Blogging as Spiritual Growth

by Aley Martin

In 1970 the search for my spiritual self took hold. I was 15 years old and interested in astrology! There was little in the way of books on the subject and it was more of a pop culture interest than a true field of study for me.

As time would provide me with more and more experiences, my spiritual self actively sought out information on different religions, philosophies and subjects with the intention to expand my heart and mind.

Over the course of the next 37 years I spent time reading, journaling reflecting, rejecting, accepting and integrating spiritual ideas in my life. Each new thing held me in rapturous attention! And then….there was a new window that opened in March 2007. Blogging.

I have been actively blogging now for over 15 months and it has literally changed my life. Having been a writer for many years, there was no place to put the thoughts I held dear until I found a new way of entertaining them, in a blog.

For one to watch the growth of their blog posts and the subsequent comments made by others that take those thoughts and move them in a new direction, is an epiphany for the spirit!

There is nothing one cannot ask of ones self or another that does not provide information or insight into the state of mind one is currently experiencing. And the most fascinating aspect of blogging in community is the synchronistic similarities others reading the blogs state in their comments and responses. It is as if we are all walking down the same street at the same time viewing the world with the same eyes, but differing lenses!

Even when we blog and no one comments or responds, we still leave a trail of where we are our spiritual progress. There are certain feelings we express and ideas we let germinate that we come back to later with surprise and great relish!

To see how you can assess your spiritual temperature, try blogging for a month on a series of questions about your feelings on subjects you may not have considered before. How did you come up with your value system? What does the word intention mean to you? Are you reactive or do you find yourself a more passive interaction person? What is your idea of God? Who are you when you are alone? With others? Do you find discomfort in solitude? What makes you sad? Happy? Have you ever thought about death with respect to how you live your life with meaning?

The key is to remain ever open minded and clear in your musings. When you blog do not fear reproach. This is the toughest thing to do when offering your words to the world. Not everyone is going to agree with you, but who cares? If we all agreed, it would be a pretty boring world, and no growth would be possible if we were all in agreement about everything….

Challenge yourself to use this opportunity to reach beyond the normal limits of everyday journaling. Growing means stretching yourself in new ways…beyond the clouds if need be!

And remember, your growth can only be measured by you yourself. No gurus are needed to find you way to the source!

Blessings,

Aley Martin

enlightened.thinker@gmail.com

Life Success, Business Success or Both aka Can You Have It All?

“To follow without halt, one aim; there is the secret of success. And success? What is it? I do not find it in the applause of the theater; it lies rather in the satisfaction of accomplishment.” – Anna Pavlova

As a working woman, is it possible to “have it all”; the career, a family, travel, financial security, flexibility, life balance?  Can you have both a successful life and a successful business?

Whether the term is “mompreneur”, “lifestylepreneur”, “socially responsible” entrepreneur using the triple bottom line or “culturally creative woman entrepreneur”, there is one key distinguishing element: maintaining a successful life, not just a successful business!

Historically, businesses existed for two reasons only, growth and profit!  In the past few years, there has been a movement to broaden the range of business models, designs and the “reason for being”.  The shift is from “working for your business” to “having your business work for you” so that you can live an incredible life!

Mompreneurs, or women who work from home, often chose this way of working as it allows them to be home with their children and grow a business.  Profit is sometimes secondary to life balance and flexibility.

Lifestylepreneurs design businesses that provide an income to allow them freedom, flexibility and life balance.

The “socially responsible entrepreneur using a triple bottom line” pays attention to: profit, the planet and the people impacted by their business.

“Culturally creative women entrepreneurs” employ the triple bottom line and have a strong orientation towards personal growth, spirituality and exploring their inner life.  These women tend to integrate business with their life purpose and design businesses that “do well by doing good”.  Their business tends to be their “self-actualization” and brings a deeper sense of meaning and fulfillment into their lives.

