The cover article of July’s  INC magazine talks about how to revitalize the  American Dream by empowering entrepreneurs to start more businesses. There’s an incredible need right now to empower entrepreneurs to expand small businesses. 8 million Americans have lost their jobs. Small businesses provide as much as 90% of new jobs.

Entrepreneurs can not only provide new jobs, they can add new innovations to green business and high tech. What’s needed is the vision, courage and vitality to get started and follow through effectively. The more aware you are of your talents and abilities and what stops you, the more you can break through them and get the most  out of your  challenges and opportunities.

The key to that is your connection with yourself. Not just your personality, but more importantly the greatness that’s inside you. What makes you unique and what you can contribute to make this a better world. If  you think only about taking care yourself, then you limit the power of making money doing what you love. Inevitably what you love to do expands you as it enriches people’s lives. Would being more aware of how you contribute to others empower your entrepreneurial potency and skills?

On my last “Clear Your Blocks to Business Success” teleclass, someone asked how vulnerability can expand your business. I gave her an answer. And she seemed satisfied at the time, but later that night I reflected on it and wrote something that was more heartfelt. I’ll say what that was in a minute, but first let me tell you a story about vulnerability.

Once upon a time in ancient Persia, there was a merchant named Babak who sold rugs at the local bazaar. He had a son, called Arash, whom he adored. His son was very lively and curious about the world. But the merchant was afraid that his son would leave him and go on some adventure and not take over the family business.

So he chained Arash to his market stall and forced him to work there. As the days and weeks went by, Arash’s spirit withered. He lost his curosity and love of life. The merchant’s business suffered as well. Fewer and fewer customers would stop at his stall. They saw the pitiful eyes of the son and looked away. They went to other rug merchants.

Babak was beside himself with worry. He felt sorry for his son and worried about his business, but he could not bring himself to set his son free. He was afraid that if he did, his son would run away and he would never see him again.

Finally one day a mysterious stranger stopped at the stall. He saw the sad eyes of the son and the pain in the father’s heart. He said to the father, “Do you know you are killing your son and destroying your business?” Babak replied in anguish, “Yes I know this, but I cannot let go of my son. He is my only son. Without him, who will take care of me when I am old?”

The stranger replied kindly but firmly: “You will not reach old age if you continue like this. Better to be free now and make your future from uncertainty than try to control your future from fear.”

Babak felt the wisdom and compassion coming from the stranger and burst into tears. He felt like a heavy stone had been lifted from his heart. Without thinking about it, he took the key from his pocket and set his son free.

Bewildered the boy looked up and rubbed his wrists. Slowly a smile came over his face. He saw the tears in his father’s eyes and they fell into an embrace.

This is where we leave them. You can make your own story from here. The point of the story is not that you will suddenly find a solution so you can live ‘happily ever after’. The point is to live life free from fear, open to receive greater possibilities to come to you.

Maybe the son stayed. Maybe he left for awhile and came back to work on his father’s business. Maybe he never came back at all. Life is uncertain. The only certainty is that if you are open and vulnerable you will receive far greater possibilities than if you try to control everything.

Vulnerability is what makes you and your business attractive to people. You are totally open and present with them. You don’t hold back. You are fully available. You share your joy in what you do. You do not try to control or hold back your life force. Aliveness and joy is your very nature. And it’s contagious! Haven’t you noticed that the most successful shopkeepers are the one’s that laugh and smile with their customers and receive them instead of trying to separate from them?

Vulnerability is not having a point of view about who or what or how you’ll receive. It’s about being in total allowance and interesting point of view about everything that comes your way. It’s opening yourself to receive whatever life brings you.

Letting go of what isn’t rewarding and fully taking in what nourishes and expands you, your body and your life. It’s not resisting or reacting to anything. While being fully present and not abandoning yourself.

Fully being open to everything that comes your way without any expectations, projections or rejections, filters or barriers. Not being vested in any outcome. Being really simple. Being fully present. No mental chatter or ‘stuff’ between you and the world. NAKED.

Your transformational business plan expresses and supports the dream of your business in practical business steps. What does that look like? You get in touch with the deepest sense of yourself. What brings you alive and sparks you. Then you continue to draw from that as you create your action steps and implement them.

That’s the extra piece that’s been missing. The ability to keep fueling and expanding your inspiration. And bringing that to implementing your action plan on a daily, even hourly basis.

The key to doing that is to bring your left and right brains, your masculine and feminine, your techinical and intuitive strengths and skills together. So you move forward in a unified way and you aren’t fighting one part of you.

