Birthday notice! Heart of Business, Incorporated turns 12 years old today! To celebrate, we’re having an informal meet-up in Portland this coming Friday afternoon, 3:30-5:30pm. If you’re local, come by and share some gluten-free cake. 🙂 If not, go get yourself a slice and join us in your heart. 🙂
If you’re thinking of coming, please drop us a line to RSVP, and we’ll send you an email with more details this week, including where it will be.
The following article is by Yollana Shore, one of Heart of Business’ star practitioners.Â
Why In The World Is Everyone Crying?
Creating and growing a heart-centered business can be… Well, it can be everything, can’t it? It can be exciting, scary, exhilarating, exhausting, rewarding, challenging, and everything in between.
Yet, when we think “business,” many of us still hold old paradigm models. Kicking about somewhere in our conscious or subconscious minds are things like maintaining emotional distance, looking good no matter what, and hitting the numbers.
This is a far cry from what I see and feel when I’m working with clients. Like the other day, when four of my clients broke down and cried during our sessions. (Consider this fair warning if you’re thinking of hiring me as a business coach because my clients often spend time in tears.)
So what’s with the tears?
Well, the way I see it, your business is not just a vehicle for making a living. It’s also a vehicle for living your purpose, for sharing your deepest gift with the world.
Finding and sharing your own deepest gift with others is an incredibly fulfilling thing. It provides a sense of enjoyment and purpose that money can’t buy. But it does come at a price.
Our deepest gift most often arises out of our deepest wound. It’s the place where we ourselves most long to heal. It’s where we have felt shocked and knocked about, where we found ourselves alone and lost without a map, and had to chart our own course through.
This is a place you have come to know intimately and where you have discovered your greatest strengths. It is also where you naturally have the deepest compassion for others.
Sound familiar? Then expect tears when you’re building and growing your business.
Because it’s tender
When you say YES to the inner call to share your deepest gifts, you are also saying YES to working from your deepest vulnerabilities.
What this means is that when you say YES to your true calling, you are also saying YES to deepening your own healing. Your heart will inevitably show you even more of your own hidden wounds, bringing them to light so that you can embrace them.
From the surface, business can appear to be a transaction between people who have a problem and people who have a solution. But a heart-derived, heart-centered business is something else altogether.
Our businesses are vehicles whereby we engage in a sacred and mysterious dance. In this dance we are offering our deepest gift in service, continually deepening our own container, and thereby becoming more and more effective at what we do.
The point is…
If grief comes up, or frustration, or fear, when you are working on your business, it’s really to be expected. Especially if your heart is in your business and you’re longing to make a difference in the world.
So if you are working on your website, writing a sales page or giving a talk and you find yourself teary, angry, scared or generally unsettled, let yourself make space. If you can, simply meet the emotions arising in you with gentleness.
You are being deepened
Every part of your business is important; marketing, accounting, showing up for clients… and stepping into deeper levels of your own healing is important too.
So that’s why I like to make space for laughter as well as tears. I think of them like the sunshine and rain that allow both the branches and the roots of your heart-centered business to continue to grow…
… But it’s not always comfortable, is it? What’s your experience with this? Do your clients cry when they work with you? Do you cry when you work with them? How do you make space for the tenderness you feel when you work?
p.s. Want to move from crying to laughter?
Yollana, who wrote the above article, is one of our star Heart of Business practitioners. And, lucky you, she has recently had a client or two complete with her. If you want some personal, hands-on, one-on-one help in your business, check out our Organic Business Development Program with either Yollana or Jason. Click here to find out more.
23 Responses
Thank you for this blog post <3 It opened up my belly for deep breathing again. To answer your question – dance. I like to dance with the tenderness, whatever it is about, in my office. The combination of expressing my feeling with my body and the music keeps the energy moving sweetly. Often a picture comes to mind, too, then I just illustrate whatever is going on.
Back to work now, this was a great breather, much appreciated. 🙂
Marie
What a great practice, Marie… I love to dance too! 🙂
Fabulous article. Loved it! We definitely teach what we need to learn and this reminded me to look at how my business has developed and changed to reflect my own healing. Really helpful. Thank you Mark.
Thank you Nikki… I wrote this article but I know it didn’t look like it at first… Our mistake! Hopefully we’ve made it more obvious, now. I’m glad to hear about how your business has developed… What a celebration 🙂
Thanks Yollana. I’m really enjoying the threads. It’s sparked an interesting discussion.
What beautiful words Mark about our deepest gift, coming from our deepest wound. This post really touched me very deeply. I felt recognised in the heart of my work. Thank you for your ongoing wisdom and the freshness of your newsletters.
Yollana, apologies! I now see that you wrote the article, not Mark. Thank you so much for your beautiful words.
No worries, Juliet. I’m actually quite humbled that anyone would mistake my writing for Marks… I think that’s a compliment 🙂
I’m glad that this touched you around the heart of your work.
Love Yollana
What a beautiful article, Yollana! It resonated with me the whole way through.
There are sometimes tears in my sessions with clients — often shed by them, occasionally by me. They think they’re signing up for time management help, but a lot of it is about healing — healing old habits, healing their inner critic, healing the undercurrents of anxiety …and instead, stepping into gentleness and acceptance “I’m ok, it’ll be ok” (and usually with that realisations comes a lot of relief, and the tears fall).
