The Do No Financial Harm Round-Up

Two posts from me, five guest posts, and over 230 comments later, not to mention the folks inspired enough to take the conversation to their own blogs, apparently this topic is something you care about.

Here’s the round-up.

First I posted Is It Possible to Do Financial Harm to a Client?, with 150 comments. The comments really brought the topic alive in amazing way. Some very deep insights.

Then we saw these posts:

• Who’s Responsible Here? Everyone by Kate Swoboda 
• Lessons From an Underdog Junkie by Adam King
  
• The Pricing Puzzle: Ethics and Emotions by Lisa Robbin Young
  
•  Good Debt, Bad Debt and the “Premium” Coaching Program by Karri Flatla

I followed up with What Does a Do No Financial Harm Pledge Look Like, where I placed a draft of a pledge on it.

A whole stream of comments followed, plus additional guest posts.

• Is It Possible to Do Intestinal Harm? by Pace Smith
• Why I Won’t Take the Do No Financial Harm Pledge by Grace Judson
• Compassion In All Directions  by Andrea J. Lee

That’s a lot of conversation. I’m not going to drag it out much longer.

Here’s the Pledge

It’s not much changed from the draft version. I may make changes as we move forward, and as I hear from folks. If you want to sign it in the comments, please do. If you don’t, that’s okay.

Click for the Pledge.

But what I do want you to do is read further.

Why This Is Important

As Grace Judson alluded to in her guest post yesterday, if you’re following this conversation, you already are sensitive to doing financial harm. Probably a little too sensitive.

By “too” sensitive, I mean you may be taking too much responsibility. You may be constricting yourself with fears of other people’s judgments or worries that somehow you might do the wrong thing.

While these worries show you care, it may also be constricting your business growth.

Here’s what I want you to do: whether or not you make the pledge public to your clients, I want you to make the pledge, or a similar one, to yourself. I want you to think clearly about your ethical limits.

Then I want you to stop worrying about it. You’ve got your ethical limits, you know what’s true about how you want to conduct your business.

Next step is to stretch in caring for yourself and your business. I want you to up your prices a bit. I want you to push your limits.

Most of all I want you to notice that there is (probably) a space between your ethical limits and your worry/constriction limits. I want you to move into that space.

For you and your business, what would that look like?

p.s. Do You Need to Inhabit That Space Between Ethics and Worry?

It’s not easy stepping into that space. Where are the ethical lines? How do you push your envelope without pushing away your best clients? And how do you do it in a sustainable manner that turns all your efforts into a profitable business?

We’re going to be helping a small group of folks do just that with their businesses through 2012, so that by a year from December you can stand strong in yourself and in your business, trusting that you are taken care of and doing work that you love and are meant to do.

The program is filling up, and Friday is the early bird deadline for the full course. But start with the free stuff.

Click here for Opening the Moneyflow 2012 No Cost Series.