Those of you who know me, follow my blog or have been clients know that I’m nuts about the enneagram, a personality type system based on ancient Sufi wisdom that tells us about our spiritual life paths.

But I rarely talk about the enneagram on this site. It always felt…too big and complex to truly honor.

Now I know what I was really waiting for–this concept that my close friend and biz partner Dina and I created. It’s a website, blog, set of service offering and events, all focused on the enneagram.

I hope you check out Enneagram Lovers and subscribe to it if you love it. I sure do!

As you evolve in your life, trying to learn to trust your intution, your path seems to become much less….dependable. And not so much a straight-down-the-line-to-where-you-can-see-the-end walkway. It’s more like an invisible yellow brick road. And nobody else can see it or feel it but you.

So how DO you know or learn to trust that you’re going the right way?

Karen Floyd of Innate Design and I talked about this today on my Emotions in Small Business radio show.

Here are a couple gems from our chat:

• Try to release the self-judgement that you’re being “fickle.”
  You have to follow your passion and find your happiness, or else no one (not your clients, your family, or you) will be happy.
• Recognize that a closed door is guidance, too.
  Rather than take your pickaxe to the wood, consider that maybe this a sign that you’d be better served doing something else.
• Reframe your definition of yourself.
  I loved Karen’s clarification that she’s not “abandoning” anything, she’s simply adding passions to her life and career.

Be sure to listen to the end of the show, when Karen shares her Four Questions that help her decide whether to follow any opportunity.  I thought they were beautifully phrased, easy to remember, and insightful enough to show me where I get tripped up sometimes in my decisions.

I’m always amazed by the serendipity and magic of life. I had thought this would be my last radio show…the spark seemed to have left and I figured why keep doing something that isn’t giving back to me on some level. I don’t expect to make any money on my show, but I’d better at least be enjoying myself and hopefully helping some people.

But with so few listeners and little feedback and dimishing enjoyment, I didn’t feel like I was getting any return on this show.

Then Spirit/Serendipity/Loki, or whatever you’d like to call it, jumped in and waggled its behind at me. Ha! Surprise caller! The show goes a little off the rails! And honestly, everything was better for it.

Yeah, I know this is the post where usually I talk about the content of the show, but this seems to be more important. Just like the show was sidetracked in the best way, so should my post about it be.

I think this was a huge reminder (I need them often, cause I forget important and profound things all the time). It was a reminder that when I try to force things to happen, to grab at any mood or idea or plan, I’m not aligned with my greatest good.

So what if I just hold my plans lightly? What if I believe in my goals and ideas, but I don’t get quite so committed to how they happen?

What if (ha! again) I remember to TRUST SPIRIT?!!!

When I did this, I found out a most useful thing about my radio show plan:

1) I’ll agree to do this show as long as the schedule keeps coming easily (my next guest for Feb 12th just fell into my lap right after I got off the air).
and more importantly,
2) I am NOT a stand-and-deliver speaker.

I realized this because I enjoyed this show more than any I’ve done so far, and I believe it’s precisely because we all went “off script.” Most of my talking points and plans went out the window once my mystery caller came on. And I LOVED what happened to the conversation once it did.

Yeah, I can deliver points, give a speech, what-have-you, if I need to. But I don’t really love it. And here’s the key point: it’s NOT my true calling.

But facilitating something new, a conversation that goes a little off into creativity, that generates some heat and some light and some new thoughts. Hells yeah! I’m into that!

So expect to hear something fresher and livelier from my next shows. I may make mistakes, be surprised and certainly less polished, but my guess is I’ll sound like I’m feeling more me. And I hope that’s what you all want to be hearing anyway.

**If you’re curious about the caller who became our additional guest on the show, you can listen in by scrolling down a bit and selecting the show called “Building Trust” in the media player on the right-hand side of this page.

Whatever!

One of my visions for the new year is to dispell this idea that our emotions and businesses are separate things, that we can just keep them separate neatly in our cafeteria tray of life.

Join me on Blog Talk Radio this Thursday, December 18th at 3pm West Coast time as I lay down the truth about feelings in business life. I’ll be talking about my experiences, anecdotes from others, and I’ll answer your questions. Got one? Email it to me or tune in on Thursday and send it via chat.

 

I am so fired up about letting people know that emotions are a crucial part of being in business for yourself (let alone of being human in general)! There are so many people who start a business and then get sideswiped by the unexpected emotional impact of it.

Take a listen to our discussion and please let me know what you think.

I love movies. Not in a classy way, like loving cinema or indie films, but straight-up, main-stream popcorn-chugging flicks. Other people are audiophiles or literary snobs; I’m a major studio movie freak.

I love them because I do believe, as Steve Martin says in Grand Canyon, “all life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” Yes, really. No, not really…but sorta really.

In this regard, I was perusing my DVD collection last night and pulled out the early 90′s classic, Groundhog’s Day. As I watched it for the twentith time, I realized it’s such a metaphor for personal growth work.

