By Sherri L. McLendon
This morning I threw a tantrum over a pair of shoes my child refused to wear. Regrettably, tantrums burst out of me when I feel powerless yet responsible for the outcomes. The unpleasantness of the scene is front of mind as I ponder the role of relationships in the earning and spending of life force energy.
Heaven help me, the reason I felt reactive instead of responsive wasmy need for radical self care. My business is growing, and I love throwing myself headlong into the work/play of life. Recklessness in that regard takes a toll at 45 it didn’t at 20. In those days, I didn’t understand the value of nurturance: cups of miso soup and mixed green salads with ginger, time in nature, dance and long walks, conversations with chickens, long baths, good books which feed the spirit, tucking my 6-year-old ninja scientist into bed sweetly and peacefully.
A direct relationship exists between self care, familial relationships, and one’s ability to move from survive into thrive. If we are not grounded in radical self care, everything becomes much more difficult than it has to be, including getting our children off to school. So today I slowed my pace, had a good cry to relieve stress, napped, had coffee with the chickens, said good morning to my neighbors, ate a lovely sandwich with sugar snap peas instead of chips or fries, and basted a hem in my child’s budo pants. My business and clients and family are the better for it.
If I do not nurture my body temple where spirit resides, how can I hold sacred space for my clients? Exceptional entrepreneurs, their work is based on a joyful calling to serve, a devotional life, a mindful, magical approach to working with money, and a view of the feminine as Source of unlimited abundance. They expect me to show up fully and reciprocate their energy with my own.
COLLABORATIONS
Collaborations can take many forms: joint venture partners, affiliates, mastermind groups, and more. A joint venture partner may be someone with whom you plan and execute a launch for an event, tele-summit, or a shared work project. Affiliates love your work and will promote it to their tribe in exchange for a referral fee. A mastermind group is a safe space where the big “why” and “how” behind the heart’s desires is determined. My own mastermind group, made up of seven dynamic women from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, knows me as well as my family. My relationship with these women, whom I’ve never met in person, is an integral and undeniable part of what fuels my personal growth through my entrepreneurial business as a spiritual practice. Their mirror helps me to grow personally and professionally.
LOVE AND MONEY
What would happen if we cultivated our relationship with money the way we cultivate our relationship with our beloved? When we accept money as love flowing to us through others, we are able to take the awareness of conscious loving and apply it to our relationship with money. We create a life we love which enables others to do the same. We attract the kind of beloved or life partner who seeks a relationship with a whole, fulfilled, empowered, responsive woman secure in her relationship to herself.
RELATIONSHIPS IN BUSINESS
Have you heard, “we do business with those we know, like, and trust?” The distinct relationship roles between communications strategies at the business level can create a desirable inbound dynamic. Broadly, the field of public relations builds trust through reputation creation and management. Marketing practice is built on relationships with clients or consumers. And sales hinges on ideas around value.
The experience economy of today preferences trust, reciprocity as right relationship, and common core values as ways to create shared vocabularies around worth with our clients. But a cautionary note is needed. Everything in the universe contains its own opposite. So we remember that trust has more than one meaning – it can also mean to monopolize. While relationships are best built over time and tested by shared experience, the holy grail of marketing is the fast decision. Values may not have a price tag, but it’s something consumers seek.
Anytime we look for our sense of worth in the other – a lover, a friend, a parent’s approval, or in our earnings - then we court the feelings of worthlessness we try to avoid. Better to face ourselves in the mirror our business provides and seek fairness. There, we’ll see the kind of economic equality which gives us the freedom to cultivate indwelling beauty and an abundant life.