About 8 years ago as I was transitioning out of health care and into coaching, doing my coach training with Corporate Coach U, one of our assignments was to write a 1-2 sentence definition of living a “successful life”.  Here is what I wrote: ‘Living a successful life means spending time with my family and having health, time and money for travel, yoga and reading, working from home three days a week while the kids are at school.’

From this description it is clear that time, family and travel are what I valued and my work supported this.  I was in the “mompreneur” category.  My definition of a successful life has changed somewhat over the years as our family and I have gotten older and my current definition goes like this: ‘Living a successful life means doing what I love, while spending time with those I love so that I can give back to the community and planet that I love’!  I would now put myself in the “culturally creative women entrepreneur” category!

How would you define a successful life for yourself?  What about a successful business?  Can you combine the two?  Give it a try.  Start with writing out a paragraph and then try to distill your definition to 1-2 sentences.  As you progress through this exercise and gain clarity, it will serve as a touch stone for you and your business and give you an anchor from which to make business decisions.  And, guess what, this is part of your business planning!

Success
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
- Bessie Stanley

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan, PCC

coach . catalyst . shakti sage
life & business coach for women
“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com
604-323-3700

Are Your Business Values in Sync With Your Personal Values?

“Values” are the essence of who we are.  Values are principles that you hold to be of worth in your life.  Values are those things considered right, worthwhile, and desirable- the basis of guiding principles and standards.  “Crystal values” are those values that are so important that if not present in your life will cause your life to shatter.  Think of what would happen if you dropped a crystal ball.  “Rubber values” are those values that you can drop for awhile with no problem and will come bouncing back when necessary.  Think of what happens when you drop a rubber ball.

Getting really clear on the values that are most important to you personally and in your business will give you a framework for making decisions, taking forward movement and assessing dissonance in your life.  Let me tell you about a client of mine.  Carol had identified that she held “social responsibility” and “respect for nature” as very strong values.  She found out that the company she was working for was pumping toxic waste into the local watershed.  She decided that she could no longer work for that company and in fact, felt she needed to report the company for the poor environmental business practices.  In spite of the fact that being unemployed was not attractive, Carol stayed true to her values and resigned.  While she had to deal with some short- term financial issues, this decision was worth it to her as she gained so much in the areas of self-honoring and self respect.

Is your business in sync with your personal values?  If it is, you likely feel great about the work that you do and love your business.  If you started your business without consideration of your personal values, and your personal and business values are out of sync, you may feel unfulfilled, dissatisfied and unhappy in your work.

In our current business environment, it is vitally important that you, the business owner knows what your personal values are, what your business values are and has a marketing program consistent with those values in every way.

Clarity, transparency and communication with your clients around personal and business values leads to a happy and fulfilling life and business and a powerfully positive business reputation!

Do you know what your business values are?  What about your personal values?   What about your crystal values and your rubber values?  Are you in sync with your values? Are you working from a single bottom line or a triple bottom line? Working with a life & business coach to support you to gain clarity on your values may be beneficial to both you and your business.

“My vision, my hope, is simply this: that many business leaders will come to see a primary role of business as incubators of the human spirit, rather than factories for the production of more material goods and services.” – Anita Roddick Founder, The Body Shop

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan, BSc., PCC
professional certified coach
life & business coach for women
“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
604-323-3700

Women Entrepreneurs: Transform Your Business With A Strategic Alliance!

Patricia Aburdene, in her book “Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism”, speaks about social transformation, she quotes from the book written with John Naisbitt entitled “Re-inventing the Corporation” and says that social transformation “occurs only when there is a confluence of changing values and economic necessity.”

This is, I believe, our current business reality, a confluence of changing values and economic necessity, leading to new ways of being in business and doing business.

My strategic alliance partner and I, in our work as business success coaches and strategists, believe that developing overlapping circles of strategic alliances is not just a powerful, fun and dynamic way of working together but is rapidly becoming a necessary model for solo-preneurs to stay in business.