How do you tap into your dream, your inspiration not just at the beginning of your business, but ongoing on a real time basis? You use techniques that get you fully present with the cutting edge of your life. Your business.
I’ll go into more depth in my next blog post on Monday.
In the meantime let me leave you with a question:
“What can I discover today that makes me more available?”

Day to day business can get very mundane. No wonder people escape into ‘reality’ and celebrity shows at night. But what if your business not only fulfilled your mental and financial attention, but engaged your aliveness and communion with the world at large. What if you felt more alive after a days work than when you started. It may seem far fetched, but Avatar got me thinking. So what would that look like? Do you think it’s at all possible?

Tiger Woods is famous for self-mastery on the golf course. His ability  to totally focus on his golf game. He could tune out all the distractions and totally concentrate. He let go of a bad round and got the most out of the next one. He was able to master his doubts and worries and use his full talent and ability.

Well, as almost everyone in the world now knows, while he was a master of his outer drives he wasn’t a master of his inner drives. And it’s probably going to cost him dearly. What area of your life are you not mastering? Will that keep you from having more of what you want? Or make you lose something that’s precious to you?

This is not a judgment of his actions. This is a recognition that he caused a lot of people pain. Particularly his family. And that he wasn’t willing to be aware of the likely results. And act based on what would be most expansive for everyone involved. 

True self-mastery encompasses your whole life. Your whole being. You reach deep down to the core of what really matters to you. And you live your life in all aspects from that knowing. From that caring. From that gratitude for what you have. And you honor that and make the most of it.

I hope you’ll join me in wishing Tiger Woods god speed in becoming a master of his personal life. As successful as he’s been with his business life. May you also be a master of your life in all aspects. Are you willing to be and do what it takes?

Business is an adventure! You can break the rules that say you have to do it the way everyone else does. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about his internet business. He was frustrated 
following the ‘rules’ about how to succeed online.

I asked him “Do you really have to fit yourself 
into someone else’s formula in order to succeed? 
Or can you simply choose to be you and use what
you perceive works for you?” 

Your business is whatever you choose it to be. The 
universe will support you if you truly and 
exuberantly be you, express your unique talent and 
listen for guidance. 

You don’t have to fit yourself into some internet 
guru’s views of the world. You don’t have to 
allign with judgments and points of view in order 
to benefit from their experience and knowledge. Follow 
the lightness. Take in whatever feels light and 
expansive for you. 

As soon as information starts feeling heavy, move 
on to something that does feel light and 
expansive. You’ll have so much more energy and 
creative power to bring to your business. 

What if you grew your business for the joy of 
exploring and playing? And picked the tools and 
strategies that fit you rather than than trying to 
fit you into them? 

I don’t know if you get how powerful this question 
is. Because so often we get entrenched in trying 
to do things according to commonly held beliefs. 
According to the way everyone else does it. And we 
get so bogged down and things stop working for us.

You are your own creator of your life. You can 
create your own business success if you use your 
awareness to work for you. 

Listen to what the universe is telling you. Listen 
to what your business and your business 
opportunities are saying. What can your talents 
and abilities contribute to them? Be open to 
receive. 

Follow the energy of your joyful curiosity. Flow 
with the guidance of your awareness and the 
universe. Optimize creative energies and 
opportunities that present themselves to you. And 
create abundance for yourself and others through 
your skills and awareness. 

Powerful business is based on an intimate 
communion with your business and the opportunities 
that present themselves.

Business is a game that’s best played when you trust 
yourself. Trust your talents. Trust your interaction with 
opportunities. And trust the universe. 

And opportunities are coming to you all the time. 
It’s an abundant world. Stay light and open so you 
can take advantage of them. Make each day an 
exciting new adventure you take with your 
business!

Have you ever wondered if there was more to your life you could be living? I just came across an interesting book on how to achieve your best performance in life and work  The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. Their main thesis is that energy, not time is our greatest resource. I’d have to agree, energy is what allows you to fully engage opportunities and challenges. Energy is the key to the mental, physical and spiritual capacity to achieve great results and live your life with the fullest possible joy and fulfillment.

