Last week I got to spend three days hanging out virtually with some of the most amazing, talented, heart-full people. I’m talking about the folks in our year-long Opening the Moneyflow course plus the Heart of Business team.

We ran a virtual event via video conferencing (which would’ve been a disaster without the incredible help of Jeremie Miller on three spiritual topics that, together, create massive breakthroughs in business. Sovereignty, Ease, and Appreciation.

The three days were filled with many insights. A lot of people cried, including me. And yes, I’ll go on record as saying that I don’t think it’s a successful event without at least half the participants crying at least once.

I don’t know if it will make you cry, but here’s one deceptively simple and profound insight that will turn your relationship with business around if you take it on.

Ready? In every place of “hard” in your business, there’s a challenge waiting for you. If you take it on it will make everything in your business easier and more effective.

• A challenge to trust, learn and grow.
• A challenge to let go of beliefs and opinions based in illusion.
• A challenge to take the time to care for yourself with health food, exercise, and spiritual practice.
• A challenge to choose love over anything that isn’t.

For instance? It’s hard to struggle day after day, without any clients coming in. The challenge is to change your opinion about sales, and learn how to enroll people with integrity.

Another? It’s hard to show up in front of people, time after time, and stutter through answering the question “So, what do you do?”

The challenge is to learn what goes into a compelling sentence, and to make clear decisions about who you help and what you help them with.

A third? It’s hard to to struggle with overwhelm every day, doing everything yourself. The challenge is to let go and trust other people to help you.

Yet one more? It’s hard to feel disconnected, lost and alone. The challenge is to take the time every day for spiritual practice and connection.

One of my favorite questions to ask myself and my clients is this one: “Is love available even here?”

Healing the Hard and Finding the Challenge

Take a moment right now and identify a hard place in your business. Take a gentle breath. Another. Now take a third one, I promise it won’t kill you.

Now, ask your heart, ask yourself to be shown, with a willingness to be surprised, what challenge is waiting for you within that hard place that will bring ease, joy and effectiveness?

Can you find the “Yes” in your heart to let go of the hard and take on this challenge?

Now, don’t keep it a secret. Share with us what you got. What challenge did you find? Did you find a Yes? What are you first one to three steps to taking it on? Tell me about it in the comments.

p.s. Needing some hands-on help?

Sometimes a course or group program just isn’t quite the right thing. Sometimes you want something very custom, with the focus totally on you and your business, on your timeline, on your agenda, you.

Yollana Shore and Jason Stein have years of experience as healers and coaches, and have chalked up tremendous successes with their clients. And they are official Heart of Business practitioners, steeped in our approach.

To learn more about working with one of them, click here.

Heart of Business Mark

A client had been wrestling with focusing in on what he does. The funny thing is that he already had a fairly well-developed business, with a full client load and a good income.

But, he had a LOT more potential, and not being able to articulate what he does was keeping his business down.

Plus, it should be said, that he had participated in a high-priced, high-energy coaching program that had created financial results in the short term, but had left him disconnected from himself, burnt out, and with no foundation to easily repeat what he had achieved.

Not good.

He needed to get super-clear on what he does and who he does it for. After he struggled on his own for quite some time, he and I worked through it in about a week, between two coaching sessions.

After so much struggle, how did he get through it so quickly? He’s a smart, open-hearted, capable person. He was stuck exactly where most people get stuck.

Permission and Surrender

Like all good-hearted people, he had a longing in him to work with a particular group, but he also didn’t want to exclude anyone.

Permission was needed to go for what he really wanted. And surrender was needed to let go of the “shoulds.”

One of the most elemental phrases in Sufism and Islam: La ilaha illa’llah. It means there’s only the Divine, that everything is the Divine.

However, the literal translation is even more precise. It says, “NO! There is nothing but the One.”

It starts with an emphatic NO!

The “No” is what we say to illusion when we are seeking Truth. The “no” is what the Divine says to all that isn’t Truth.

If you have a truth in your heart, lean into your heart’s connection to muster up a Divine “NO” to illusion.

Illusions like:

• I must take care of everyone who shows up.
• I must make sure that everyone gets all of their needs met.
• It’s my job to help everybody, no matter what.
• I’m not allowed to follow my heart.

Stop. Just stop. Read through those illusions. Any of them have a grip on you? Or another one that’s similar?

Then ask your heart: who is your business really here for? Who are you really here for? Take your time. Don’t rush. Give yourself some gentle spaciousness here. As you get any little bits of clarity, write it down. Breathe. Relax. Open.

Okay. Got something in front of you? Time to say “Yes.” And surrender to what your heart shows you.

Keep breathing. It’s going to be okay. In fact, it’s going to be more than okay. It’s going to be WONDERFUL. Because now the people your business is really here for, the people you most like to work with, will be able to find you.

