Running your own business gives you freedom: freedom to say what you want your business to say, work in the way you want to work, and call the shots as you want to call them.

Or does it?

Think about your non-work life: chances are, you give yourself the freedom to schedule your non-work life how you best see fit: time for exercise, eating, cleaning the house, reading books… whatever is important to you.

But do you do the same thing in your business? Or are you letting the conventions and norms of society dictate how you work?

Ask yourself this:

• Regardless of how it turned out at the end of the week, did you have the intention going into last week to work around 40 hours? Monday through Friday? Nine to five, or thereabouts?
• Do you check your email when you want to, or when you think you should?
• How about your phone? Do you let it go to voicemail, or stop what you’re doing (even eating) to answer it?
• If you have clients, when do you schedule them? Whenever they can work with you?

Whatever your “sacred cows”, it’s time to barbecue them.

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By and large, we are chickens. If we had it our way, we’d prefer to know what to do before we start doing it.

Thank goodness, then, that life’s lessons show us what we need to learn, despite our preferences.

Over ten years ago, I began studying spiritual healing. A core part of the system I learned was the use of intuition, to show you what you (and your client) didn’t know was there, but was actually the source of the client’s complaint (and believe me, you can process, work on, and dissect issue after issue, but unless you’re getting to what matters, you can spin your wheels forever).

Fortunately for me, developing my intuition was something I became very good at. Soon, I became known as something of an expert at it. So when a student asked me once, in a gathering of over a hundred students, “How do I know what I’m getting intuitively is right?”, my answer was, “You can’t — “ (which made the jaw of the person I was teaching with drop to the floor), “until you trust it and act on it, that is.”

In intuition (as in all life), trust comes before knowledge. You have to trust that the path you’re on, the person you’re with, or the idea that just popped into your head is worth something, before you can actually find out whether it is or not.

It would be nice (you think) to know that a new flame is worth the cost of dinner and a movie before you fork out the dough, but the only way you’re going to find out is if you go for it.

It would be nice (you think) to know if an idea is worth its salt before you invest your resources in it (hence, the ubiquitous — and often wrong — focus group).

But the truth of it is, you often have to go on an unripe sense of whether or not something is “right”, and trust that your heart’s inklings are pointing you in the right direction.

Think about this: if Edison had tried to play it safe, we’d still be working by candlelight.

Here are some other examples of places where trust has to come before knowledge:

Relationships: trust the person has good intentions before you know for sure.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
- E.M. Forster

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
- George Macdonald

Expertise: trust that you know what you’re talking about even before you can find out through experience.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Entrepreneurialism: trust that your passion will impact people, even before you know it for sure when they show up.

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
- Marie Curie

Trust the Universe. Trust and believe and have faith. I truly had no idea how I was going to bring the knowledge of The Secret onto the movie screen. I just held to the outcome of the vision, I saw the outcome clearly in my mind, I felt it with all my might, and everything that we needed to create The Secret came to us.
- Rhonda Byrne (creator of The Secret)

Management: trust that the person who you delegate a task to can do it before seeing that they can. Let them show you how they can shine.

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.
- Booker T. Washington

Team building: as Peter Drucker says:

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don’t think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

And, last but certainly not least, enjoyment of life: trust expands your heart, and distrust closes it. It feels better to live a trusting life than a doubtful one. Whether you end up being right or wrong, it ultimately doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the moments you enjoy along the way. As the Irish say, “When mistrust comes in, love goes out.”

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
- Samuel Johnson

We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.
- Walter Anderson

Wouldn’t it be great (we think) to know, first, before we have to extend our trust.

And how lifeless, dull, and uninteresting life would be if we did.

Image by ishrona on Flickr.

In just about every post on Monk at Work since its inception, I’ve presented ideas, problems, concepts, and scenarios, all about ways that people (i.e. you and me) can lose sight of our hearts as we work. I’ve also done my best to provide solutions, based on my years of experience as a spiritual and energetic healer, business consultant, and teacher.

Today, however, you’ll get none of that (or, very little). Instead, today is about questions. My questions.

Because yes, I still have them. I have questions all the time, about how to do things, what to say, what to create… I have way more questions than I’ll ever have time to find solutions to, no matter how intuitive I am.

Bulldozer Questions.

