Renewable Resources
September 2008, by Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, MCC (Master Certified Coach)
www.privatepracticesuccess.com
Does the daily grind of owning and operating your business overwhelm you? Do you have a never-ending to-do list for your private practice that stays constantly full? Do you feel tired from the stress of being in private practice?
If so, please join the crowd. The most common complaint I hear from thousands of professionals in small business ownership today is about their sense of overwhelm. There is always so much to do.
Running a small business is hard work even in the best of times. Keeping one afloat in a difficult economy is exhausting. Just as our country is running low on its traditional sources of fuel, so are many of us in small business ownership. We are out of gas, still trying to do all and be all. There has to be a better way to stay energized. Read on.
“Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.” (William Hazlitt)
When I first start to coach someone new, I always ask: Where do you get your energy from?
I want to know if this client can tap into constructive sources of energy such as exercise, meditation, nature, friendships, family or other sources of love and affection. I also want to know if my client gets energy from his or her existing work. If work is an energy drain, my client may resist my attempts to create more business, i.e. more work.
Owning a small business is so demanding that we often need more energy to operate it than we expect. Too many of us use adrenaline or fear as our primary business motivators. While they are effective motivators, they also come with a serious cost.
While vacationing in the mountains of Aspen this summer, I thought about the need for business motivators that are green: renewable resources that would effortlessly fuel small business owners, giving us the power needed to operate our businesses to the best of our ability.
My ideal green business energy source would be one that would keep me calm in the midst of a crisis, generate creative yet pragmatic business ideas, be able to spot and sort opportunities, validate my best efforts, and motivate me whenever I need a boost in pursuit of my goals.
Musing about this in Aspen, I realized that this was a pretty good description of my role as a business coach for others. But then I had an aha! moment: I do this same role for myself, using an inner, intuitive part of self.
I spent some time thinking about how I had developed this inner business coach that I regularly tap into for advice, motivation, and answers. It works as an intuitive wellspring of calm or motivation --whatever I am needing at the moment. This is my intuition at work, in service of my business.
I would like to help instill this same type of internal business resource, which I am now calling my Intuitive Business Coach, within every person I reach. I want to first show you how I have developed this part of self and then invite you to do the same, through the monthly email newsletter and also via a new teleclass.
“Intuition has always been a vital part of human intelligence. It encompasses skills that have always been critical to human life. In a sense, intuition is responsible for the survival of the species. Its long evolutionary history has made it a deeply buried power of the mind.” (Daniel Cappon, PhD)
My sense of intuition has been my fallback survival position for decades. I relied on it as a single, working parent to know, in my gut, if my son, a latch-key child, had made it home from school and was safely inside the house. My intuition was my guide when I left safe employment in the lucrative family business to pursue a riskier career in social work. It directed me in how to build a private practice and move onto the path of business coaching. It guided me to write my books. I have also used my intuition for personal purposes: to determine which house to purchase, how to end a bad marriage, and, later, how to find a much better one.
To develop your own intuition for business purposes, you will need to define and refine your intuitive process so that you understand what it is and how it can be utilized. My best definition of intuition comes from Daniel Cappon's article, “The Anatomy of Intuition,” (Psychology Today, Issue 26, May-June, 1993.)
Cappon says that intuition is a natural, normal skill that helped us survive as early humans and was relegated, as were so many of our basic human survival functions, to our unconscious mind during our evolution as a species. The primary task for us now at this stage of evolution is to bring our intuition forward, to make it more conscious so that we can access it with consistency and interpret the information it provides accurately.
I like this practical approach to intuition because it makes sense to me and matches the way I have developed my own Intuitive Business Coach. I have started giving workshops about intuition at a few conferences lately, and know that many therapists and healers regularly tap into their intuition for clinical work. I do, too. But I am inviting you to go further and branch out, to look at ways to use your intuition for business development.
“My clinical experience has convinced me that intuition is very democratic -- everyone has some capacity for it. Not everyone uses it. And not all those who apply it use it equally. Preliminary evidence…demonstrates that intuition can be trained.” (Daniel Cappon)
Because intuition normally functions at an unconscious level, intuition training focuses on structuring your intuitive process to make it consistent, useful, and conscious. With training, your intuition can help you to make better business decisions and spot opportunities that will be most profitable. Tapping into it is energizing, not depleting. It doesn’t run out.
Ready to get started tapping into your own business intuition? Here is this month’s exercise:
Decoding Your Operating System:
This month, be curious about your existing intuition.
- How does it show up? Remember, for most of us, intuition is unconscious so it communicates to us in the language of the unconscious: dreams, body sensations, fleeting thoughts, images, subtle spoken messages.
- Keep a journal during the next 30 days and notice when you get an instinct, a gut feeling, a sensation in regards to your private practice.
- What did you sense? What happens when you follow through? When you don't? Start to decode the language of your own Intuitive Business Coach.
- To better understand how your intuition may already be trying to make itself heard, felt, or seen, take a look at Daniel Cappon’s list of 20 intuitive characteristics here: The Anatomy of Intuition (My thanks to my colleague and fellow intuition workshop presenter Kelly Dorfman, MS, for telling me about Cappon and this article.)