important and you’re wanting to give that experience directly to the client, to help them leap forward? I explain spiritual transmission as it was taught to me, and as I helped to teach it in the Teacher Internship Program at the University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism.

So here it is:

Was it helpful? I probably didn’t need to stand directly in front of my illustration, eh?

Then, the video ended up being 12 minutes and youtube only allows ten! Oy! If I had another day I would edit and cut, but there was no easy 2 minutes and 37 seconds to cut out. So I took the easy way out and made part one and part two.

Thankfully I have room to be messy here, because do you really want to watch 12 minutes of video from me?

Today’s video ended up being a Sufi chanting instructional video, how to clean the four layers of your heart with specific chants from my lineage. I got to practice more with lighting, with titles and text, and with cropping. Learned a lot. Here it is.

Part one, the how-to:

Part two, the actual chanting practice:

How’d this one land?