The new Laura Marling album I Speak Because I Can is beautiful: we all marvel at how someone so young can write so maturely.  Elegant nu-folk.  Not so new, but probably off your radar is Nothing Gold Can Stay by The Duke and The King.  It’s got a lovely ’70s feel to it and some really witty lyrics.  And I must thank friends Mark and Ruth for turning me on to the latest Gil Scott Heron, I’m New Here which is sublime.  Amazing voice.

For the readers among you, I must plug a friend’s book because it’s perfect summer reading.  The Cloths of Heaven by Sue Eckstein has been serialised on Radio 4 so you may have come across it, a great tale of ex-pats ‘doing good’, and other things, in Africa.  I loved Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Froer that I read recently - not new but new to me.  If you are interested in things systemic, watch how the past and the present unfurl towards each other, and note the power of family secrets to emerge.  I also loved A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book, for a family epic set against the Sussex downs and the arts and crafts movement. 

I didn’t get to see this but really wish I had.  There’s an exhibition on in London somewhere (just saw a poster) featuring 3 generations of Wyeth painters.  I went to an Andrew Wyeth exhibition as a child and adored it: we have a print of his in my parents’ house that I love.  It finishes around 20 Aug so I’ll miss it but if you’re in town, find it if you can.  I’m gutted to miss it - send me a postcard! 

Also film-wise we just saw Inception which I hadn’t expected to enjoy so much and even, yes it’s true, The A Team!  Laughed out loud at the 3D scene…

Happy viewing, listening, thinking, absorbing, resting, reading, living!

I did what the doctor had ordered religiously day after day and gradually this little half a thing got better and stronger and fatter and bolder, until he started scampering round happily on his remaining 3 legs and cocking his remaining ear towards me when I came in the room and looking up at me with his one bright eye and coming up to the cage door to come out for his cuddle and his honey treat.  The Previously Very Competent Children said: “It’s not fair.  He likes you more than us!”   And I had to admit that was true.  He did.  Even though I must have hurt him and upset him dreadfully through all my nursing.  It occurred to me that he never bit me once through all that time, though the poor thing must have had good reason, and now through that experience we were completely bonded.

I was mulling all this over the other day when it struck me how much healing requires a bond and an agreement, a declaration of willingness, on the part of the healer and the one seeking healing.  I could not have simply imposed health on Flax, he could not have made himself better without me: somehow, between us, we managed it.  This is something to bear in mind for people whose business is healing, or a consultant ’healing’ businesses (problem-solving), or any kind of contracting for growth and development.  Your intervention will only be as effective as your client is willing to match your intent with theirs. 

It is important then to invest some time at the beginning of the contracting process to gauge your potential client’s intent.  How many of us are brave enough to turn a client away if this fit isn’t right?  There’s a danger that we convince ourselves that this situation will improve, or that we can do all the ‘healing work’ for them, and we might end up pouring loads of energy into a project that isn’t ever going to work.  We’ve all had experiences of this kind of ‘black hole’ project, where the worse it gets, the more energy we put into it, and it becomes very difficult either to walk away or produce a successful outcome.

If this sounds familiar to you, it might be worth considering clarifying your contracting process and building in checkpoints where you would need to consciously decide that the potential for development was mutually held before progressing.  A worthwhile question might be: How would I know that both my and my client’s intent are sufficiently matched to ensure the success of this endeavour?  How could you tell at the start that the right ingredients for success are present?

marketing with heart provides a package of a one-day workshop plus a one hour one-to-one coaching session, to support you in developing a strategic marketing plan. You can get a clearer idea of where you are with your business, where you’d like to be, and how to get there, given the resources you have at your disposal. Having a realistic plan puts you back in control of your business. When you feel centred in this way, you are able to look up and keep focus on your vision for your business, instead of always looking down at the pile of work on your desk! You can put your heart and soul into building your business, and you can be sure that your clients and customers will notice the difference!

If you’d like to find out more, see the marketing with heart page or give me a ring. I would love to find out more about what you love about your business, and to support you to plan for its growth.

What about when you just know in your bones that something is right or wrong? It’s not rational, you couldn’t say why, but you have a very strong feeling for or against a course of action. You have a gut reaction to something. Have you stopped to analyse what that feeling really is? Or where it comes from? It’s not coming from your head. It’s not a mind thing. It’s in your body. Our culture has privileged the head, the mind, knowledge, the known world, over the body, feelings, gut instincts, the felt sense. And yet it is there, and we do use it, in all sorts of subtle ways that we hardly stop to notice. It’s there in our physical resistance to facing an unwelcome task, it’s there when we have a hunch about the right course of action to take, it’s there in a dark alley at night when you know you’re in a dangerous space and you need to get to safety. How do you know when you’re in danger? Imagine you’re in that alley. How do you feel? It’s not a calm rational mind that tells you the statistics for muggings in dark alleys that gets you out of there. It’s the empty feeling in your stomach, your heart pumping, every nerve tingling. Your body is feeding you the information you need to do the right thing.

What is the body ‘reading’ in these circumstances when it’s feeding you information? What signals does it pick up? It’s really accessing that current of energy that exists within, around and under us the whole time. It’s always there and we are always able to read it, but we rarely do so consciously. And the reason we don’t use it is because we can only read it with our bodies. And in this society, we tend to doubt information that comes from our bodies, in preference for mind information - thoughts. And yet we are constantly being influenced by this ‘field of energy’ in which we’re situated. If we’re not consciously reading that energy we will not be aware of how it’s affecting us. But it is possible to include information from this ‘field’ in support of any kind of project you’re working on: it’s the fourth resource.

More about this later…