4 Ways to Raise Your Bottom Line by Being Adventurous in Your Business

I received a card this week from a friend that contained this quotation from Helen Keller: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” It got me thinking about the ways that I am adventurous in my business and noticing that when I’m adventurous, that is when I am the most successful.

To be adventurous means that you participate in exciting enterprises and bold undertakings. Are you adventurous in how you run your business? What would it look like for you if you were?

Whether you haven’t been exercising your adventure muscles out of fear or lack of know how, today is your opportunity to flex those muscles. Being adventurous is both fun and the perfect way to increase your credibility, visibility and profitability.

So, here are 4 ways for you to raise your bottom line by being adventurous in your business this week. Pick one or more, flex those adventure muscles and have some fun with it.

1. Talk to strangers. Isn’t there an old saying about strangers being friends you haven’t met yet? Strike up a conversation about anything with someone you don’t know at your local coffee shop or supermarket. Doing this grows your confidence and makes it much easier for you to talk to people you want to do business with when you attend your next networking event. It’s fun, too, as you get to meet a variety of people and make great new contacts. So, at the next opportunity, smile, look a stranger in the eye and say “hello.”

2. Let your personality show. In life, and especially in business, it’s easy to get caught up in acting like you think you “should” instead of simply – and proudly – being yourself. However, real success only comes to you when you are being real, when you are being you – truly, madly, deeply YOU. If you have pulled back on living the adventure that is being opening and authentically yourself, today is the perfect day to show the world who you are. Speak your truth. Stand up for yourself. Show people your sense of humor. Let your voice shine through in your business writing. Etc.!

3. Stake your claim. What do you believe? What is the work that you are brilliant at? What causes are important to you? Shout out who you are, what you do and what you stand for. Lay claim to your unique talents, perspectives, ideas and ways of being. Let the world see the real you even if (perhaps especially if) some people will disagree. Make peace with the fact that stepping into your power means you may ruffle a few feathers and be OK with that. Draw a line in the sand about who you are, what you do, what you charge, who you work with, etc. Trust me, as scary as this is that first day, you’ll be so glad you staked your claim.

4. Charge what you really want. You’re a business person with amazing and unique talents that change people’s lives. That means that you can charge fees that you fee great about and that are based on the value you add to your clients’ lives and not what you imagine they maybe can afford. It takes courage to charge what you are really worth so accept the adventurous journey of charging fees that make you happy.

Don’t worry if baby steps feel adventurous to you right now. Start there and see where it takes you. I guarantee that once you see the results you get from a little bit of adventure, you’ll be inspired to go bigger with it.

Raise your vibration, change your experience

The more I study and read, the more I realize the power of our emotions. Not only do they impact how we feel, but they also influence what we’ll experience in this life.

The Bigwigs say it too. Optimism is good for our health. Happiness can make us live longer. Hostility and anger contribute to high blood pressure and heart disease. The list goes on.

No matter what the article I’m writing, the Biggest Bigwigs I’ve interviewed (Beware, going to start name dropping here), Joe Vitale, Denis Waitley, Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, and scores of others often bring up the power of emotions. Understanding how emotions serve and hurt us, is the key to thriving in this life experience.

I’m not saying you have to feel good all the time. I’m for sure not saying you’ve got to suppress or deny the bad feelings. Just ask my husband, I’m not a suppressor. The point is to notice what you ARE feeling. Then, using the insight that emotion provides, consciously pick something that feels a bit better.

When you are stuck in anger or sadness or overwhelm you are emitting vibrations that – per the Law of Attraction – attract more of the same anger, sadness, and overwhelm. Practical example: If you go off on your partner in anger, chances are they aren’t going to give you back a bunch of love. Most likely, you’ll get their anger, withdrawal, defensiveness right back.

The often used, but, appropriate analogy, is that our vibrations are like the frequency on a radio dial. When you reach a certain frequency you access the station you want. If you’re humming at a low frequency, you’ll access lower emotions and happenings. Higher frequencies draw higher emotions – love, joy, optimism – and bring you closer to your desires.

So, if you catch yourself in a low frequency, observe the emotions you’re experiencing and then raise it up a notch. Start by getting some perspective and then making a shift to something a little bit better.

Here’s how to do it.

• Note your mood and circumstance. What emotion are you feeling? What’s going on that you don’t like? Keep it short. Don’t editorialize or dwell. Just notice the thing you don’t like, for example: cat urine outside of the box is most definitely something I don’t like.

• Shift focus to the other side of the situation. There are multiple ways to look at every circumstance, now take a more positive view. What is working? What DO you want? Why? Answer these questions and you’ll automatically feel an emotional shift taking place. Well, at least the cat went inside the garage, and on a stack of newspapers. That was good thing. I want a healthy, happy cat and an easier clean up for me.

• Notice the shift. You won’t go from despair to elation in 30 seconds flat, but you don’t have to. As Esther Hicks says, guided by Abraham, just reach for something a little better and your vibration will move a little higher. From there, you’ll start drawing in things that feel slightly better, and that will raise your vibration another notch. Soon you’ll be out of the mess – literally. My renegade cat is back in the box.

