I know lots of people, including myself, who receive downloads of many, many ideas within their own heart, or sparks of idea after idea igniting in their mind. Way too many to act on properly.
What do you do with them all? Trying to act on them can overwhelm your business, undermining momentum and confusing your audience.
And yet not acting on them can feel like refusing the muse.
Before I tell you what I recommend, I want to explain a spiritual reality as described by the Sufis.
The Imaginal world.
In Sufi cosmology, the Divine has many layers, or worlds, to our reality, and one of them is called the Imaginal world. In this world, images and meaning are matched up, and it happens very, very quickly.
However, it is not a physical world, or one that carries any lasting reality to it.
For instance, a butterfly might be connected with an idea of beauty, and we get that in a dream. But it’s not a permanently assigned meaning, it just carries that meaning in that instance. Next time, a butterfly might carry a different meaning for us, like something be short-lived, or something being delicate.
Many of the meaning-image matches will serve a purpose in a moment, and then evaporate, like dew in the morning sun.
You’ve probably experienced this, where you’ve had an idea come in, and then later… where is it? You can’t remember it.
The miss-step in this situation is that many folks try to take these sparks of meaning, which are significant and impactful in their moment, and try to create something permanent out of it.
Here’s some approaches I recommend experimenting with when confronted with many, many ideas.
Appreciation.
Above, I mentioned dew in the morning sun. Sometimes things are meant to be savored, but not preserved. What if you could appreciate the ideas as they come in, but not feel attached to them?
See which ones stick.
Sometimes there is something deeper or more persistent in one of these ideas. Watch for those that stick around.
This is different than trying to capture or preserve everything. We can take conscious heart awareness and appreciation of the ideas as they land, witnessing them. And then, hours or a day later, we may notice that a particular one or three of those ideas stuck around.
Write it down. Lean into it a little bit.
Create content before programs.
Many people leap directly into trying to turn the ideas into programs, or offers, or entire wings of their business, and that can be exhausting and overwhelming.
Just try writing an article, or shooting a video to share with your audience, or to start to build an audience.
Or even just a short social media post.
For those that last, they turn into realities.
If an article or post or video gets a lot of attention, and creates some momentum… maybe it could become a webinar, and then maybe a paid course or offer of some sort?
If you sit with an idea for awhile and write it up, and it comes in more strongly, and you develop it over time, it may become part of your business, in small ways, and then in bigger ways.
I know this is simple…
I see folks get so overwhelmed thinking that everything that comes in must be honored, and that honoring somehow becomes taking each idea to its ultimate expression.
Please be kind and gentle with yourself. It says in my tradition that the Divine is closer to you than your jugular vein, that the Oneness from which we come and from which we aren’t separate in any way, knows our abilities and our capacities and our situation intimately, even better than we know ourselves.
This Oneness would never ask us to be overwhelmed carrying out elaborate versions of each spark that comes in. Rather, we can delight in the endless creativity available to our hearts, and then follow nature, taking our time, noticing which seeds germinate and which don’t.
I’ve mentioned how in the late summer the hickory trees in our woods will drop a LOT of nuts… all of them nonviable. The trees know which nuts aren’t going to produce a tree or nut meat, and dump them, while the living, edible and grow-able nuts drop later in the fall once they are done developing.
It’s okay to let things go that may look beautiful, and may even be inspiring in the moment, but aren’t destined to have an enduring existence.
This way, you can focus on the ones that really are meant to root and reach for the sky, taking your business with it.
with love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.
I’m not going to predict any more…
It’s been a few weeks that I’ve confidently been stating that the website is almost ready to launch. We keep running into technical issues, and the truth is that I made the announcement prematurely, before truly understand the scope of technical detail that needed to be handled.
And boy oh boy, did that realization feel terrible! Oy… but, good people are bringing their best to this project, and it will get done!
In the meantime, I’ll let you know that yes, soon(ish) you will be able to join our Learning Community. And, soon(ish) we will be offering a home study version of the Heart of Money & Power course.
If you aren’t wanting to wait, and need support, I do have small group coaching space, and some individual deep-dive business assessment slots available.
You can see details here: Working with Mark (Scroll down to “Two alternatives to long term work)
Or here: Mark’s Small Group Coaching
And, as always, love and love!