If you’ve never seen it, Bill Murray plays jerky weatherman Phil who gets stuck reliving the same wintery day in a small town in Pennsylvania. Realizing that no matter what he does, he will wake up the next morning with no consequences, he goes through many stages of acting out.

First, he tries his hand at theft and reckless behavior, and uses the situation to satisfy all his animalistic desires. Getting bored with that, he sees the glimmer of something worth working for–the heart of a kind and soulful woman.

But the Beloved cannot be won through trickery and manipulation, he finds out. She cannot fall in love with him because, as he blandly confesses, ”I don’t even like myself.” Now that his veneer of pleasure has worn away and the veil has parted so that he sees the truth of the life he has made, he falls into despair.

He begins the process of literal self-destruction, but, for whatever magical (spiritual?) reason, he continues to keep waking up alive on that same Groundhog’s Day morning. Having eventually grown weary of punishing himself, he finds humility, which draws his Beloved nearer.

This helps him to realize the importance of honesty with himself and he finally starts to work on becoming the kind of man he can enjoy being (instead of pretending to be). By the end, he’s living a day that makes him happy regardless of the future, and he is united with his Beloved.

And yes, it’s Bill Murray, for pete’s sake, but it’s really a funny and truthful movie about all the ways a person can live a life that makes them unhappy, and the one way to live instead a happy life.

So what’s the secret to living a happy life? Well, you should watch the movie, first of all. It’s much more evocative to see it in story. But I’ll give it to you in prose:

• Be honest with yourself.
• Take personal responsibility for your behavior and what parts you play in relationships.
• Be compassionate with others.
• Give back as much as you can.
• Take care of your mind, body, emotions, and spirit.
• If you want to learn something, practice hard and be patient.
• Forgive yourself for your mistakes.
• And remember that all you have to make yourself happy is the present moment.

If there are other fans out there, I’d love to hear your comments on what secrets to happiness you’ve gleaned from Bill.

p.s. I’m not the first person to find psychological depth in Groundhog Day. Check out this journal article, if you dare: Revisiting Groundhog Day (1993): Cinematic Depiction of Mutative Process.

Passion…is not an emotion attached to a single goal but a pervasive, permanent desire independent of any person, thing, or place. Passion is the overpowering, inescapable fate of all artists, who must learn at great costs and pain not to control it — for control is impossible — but to ride it so that it will not destroy them…

There is usually something at least slightly shameful about our passions. Respectable people control their desires. But passion is an appetite that exceeds the accepted bounds of good taste, common sense, social code, financial prudence, and moral convention. It is a desire that should be curbed or repressed but has proven so powerful and permanent that it survives our resistance. 

– Full article text available at http://www.danagioia.net/essays/epassion.htm.

I love that–the notion that passion cannot be controlled, but must be ridden. When I get worn down by the exhausting process of being open to so many influences and rejections, what gets me through it is connecting to that firey dragon of my passion. That passion carries me when my willpower cannot.

Well, I certainly wasn’t the most obediant kid, that’s for sure. But in recent years, I’ve come to question the idea that I’m lazy. Given their choice of adjectives to describe me, most people who know me now wouldn’t put “lazy” anywhere in their top 50 words. In fact, when I relate that story about my childhood, most people look at me like I’m nuts (or like my mom is). After all, how could a person who started her own business and completed grad school twice be lazy?

Here’s the thing: I don’t think lazy exists. There’s no such thing as lazy. There’s only your reluctance to do stuff you don’t want to do. So stop giving yourself shit about how you’re not doing what you “should” do, and spend time focusing on what you truly love to do.

That’s the question keynote speaker Scott Berkun asked me and the other 200 attendees of the indie biz conference BizJam this weekend. We shouted out answers about creativity, wealth, and dedication.

Turns out, the answer is slightly more surprising. Scott says the thing most successful starters have in common is a high tolerance for risk.

If you believe that–and I sure do–then it’s a good thing to keep in mind if you’re transitioning to self-employment. The hardest challenge I see clients face is the leap from the safety of “what-I-know” to the murky space of “what-I-hope-will-be.”

An indie business owner is like the trapeze artist who has to learn to let go of one rung in mid-air and trust the momentum to carry her to the next swing. It’s terrifying and exhilarating, and if you plan to launch a business that starts and ends with you, you have to figure out if you can stand it.

If you want to learn more about Scott Berkun’s theories on entrepreneurs and innovators, check out his book, The Myths of Innovation.

This is the situation my professor Sherene Zolno faced a week ago–30 mentally saturated, angsty, confounded people looking for answers. What did she do to help us work through some of our soul-searching? She asked us to answer four questions. I’m passing them along to my readers who are walking a similar path of self-inquiry.

• What are you not called to do in life?
• What can you do (ie what are you capable of doing)?
• What are you masterful at?
• What are you called to do?

Feel free to list as many things as you can think of for each question. Then take a look at what you’ve written, call a friend and discuss.