The authors recommend cycles of rest and activity to maintain high performance. Yes of course, we all need down time and recreation to recharge ourselves. At the same time, there’s another way to achieve your highest personal performance and regenerate yourself that doesn’t deplete you as you engage in activity. That’s being the potency that generates results. Generation comes from you’re being the full potency of you. No I don’t mean sexually, though that’s part of it. I mean the full aliveness, joy, strength, talent and creative power of you. That’s not based on your mental point of view or judgments about how right you are.  It’s a state of being, not a mind set. How do you get to that state of being? You step away from using judgment as a source of creation and choose instead to be the  ease, the power and the energy you are already. Paradoxically, it’s not as a need to achieve something and being vested in the outcome.  But simply being the joy and aliveness and freedom you truly are and expressing that. Celebrating it so it shows up in your life and work as the whole real deal of you.

You don’t need any  justification or goal to make you complete. You are there. You are what you seek. Anything that you see will be  fun and expansive is sufficient reason for action and you’ll find out how to make it work. You don’t need to fulfill some need. If it’s what you’re life and business requires, it will be expansive. So start claiming and owning your full capacity. And destroy and uncreate all the programming that doesn’t allow you to. When you act from being the overflow capacity of you, then you create from your full potential of  greatness, not from the need or insufficiency of you. Life is alive moment by moment rather than a constant striving for a  distant goal. You draw to you more energy and more possibilities as you live the power of full engagement.

What to look out for is judgement. Judgment is what stops your ability to create expansive outcomes. It kills new possibiliites dead. You may get what we think you want, but you won’t get something greater than you could have imagined possible.  For something truly great to show up you have to create from being. Then you’re not just thinking or doing, you’re being the energy and consciousness that expands your capacity to not just have more energy, but greater clarity and awareness of what will make your life and business phenomenally great!

Without greater awareness, energy gets wasted and misused. High performance, as any athlete will tell you, is not just about energy, it’s about being able to make the right moves at the right time. That takes more than mental acuity and physical know how. To really function at top performance requires a 360 degree awareness of your life. You take in everything, but only pay attention to what’s critical for that moment. What powerful awareness and top performance and fulfillment could you have if you embraced all of you? What would that take? I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Choice creates greater awareness. Making a strategic choice can make you more aware of how to reach your goals. Unfortunately, we often come to a conclusion based on judgments instead of awareness and limit our choices. You know the old story, you find something you love to do and turn it into a business. Pretty soon it consumes your life.  And a lot of the reasons why you decided to become an entrepreneur in the first place get sacrificed to trying to make your business successful. Tim Berry of Planning Start Ups Stories  wrote a thought provoking post called Choose Your Own World View. Pick One about juggling business success, work you like and the people you care about. They all come together in harmony in your life or they all pull apart. It’s  easier for work you like and business success to come together. There will probably have to be compromises for people you care about to fit in as well.

Ultimately it’s your choice. Either you believe it can work, or you believe it won’t. Whatever your mindset is, that’s what you create. When you choose for something to work out, you’re willing to find out how to make it happen. You choose to be an entrepreneur because you like the lifestyle and the greater freedom, money and personal fulfillment it can bring you. Then you choose for it to work  so you don’t sacrifice parts of your life in order to make it happen. That sets you up to ask the questions and get the awareness to have all the parts come together so they synergise into a whole greater than the sum of the parts. What would you like to choose?

Can you connect all these dots with 4 continuous straight lines without taking your pen off the page? To do so you have to think outside the box. You have to drop your judgments about what’s permitted or possible.

Thinking outside the box was developed in the 70′s and 80′s by business consultants trying to get their corporate clients  to come up with  innovative ways to solve their business challenges. The trouble with business systems is that we get mentally and spiritually lazy. We start depending on fixed ideas about what’s possible and how we’re supposed to think and be. Society in general is about stability and conformity. It confines us to narrow possibilities. In order to have a dynamic growing business, you have to expand past the limits of what other people think is possible.

The trick is to synergize innovative thinking and ways of being with the power of  group collaboration and shared resources. How do you do that consistently and effectively whether you’re a one person operation or a large corporation? You develop a culture that does not support judgment. That honors personal expression and transformation. It’s one thing to think outside the box, it’s another to be outside the box. You see thinking outside the box can be done sporadically by learned or practiced behavior. But if there isn’t true valuing of change and differences, there are bound to be challenges that are outside of our capacity to deal with effectively.

When you don’t judge, you’re not blinded by prejudice, you can clearly see what works and what doesn’t. You’re much more  effective  and proactive and get better outcomes.  What else can you do to develop outside the box business results for yourself? I have many more ways I do that with my clients.  What ways do you use to get outside the box results with your business? I’d love to hear your comments.