Some questions are small, some are large. And some, like the one I’m dealing with right now, is huge. Gorilla-huge. Boulder-huge. Construction-equipment-huge. And as much as I don’t want to admit this to the question… I don’t have an answer for it.

But here’s the rub: When I get a question stuck in my mind that I can’t answer, it sits front and center in my consciousness, like a splinter under a toenail, unable to be ignored.

It’s rough; I can’t focus on any other work when a question sits in my mind like this. It’s like an insistent three-year-old, who just can’t understand, "not right now; can you see that Daddy’s trying to focus?" The question just keeps saying, "look, man… look at me. Look. Now. Hey, I’m talking to you. Pay attention to me. Hey. Look. Look at me, man, because I’m not going away until you do."

And so I look. And I listen. And I ask it what it wants, what the real question is. But the problem is, even when I hear the question, I have no answer for it. It’s not a question that can be answered right now, at least not with a meaningful answer.

But it doesn’t like that.

No answer is not an answer.

And so it waits, with all the patience of that three-year-old. Look. Look. Look. Look at me.

(How can I not look at you, you mean? How can I deny you, the spike in my forehead, the salt-and-lemon-juice-cocktail in the wound of my uncertainty?)

All normal thoughts of productivity go out the window in times like these. I’m forced to attempt patience, to pull all the stops out of my repertoire of self-healing techniques, and deny all my self-protective impulses that tell me to ignore it, cover it over, distract myself, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll go away on its own.

(Heck, why do you think I’m writing this — for glory? Goodness, no; hoping that writing would provide catharsis was my latest, best idea to bleed the pressure out of my mind, after a day spent tapping, talking, praying, pacing around my office, and soul-searching to the best of my ability…)

My last question — and this one’s for you:

What do you do in times like these? When you’re faced with a question, a decision, even one that isn’t formed enough that it has words yet, but you just know you have to change something… what do you do?

UPDATE: I just had to add this… my muse-of-writing, the Communicatrix, recently posted about her own travels into what I call "The Pit" — she calls it "The Black Hole." And her post also mentioned another by An Amateur’s Manifesto… both are outstanding. Highly recommended.  

Want a podcast of this? Click here.

Image by scottfeldstein on Flickr, via Creative Commons license.

And thanks to all those who commented on the previous posts so far: Matthew, Tom Volkar, Dylan

Ever have one of those times where life’s events lead you to question the course you’re on?

(Of course, we could philosophize that you think you’re on one course, but life has you on another, and you’re just figuring this out as you go…)

But what I really want to get to is this idea of a crisis of confidence: the feeling that perhaps the path you’re on isn’t the one to be walked… that a course correction is being called for.

Anyone in business for themselves — shoot, anyone in business at all — has got to feel like this from time to time. If you read Po Bronson’s book, What Should I Do With My Life, then you know that no matter who you are, or where you’ve come from, the idea that the profession you find yourself in could/should/must change is an idea that’s alive and kicking in us all.

There’s no way I could write a post like this one and not talk about the potholes in my own road, so, here goes:

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When your optimism clouds your ability to clearly see what’s happening, that’s called “wearing rose-colored glasses.” You know what wearing those glasses is going to do to you… the beliefs you bring to any situation are going to affect the way you show up, and cause you to see things differently from how they really are.

Rose-colored glasses are one thing. But what about when your glasses are a different color? Say, “sludge brown”, or “rotten-egg yellow”, or “toxic-waste green”?

Is that going to mess with your clarity? You betcha.

So there you are, hard at work, minding your own business, and frustration/procrastination/lack of motivation comes along. And once you realize that this feeling isn’t just going to blow over, you do your best to deal with it, whether you take a break, repeat affirmations, or do something to shift your state of being away from the negative and back towards the positive.

Self-healing techniques (for lack of a better term) are great for dealing with the immediate moment. And over time, they can change the way you live and work tremendously.

But this just wipes away a proverbial speck on your glasses, by handling the acute scenario. Important, yes, but different from addressing the chronic situation.

Cleaning the specks off of your glasses isn’t the same thing as taking the glasses off.

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I’m so curious when I see the kinds of businesses people are in. How did they get there? Why did they go into that line of work? Often times when I talk with someone for the first time, I make it a point to ask them how they got into whatever is they’re doing.

