Tag: thought leaders

Your Values: The Key to Living with Power and Purpose

Knowing and living your values is a foundational step if you are a messenger, visionary, thought-leader, and make-a-difference change-maker. Join a community of change agents at The Gathering to tap into the power and purpose of values.

Values work is potent. There’s great richness in going deeply into the foundational building blocks of values as part of the inner shift we are here to usher through in our work and with our clients. Working with values is the first step if you, like me, care deeply about making a significant difference in the lives of your clients, and so, by extension, inviting that big difference to show up in the world.

It’s most effective when values are shared, and so building community around values is one of the great challenges we face in co-creating a new society and the upgraded institutions needed to serve it.

I have been called into a hugely productive partnership and collaboration with The True Purpose Institute. Their “first Wednesday of the month” tele-seminar, called The Gathering, invites change makers in all arenas to come together to learn and strengthen the inner game that will make us more effective in the change we are here to support in the world.

This Wednesday, 5 June, is the call that focuses on Values.

It is part of the True Purpose Institute monthly “Gathering” calls, and is being offered in partnership with the Barrett Values Centre. I invite you to join us if you can. I urge you to sign up to receive the recording, even if you have a conflict with being on the call live.

Here’s a bit about the “inner requirement” for knowing and living your values as change makers.

~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=

When wielding great power, you must be guided by
clear principles that ensure your actions are in
alignment with your purpose. As Mahatma Gandhi
said, “The means are the ends in the making”!
How you go about creating transformation is every
bit as important as the transformation itself.
Moreover, the values you choose must be consistent
with the world you are creating. This ensures that
your actions will continually model and reinforce
the new paradigm (assuming your behavior aligns
with your values, of course!)
~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=

Below is the link to sign up to receive the call-in details about The Gathering calls. There is no charge for the call, though there is a place to “pay it forward” via a True Purpose Institute-affiliated nonprofit.

The Gathering for Change Makers offers a year+ of monthly, high-level change-agent and inner-game strengthening conversations and community calls.

Here’s the link to sign for to get the call details (and also get access to this call recording as well as past and future call recordings):

http://Tinyurl.com/bjmTPIGathering

 

To sharing values in community!

Bobbye

Owning Your Greatness and Why It Matters

Owning Your Greatness:

The Write Synergies Path to Manifest Your Creative Vision

Birthing visions and clothing those visions in words: What an exciting path to traverse!

For Conscious Creators, change agents, thought leaders, and those committed to creating a global awakening of consciousness, aligning your heart — the inner fire and desire — with what you intend to create and manifest in the world, is absolutely crucial.   Without this inner alignment, all the outer marketing tools create anemic results at best.

At worst, they fall flat, and drag you farther from your goal because you are literally “losing heart.”

Starting today, is there some way to bring that inner heart-knowledge into alignment with what you intend to create in your business, book, or creative project?

One powerful process to manifest your creation and your vision is to follow your inner yearning. Listen to it. Get into a dialogue with your inner yearning.  I’ve discovered that one of the most effective ways of tapping that inner yearning and building the dialogue is using a gentle writing and journaling process. I’ve seen this process create miraculous transformations in my Yoga + Writing workshops time after time.

In one iteration, I call it, “The Write Synergies Path to Owning Your Greatness.”  A guide and playbook to this process is my gift to you for signing up in the box at the top of the right column.

But what does this “The Write Synergies Path to Owning Your Greatness” really mean?

Write Synergies is all about generating results greater than the sum of the parts using writing.  This can be a process of uncovering information, tapping into your essence, connecting with your inner voice or trusted source, as well as generating finished results.

Owning Your Greatness means just what it says. We each have gifts to give.  Those gifts are our greatness, often living quietly hidden and invisible for years — if not lifetimes.  After a time, the inner yearning to express those gifts becomes palpable, not to say painful.  When the pain or divine discontent gets great enough, that means it’s time to listen, to really pay attention, and make something happen in bringing your vision to life. It’s time to join yourself on that inner journey.