Now, don’t keep it a secret. Share with us what you got. What illusion did you say “no” to? What are you surrendering into?

p.s. Needing some hands-on help?

Sometimes a course or group program just isn’t quite the right thing. Sometimes you want something very custom, with the focus totally on you and your business, on your timeline, on your agenda, you.

Yollana Shore and Jason Stein have years of experience as healers and coaches, and have chalked up tremendous successes with their clients. And they are official Heart of Business practitioners, steeped in our approach.

To learn more about working with one of them, click here.

Heart of Business Mark

Introduction: This is a guest post by Leesa Barnes of success refresh. I asked her to share the journey of how she brought her connection to the Divine into her business. You can find her at http://www.leesabarnes.com

I crave patterns.

No, not sewing patterns (although I do love to sew), but step-by-step formulas that follow a predictable path.

I love math. Yup, I said it. I’m a numbers-holic. I also have a unique ability to learn new languages fast – even at THIS age of…well, a lady never tells her age. I majored in history in university and then found my way into the exciting world of technology.

A wonderful coach helped me see why I was interested in such an electic mix of subjects. While others were mystified how a degree in history would prepare me for a career in technology, this coach said in a rather elegant way that…

“Leesa, you’re attracted to patterns.”

The Comfort & Safety of Patterns

When I started my business in 2006, I kind of had no idea what I was doing. So, I looked for patterns of success. If someone looked successful, I registered for their course to digest their pattern. I was eager to learn how to move people from “I’m interested” to “I’m sold” using a tried-and-true, step-by-step method.

I learned from some of the best soothsayers in the market. I learned how to use words on my sales pages and in my ezines to present a perception of my own success. I enchanted using the right colours, the right pictures and the right language to captivate attention in a magical way.

I remember trying to fill a 3-day workshop back in 2008. The title I used on the webpage was…

“Give Me 3-Days & I’ll Teach You How to Earn an Extra Four, Five or Six Figures Each Month Working Just 4-Hours a Day”

The title didn’t fit my reality. I was working 16-hours a day and although I was generating four, five, or six-figures – it was sporadically and definitely not monthly.

My mentor at the time scoffed at my concern and said:

“How do you think I built my empire?”

Why the Pattern Was Failing Me

I was struck by a passage in Os Hillman’s book, Today God Is First: Daily Workplace Inspiration, where he said…

“When you market, a product or service based on a perception – and not reality – you’re practicing witchcraft.”

In the Christian tradition, witchcraft refers to creating harmful illusions based on ego. It’s a view that your works are more powerful than God – the Divine. It’s based on selfishness because the works performed are meant to bring attention to you, but not to help or bless others.

On my sales pages, I was using the pattern to create an illusion. I had surrounded myself with others who thought it was okay to bedazzle and enchant using the pattern. Case in point – back in 2010, a colleague had filed for bankruptcy, but did not see anything wrong with continuing to call themselves the “millionaire success coach” on their sale pages because the pattern taught them to use pictures and words to create a perception of success.

In the words of my tradition, I was practicing witchcraft, and I didn’t know it.

But, more importantly (and don’t miss this), I put faith in my own God-like status and worshipped the pattern, the blueprint, the step-by-step system as the very thing that would bring me wealth, power, and recognition. I’ve come to realize that when we put our trust in the created instead of the Creator, we do things that compromise our values, our beliefs, and ultimately, our faith.

Fixing My Relationship With God Fixed My Relationship With My Clients

Fast forward to 2011. I served less people, but made the most money in my business than I ever had. Did you hear me? I had the best year financially because I worked with less people. For the first time in my business, clients invested in one, or more programs.

I knew when my clients were getting married. I knew who was going to have a baby. My clients shared EVERYTHING with me and lovingly told me when I was doing well and when I slipped up. My clients had become my family members and I enjoyed their company, their wisdom, their interaction. A renewed sense of love and devotion washed over me for my clients and for their ultimate success.

This turnaround in my business happened because I did one thing – I broke up with my idol, the pattern.

Now, don’t misinterpret what I’m saying here. I still attend workshops. I still invest in educational and training programs. I still love math, technology, languages and history – anything with a predictable pattern.

The difference between then and now is that the pattern is no longer my God. This realization didn’t happen overnight. It took 90 days. I closed my laptop in late 2,010 and went on a spiritual journey to reconnect with the Source. I wish I could say I went to Israel or India and wandered in the wilderness, rent my clothes and covered myself with ashes. That would make for a good story, but it wasn’t anything like that.

Instead, I consulted with God for many hours each day in my familiar surroundings. Whether I was in the quiet of my bedroom or communing with nature in the great snowy outdoors (it was during the winter months when this happened), I wrote notes in a journal and refreshed my soul with the Creator’s promises from the Bible.