Successful strategic alliances “focus less on defining the business plan and more on how you will work together” (source: Jonathon Hughes and Jeff Weiss, Harvard Business Review).

So, what needs to be in place to support a successful alliance?

Each entrepreneur needs to have a clear “sense of self” and their business and
it is vital to take the time up front for discussion of the following questions:

•    What are we going to do together, ie what, when, how, why, who?
•    What are our individual and shared roles and responsibilities?
•    How are we going to work together? What organizational model will we use?
•    What are our values?
•    What are our implied agreements?
•    What are our expressed agreements?
•    Benefits:
o    What’s it in for you?
o    What’s in it for me?
o    What’s in it for us?
•    How do we handle conflict?
•    How will we end the alliance?

What I believe the most important factors to a successful strategic alliance are: a shared vision and core values, an understanding of each others communication styles and strengths and weaknesses and a shared commitment to the relationship.  It is about “who you are” as much as “what you do”, that creates a strong alliance.

We are moving way beyond “competition” as an organizational model in business.  Strategic alliances utilize the following organizational models: cooperation, collaboration and co-creation.  Utilizing these three models and forming strategic alliances can truly transform your business and your life!

If you would like help with this, or more information about making us your business success support partners, please contact me at the following coordinates:

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan, BSc., PCC
professional certified coach
coach . catalyst . shakti sage
life & business coach for women
“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com
604-323-3700

“Freedom is a bigger game than power.  Power is about what you can control.  Freedom is about what you can unleash”  – Harriet Rubin

Since reading the book, “The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World” by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, I have been fascinated by the potential for this socio-eco-cultural group to change the world.

Superimpose what I see as my personal “life mission” to support women to lead meaningful, rich, deep and fulfilling lives and you get:

Positively Outrageous Women (www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com: an oasis for culturally creative women. It’s about nourishment, connection, community, co-creation and transformation)

I am in the midst of redesigning the above site as a community/social networking site for culturally creative women and I need your help!

I will be posing a series of questions and starting the discussion on a series of topics and I would love your input.  I will be doing this on a wiki site, so it truly will be a co-creative effort!

I wish to acknowledge the authors of the book, “The Cultural Creatives” (www.culturalcreatives.org ) as well as Jim Garrison from “Wisdom University” (www.wisdomuniversity.org) and it is my intention to link in and co-create in alignment with their work.

Please join in!

Zoey Ryan
coach . catalyst . shakti sage
life & business coach for women
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
www.zoeyryan.com
zoey@telus.net
604-323-3700

“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”! 

I love how amazing the human body is!  It is close to my eldest daughter’s birthday (she will be turning 20) and around this time of the year, I remember so clearly, the day our lives changed for ever with her birth!  There is nothing like becoming a mom to turn one’s life topsy turvy forever.  I count the births of our three daughters as three of the most profound and powerful experiences of my life and remember too, that insatiable drive and desire to have a baby before we had the first one.
Now, with the whole menopause thing behind me and with less fluctuation in my hormones, I am starting to feel that same draw for the wonder of a baby, but this time, its’ about becoming a grandma.  Now, I have no desire for my girls to have babies before they are ready but I find my thoughts drawn to being a grandma.  I am talking to grandmas, listening to their stories, loving the pictures and reported anecdotes and I realize, I am a “grandma in training”.  Given what I know about myself and my commitment to keep this world safe and healthy for the next seven generations as well as my “kind of boho-chic, thrift store find” style, I realize the I am a “hippy grandma” in training!

Hmmmm, I am going to ponder what all this means.

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan

coach . catalyst . shakti sage

hippy grandma in training

life & business coach for women

“Coaching for your heart & soul”

www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com

www.hippygrandma.com

Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

The self care discussions of the past few weeks have been kind of “heady”, requiring self-inquiry and reflection.  Let’s change things up abit and for this week, sink into body centered practices and the concept of mindfulness.

