smARTist Telesummit 2012

This January, I have the rare pleasure of joining a wonderful group of business and creative teachers and coaches to help support artists in their craft and businesses. The theme this year is Communicating with Confidence.

I hope if you’re an artist, or have a friend who is an artist, you’ll consider joining us for a week of valuable speakers and panel discussions.

Visit the website here.

smARTist Telesummit 2012

Do you ever wonder why some artists are wildly successful and others can’t figure it out? One critical reason is they’ve learned the secrets to connections that inspire sales.

Communicate with Total Confidence to the Right Buyers and Collectors so You Too Can Grow Your Sales

smARTist presents the longest running, online (and off!) professional development conference for visual artists.

This Online, Live, 7-Day Art Career Conference Is For You If…

• You are ready to connect with collectors, communicate with confidence and make more sales.
• You want your artwork in the world and are confused, or overwhelmed, about the best way to go about this.
• You toy with the idea of working as a full time artist, and aren’t sure where to start.
• You work as a full time artist and you want new ideas and more inspiration to sell your art.
• You know there are better ways to market your art, online and off, and aren’t sure which ones work best.
• You have lots of ideas, and want help focusing on where to begin and how to keep going.
• You want support and information from fellow artists who are on this path with you.

Click here to see the roster of topics and speakers and to sign up.

Masterminding Moments Happy New Year

When Was the Last Time You Reconnected With Your Passion and Purpose in Your Business?

My masterminds ended the year last year with an assignment to write a “love list” for their businesses; refreshing themselves in what they loved most about, and what had drawn them to, business for themselves originally.

What Would Be Your Manifesto?

One member took the assignment to all together more intentional level. She had come to the Mastermind to reconnect with her creative process. And connect she did! She wrote her own Manifesto (aka Jerry McGuire style) which blew the roof off of any resistance or block she’d feel experiencing in her business. Now she’s basking in focus, clarity and enthusiasm for her business and her life.

Another member says she’s feeding her own spirit again, not only nourishing her business but making new, more courageous decisions and taking new, more definitive actions.

Waa Hoo! I’m so Impressed!

Next week, we’ll be discussing  the fantasy of the “desire for speed and huge leaps” vs. the ease and power of creating a momentum in our businesses.

Wish you had a safe, supportive, structured, place each week that could aid you in becoming who and what you want this year?

I lead small, highly personalized, targeted and results-oriented groups each week for entrepreneurs, serious about creating dynamic changes in their businesses and personal lives. We have a great time and we get more done together than any of us could alone!

Not like any mastermind you’ve ever experienced; call me if you’d like to discuss whether this format might work for you and your business. 541-488-1678

Be A New You In the New Year!

You’ve heard it before, be the change you want to see in the world. Just another way of saying if you want different results than last year, you must change.

You Can Teach a Dog of Any Age New Tricks!

So when did change become synonymous with hard, uncomfortable, and unpleasant? Is it no wonder we resist change?

Try this, take a moment and remember a particularly happy event, and I’m guessing if you backtrack in your memory a bit, you’ll also see that something in you changed before you experienced that blessed result.

Perhaps you prepared for a new baby, or planned to join your life as husband and wife with another? Maybe you took a course, changed jobs or moved.

Those were the actions that set you on a new course and brought new events to you. But before that, you changed who you were being.

New Year, New Patterns of Behavior, New Results

This year, I’m going to be exploring ways to bring about positive change that are not hard, uncomfortable, or unpleasant, but are in fact fun, easy, expanding, and life affirming. As you change yourself in all the ways you most want, your life experiences change in all the ways you want.

New Year Resolutions For Being

This year, join me in starting a list, not of what you’ll do, but of who you will become. Add to that behaviors you will endeavor to repattern and you’ll have an award winning recipe for change in the most enjoyable, effective and speedy way.

I’d love to hear your recipe for your new BEING this year.
Comment below or on Facebook. Would love to connect!

My sincere wishes for you all to enjoy a very
Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year!

Christmas Is A Time For What? Guilt, Stress and Anger?

It’s a wonderful contrast, this time of year. Everything around us is shouting of joy, peace and cheer.

But does anyone notice the proliferation of depression, of stress? Is it any wonder the incidence of drinking to relax increases?

What if those feelings had a different purpose than we thought?

