While facilitating a variety of sessions recently, I’ve had volunteers up at the front of the room with me while we’ve worked through their business challenge with everyone watching.
One woman, who was struggling to have enough clients in her business, brought my attention to a tension between “coaching” and “teaching” which has a real impact on the ability to be successful in business.
If you’re not familiar with the difference, briefly “coaching” is a modality associated with helping people find their own answers within through asking skillful questions. “Teaching” is when you impart information to someone in a way that they can actually integrate and act from that new knowledge.
Both are necessary. Guidance and intuition are amazing, but you don’t want someone doing brain surgery through guidance and intuition unless they’ve already learned how to be a neurosurgeon. (Of course, there’s always an exception, like when someone took Spock’s brain on Star Trek.)
In this instance, I helped her, in a matter of minutes, get super clear on two possible niches using principles from our course How to Say What You Do In One Compelling Sentence. Then we spent a little more time on how to pursue each of those niches in the next two months using principles I teach in Sacred Selling. Part of the work we did included enlisting others in the room in helping to send her referrals (which they enthusiastically agreed to.)
Then I asked her to go into her heart and choose which niche to focus on first. After a minute or two, she chose one.
It’s a tricky situation. Learning knowledge from someone else can throw you off your own knowing. How do you know when to stick to what you’ve learned and when to following your intuition and go off-road?
The answer? Don’t do both at the same time. When your heart helps you realize that you need to learn something, learn it! Soak it in, try it out, practice it. For instance, in learning the elements of a core marketing message, you may initially feel like you aren’t speaking with your voice. Don’t let that turn you away from the learning.
After you integrate the learning, which hopefully includes an understanding of -why- each element in a message works, then you can go back and reword what you’ve written in your own voice.
Trusting yourself doesn’t just mean following your heart. It also means trusting that your essence is so permanent in you, so powerful and glowing, that it’s always there. You can learn something new, and your essence can, with a little bit of time, help you digest and integrate it into something that is truly you.
In this instance I asked her to not act on her decision immediately. “Go home, let all of this integrate for a day or two. Don’t make a decision off the “high” of the experience of being in this room. Check in with your heart when you’re not being influenced by people around you, and see what feels really true to you.”
Do you take time for information to integrate before making big decisions, away from other’s influence? Both learning from others and listening to your own heart are important enough that they deserve their own separate time and attention.
Yollana Shore, our practitioner in Australia, is a star at helping clients create a business that is both effective and truly reflective of who they are. This tension between learning and intuition is a graceful dance that Yollana leads her clients through.
Click to learn how to work with Yollana..
Before you get to the video interview with her below, which is SO worth watching if this is an issue for you, I want to mention a few things.
First, remember this is the final month that my first book/program will be available: Unveiling the Heart of Your Business. You can read why we’re retiring it here. You can check out the book itself here.
Second, we’ve been enjoying the *heck* out of the Readiness Assessments we’ve been doing. We completed the first 20 in our pilot run, and now we want to invite more to try them out. Are you ready to move your business forward? And if so, what are your top priorities? Let us help you out with a readiness assessment, no charge.
Thanks for listening. Now, let’s get to Lisa’s interview with Yollana:
You have within you a gift that is giving itself to the world. Don’t stop now. (click to tweet)
Can you answer Lisa’s question in the comments? Or just share what you’re taking away. Or questions for Yollana!
4 Responses
Mark, this is a wonderful example of the confusion many heart-centered entrepreneurs experience when they are learning something that may on the surface appear to counter or conflict with “inner knowing.”
I agree that acting in the heat of the moment isn’t always the best course of action. Integration is important.
And, the mind is tricky. How often have well-meaning folks learned something new and experienced the “inner knowing” in the moment, and then left the seminar to think about it, promptly second-guessed themselves and eventually talked themselves out of doing anything?
Sometimes the conflict isn’t between the learning and one’s intuition. It’s often between our own heart and our mind/fear, and unfortunately most are practiced in ultimately listening to the latter.
Tshombe- that is so true. The mind is tricky, isn’t it? Yet, people still do find their way forward, through the fear, thank goodness!
Thank you for the excellent advice. The aspect I find the hardest is setting a goal for each day and sticking to it. I am trying not to get involved with too many things as I was overextending myself. This is is helping and I am becoming more organized now.
Glad it helped, Peter.