Of course, I know as well as the next person that for many of us, our careers are something we backed into, a step at a time, finding ourselves moving from decision to decision with guesswork and uncertainty, more than something we mapped out with precision at a younger age and then, blueprint in hand, just had to walk the steps we’d outlined.

For the most part, the “walking backwards into the future” method works just fine. Small steps lead you down long paths, just by reaching your toes backwards, feeling the next rock, and then shifting your weight onto it. You do this every day.

But what happens when you get to a big gap? To a place in your path where your toes can’t feel the next stone? A place where there is no easy answer, and looking backwards to your past doesn’t give you any help in knowing where to step next?
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A Monkifesto isn’t a sauce for your pasta… it’s a manifesto of sorts, with a monkish twist.

Look, we’re all stressed for time. The more time you take to read someone’s ebook, the less you have for everything else. And in today’s mounting tidal wave of information (that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down), you don’t need another 20-page ebook to read — you need something that packs just as much punch, but in a fraction of the time.

Enter, the Monkifesto.

True story: I spent days and days (spread over weeks and weeks) creating a free ebook for you on the topic of intuition. Why? Because a lot of people I’ve talked to still don’t realize how useful, easy, and non woo-woo it really is. But in order for you to absorb that information (it came out to be about 22 pages long — over 5400 words), it would take you about 25 minutes — a generous estimate, given the average person’s reading speed.

25 minutes! Wow. And that’s assuming you read straight through it, not even stopping to do the exercises.

And hey, it’s good information — the benefits it could bring you far outweigh the time investment. But, what if you could learn the same information, remember it easier, and be done in three minutes?

Now we’re talking, eh?

Okay, enough talking — I’m making the first Monkifesto available today. Yes, it’s on Intuition, and yes, it has instructions for you to start increasing your own intuitive abilities. I would love and appreciate it if you’d leave a comment (or post about it on your own blog) and let me know what you think.

This is something I’d really love to see get spread around, far and wide, and shared with as many people as possible. So please, don’t hesitate to blog, write, sing, talk, share, or create an interpretative dance about it.

Of course, this Monkifesto will be the first in a series, so be on the lookout for updates as time goes on.

And of course, the release of this Monkifesto is timely — a new round of the Black Belt Business Intuition course starts on July 12 (so if you get fired up by what you see, you know where to go to get on the fast track…).

Okay, here’s the link to get your copy of the Monkifesto, or just follow the “Monkifesto” link at the top of every page…

Image by me, under a Creative Commons license.

And thanks to all those who commented on the previous post so far: Char, Jean Browman

There’s a great discussion brewing over at Dave Schoof’s site, The Disquiet, about the places we go inside when life isn’t showing up the way we think it should. Namely, we blame ourselves.

I wrote an article about this a couple years ago, while living in Florida, and now that this discussion is going, it seemed perfectly timely to post it again (it’s a timeless topic, after all), with a few edits for clarity’s sake. It speaks to the feelings we have, and judge ourselves for…

The last few days in my office I had been feeling as if something was missing in my work. I took that feeling to mean that I was barking up the wrong tree, and that I should change my focus, my approach, or what I was teaching and to whom.

I assumed, given my feelings of discontent, that I was wrong about my course. “I must be making the wrong choice,” I surmised, “and I need to throw it away and find something new in order to be happy.”

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Do you keep running into the same dead-ends in your work? Do you feel unable to see beyond your old paradigms, or bust out of the ruts you’ve been working in?

What’s the use in trying another tactic, if you’re only drawing from the same pool of information?

You don’t need a retooling of your strategy; you need a new perspective.

A new round of the Black Belt Business Intuition (Level One) workshop is slated to begin Thursday, June 28. Come take a look; it could be just what you’re needing.

I believe blogging is making me a better person.

Blame it on isolation. After all, for a long time, I worked primarily at home, I live in the country, and seldom talk on the phone with people except for a specific purpose (I’m calling a company’s customer service center, or the other person is paying me for my services).

Getting out of touch with the human element is bad for business, bad for the heart, and bad for creativity… which is why I’m loving the blogging world so much. The conversations give me an opportunity to get inside the viewpoint of so many other people, on so many different topics, in so many different arenas.

Sure, it’s a completely different experience than getting face time with a living, breathing, human being. I’m not suggesting that it does, would, could, or should replace anything.

But, in lieu of other opportunities to mingle with such amazing people as I’m finding online, it’s not only great, it’s evolutionary. (more…)