In that time, God reminded me that I’m fearfully and wonderfully made. That He knew who I was before I was born. That He gave me my giftings so I can bless others. He reminded me that the reason I’m on this planet is to help others on their path to success – and not to pad my ego. When I reopened my business in early 2011, I had transformed my faith, my business, and the words I used so that God would be pleased with the output.

So, what exactly did I do? Here are the 3 ways I transformed my business with action tips on how you can go beyond the pattern…

Transformation #1 – Patterns Create Transactions, Connections Create Loyalty

Prior to 2011, clients would enter my tribe, invest in a product, stay on my list a little while, then unsubscribe. A few weeks later, their faces and words would appear as testimonials on other people’s websites.

At first, I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get testimonials from them. But, once my own transformation happened in 2011, I now understood that by offering discounts, fire sales, and hard deadlines, I had built my business on transactions, instead of connections.

In his book, Start With Why, Simon Sinek calls these methods manipulation. Manipulation leads to a transaction-based business. A business can never grow or be sustained on a transactional based model. Instead, Simon calls us to focus on building relationships that will inspire our clients to take action and build loyalty with our brand.

After my 90-day spiritual quest, I put together a plan to build my business based on connections. As a result, I started to see the fruits emerge in terms of loyalty. Clients were sending me testimonials without my having to ask. Clients sent referrals without needing affiliate links. Clients understood that they were investing in their success using me as their guide. Refund rates went down dramatically, so much so that when we had our sole refund request in 2011 (someone who slipped through the cracks and didn’t have a conversation with me), my team had to scramble to find our outdated policy hidden in the annals of our operation and standards guide.

The biggest show of loyalty was how often clients were investing in additional programs. Clients were not only investing in 1 product, but 2 or more. I had to remodel my business systems to support multiple investments made by the same person. For example, each digital learning product had its own website. If someone invested in a learning program, they logged into one site. However, because clients were now investing in 2, 3 or more programs, it became confusing for them to login to 2, 3, or more websites with 2 or 3 different usernames and passwords (and equally confusing for my support team).

So, we consolidated all our digital learning products into an online academy. Now, clients use one login to access every program they ever invested in. One login, one website and this makes my support team very happy.

Your action = Transform your business so you rely more on building connections than on spurring on tranactions.

Transformation #2 – Listen More, Talk Less

I built so many boundaries around my time because I found that people were draining my energy. But, the issue wasn’t them, it was me. Whenever I spoke to people, I instantly jumped in to solve their problem. Then they’d walk away, satisfied and I’d retreat to my bed completely drained, angry and frustrated that I just spent an hour with someone that I could never get back.

In my training programs, again, I’d do most of the talking. I’d yap and yap and yap and yap, then take a week just to recover. My students would then provide feedback saying “I felt Leesa was holding back,” or “Leesa didn’t give enough value.” Plus, they wanted me to throw in more bonuses and freebies because they felt they didn’t get enough. I was incensed.

The Bible states that the wise close their mouth and listen. Listening is such an underrated skill, and more leaders need to do this in order to truly be a blessing to others.

I now have conversations with people where I ask thoughtful, loving questions. I enjoy connecting (it’s one of my core values) and I’m an equally curious person. Everyone’s experiences are unique and I’m fascinated by the stories people tell. My training programs have also changed drastically. Instead of being the Sage on the Stage, I’m now the Guide on Side. Students do pre-work, then come to the live session where I break them into small groups and let them help each other. My focus now is on transforming students instead of showcasing my expertise.

Your action = Do less free-for-all teleclasses and instead, open your calendar and invite people to schedule some time to talk. Ask the right questions. Listen closely. Then move them into the program that you feel can help. Sometimes, this may be a “competitor’s” program. That’s okay, because if you’re leading by connections – and not transactions – your goal is to help the person find the right fit.

Transformation #3 – Add to Your Tribe Only Those Who Will Be Compatible with Others Already In It

Once I de-elevated myself from my God-like, self-absorbed, ego-filled position and put God there instead, I realized that I could not solve everyone’s problems. Only God can do that. So, I stopped working with everyone who could fog a mirror and instead selected people who would match up nicely with those who were already in my tribe.

Yes, I looked for people who were in the right place at the right time and who had the right problem I could solve. But, I also knew that I had to be of service to those who already committed their time and energy to my brand and my style of leadership. I needed to honour the connections that had already formed by adding those who could enhance the group – not tear it down.

Your action = Instead of listing your values, identify the characteristics of the tribe that has already gathered around your leadership style. Ensure that future clients that are added to your tribe have these characteristics as well.

Final Thoughts

Putting my trust in the Creator instead of the created renewed my faith. Fixing my relationship with God helped me to fix my relationship with my clients. Although patterns still show up in my life and business, I now give myself permission to adjust the pattern based on my values and my client’s needs. Moving beyond the pattern changed my business from one based on transactions to one based on connections.