So, if it feels like you’re being repeatedly smacked in the forehead with a tether-ball, time to duck. Then, raise your vibration to another level. You’ll feel better and better things will begin to happen.

Raise Your Self Esteem by Getting Unglued from Your Stuck Feelings

You know those everyday hurts and pains. And you know how the tiny hurts and irritations can have a cumulative effect. Then one day you just erupt with the disappointments, hurts or irritations that you've been trying let pass, ignore or talk yourself out of. And then your self esteem plummets because of the childish, inappropriate way you acted.

For some examples of those tiny hurts, let's say you walk into a party and experience a group of friends turning their backs on you instead of smiling, or your mother screams she'll have a heart attack if you go out with that woman, or you find out that your mate has been viewing pornography every night after you go to bed. The hurt can be as seemingly small as smiling at someone and getting a cold glare back.

Any of these things will usually trigger an emotional reaction, however slight and brief. It's natural. If we could just feel the feelings they will just go on through our amazing, self righting body/minds and would re-center ourselves and move on to what was next.

But the truth is that most of us don't just stop at feeling the feelings. We make up stories about why "it" happened; or how inadequate, weak, or stupid we are to have the feelings we have; or how wrong "they" were to do whatever. In other words, our interpreting machine starts whizzing. And as we are nattering away, we know we are doing this and our self esteem is sinking.

Much of our self esteem (at least until we have trained ourselves for a radical self-acceptance) depends on what emotions we are feeling. Ideally we would open-heartedly accept however we feel. But, let's face it, when we feel loving, playful, generous, we feel good about ourselves. However, when we are caught by anxiety, sadness, jealousy or hurt, our self image can suffer. At those times, we don't measure up to how we would like to feel, how we would like to be seen, how we would like to imagine ourselves to be.

The problems we have with ourselves and with those emotional states come from getting stuck in the feelings, from identifying with the feelings. It is the experience of "I AM angry" rather than I am a beautiful being who "has anger" passing by. The real problem is our reactions to our feelings, and our judgments about ourselves for having those feelings. That keeps us stuck as we resist, and react ad nauseum.

I'd like to give you a way to experience your uncomfortable feelings but not get glued to or avoid them.

This method is called Conscious Witnessing. It is explained in great depth by Wayne Dyer in Your Sacred Self: Making the Decision to Be Free. This method is also something that therapists may use to assist people who are working through major trauma.

This split focus and detaching method requires that you observe painful moments from a detached, slightly dissociated place a couple of locations away from the experience.

For a visual metaphor of the placement of the vantage points, you can imagine yourself in a movie theatre in the projection room. And you are doing three things at once. 1 )You-as the Conscious Witness--are looking down into the theatre, and having your own response as you watch and 2) you notice your emotional reactions, thoughts, body sensations as you 3) see the painful incident played out on the screen.

I'll describe the process using an experience of a composite client. I'll later demonstrate how it can be used for more harmonious relationships.

One step removed: viewing a video or film of the incident with you in it

In the theater metaphor, you are not in your body, seeing the incident from your own eyes as you were when it first happened. You are viewing the incident on the screen as you sit in the theatre.

To practice, the first step is to pick an experience that is not horribly painful, but enough to register some emotional pain. Now play the video or screen scene forward as you non-judgmentally notice your responses.

Using Your Conscious Witness View for Relational issues

I now turn to an example of how using the Conscious Witness position can help to get a different perspective on relational issues. This practice not only provides emotional relief, but can provide emotional freedom with which to imagine and carry out alternative responses.

Below is what happened with a woman as she experimented with using the Conscious Witness perspective.

The scene: she and her partner are lying in bed watching TV before sleeping. He makes a derogatory comment about the program. She quickly picks up her journal and begins writing energetically in it. He thinks she is offended by his comment and is writing nasty things about him. He sighs in pain and disgust, feeling criticized. She thinks he is taking her actions personally (she's actually inspired and writing a poem). She thinks, "There he goes. Again."

This client was feeling angry, lonely, sad, disgusted, and depressed about her relationship. She was thinking, "He's so not there-as usual. He never sees ME, only his ideas of how I'm disapproving."

As she lay on the bed, in pain, she saw that he had gone to sleep. She decided to try the Conscious Witness point of view of their exchange. As she replayed the scene from her conscious Witness point of view was an all too familiar relational pattern, played out countless times. She suddenly burst out laughing at the predictability and the "ridiculousness" of the pattern. She wrote in her journal, now, "This is hysterical!" Her feelings of annoyance at her partner vanished, and she went to sleep happy.

She is understandingly excited about continuing to use this practice to detach from her unwanted emotional intensities. She is also freed up from her distress enough to actually invent alternative ways of reacting to the pattern when it appears again.

I hope this Conscious Witness practice will bring you relief and restore your humor at our relational foibles.