I have an idea that dark cloud of depression that can roll in as we grow close to the holidays is really just a coping mechanism, “cover” if you will, holding down a building tension of guilt, stress, and anger like a giant lid so that it doesn’t explode forth, taking casualties, leaving behind a mess of regret.

I remember a Christmas eve night years ago, alone with my two, small children, little more than $10 to my name, I sat in a Taco Bell, tears leaking down my face as my kids laughed and ate their burritos.

I felt guilty that I couldn’t be the superwoman I thought I should be, that I wasn’t yet able to do the impossible that I thought was necessary to restore my small family to a better quality of life than living week to week. I felt financial, ex-marital, and holiday stress combined to an extreme. And I felt so angry I could barely unclench my hands from the balls they would form as if of their own accord.

Awareness of my feelings led me a deeper awareness of those around me.

Looking back, my children now graceful and confident teens, I see the situation differently than I did then. Then, I could only see my suffering.

But now, I see a woman who’s guilt was trying to wake her up to the strength of purpose that wanted to step up and lead, a stress that wanted to alert her to value and place a priority on caring for her body and needs to last out the long run, and an ager that wanted to assert the boundaries that would create true safety, security and well being for her children.

…which led to new choices in actions…

Despite knowing mentally, that my emotions can provide much needed and useful guidance in situations, and can even help me shift my situations to what I do want, I can still find myself, initially, in resistance of such emotions as sadness, anger, guilt, jealousy, or overwhelm, especially at this time of year when it’s even easier to react to my expectations or unhealed hurts and disappointments from the past.

It’s the skills I learned as I confronted and worked with those emotions that still serve me today when strong feelings come up. Many are the same skills I teach or use working with my clients.

The best time to learn how to work with your emotions is when you’re smack dab in the middle of feeling them. And the holidays are the perfect time to use what’s showing up in your life to learn how to use those emotions in ways that can take you to new territory, using new equipment.

…so I didn’t miss new opportunities.

A final note, I almost missed the delight and joy my children were experiencing on the Christmas eve, for being swept up, resisting the suffering I was experiencing; almost but not quite. I didn’t yet have the skill set to utilize the guidance of my emotions, but intuitively, I did follow an urge to “look up and pay attention to what was right before me eyes”. Their smiles, their laughter, their beautiful shining faces, all these were beaming forth as we ate our humble burritos and took a leisurely walk around Pepper Drive, where 10 blocks of neighbors decorate with lights like no where else around. They didn’t want packages. They wanted my attention. They wanted to share their experience with me. They wanted to walk hand in hand, it was that simple.

Each year this time, I’m thankful that I didn’t miss it. And I’m thankful for every year’s work since I’ve devoted to learning about how to use my emotional guidance system because it allows me to enjoy a holiday with my family that is truly a time of peace, joy and cheer!

I wish you all a day, a week, a month, a new year of what you wish for most for yourself. May you enjoy this time of year and those around you. May your insight and awareness lead to an expanded experience of life. Best wishes, Deborah

Did 11-11-11 Catch You By Surprise?

I hate to admit it, but I really wasn’t paying attention much to all the buzz around the 11-11-11 phenomenon. Heaven knows I received enough e-mails on the topic, even from some unexpected sources.

But it wasn’t until my daughter mentioned that she and her partner, currently in his first year at Reed College, had wanted to spend the day together and make wishes together at 11:11 am and 11:11 pm, today, 11-11-11, that it hit me what a sensation today is becoming.

photo credit: Tarter Time Photography

Dreams May Come True, They Can Happen to You…

A friend commented that something rare sparks our wish that wishes do come true, that magical things happen and that we can create what we want simply by by our believing it. We laughed about how 11-11-11 can mean anything you want it to mean.

My comment is “so why not make it mean something you do want!?”

So What Can It Mean?

I asked another friend what would she want to make 11-11-11 mean and I loved her answer. She said she’d like 11-11-11 to mean that our wishes our our prayers on this day were in alignment with one another and with a higher good for us all.

I loved that. Just had to share. So today, I invite you to adopt a meaning for 11-11-11 that works for you, for your good, and for the good of all.

See you all in my wishes at 11:11 pm 11-11-11!

Deborah

P.S. Did you make a wish today?

Do You Know Your Perfect Question?

Business Is Changing

It got me to reminiscing about my own business and the perfect questions I’ve been using to lead myself to  a place in my business that felt better.