About the Author

Leesa Barnes is an award winning motivational teacher who helps faith-centered messengers become financially and spiritually successful. After operating a successful consulting business, an online global association and authoring countless training programs and books, Leesa teaches you how to use the right words and the right online tools to share your divinely inspired message so you attract the right clients. To learn how to add a more authentic, raw, and naked faith to your business, visit http://leesabarnes.com.

Heart of Business Leesa Barnes

This is a guest post by Heart of Business Alumni Community Member Jenny Bones.  Jenny is on a mission to teach people how to change their world with their words. Devouring everything to do with entrepreneurship and/or chocolate, she is currently hosting the first annual  S’mores Summer Camp for Solopreneurs. When was the last time you roasted marshmallows by the campfire? Come check it out.

I used to like to joke that, because of my Catholic upbringing, I only had two motivators in life: Fear and Guilt. Of course, it was one of those jokes that really wasn’t that funny. Most of my jokes aren’t.

For the past two and a half years, I have been carrying around with me some monumentally intense guilt. Through a series of very unfortunate events, I had to make the gut-wrenchingly difficult decision to move away from my family and try to rebuild my life.

I love my children. They mean everything to me. I raised them with gentleness, compassion and tenderness and they blossomed into the most amazing young adults I’ve ever known.

At the time I moved away, my daughter was just graduating high school and getting ready for college. My son was going through a separation with his fiancé and they were dealing with the trials and tribulations of dissolving a romantic relationship when there’s a child involved.

They needed me.

And I couldn’t be there for them.

It was the most soul-crushing guilt I’ve ever experienced.

Nobody could soothe me. Nobody could convince me, no matter how hard they tried, that I wasn’t the worst mother who ever lived…that I did what I did because I had to, not because I wanted to. “After all,” they’d say “you moved to Detroit, not the Bahamas.” And they had an excellent point.

Through prayer, meditation and during several chakra healings, I received consistently clear messages that my family back home was being well taken care of and watched over. It would provide a moment of healing and relief from the guilt, but the moment was always fleeting. So tightly was I holding onto that guilt.

Guilt sits on your heart like a hot, crushing stone. It burns and aches and never seems to go away.

One day, during the Heart of Money course, I was on a call with Mark and he mentioned that guilt is “just an illusion.” My ears perked up. I knew that this guilt I was carrying around was holding back my business and personal relationships. But the sensation of it had become so familiar, something I could count on. It was like a comfy security blanket of self-sabotage.

So, I took a deep breath not sure if I really wanted to hear his answer, and asked Mark to explain this “guilt as illusion” thing a little more. He didn’t. Because he’s a smart cookie. Instead, he asked me to meditate on the Divine quality of patience, As-Sabur, during my Remembrance practice.

I thanked him and tried to hide my disappointment. I didn’t want to do the work myself! I wanted him to spend an hour or two explaining this concept to me in detail so I could walk off and pretend like I understood.

“OK, fine,” I resigned silently as my inner child pouted, “I’ll go and meditate on patience and try to figure out what the heck it has to do with my questions on guilt and illusion…but I really don’t think it will help.”

I practiced daily for two weeks focusing on the Divine quality of patience. And sure enough, slowly the answers began to sink in.

What is guilt? Guilt comes when I’m angry with myself.

Why are you angry with yourself? Because I haven’t been able to help my children as much as I wish I could.

What does this guilt keep you from accomplishing? I think I’m keeping things smaller than they should be because I don’t deserve the success.

But the success would allow you to help your children more? Erm, yes.

What if, instead of getting angry with yourself, you were as patient with yourself as you are with your children? …DOH!

Just like that, I got it.

I realized that if I were as impatient with my children as I had been with myself, I’d consider myself an abusive and unfit mother. No wonder I was keeping everything around me small…I had been keeping ME small!

Guilt may top fear as the single most destructive force in my life and my business.

Once I shifted all that guilt to feelings of true compassion, understanding and forgiveness, everything else around me started to shift. And I don’t mean all slow-like, I mean at lightening speed like it had just been waiting for me to come around and get it, already.

Being compassionate with ourselves is a lesson that comes in many, many forms.

I’ve learned it no less than a bazillion times already in this lifetime and I’m sure there are a few more lessons to go before I’m gone…at least I hope there are! But this particular guilt-busting lesson has seriously transformed my business in recent months…and I have the numbers to prove it.

In truth, it is the most important thing we can do not just for our businesses, but for our family, friends, clients and the entire world around us: To treat ourselves with the same gentle compassion as we would treat a newborn baby. Go ahead, give it a try. Trust me, the ROI is out-of-this-world.

What have your struggles with guilt looked like and what insights have you gained around this issue? Please share so we can all learn and grow together.