I remember in a sales conversation with a potential client describing the sort of changes I’ve seen with previous clients. And I started to cry, right there in the sales conversation. Luckily I’m not embarrassed by my tears (or anyone else’s) so I honoured them and didn’t try to push them away. The thought did cross my mind “Is this professional to cry?” But I needn’t have worried. Before I said anything, he chimed in “Wow, the fact that you’re crying shows me how much you care about your clients and how passionate you are about your work”.
It was a good lesson in realising that tears can be appropriate in business settings.
What a cool story, Erin. And I love hearing about the tenderness you bring to your clients. How lucky they are!
Sometimes my purpose and making money just have to be separate. It is has helped me to focus on residual income independent of my heart and talents. In this way my work is not driven by consumer demands, but an inner call that may not be so clearly defined as a product or a service.
Thanks though. It is true that the biggest personal growth tool is sales!
I’m not sure about “the biggest”… but there is certainly an opportunity for personal growth in the selling process… 😉
Thank you for your insights, Yollana. I find all kinds of emotions arise as I do my passion via my business. Today I realized I was so frustrated/angry. I took a brisk walk with my dog and discovered that what I was feeling was the lack of control over my hand/thumb pain. Of course my hands are critical to my creative work of painting, and the prep work in order to paint. So in additions to other chronic pain with which I deal, I now add infrequent but painful bouts of hand pain. And I notice all my fears that crop up, and what might be a way to deal with them For example,can I continue doing this work? Well, it might be time to hire someone for the work that I can’t manage. Besides, working with others is much more fun.
What is the gift in all this? I pray more, surrender, and rely much more on the Divine.
Sorry to hear about the pain you have, Kathy… And glad that you can find your way through it into deeper presence, and new enquiries which open doors to new possibilities…
Oh, Mark,
You’re speaking my language. I find beauty in tears and cry often – they’re how I feel and process my self judgments, “shoulds,” expectations, grief, and pain. They’re how I touch the mystery and wonder of life. Whenever I’m experiencing a moment of deep healing, tears are present.
This is also often true for my clients – we cry a lot together!
Interestingly enough, I was crying right before I read your blog post. I’m working through Unveiling the Heart of Your Business, and what arose for me this morning was this deep grief and frustration – I have so much passion for my work, and yet I’ve felt so undernourished by my business! I felt this deep grief of, “Sometimes my business breaks my heart.”
I just sat with my pain and felt the anguish – there was a sacredness and spaciousness in crying my tears and letting them be.
Dr. Gordon Neufeld, one of my mentors, taught me about the power of tears – and in letting my children have their tears. In fact, on a brain level, tears of grief/acceptance are how our children wire up their frontal lobes and literally mature. I just find that fascinating.
When I lose my tears, my heart becomes hardened. So I see tears as what keeps our hearts soft and so, so tender. I never want myself, my clients, or my dear children to lose their tears.
Thank you for a healing post, Mark.
In gratitude, Karly
In gratitude,
Karly
Hi Karly,
I really enjoyed your post, especially the info on the power of tears. Intuitively, I’ve know that tears are really helpful, but I didn’t know about the connection with frontal lobes. I’ve read that tears invoke beta-endorphin (that’s why we feel better after we cry!), but now I’m going to look into Dr Gordon Neufeld’s work (and check out your website too).
Yes… I had heard that tears are a way that we release cortisol stress hormones from the body, but not the connection to the frontal lobes either… Nothing like a good cry, huh?
Nicely said Yollana, thank you for describing both the tenderness of business and the intimacy of client sessions so forthrightly!
I have indeed touched several clients deeply enough to bring on tears. It’s been my experience that their tears come from the relief at feeling witnessed as much as the safety to show the depth of feeling facing their problem.
It’s most assuredly true that my own spiritual growth can be tracked by the deeper needs and concerns facing the clients who come in to see me during a given period of time. Something Holly there at HoB first taught me, actually – long, long ago when I first met her as a massage therapist here in the SF Bay Area.
I so enjoyed the eloquent way you wrote about it all!
Hi Victoria, thank you for your kind comments.
Yes, isn’t it true that we deepen together with our clients!
And how cool that you remember Holly telling you that as a massage therapist! You guys go way back! 🙂
Love Yollana
Thank you all for your comments, insights and sharings…
I always feel lucky when I get to share my thoughts here on the Heart of Business blog… and realize again what a thoughtful, caring bunch of people we get to hang out with here in the Heart of Business community.
I’ll be back with some personal replies later today when I’m at my desk (the mobile version of the blog doesn’t seem to have that function) but I wanted to touch base now to say thanks for your comments… I’m reading and enjoying them 🙂
Love Yollana
Digitale Distribution gibt unabh
Yollana, thank you for this incredible post. It touched my heart in a way that I really needed today. My life and my work are in a place of major transition – good, yes, and hard. I have been having many “what is the point of me?” moments, as one of my mentors calls them. It is so good to be reminded that it is not strange that my deepest, best work arises out of my own wounds, and that in fact this is a beautiful thing. Thank you for keeping my heart soft.
Julie… Thank you for keeping your heart soft! I’m glad if these words helped… Wishing you gentleness in this transition time…