Choice Versus Guidance in Business

There seem to be two camps in the world of doing your own thang and being self-employed. One camp, which has overall tendencies for being less woo-woo, proclaims you are powerful, can make powerful choices, shouldn’t follow the herd, need to be an individual. It’s all about making choices and forging your own path.

The other camp, which has overall tendencies for being the woo, encourages following your heart, guidance, listening to Spirit, being in the flow.

I won’t say these two camps picket each other’s storefronts, but it can cause some tumult in your own mind. When it comes to your business, how do you move forward? Do you bow your head and follow guidance or do you stand up straight and make powerful choices?

A Story of Choices Gone Awry: $142 Million to Lose an Election

It has been said that making a bold choice moves the fates in your favor. Unless the choice is a wrong one.

Our recent elections here in the United States showed some individuals making some big bold choices. For instance Meg Whitman, former eBay chief executive, spent $142 million of her own money (Her own money? Holy God, how can anyone with a fortune that size think of that as her own money?) on a campaign to become governor of California.

A big, bold decision by any standard, she committed herself in a very powerful way. And lost. To someone whose campaign spent less than one sixth of what she did.

Big, bold choices may indeed move energy, but not always in the way we think. In this case, it stopped Ms. Whitman in her tracks.

Similarly, I’ve seen small business owners make huge declarations, ‘I’m going to quadruple my business this year and eventually become the dominant force in X industry.” Check back in with the same bold declaration maker a few years later and they are working for someone else.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s just that the big, bold choice didn’t really do what they thought it was going to do. Making a choice doesn’t guarantee an outcome, which might leave you a little cautious with your big, bold choices.

So clearly, guidance is what you want to go with…

A Story of Guidance Gone Awry: Waiting and Waiting

Less dramatic than the governorship of California, but not less painful for those involved, is the “waiting for guidance” problem. I’ve spoken with very sincere people who had started businesses, but hadn’t really taken them forward in any significant way because they were “waiting for a sign.”

Spending time in meditation or prayer, they didn’t want to make a choice that wasn’t in “God’s will” or was otherwise potentially disconnected from Divine guidance. So they waited and waited. And waited.

Clearly they needed to make a powerful choice…

Understanding the Nature of Choice and Guidance

You could make an argument that Meg Whitman’s choice wasn’t really a “powerful choice” if she had the money and just decided to go for it. You could also make the argument that those passive business owners weren’t really listening to guidance.

Without claiming secret knowledge of their internal reality, I would suspect you might be on to something. It has to do with the nature of choice and of guidance.

From the perspective of Divine knowledge, where we are not separate from the Divine, and that everything is given existence, enlivened and moved by Source, choice is an illusion. If we’re not truly separate, individual beings, then how can we make separate, individual choices?

From the perspective of the human being, understanding ourselves as individuals moving and acting in a physical, 3-D world, we are not witnessing or experiencing the true Unity and Oneness of the Divine. Therefore, any intuition, guidance or messages we might receive are going to be filtered through that more limited perception and so won’t be pure, absolutely unfiltered Word of God guidance.

If we can’t truly make choices, and yet we can’t access complete guidance, where in the heck does that leave us? I mean, I’m just trying to run a business, dude, and take care of my family and my clients.

The Middle Way

Every moment reality is being created anew by Source, and so potential for your business unfolds further in every moment. But only if you engage with it.

Yet, if you make big choices purely from your mind, you risk losing the sense of what is unfolding. At a minimum, you’ll feel some sense of “oops,” and at the worst you’ll waste $142 million dollars on a failed venture.

My tradition of Sufism teaches that living for an extended time in extremes leads to problems, so it recommends the middle way. The middle way is absurdly simple and straightforward, as the middle tends to be. You are probably already doing some aspect of it.

Do this: set aside a reasonable amount of time, ten minutes, an hour, maybe even a full day, if you’re feeling a lot of nervousness or stuckness around some aspect of your business. With this time, do spiritual practice.

Don’t ask questions. Don’t do processes. Just sit in meditation, or prayer, or Remembrance.

Then look at the situation you are facing and make a reasonably-sized choice. Notice I didn’t say a “reasonable” choice. You may end up making a totally bizarre and unreasonable choice.

But you don’t want the scope of your choice to outrun your sense of what you can see. Take that choice forward.

Then repeat.

Guidance is About Whims, Choice is About Following Them

It’s become a cliché that the voice of God is a “small, still voice” because it’s true. Divine knowing, connection to Source is rarely received as a thunderclap. When I taught at the University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism, I told students to “follow your whims.” I only felt confident about that advice because of how much time they had spent polishing their hearts.

The Sufis talk about the heart as an old-fashioned mirror made of metal instead of reflective glass. Metal mirrors require polishing to maintain the reflective surface. Without the polishing rust sets in, slowly obscuring the surface.

Spiritual practice does that for your heart, allowing it witness and reflect more of the Divine truth. If you spend some amount of time in spiritual practice, then look at your heart, trust what you get, and take a step forward.

It can feel tricky balancing between confidence in your heart’s guidance and remembering that that guidance is imperfect. This is where the “reasonable scope” I mentioned above comes in.

By keeping your choices reasonable in scope–not choosing to take on the world, but simply taking on the next project–you can feel confident with what your heart showed you. Then you polish your heart another time with spiritual practice, look again at your heart, and step forward once more into your heart’s whim.