Heart of Business Jenny Bones

Every month our Alumni Community has a different business focus. While this has many benefits for the community, the practical work involved is that each month I need to find/create a worksheet, and find several related articles that juice the conversation. I also need to create a conversation thread on the Community Forum, and create the backlinks for it.

Let me tell you something: how you handle tasks like this will define how big your business can get. It will tell you how much you can handle and how much space you have for creative thinking.

The least effective way to handle this is reactively.

“Reactive” means “OMG, it’s the end of April! I’ve got to choose the Business Focus, create the worksheet, find the articles.”

Inevitably this ends up handled at the last minute, often after your assistant is no longer available (if you have an assistant), and you end up doing everything yourself. Stressful. Not fun.

Then, relieved to have it done, you forget about it until next month, when you do it again at the last minute.

The next best effective way to handle this is slightly pro-actively.

Having learned your lesson, you start to schedule it in your calendar or other task/to-do system. You realize early in the month that you need to get that darn business focus done, so you do, two to three weeks ahead of time. Nice.

If you have an assistant, you hand it off to him or her, and he or she gets it uploaded and handled for you. Not so stressful.

Yet, after a few months of this, it gets tiring. You start to feel like you’re on a gerbil wheel.

The most effective way is to do it in a batch.

Batching your tasks takes a lot of discipline and focus. Why? Because there’s a LOT going on in your business, stuff that needs to be handled right now.

And batching takes time. Instead of spending just 30 minutes pulling together the minimum needed to get by, you schedule half a day, maybe more. Half a day? What are you doing for a full four hours?

You are getting all 12 months of this task done. You are saving them in Evernote, or another note storage system, all in HTML for easy uploading. You have the associated pdfs already uploaded to the server.

It’s done. Each month for twelve months all you do is upload what you need. Easy.

Even easier if you have an assistant or a team in place, and you can just hand everything over to him or her.

This May Seem Obvious. But Are You Doing It?

As I said, it seems obvious, but until you do it a few times, it’s hard to get the discipline in place to follow through. It’s all too easy to let your schedule be overrun by urgent deadlines.

However, if you can hold the line. If your heart can stand strong against the urgencies of the moment, and you batch as much as you can, you’ll notice something strange. A peacefulness, a sweetness to your life.

The number of urgent matters will have decreased significantly. You’ll find yourself with long stretches of creative time.

Even better, your creative oomph won’t be taken up handling these regular tasks. Instead, your creativity will go towards proactive, nourishing, business developing activities.

Do you batch? Or does it give you conniptions to try to batch? What’s your experience? Leave a comment on the blog.

Here are a few related articles and other resources to check out:

• How to Use Systems Without Turning Into a Heartless Zombie
• Avoiding the Funeral After the Big Breakthrough
• When Does Perfectionism Matter?

p.s. Needing some hands-on help?

Sometimes a course or group program just isn’t quite the right thing. Sometimes you want something very custom, with the focus totally on you and your business, on your timeline, on your agenda, you.

Yollana Shore and Jason Stein have years of experience as healers and coaches, and have chalked up tremendous successes with their clients. And they are official Heart of Business practitioners, steeped in our approach.

To learn more about working with one of them, click here.

Heart of Business Mark

This is a guest post by Heart of Business Alumni Community Member Sue Kearney. She runs MagnoliasWest, helping you with personal branding, logo/marketing design and web development.

I’m a lifelong spiritual student and practitioner. In the last ten years, since I’ve been working with women as a coach, my commitment to spirituality has deepened in many ways.

Yet, I’ve found myself keeping some of my more arcane sacred practices veiled from my business interactions and offerings.

In the last year or so, as I work more and more with my own heart-centered business coach, and study with teachers who live and work with transparency, I have come to realize that it’s time for me to step out from behind the veils.

What held me back from an open expression of my spiritual path?

Although I am not looking to enroll anyone in any of my spiritual paths or practices, I carried around a fear that some revelations might be too big, too woo-woo for people to take.

I was operating under a belief (that I no longer think is valid) that my business offering and my spiritual path should be separated. No overlap. With walls and moats between, please. This was because I simply didn’t know—hadn’t seen, hadn’t imagined—that there could be a way to bring my open-hearted most loving spirituality into my business in an integrated way.
I thought that my coaching and design clients would resist and misunderstand suggestions to deepen and broaden their connection to spirit.

Transparency

I have always talked about having a big toolbox full of practices. Now I’m upending my own toolbox and sharing with you the spiritual awesome that makes up what I deliver from my heart in my work.

