More on Letting Go and Moving Forward in Business

We were having dinner recently with friends who also have twins our boys’ age. After dinner, the four toddlers were creating havoc away from the kitchen so it was my chance to get the dishes into the dishwasher without them using it as a jungle gym.

The father of the other twins is a project manager who also has a knack for helping people get their businesses on track. He spent a good deal of time working in a company where he gave the owner lots of advice on how to make it profitable and sustainable. The owner never followed through with his advice until she spent a tremendous amount of money with a consulting company to hear the same things he had already told her.

We talked about this, and I was sharing with him my experiences and insights from working with thousands of entrepreneurs over the last ten years about why so many people can’t just take good information and apply it without some sort of struggle.

So I thought I’d share the same insights with you.

The Recipe for Struggle

Having a business is not rocket science, as the saying goes. Why, then, is it such a struggle?

There are three ingredients that, when mixed together, create a great deal of difficulty in learning and change.

The first ingredient for struggle is lack of knowledge. When you don’t know how to do something, it actually takes a good deal of time to learn and integrate it well enough to apply it in your situation without just copying it. According to research done by cognitive scientists, it’s actually incredibly hard for humans to learn something in one context, ferret out the underlying principle, and then apply that principle to a different context.

The second ingredient is negative experiences. If you’ve had negative or upsetting experiences with the area you are trying to learn, it’s going to slow you down. Instead of being open and receptive to what you’re learning, you’re going to be on your guard looking at each piece of information and judging whether it’s safe or not. It’s like airport security slowing everyone down everyone to scan all the bags in an effort to prevent some kind of violent act.

The final ingredient in the recipe for struggle is being attached to your worldview. You’ve spent decades getting clear on how the world works, building up your filters and perceptions around that understanding. To learn something new often requires a change in worldview, which means you have to let your old worldview go. Letting go of your understanding of how the world works? Scary and destabilizing, no matter how great the new world view.

Beginning to get why all those offers to teach you the fabulous six steps to untold wealth and success fail so often, even when the information is more-or-less correct?

How do you learn about business without sitting in so much struggle? There are three remedies that counteract the three ingredients. You may not like all of them, but just like I choke down the bitter Chinese medicine formulas Jenny, my acupuncturist, serves up, I recommend you take these as quickly as possible. And really, they aren’t that bitter. Sometimes Jenny’s formulas taste good.

The Three Remedies To Struggle in Learning Business

Here they are:

Remedy One: Practice and Patience

You remember all that time in school you spent solving pages of the same math problems, or answering a stack of questions about a book you read? There’s a reason for it. Repetition helps the mind understand something from many angles.

When I work with groups, people are sometimes amazed that I can take someone’s rambling three minute explanation of their business and wrap it up into a pithy marketing message. Perhaps not quite the final draft, but well on its way.

It’s not because I’m so cool, it’s because I’ve done that particular exercise thousands of times, so I can find the elements I’m looking for and fit them together no matter what kind of business it is.

When working on something like your marketing message or your website, the pressure is intense to get it right the first time. Especially when bills are breathing down your neck.

The remedy, however, is to give yourself some spaciousness with it, and to practice it. If you’ve learned from someone how to create your marketing message, give yourself two, three, even four weeks to play around with it. Try using the formula on five other businesses you know that have ineffective marketing, especially ones in different markets than yours. Create five different versions of your own marketing message.

This kind of practice will help you become more fluid with the approach you’re learning. That fluidity will translate into results that come with much greater ease and presence.

That spaciousness to practice is an expression of the mercy that comes from realistic expectations.

Remedy Two: Find Someone You Trust

Even if someone is a whiz-bang at business, if you don’t have complete trust in their integrity, you aren’t going to be completely receptive to them.

I’m not talking about blind faith. You’ll still hold on to your own sense of what’s right and wrong. In my spiritual path, we have a spiritual guide, and people do ask him for advice. However, there is also a strong teaching that after you receive guidance from him on a question you’ve asked, you need to take that guidance into your own prayer practice and see if your own heart confirms it.

Trust increases your receptivity exponentially. If you’re on guard every time someone tells you something; if you have to question, prod and poke at it to be sure there is nothing dangerous inside, you will end up exhausted, and your ability t learn will decrease dramatically.

So find someone you trust, someone whose integrity seems relatively spotless, someone you’ve seen handle their own mistakes with grace and responsibility. The strongest trust is not given to someone who seems perfect, but rather from someone who messes up sometimes but can come forward and deal with it forthrightly.

Remedy Three: Grief, Tenderness and Time

So many heart-centered people have had truly painful and disheartening experiences engaging with businesses. To then try to go into business themselves means that at some level they struggle with imagining they will have to become a perpetrator of bad deeds.

For many people, the black and white of “business bad, heart-centered good” can be comforting. For others, just being able to rest in the expectation that businesses are going to do wrong creates some ease, because you don’t have to get angry every time. After all, “that’s just how it is.”

Learning how to do business from the heart means changing your worldview; it means coming to understand that business can be sacred and full of integrity and love.

Changing worldviews is one of the biggest surprises for heart-centered business owners. We so often want to just charge forward into the new dawn, but find themselves moving at an inexplicably slow pace.

That pace can be quickened, ironically, by slowing down and taking conscious time to grieve the loss of the world as you’ve known it. There’s no formula, but if you notice yourself feeling gummed up, doing things more slowly than you think they should go, or avoiding tasks altogether, then you might be up against some unexpressed grief.

Taking time to notice if you have emotions puddling in your body and bringing in spiritual practice and connection can be a compassionate gift for you and your business.

Learning Is Hard Work

Running a business doesn’t have to be a Herculean task, but learning how to do it can take more effort than you might expect. You can make it much easier on yourself if you find someone you trust to learn from, by giving yourself more time to practice what you learn, and by taking time to grieve and express emotions.

You bring a gift to the world, and you are the only one who can bring that gift. It does take effort to craft a business that is as sacred and effective as the gift itself. You can do it, and your heart can help show you the way.

p.s. Need Help Crafting a Business That is Sacred and Effective?

Our practitioners are all experienced in business and in the ways of the heart. They are ready to roll up their sleeves and help you get your business going. Read about our Organic Business Development Program and see which practitioner you click with the most.