Being heart-centered, following spirit, connecting to Source seems to be all the rage these days in certain small business circles. And why not? It seems so fun, so nourishing, and it certainly seems to be effective.
What gets glossed over are the costs of being heart-centered. You may already be familiar with the pain of being out of your heart in business, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t real costs to doing business in a heart-centered way.
Don’t get me wrong, your business can thrive tremendously well from being heart-centered. You can make money and have clients while still being deep in your heart. It’s just that there are indeed costs, including some sacrifices you make and some corners you can’t cut.
There are two costs I want to talk about today. Both affect your cash flow.
The First Cost: Fewer Sales
When you’re heart-centered, it means you aren’t willing to squeeze every last dime out of someone. When someone is on the fence about buying from you and they ask your opinion, you give them an honest answer whether or not you get paid.
Recently a potential client emailed me, “I’ve been considering hiring you, but I’m getting cold feet. It’s a big decision. Can you really help me?”
I emailed back something like this, “I have confidence I can help you. Yet, if you have cold feet, make sure you check out all the options. Here’s another coach I have huge respect for that I think would be useful in your situation. Check him out and see if he’s a better fit.”
She did end up hiring me that time, but it doesn’t always fall that way.
Let me be perfectly clear: if you choose the heart-centered path of doing business, you will sacrifice some sales along the way.
The upside is that the clients who do hire you will truly trust you and be with you through thick and thin. You’ll have a real relationship and not just a fee for service transaction.
Those kinds of raving fans will, of course, bring you more clients. Your business will grow sturdy in this way, but it’s a hard choice to make when you don’t yet have momentum. I know for me, though, that every time I take right action using sacred values, I can feel a sense of wholeness and integrity in my heart that I can’t really live without.
So, all in all, not too bad a cost. Lose a few sales along the way, but make up for it in the strength of your relationships.
The Second Cost: Speed
It’s been said that the Divine created the world in six days. What they don’t tell you is that the mystical accounting of time equates one Divine day to, oh, millions of human years. I forget the exact number, but my Sufi teacher told me once.
Working in a heart-centered way means following Divine unfolding, not trying to push things through. Sometimes things do happen very quickly. Other times it seems that we’re a special case study of God’s in the lesson, “How to teach a human being patience.”
Also, when you’re heart-centered, there is a clinging to integrity and wholeness that I mentioned above. This means that we care about doing things with love. We care about being in alignment with sacred values. We care about our own hearts and our own healing.
This means that sometimes grief or other emotions rise up in the course of doing business, and those emotions can paralyze us for a time. And when that happens, you like to let them unfold. You like to honor your own needs. You don’t like to stuff yourself with food, alcohol or drugs and just push through them until you have a total breakdown.
This necessarily slows down the pace of your business growth.
Of course, for this cost there is also an upside. In honoring the true needs of the heart and the Divine pacing you probably don’t get too far down the wrong path. You don’t make unhelpful commitments and stick to them for months or years because you are committed to pushing through and achieving some narrow definition of success.
Instead, in the slower pace, you may notice side paths of opportunities that you would never have seen if you’d been going faster. When moving at the true speed of your heart, you witness and experience the miracles that are waiting for you in the spaces between your actions.
In honoring your true needs, your full being can show up and the actions you do take have much more impact than if only your head were there.
You Guessed It, I’m Talking About Heart of Business
Heart of Business has been going strong for nearly ten years. In this past year, something has been bubbling up, and we haven’t been moving as quickly as I, in moments of worry, have thought we should.
Resting into the true pace of the business means that we here at HoB can see what’s going on, see what’s not working. There are changes happening in the world that we need to be alive to.
Also, the business has grown much like the blackberry bushes in my backyard. Lots of runners and shoots, lots of delicious fruit… and it’s become a bit tangled and messy. Someone asked us, again, “It’s not clear! Where should I start? What should I do first?”
Time to prune. Time to honor the slowness. Time to replant our flag.
Because the business has been solidly in momentum for nearly five years, it’s been challenging for me to experience this newness and uncertainty. At times I feel unbalanced, like I can’t quite get my footing. Other times I feel clear in my heart. Back and forth between those feelings is exhausting! It sucks! I want my solidity back!
Then I breathe. This is what life is. We grow. We change. Parts die, new parts emerge. As we age, we refine. We become more of who we are, and less of the distractions and low-calorie fillers.
We’re embracing the whole messy, slow process as much as we can. And nourishing ourselves as best we can.
Kate is taking on an in-depth training in Enneagram to strengthen her love and insight into relationships and community. Her understanding of interpersonal dynamics and how people learn and communicate is already amazing, and with more to come I’m very jazzed.
For me I’m entering a Masters of Divinity program with my Sufi teachers to become the student again. To immerse myself in my lineage and to further bring the fruits of an ancient spiritual tradition as an offering of healing to the world of business.
Look for changes happening over the next months, the first of which we’ll announce next week.
My heart is happy. I feel clear. Because I’ve been through this process of clarifying before, I know I’m going to be in the “spin cycle” many more times before this particular load of wash is done.
We’re in the process of evolving and growing, and we are paying the costs of being heart-centered. It’s the only way we want to live.
How about you? What costs are you paying because of your commitment to being heart-centered? What upsides are you noticing?
