A New Adventure Awaits…

A New Adventure Awaits…

Next Saturday, I am due to give birth to my daughter, who is the first child of Daniel and I. While I do not know what is in store for us, but I trust and I can feel this is the greatest adventure we have ever undertaken.

This moment, right now, feels like the space in between the in-breath and the out-breath. It is a very special, tangibly sacred space. I know the future—an exciting, challenging, and love-filled one—stretches out before me and that the past is nothing by a feeling memory. I am deep in trust in my ability to write my future with authority and authenticity.

As I learn to to breathe in a new way in this new space, I will be taking a pause from my writing here, and from my advisory services as well. I’m climbing higher on my personal mountain, amazing myself with my ability to connect with and pursue the things that I most want to achieve and receive, and thus the things that most scare me. As I face my greatest fears and desires (they are two sides of the same coin), I can see how I’ve held myself back and how the future is as expansive as I choose to make it. It is ripe for my co-creation.

One big way I’ve hindered my expansion is by not creating a strong way for me to easily share with the people who care about all that I do and am. I have been afraid to allow us to truly keep in touch with each other. It’s not easy for me to share myself, it’s not easy for me to feel it’s safe. Often, I try and limit contact to compensate. And so I’ve never seriously created a way for us to keep in touch… for me to let you know what I’m up to—and for you to share what your creating and growing in your world.

Using Typeform, a tool for creating beautiful and humanity-filled lead generation forms I feature on my Resources page, I’ve built a sign-up form for us to stay connected with. Please fill it out if you feel motivated to do so. If you do, I’ll be sure to keep you updated by email on all that’s growing in my world.

powered by Typeform

So for now, I bid you adieu. I’ll be back writing here when the time is right. As I pause here and get comfortable in my new adventure, I encourage you to take a Strange Adventure with me. Please enjoy my fiction story, Cross My Heart. A new installment comes out every Friday into November.

I love and appreciate you dearly. Thank you so much for reading and for caring about my journey.

xoxoxo,

Exploring Our Money Shadow

Exploring Our Money Shadow

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book from Integral Publishers, Pay What It’s Worth: You Don’t Need to Set a Price on Value. Stay updated on when it’s available for purchase here.

Money is a symbol of two basic principles that underlie every process in the physical world: the principle of value, and the principle of giving and receiving. Whether it is our money, our labor, our commitment, or our care—we estimate the value of something by what we are willing to give for it and receive from it. This respect and attention we give to what we value, and how we value it, is a reflection of our self-worth. The lack of respect we give to the things that matter to us—including our bodies and the worth of our labor—is also a reflection of our self-worth. This unconscious lack of respect is our shadow energy around money and self-worth, and commonly manifests itself as the emotions of fear and greed, which are closely tied to our modern relationship with money and wealth. The corruption, materialism, and consumerism of modern society, and the widely disproportionate difference in wealth between the people at the top of the income ladder and the rest of society are all manifestations of our collective money shadow.

Unaware of our personal shadow energy, we have “bought into” the idea that if we can afford an item, it must measure and reflect the inherent value we hold—and if another cannot, they must be worth less and hold less value than we do. Disconnected from our own and others’ true sense of worth, we are losing our intuitive sense of how much to give for the value we receive. Instead, we are building ourselves up with material accumulations, as though they alone are a reflection of our worth and deservedness. What our money shadow does not recognize however is that money is only one type of currency, one type of wealth, and it is not a true measure of our self-worth. Perceiving money as the only and/or most important measure of wealth and self-worth can only leave us feeling unsatisfied. There will always be someone with more money, and thus there will always be someone for us to feel less than. While several psychological studies have revealed that although material security definitely increases our happiness, beyond a certain income level this correlation between income and happiness drops significantly. One reason for this is that a major ingredient of happiness is a sense of sufficiency—of having enough. In a culture where we are trained to consume and to compete and compare, many of us have lost the ability to recognize this feeling of satisfaction. We find ourselves feeling we do not have enough, that we are in lack, and these feelings further trigger our shadow emotions of fear and greed. We find ourselves feeling that we are not enough.

While we may not objectively live in poverty, in essence, our culture lives with a poverty consciousness. Attached to material goods as a symbol of our self-worth, we are now better equipped to feel in lack—to feel we do not have enough and are not enough—than to feel satisfied. This lack of satisfaction, this poverty consciousness, is extremely painful and often manifests in mental habits like criticism, judgment, envy, and anger. Unaware of the pain we are in, and unable to recognize a feeling of satisfaction within our self, we unconsciously invest in scarcity—we acquire for the sake of having more and more, further losing our ability to access our inner feeling of “enough.” Lost in our greed, we endlessly chase the ever-receding prize that is our happiness.