Many are being called in this moment to share those visions and gifts. In this profound shift and turning toward consciousness on this planet right now, all the deep gifts are needed. How do you have the courage to bring them forth, out of their long invisibility and into the light of day?

“The Write Synergies Path to Owning Your Greatness” is a process that gives you the chance to listen and write your own vision into expression. So many of us hold ourselves back! I know. I’ve been doing it for years.  We put on the brakes, slip into the invisibility cloak and resist having to fully step into owning our greatness.  Now is the time.  We are called to express our greatness and gifts fully.

Starting right now: Make this the year that you are Owning Your Greatness — and receive the commensurate results!

Information Overload Vs. Discernment

The gifts, messages, and sacred stories are flowing with abundance. If you chose, you could listen in and connect with thought leaders in your niche every single day, multiple times a day. You can follow the teleseminars, webinars, tweets, blog posts of Cultural Creatives on many different parts of the same or similar paths. You can try to comment on everyone who resonates, and so many people do. Their messages are potent for you.

For those of us charged over the years as “Living Libraries of Light,” the ocean waves of messages from thought leaders threaten to swamp us. Information overload is very real. We inhale to take it all  in — and choke. We open our arms to embrace all that seems good and true and beautiful — and we are carried into the undertow because we cannot embrace it all.

The great shift and turning is upon us, the turning of an age. You can read about networks, circles, communities, tribes of people dancing at the edge of transformation, opening the doors, windows, and portals, ushering in new ways of being that are freeing and liberating and connecting us with our true selves, our deepest and  Divine Essence. The forward motion and momentum, unfolding us into our future selves, continue unabated.

Even so, others steadfastly yank on chains of the past that hold us fast in old models and paradigms that are breaking down.  The powerful in the world clamp down on anything that empowers greater numbers of us. That is the old story that the powerful are trying desperately to hold onto. And in this time of disparate and desperate polarities, we are tacking, our small ocean-going canoes heaved first one way, then another.

Discernment is key. How do you discern who to follow, who to listen to, who to invite into your own inner sacred space? I’m not saying I have all the answers, but perhaps together we can access and share some useful questions.

Delight Your People — Blog Challenge Post 22

What will it take to bring spine tingling delight to your people, your perfect customers, clients, to your tribe, circle, audience, community, readers, viewers, listeners?

Following this Write Synergies Path, we’ve traversed the inner path of awakening awareness. We’ve added accountability, built momentum (inner and outer) for your foundation, and we’ve talked about creating and implementing.

But who is it all for? And how can you create your vision in such a way that it really resonates down to the tippy toes of your perfect people? People talk about niches, of not trying to serve the whole world. But that often feels, in particular for the heart-full soul-preneurs, visionaries and thought leaders who don’t want to leave anyone behind, that they are being forced into a box that they’ve worked so hard to get out of, the smallness box.

You don’t want to leave anyone behind, and you resist forcing yourself and your message back into a tiny, ill-fitting box.  Reflect back to your own experience working with people. You know there are certain people who are more fun to be with, people with whom it’s hardly “work” at all to serve them, to offer your products.  These are the people who need to “hear it from you,” as Jan Stringer and Alan Hickman like to point out. (You also know in your bones that there are people for whom the whole thing is just an uphill climb. Those may be the clients who need to hear the message from someone else, not you!) The people who can only hear it from you: This is the essence of a niche — your tribe.

There’s something compelling about the basic idea of like-attracts-like, the law of attraction. In the coaching I’ve had with Jan and Alan, co-authors of  BEE-ing Attraction: What Love Has to Do with Business and Marketing , and with their BEEing Attraction work, this like-attracts-like principle leads to a “trick” question. You ask, “What makes my perfect customers/clients tick?”  As it turns out, it’s probably the same thing that makes you tick.

Hmmm. So in essence you are creating your business or program or service that addresses a singular challenge or obstacle that you have somehow successfully dealt with for yourself. The delight comes, on your customers’ side, when they so totally “get it” that you “get them” and their obstacle. They see themselves reflected in the words on your site or that they hear in your teleseminar or in your conversations. They know that you have a deep understanding, not only of the pain of the obstacle, but also the solution to release that pain. That is the beginning of the delight. And there’s more.