• I am a High Priestess in a women-centered spiritual tradition. In this role, I facilitate women’s spirituality. I create and lead rituals. I support women in intentionally blessing and marking life’s transitions: births, deaths, partnerships, business ventures, new homes and offices, childrearing and child-releasing. I usher women into relationship with the Goddess, with she of 10,000 names.
• I am twenty-one years clean and sober. I am a sober woman who knows exceedingly well what it’s like to be driven to obliterate consciousness 24/7, and who also knows what it’s like to let go of those destructive behaviors and change every single thing about herself and her relationship to life. Slowly. One day at a time. Because I’ve been there, I can hold space for balance and moderation in the lives and workings of my clients, and support all efforts to liberate one’s self from addictive behaviors.
• For more than twenty years, I have not incurred any consumer debt. This means I spend the money I already have—I don’t use credit cards. As a cash-based woman, I am a resource for women who are ready to make a change and back off from our culture’s emphasis on over-spending and having more and more and more things.
• I pay attention to astrology and I am a student of divination. As such, I bring reminders of rhythms and flow to women who are struggling with what is happening now.
• I am an active participant in my health. I have a network of practitioners from various disciplines whom I use as part of my self-directed efforts to live long, with fitness and ease. I am a champion for anyone who wants to take a stand for her own health, who needs support in resisting our culture’s passive approach to health.

What you can do to free yourself from limiting beliefs and to express the full juicy spectrum of yourself in your work, in your business, in your life?

1. Be open to new and different possibilities and practices. Continue to learn. Expose yourself to teachings that are practical, and spiritual, and heart-centered, and useful. Have a nice variety in your toolbox. Integrate what works into your life, and change them up as you go—use what best suits you in this moment, in this day.
2. Make time for practices that fill your container and put your heart and soul back in everything you do. The first time I took a business course that included meditation in the material (thanks Heart of Business!) was a big ah-ha! moment for me. Of course! Duh! There is so much value in the practices that restore and repair and renew our hearts and our consciousness. Without it, all the good work we put into our business lands in a leaky container. I did some gentle experimentation. I brought meditation into some of my coaching calls, and it resonates so powerfully with my beautiful clients! A few minutes of meditation establishes groundedness and purpose where a client might have been feeling scattered. It also changes the tone of the client meetings, and is a powerful antidote to pettiness and stress.
3. Be gentle with yourself, get support, don’t do it alone. Set conditions of enoughness. Your ideal may be to meditate for ten minutes, seven days a week. Or go to the gym five days a week. And then what happens when you skip a day? Here’s how to avoid getting harsh with yourself: lower the bar. Free yourself, let five days a week of meditation, or three visits to the gym, be enough! Get support for yourself: Enroll a friend as a meditation buddy, or a walk partner. Or hire a coach, someone with whom you can roll up your sleeves, and dive deep into your business, your work/life balance, and the full expression of your juicy most creative self.

Sue Kearney is Chief Inspiration Officer at Magnolias West, her coaching, branding and web design practice. She is a dancer, DJ, artist, and a maker of kombucha, sauerkraut and herbal medicines. Sue is a student of astrology, tarot, and a practitioner and facilitator of women’s spirituality.

She offers a Self-Love Coaching program, as well as a Brand Refresher Review. Contact her at Magnolias West.

Heart of Business Mark

This past weekend, at our annual retreat on Bainbridge Island, there was a strong consensus among my Brain Trust that I had to make a significant shift in my business model. Places in how I ran Heart of Business where I was struggling, unsure, or feeling lost came into focus, at the expense of my comfort.

When an uncomfortable truth comes in, for me time seems to go into slow-motion, my stomach feels queasy, and I sometimes cry. The last five years I cried, but this year I didn’t. Instead I just felt overwhelmed and slightly nauseous.

I don’t know when I first got the idea of having a mastermind group. The first one I started myself. Then, when that dissolved, I joined up with these beautiful people in their Brain Trust.

These five people to the left here are among the brightest lights in my life, and have patiently and compassionately helped me walk ever more deeply through my core pattern.

Because that’s what has become clear to all of us: that we each have our own core pattern which just keeps showing up in different ways. Witnessing, acceptance, and gentle nudging (and, where appropriate, rear-kicking) is what gets us moving forward.

Note to self: don’t despair if the same problem keeps coming up. And up. And up. It’s supposed to.

It’s great to have a coach and it’s great to take courses, but a mastermind is different. A mastermind is peer-led. A mastermind doesn’t cost anything. And because of those two things, a mastermind can go on for years, until all of you in the group know each other so well, have so much trust and love, that you can help each other make HUGE changes.

It takes patience to go this deep with people, just as it takes patience to build a truly sustainable business. But it is so worth it.

My mastermind held me lovingly, but wouldn’t let me waver. When I became overwhelmed and my mind blanked out, they just kept bringing me back to focus on what’s true. They didn’t force me down any path, but they helped me open my eyes to the path that is waiting for me.

I can’t share details because it’s all too nascent, and I still have to sit in prayer to get true clarity after the input and the processing. But I do know that now, for the issues we were focused on, I feel hope, creativity and aliveness, where before I felt sad and stuck.

Here are my Brain Trustees, the people who know me, warts, failures, bruises, fears and all. And still love and support me.