“Questions provide the key to unlocking our unlimited potential. Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers”. …Tony Robbins

Like many people, I think I’ve noticed changes in many areas of life; my industry, coaching and training, being one of them. I admit to a certain resistance to the way coaches were more successfully connecting with their clients.  I had a real inner dialogue running about the industry, about my own abilities with the new social media technologies, and about the business aspects of my business in general.

Coaching Myself Through My Resistance

Coaching myself around the resistance and seeking outside coaching around new skill sets has led to many new realizations and an ongoing unfolding into new possibilities for the form serving with my unique skill set demands.

One extremely helpful coaching technique has been to use “connecting questions”, questions of power that unleash fresh, new possibilities.

Questions That Sparked Positive Change

Here are some of the questions I have been using to guide me into infusing my business with new energy:

1. What needs to be healed or transformed for a new belief in my ability to grow and change along with the changes to the coaching industry?
2. I wonder what techniques would best support me as I change my old patterns that no longer fit the way successful coaches do business, into new patterns that serve both my business and my clients.
3. How can I take what I’m learning about what is unique and helpful to others, that lives inside of me, and present that in a way that only those who are currently looking for those services can’t help but be magnetically drawn to my offerings.
4. Who must I be and what must I do to continue to serve my current client base, to encourage and support them, while exploring other market place arenas?

As I grow in my ability as a business person, to support my business in ways that best support my clients as well, what can I do to learn and perfect the skills that will be needed for my future business success?

Power Questions Change the Future Several Ways

By asking one such question each week, and then looking for the answers, I did several things:

• I sharpened by preference and intention
• I directed my busy monkey-mind to activity that served my business
• I changed what I experienced because of what it was I was looking for (that’s Law of Attraction, that is!)

But Wait, There’s More

To put a cherry on top, I kept a weekly positive evidence notebook, for myself and to share with my various mastermind partners.

Create Your Perfect Question

Want to know how to create your own perfect question to keep your mind directed to bring you want you want? I hope you’ll join me for Ask The Right Question, on November 16.

Or contact me about joining one of my Mastermind support groups; reasonably priced, momentum generating weekly meetings with other good people doing good work in the world.

Shake It Up Baby, Twist and Shout!

Last month I talked about River Rafting and what it has to teach us about moving faster than the stream to navigate the water, and that the way to get moving faster is with support.

This month I want to talk about how to change patterns and to get us started I’m going to share a rather startling experience I had this last weekend.

Shake It Up Baby!

Patterns are what control most of actions. We’re fairly well conditioned by age 11 and for most of us, we aren’t acting out of choice, but out of habit, patterns or conditioning.

Ever have that feeling you’re headed for a fall or crash but can’t seem to avoid it? That’s the work of patterning.

So how do you get out of patterning? Well you have to shake things up a bit. You have to give that conditioning some new options. And I’m going to talk about that some more later this week.

A Shake Up is what happened to me this last weekend as I was executing a simple Fall task, placing leaf netting beneath my Japanese Maple, atop my pond. But fortunately for me, despite the shake up, some patterning that I had intentionally put in place, came in handy.

Twist…

On moment I was bending down to straighten the net over the dark water and the next I was falling, face first towards the surface of the pond.

Time slowed as I felt my hand hit and dunk beneath the top of the dark water, as if I expected it to brace my fall.

Then muscle memory kicked in. I’ve practiced falling into moving water, river rafting so that I would flip and ride the rapids down on my back. All it took was for my hand to hit the cold, wet of the pond and I began to twist so when I came to rest, it was my tail end that was on the bottom of the pond and my face was above the surface.

…and Shout!

And good thing too. Because I was so surprised, I had begun to shout out and if my body hadn’t reacted, I would have been swallowing a big mouthful of dark green water!

For several moments I just sat and floated in the pond. My son kept asking me, “are you OK”, “are you OK”? and finally I burst out laughing; the whole thing was just so silly.

Isaac gave me a hand out across the slippery rocks at the pond’s edge.

As I stood dripping: cold, wet and laughing I was so thankful for my body’s patterned response. After a hot shower, I began to think about something a client said to me recently. He had called me for some couple’s coaching after a particularly nice date with his wife.

He said that both he and his wife wanted to work on skills, just as I had with my river rafting, so those skills were patterned into place if they came upon a more stressful time.

When I find myself experiencing something I don’t like, I try to remember that this is the perfect time to become aware, make a new choice or intention, and experiment with new actions: shake it up a bit, create room for a new pattern.