More than even the solution to their problem or a way to address their challenge, what they most appreciate is your Presence, loving them and their problem, loving offering the solution, listening for their particular nuances.  Developing Presence in your own way, your authentic content and presentation and voice, creates a dramatic result, a Presence you can share with your customers. By taking the time to develop yourself on this inner path work, you have more to offer the people you are here to serve, and you will be serving them at an even more profound level.

Your Presence — in your words, in your articles, blog posts, videos, audios, in your conversation –  is a source of delight to the people who need to hear it from you. It is the deep listening that you bring to your client interactions. It is the deep understanding and empathy that you have for the challenges they are going through.  It is your authenticity and the love that you bring to heal the pain of the obstacle, problem, or challenge by offering your services and products as solution. And at the foundation of your products and services: It’s you. Your Presence, honed to a crescendo of power to be totally with your clients, meeting them wherever they are on their path.

Delight is a pale imitation of what they will really feel when you, your Presence, is completely in the moment with your clients.

As my mentors, Judith and Jim say, “It’s all in the connection.” Developing your Presence is the path to creating the connections that matter.

Connect with our 30-day blogging challenge on Twitter at #blog30

Writing Your Inner Journey–Blog Challenge Post 14

I came across marketing expert and coach, Tara Kachaturoff, on Connie Ragan Green’s 30-day blog challenge.  Her post today, “Marketing Your Book – The strategy may be in “why” you wrote your book,”  suggests that authors and would-be authors look at the reasons why writing a book was important in the first place. Tara explains, “You can often find hints of marketing strategies that might be a good fit.”

She concludes, saying,  “I believe there is value in taking time to explore your original intentions as you may find some highly aligned and inspirational strategies that are perfect for you!”

Tara’s insights are right on the money. What she opens the door to here is the deep dive, what I call the “inner journey.”  In particular for conscious creators, visionaries, thought leaders, and paradigm-changing authors, writers, messengers, healers, and soul-preneurs, this sort of reflection creates the foundational inner work that strengthens the creator and the project. But why, you may ask, does that matter?

What I have discovered and observed over my time in corporate book publishing and a decade-long self-employment journey helping all kinds of clients with their words,  is that all the fantastic outer stuff is great.  But using those juicy marketing tools alone can result in “bright shiny object syndrome” without the foundational grounding of this inner journey.  Both creator and creation become like a tree without roots, and just as unlikely to thrive.

Think about it. Without examining your underlying motivations, your vision, aspirations, and goals, without the inner clarity that comes  from envisioning your path and ultimate destination (or at least the next few steps), then you risk traveling the road that old saying describes: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

Ideally this inner work and inner journey takes place before the book is published.  But as Tara observes, it can be powerful at any point in the process. I like to point out the importance of this by saying “the inner journey IS the journey.”

Safe travels to all!

Post 14 in the 30 day blogging challenge. Follow the great collegiality on Twitter at #blog30.

What Shelf? — Blog Challenge Day 12

The conundrum of the interdisciplinary writer and not fitting into book categories.

“I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don’t have a prize for yet.” Seth Godin

I thought of Seth’s comment earlier this week as I browsed the bookstore preparing for my “competitive analysis” for the Write Synergies book that I am ostensibly working on. As I consider the focus for this [first] book, I’m not even to the point of being concerned that there’s no prize yet. What is a concern is that the book’s author (moi) rarely sees it fitting on any of the available bookstore subject shelves.

Part of the process of developing your book and message is to see where your big ideas and visions locate themselves on the continuum of other creations, books, and messages of other thought leaders. You want to be out there, but not too out there. You want to have a shelf and category in the bookstore as a destination, a place where your people will naturally congregate, where they go for information and books similar (but not too similar) to yours. And online, you want the keywords, especially the long tail keywords, that people search for to find you and your information.

Over here, things aren’t cut and dried. Over here, the subject boundaries are more like permeable membranes. When you’re a passionate interdisciplinarian, they don’t make shelves for that.

Post #12 for 30 Day Blog Challenge. Follow us on Twitter at #blog30.