• Jennifer Louden from http://www.jenniferlouden.com
• Michael Bungay-Stanier from http://www.boxofcrayons.biz
• Michele Lisenbury-Christensen from http://www.lovingwithpower.com 
• Molly Gordon from http://www.shaboominc.com 
• Eric Klein from http://www.wisdomheart.org/

If you’re ready to get going, may I suggest that you don’t do it alone? Get a mastermind group together.

Do you have a mastermind group? Or, if you don’t have anything so formal, do you have friends and community that support you in your journey in business. Leave a comment on the blog.

Here are a few related articles and other resources to check out:

• Why Your Business Needs a Peer-Led Mastermind Group
• Help From A Drinking Buddy
• How to Call in Happy Helpers
• Mastermind from the Heart is a workbook and audio class that comes as a business with Unveiling the Heart of Your Business.
• The Heart of Business Alumni Community is a great place to find like-hearted mastermind buddies.

p.s. Needing some hands-on help?

Sometimes a course or group program just isn’t quite the right thing. Sometimes you want something very custom, with the focus totally on you and your business, on your timeline, on your agenda, you.

Yollana Shore and Jason Stein have years of experience as healers and coaches, and have chalked up tremendous successes with their clients. And they are official Heart of Business practitioners, steeped in our approach. To learn more about working with one of them, visit:

Organic Business Development Program

Heart of Business Mark

I’m *finally* healthy after a very sick winter. I’m happy. I love my beautiful wife. The sun has come out here in Portland, at least some of the time, and my kids say the Cutest Things in the World every single day all day long.

Sounds like love, doesn’t it?

But, what I described above isn’t the whole picture. There are some real challenges in life. We’re hiring a new operations person. We’re deeply examining our business model. We’re contemplating some big projects. And the first three months of this year have been BUMPY.

Does that sound like love?

When I strip down the beliefs in my own heart, I find that when I hit a bumpy patch, or when I face something uncomfortable, I no longer believe that love is still present. I no longer believe that compassion is really there.

The Sufis (including me ) teach that everything, everything that exists comes from Divine Source. That love, mercy and compassion are the foundation of the entire creation, even things that aren’t so fun.

The issue isn’t whether love is hiding from us, it’s our limited understanding of love. On our website I write “Every act of business can be an act of love.” But what does that mean, exactly?

Love can be:

• Soft and squishy.
• Nourishing and warm.
• Overwhelming and scrambling.
• Stronger than anything else, forcing everything else to its viewpoint.
• ???

I got you started, so take it from here.

My challenge for you: Identify at least three very different experiences of love. Then, find some part of your business that is frustrating the heck out of you, and look for an unexpected expression of love. I’m going to guess it’s not the soft and squishy kind.

For example, let’s look at the last few months, where it became really obvious that I was wearing too many hats, spinning too many plates, and had basically an unsustainable life.

I wanted a break. I wanted to rest. I wanted… but love, in this case, looked like a great wave, breaking me down, leaving me bedraggled, gasping. And humbled. And quiet. Able to let go of many things.

And pushing me to hire that operations person, who should be starting in a couple of weeks. It was a pushy, domineering kind of love. But the experience in my heart was one of support, of strength, of clarity.

Then: Drink that love in. It’s safe. It’s okay. Just because it’s not soft and squishy doesn’t mean it’s not love. If you let the love that is present in, in the form that it’s in, then maybe, just maybe it can transform you and the challenge in your business in an unexpected way.

Let’s hear from you. What did you discover in this exploration? Tell me about it in the comments.

Here’s a few other articles to check out:

• Is Your Business Suffering From Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
• What Heart-Centered Isn’t
• When Making a Profit Feels Greedy and Selfish 

Heart of Business Mark

Here’s a dream scenario: you have a raving fan client who has colleagues who need the same help you gave him. He offers to introduce you to them and recommend they work with you. Nice!

One of our Opening the Moneyflow participants, Donald (not his real name) had just this wonderful opportunity. The trouble was…

“My client introduced me by email to his colleagues. I then sent an email to them saying if I didn’t hear from them I’d follow up with a phone call next week.

“The next week came and I didn’t want to make the calls. I felt nervous and anxious. I kept telling myself it was just a conversation, and eventually I forced myself to make the calls, leaving two voicemails.”

“What’s wrong with me? Why was it so hard to make those calls?”

Painful, eh? What’s worse, he never heard back from either referral.

He Should Have Been Uncomfortable

There’s been no evidence whatsoever that these two referrals are either looking for help or want to be contacted.

In Sacred Selling, I explain that sales doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That the sales conversation is preceded by the steps of building a relationship of trust. Without the trust and connection, you can’t have a real sales conversation.

Our client was really struggling with self-judgment over making those calls, but here’s the thing: he should’ve struggled. Far from being negative self-talk, his heart was telling him that the situation didn’t feel right.