Easier, however, is to practice new patterns I want in place should I find need for them during a shake up I didn’t consciously plan.

You might be interested in no-charge teleclass this week, What’s Holding You Back? Bring a willingness for a new awareness around an issue you’d like to overcome and we’ll get busy changing any pattern that is keeping that issue stuck in place.

Please share your own stories of patterns you’ve overcome and how you overcame them below.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now?

I often hear this question, “Should I stay or should I go?” Another one I hear is “Why can’t I just get going? I want to go but something is pulling me back.”

Decisions and Follow Through

Life is always offering us opportunities to make decisions and to follow through.

Sometimes we find it difficult to make a decision. And sometimes we find it difficult to follow through once we’ve made a decision.

How to Make Up My Mind

I’m heard teachers emphatically state that you must make decisions quickly to be a success. And I’ve hear just as many insist that you must slow down and give adequate consideration before jumping into any action, look before you leap.

Which is it? Well, as a coach, I think it depends on the individual and the individual situation. I’ve also found that following through on any decision made can be severely hampered by what I like to call “dueling intentions”.

Dueling Intentions

You know, you’ve surely been there at some point. One part says “stay”, the other says “go”. On the one hand you want to get into action, but there’s a part that’s holding back, keeping your foot on the brake.

My idea is that until I become aware of the tug-of-war, identify the players, and resolve the needs of each, I’ll never come up with a solution that will allow me to move forward unhindered.

Resolve Dueling Intentions

Want to know more, or experience the shift from being stuck in stop-and-go to moving forward? Join me on Tuesday, October 18th, for an actual working teleconference call; Reconciling Dueling Intentions. Can’t make it? Sign up and I’ll send you the recording with a bonus good until Friday.

Post your comments below and I’ll address your situation in the call.

Support That Magically Alters Reality

After just one week in my first Mastermind group, one of the participants revealed he had both contracted to sell, and sold the house…in one day!

He said it so casually, as if it were no big deal. But this was exactly what he’d expressed he’d been wanting, and experiencing some difficulty achieving, just one week before.

What made the difference? What helped clear the way for ease and effortlessness?

Well I’d like to think that the support structure he’d built for himself by attending my Mastermind 4 Maximum Momentum had done the trick. And you can create this for yourself. It’s easy if you know the essential component that makes the magic work.

The Magic is Engaged When Someone Listens,
Truly Listens

The mere act of being listened to by someone who totally believes what you want can happen for you, opens all sorts of channels and pathways for your good to start zooming towards you.

That supporter, offers no resistance to your desire, no speed bumps, detours or hazards, so your reality can suddenly deliver what you want toot-sweet.

One friend, one person who is truly understanding, who takes the trouble to listen to us as we consider a problem, can change our whole outlook on the world.”
Dr. E. H. Mayo

The important detail here is to choose only those people to listen and support you who are capable of hearing, seeing and knowing what you want as possible. This rules out most of our current friends and family, as they have been seeing, hearing and knowing us as a certain person for some time. Seeing us with fresh eyes might threaten their own status quo.

Look Outside Your Current Circle

So look outside your current, obvious circle. Choose to gather for support with people who have a skill set for genuine listening and the capability to be confident for you.

Being a Support to Others Attracts Supporters to You

If you haven’t yet found the people you’d like to support you on a regular basis, you can get into the attraction of support by allowing support to flow through you to others.

Practice active listening, listen without judgement or opinion. Listen to hear the strength, capability and vision for another. Not only will it be an enormous gift to them, but it will keep you in the energy of support and your own support will be magnetically drawn to you.

Want the Goodies the Fast Way?

Want to try a Directed Mastermind? I’m creating small groups of 5-6 who meet on a teleconference bridge line or face to face through the miracle of teleconferencing, if you prefer; once a week, for one hour each meeting. I direct the meetings to keep the energy moving and the creative ideas flowing.

Contact me, Deborah@AnsweringTheSacred.com for more information or call 541-488-1678.

Don’t Try To Push The River Up The Stream, Ride the Wave!

I found some fun video to give further example of what I talked about last week.

Remember the principle; to ride the wave, you have to be working together to move faster than the speed of the flow. Having a powerful team and talented guide can make all the difference in having an exciting ride as opposed to being tossed and thrown.

Consider joining me and a highly focused group that can support you in attaining and riding the flow of momentum. Visit here.

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