Jon Kabat – Zinn in his book, “Coming To Our Senses: Healing Ourselves And The World Through Mindfulness” calls “mindfulness” a particular kind of awareness, he says “Mindfulness is the final common pathway of what makes us human, our capacity for awareness and for self-knowing.  Mindfulness is cultivated by paying attention, and, as we shall see, this paying attention is developed and refined through a practice know as mindfulness meditation’.  I add that mindfulness is about using all of you, all your senses and all of your body, to put your full self into living your life!

So, the self-care enchantments for this week are about paying attention to yourself, your life and your body and about deepeing your awareness and mindfulness.

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

1.    For this week, every morning before getting out of bed, ask yourself, “how does my body feel, where do I feel tight, or tense or relaxed and melted”.
2.    Pick a food that you enjoy, something like a fresh strawberry, cool firm grape or a delicious bowl of homemade soup.  Eat this food with mindfulness, care and attention, savouring every mouthful, fully experiencing all the flavours, textures and smells.  Draw out the eating of this food, make it slow and sensual; spend at least 5 minutes eating this one food!  Do you feel satiated?
3.    Think of the areas or times in your life that you are “mindless” not “mindful”.  How does mindlessness serve you and not serve you?

If you feel drawn to this, write about your experiences with mindfulness this week.  You may wish to start a mindfulness journal or a mindfulness ritual.  Enjoy the fullness of you!

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan
coach . catalyst . shakti sage
life & business coach for women
“Coaching for your heart & soul”
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com
604-323-3700

“I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles”  – Anais Nin

Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

Building on the discussion of last week, one of the positive outcomes of going through a time of dissonance and chaos is that a time of chaos often precipitates a re-evaluation of personal values.

“Values” are the essence of who we are.  Values are principles that you hold to be of worth in your life.  Values are those things considered right, worthwhile, and desirable – the basis of guiding principles and standards.  Examples of values are: honesty, integrity, freedom, community, social responsibility, authenticity etc.  “Crystal values” are those values that are so important that if not present in your life will cause your life to shatter.  Think of what would happen if you dropped a crystal ball.  “Rubber values” are those values that you can drop for awhile with no problem and will come bouncing back when necessary.  Think of what happens when you drop a rubber ball.

Getting really clear on the values that are most important to you personally will give you a framework for making decisions, taking forward movement and assessing dissonance in your life.  Let me tell you about a client of mine.  Carol had identified that she held “social responsibility” and “respect for nature” as very strong values.  She found out that the company she was working for was pumping toxic waste into the local watershed.  She decided that she could no longer work for that company and in fact, felt she needed to report the company for the poor environmental business practices.  In spite of the fact that being unemployed was not attractive, Carol stayed true to her values and resigned.  While she had to deal with some short- term financial issues, this decision was worth it to her as she gained so much in the areas of self-honoring and self respect.

Is how you live your life in sync with your personal values?  If it is, you likely feel great, in balance and fulfilled.  If how you are living your life is out of sync with your values, you may feel discontented, frustrated and “not all there”, kind of like you are living someone else’s life.

So, the self-care enchantments for this week are all about giving yourself the time to gain or re-gain clarity about your values and how you use your values in your life and work.

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

1.    Set aside about 30 minutes and first create a list of “value words” and then ponder and identify which ones are your “crystal values” and “rubber values”.  Most people find that they have about 4 crystal values and about 4-6 rubber values.  Let me know if you need help with this exercise!
2.    Think of a chaotic time in your life and ask yourself what role values  or values out of sync played in the chaos.
3.    Treat yourself to something special for doing this exercise with flowers, a candle lit bath, a new yummy book, or something totally unexpected.

Although gaining clarity on your values and how you use them is already a huge gift to yourself, it strengthens your commitment to live by your values if you also add in the treat!

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan
coach . catalyst . shakti sage
life & business coach for women
“Coaching for your heart & soul”
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com
604-323-3700

“I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles”  – Anais Nin