Donald pushed through and called anyway, and, of course, it wasn’t a tragedy. But he didn’t get the clients either.

How do you tell whether it’s negative self-talk you need to “get over” or a message from the heart asking you to be appropriately cautious?

In a situation like this, two questions to ask:

The Two Questions

First question: Has the person in question expressed any need for help in the area you help with?

Second question: Has the person in question expressed any desire to to connect with you in particular?

If you put yourself in Donald’s shoes, feel the difference between reaching out to someone who has expressed zero interest in what you do or in talking to you, versus picking up the phone to call someone who both wants what you offer and wants to talk to you.

Big difference. I bet Donald wouldn’t have had any trouble calling either of his referrals in the second situation.

How He Could’ve Saved the Situation

Our clients need education. Unless they deal with a lot of referrals themselves, they probably don’t know how to make a powerful introduction. To do so just takes one small extra step on the part of your client.

That step? To reach out to the people he wants to refer, and ask them the two question. Here’s what it could sound like:

“Hey, I don’t know if you know I worked with Donald all last year and he helped me a LOT in the following ways (x, y, z). And, from our recent conversations, I know you are having some of the same challenges I had the year before. I’d love for you to have the kind of results I’m getting. Is that something you need? Do you want me to introduce you to Donald so you can have a conversation? He’s a really nice guy. He won’t pressure you or try to sell you, he’ll just ask questions, listen and let you know if he thinks he can help you.”

If he then hears a “Yes” from his colleague, then the introduction is going to be MUCH more effective.

Let me highlight what was in that introduction. Then, you can ask your clients to say the same things to any referrals.

The Three Elements in a Pre-Referral Recommendation

1. His own experience and results working with Donald.
2. Empathy for the challenges he sees his colleagues having and his wish for them to succeed.
3. A description of what Donald is like and what was involved with being introduced.

If you educate your clients to express these three items to potential referrals, and get permission from them to be introduced, you’ll see a MUCH higher percentage of referrals actually landing. And you won’t spend time uncomfortably chasing people who don’t want to talk to you.

Whew… what a relief!

Are you successful at receiving referrals? Do you educate your clients in any way?

Heart of Business Mark

One of our Heart of Money participants was still struggling with her pricing. “I’ve had some incredibly breakthroughs in my relationship with money, but pricing myself still feels hard. How do I do this?”

After hearing her explanation, I immediately saw what was going on.

“First of all, empathy! Pricing is hard! And the big reason it’s so hard… it’s not just about your price. You’ve got at least three questions wrapped up in the question of price, and without separating them out, you can’t get a clear answer to your pricing.”

This is why we spend an entire class in our Sacred Selling Course on pricing, and another entire class dealing with the other questions that get tangled in pricing.

But let me break it down for you a little right now.

Finding the Vagueness

If you’re asking “How much?” then one natural extension is “For what?”

What in the heck are you selling? A lot of struggle with pricing can actually be traced to a real vagueness about the offer.

The vagueness descends in three places.

1. What are the results of taking advantage of your offer?

In Sacred Selling I talk about the destination your client wants to get to. Does your offer look like the destination they want to reach? Or does it look like a roadblock?

How can you be more honest, open, and clear about how your offer is the path to the destination your client is trying to reach?

2. What is actually provided in the offer?

It seems silly, but people actually need to know. Are you available for email or phone consults outside of regular sessions? Are there worksheets, workbooks, guided recordings, who knows what? that you offer.

Make sure your clients know, and make sure you know. If you think it through, you may be surprised at how much you offer. And maybe you’ll be inspired to add.

3. What does it take for you to provide the offer?

Once clients actually bring conscious attention to what’s needed so they can provide all that’s included in the offer, they often end up wide-eyed. There’s a lot more going into what you offer than you thought.

You need to buy premium tea so it’s available for clients? You need space on your schedule so you can respond to emails and phone calls in a timely manner? You need continuing education and mentorship so your own skills stay sharp?

Suddenly It’s More than Just an Hour

If you start to get the big picture about your offer, all that you offer and all that you need, you start to see that it’s a lot more than you imagined.

Take a moment in your heart to encompass the truth of your offer. Then return to the question of price, and notice how different prices you had been considering feel.

This may not clear all of your worries and upset about price, but I’m willing to bet that it eases the struggle, and takes a certain amount of confusion and pain out of the process.

What did you notice?

p.s. More about sales, no cost.

If enrolling new clients isn’t super easy for you, try out the Sacred Selling No-Cost Learning Series. First lesson arrives April 9. It’s true, I’m hoping the right people are inspired to join the full course that starts in May. But, the best way I thought to inspire you was to actually give you real teachings.

So dig in, and find more ease in enrolling clients.

The Sacred Selling No-Cost Learning Series

Heart of Business Mark