After I coach a client, I write-up a few notes and send a recording of our call.
My notes to a brave & wise client (woo to the hoo) this week inspired this post. Consider these directions to get any new venture cracking – writing a book, launching a coaching business, even figuring out what the heck it is you want to venture.
Shall we?
1
Your holy duty is to pay intimate attention to what you want and to let yourself want it. We squelch our desires within nanoseconds by saying “Not possible” or by launching into a sudden and deeply engrossing story in which our ex or our child or our health is to blame for why we can’t _______. Your highest calling is to watch for all the moments you run away from, run roughshod over, your desires and instead, belly up to what you want.
LET YOURSELF WANT. This is not about making plans! Run away from the plans. This is naked wanting.
As my friend Lorin Roche writes in the Radiance Sutras:
Whenever a wanting moment comes.
Celebrate the rising of desire.
Attend to the desire itself,
As a shimmering impulse of energy
Vibrating the body into motion.
In the flash of knowing,
When intelligence arises,
Attend to this rising,
As the illumination of the Self.
2
Those thoughts about your past, why it’s too late, why you can’t are wearing a boring loop-groove in your brain that gives you more of the same doom. Make a new groove. When the thought-groove starts grinding, try:
- Listening to MantraWave. I sometimes listen while I walk or even write.
- Get up. Go outside. Look up. Don’t force perspective. It will come to you.
- Pay attention to something with all your senses – like an apple on your desk. Take in the color, the scene, the texture. Curious sensory exploration.
- Get Rick Hanson’s app for Buddha’s Brain and attend his free series.
- Write down (you must write) 5 things you feel grateful for right now. Simple honest now.
3
Build a strong case for self-trust. List all the ways you trust yourself now. I trust myself to comfort my daughter, to sleep enough no matter what, to put food in the dog’s bowls, to keep apologizing to people when I hurt them, to keep opening my heart to Bob… what do you trust?
List all the ways you are venturing into your new future with eyes wide open. How are you tending to being an adult while taking your new venture risk?
Refer to this list often.
4
Self-care is your foundation. If you aren’t sleeping, if you are eating crap, if you are not moving, you will not be able to birth this venture. Approach self-care like a dancer does care of her body. Without it, the dance cannot happen.
5
When you think of the people who have belittled your creative dream in the past, put your hand on your heart, connect to that which is larger than you (god, ocean, nature, love, etc.) and ask for what you need now that you didn’t get in the past. If you needed encouragement, ask for it. If you needed mirroring, ask for it. If you needed time to create, ask for it. If you needed the guts to say “Screw you, I believe in me,” ask for it.
You keep going back to the betrayed moment because you’re looking for something you need that you can get now – if you will only ask for it and let it in.
6
I hear your doubts and fears that you need to be a master before you can do your new thing. If there is one thing I want you to take away from our session, it is you only develop your mastery by doing what you wish to master. Thinking, planning and study are good and doing catapults. Failure accelerates.
7
Start reading and learning about small business and platform-building now even though you have no idea what you will offer. Start with::
Micheal Hyatt’s book Platform
Mark Silver blog, books, courses
Molly Gordon chock full of wisdom blog and courses
Chris G.’s book The $100 Start Up
8
Create a community of the adequate, a group – loose or carefully structured – that helps you stay juiced and moving toward what you most want. I’ll be teaching a short course on how to create groups like this in early October. Subscribe here to either list to know when the course opens.
9
Begin again when you forget all this and lose your way in foggy stories and outmoded “But do you know who I was?” rants. When two weeks / months / years go by and you did nothing on your new venture except obsessively click on links and compare yourself relentlessly to ______ or _______ or watch The Good Wife and Friday Night Lights reruns, do this::
Take yourself by the hand.
Remember fear is good fuel.
Focus back on the intimate moment of desire.
Falters and eddies are simple a chance to begin again.
I’m here if you need me! I can’t wait to watch you soar.
P.S. Dear readers, will you please share our favorite getting started-staying-on-course with a new venture resource in the comments? Thanks!