It is not easy to feel whole and satisfied in a collective culture that sells you on your insufficiency. It requires cultivating a conscious awareness of how you behave and how you think. It involves actively looking at your attitudes and imbalances around money, authority, and health. There is a balance to be found between greed and generosity, between trusting in abundance and buying into scarcity. A healthy relationship with physical wealth can be cultivated within yourself.

photo credit: Jimi Filipovski

Transforming…

Transforming…


I see now this space, this blog, was originally created by me as a place where I could feel free to express myself, perhaps for the first time since I was a young child. A space that is sacred to me, it has brought me much joy as my life has unfolded and transformed over the past eight years since I created it. What began for me as a vision of working for myself and of having the space to write, has grown and transformed into where I find myself today. I’m similar, yet completely different. Renewed with clarity and more in touch with the innerpreneur within.

Now feels like the right time to share with you all I’ve been creating, molding, and birthing in the background and in the foreground as I’ve continued to transform…

I’m Seven Month Pregnant…!!

With a little girl… She’s my first child and she’s already teaching me so much about motherhood, about nurturing, about self-care, and about healthy, loving, and firm boundaries. I look forward to meeting her on the outside but in the meantime, I’m enjoying baking her and nurturing her from within. She is absolutely my wildest, most exciting, and most terrifying adventure yet.

I’m Publishing My First Book, Pay What It’s Worth: You Don’t Need to Set a Price on Value, with Integral Publishers…

Available this Winter 2017.

A brief description: What kind of growth could be possible if you didn’t set a limit to your business’ value? In “Pay What It’s Worth”, Tara Joyce provides you with an elegant framework for understanding how not setting prices can be a viable strategy for your small business, and guides you in consciously exploring your relationship to money, to other people, and to exchanging value. Imagine… integrity as your most valuable wealth creation tool.

My ebook, Pay What It’s Worth: Building Your Sustainable System for Not Setting Prices, has been expanding since it’s birth a few years ago into a full-fledged book manuscript, Pay What It’s Worth: You Don’t Need to Set a Price on Value, that I’ll be imminently publishing with Integral Publishers this coming Winter. The manuscript has undergone a looooong, s-l-o-w publishing process with many starts and stalls, but I’m confidently feeling the shared momentum behind the book and it’s publishing now. You can stay updated on its availability here and I’ll certainly be sharing more on it as things continue to progress.

I’m Releasing Cross My Heart, My Digital Fiction Series on August 4…

A brief description: Join the (strange) adventure of two world travelers bringing to light the beauty of the dark—making the invisible, the unknown, visible.

With 4 of the story installments available to read now, and the rest premiering August 4, Cross My Heart: Strange Adventures in Vancouver, is my first foray into fiction. I’ve decided to share the story the way we used to with radio serials, releasing a new installment of the story each week, beginning August 4 and continuing into November. I plan to expand the story into an ongoing series of stories, but for now, you can join the adventure and subscribe to read the first story here.

I’m Crafting Precious Metal and Stone Jewellery…

For the past year and half, I’ve been learning about the value and properties of gemstones and the art of crafting precious metal bracelets and other jewellery items. I began custom making bracelets for my friends and family before setting up an Elastic Mind Crafted shop last year. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of crafting bracelets for women throughout the world that uniquely support their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. I plan to soon begin crafting necklaces too and I’d love to make you the piece of jewellery you need. Though Etsy doesn’t allow Pay What It’s Worth pricing, I’ve done my best to price my bracelets accessibility and fairly.
Elastic Mind Crafted | Aquamarine & RubyElastic Mind Crafted | Moonstone

I’m Advising More, Co-Creating Less…

I love working with my clients and supporting them in creating their marketing communications, yet for me part of having and holding this space is investing in these people and their work. When I was designing and developing with them, along with advising them, it was very consuming to the point where I lost my own focus for a while. I couldn’t make space for the projects that mattered to me personally, and ultimately, with time I realized I needed to make some adjustments in my business if I was going to. I needed to step back and reassess. I needed to find a better balance with my client work and my own creative work. Which led me to return to my very original business offering, communication guidance and advisory support—helping you to get clear on what you need to say and how you need to say it to best connect with your ideal client. Which leads me to my newest offering…

I’m Offering Editing Services…

I realize I love supporting you in a different way in saying what you mean, in the form of editing your communications so they more clearly connect with your reader. I’m still formulating my editing service offering but you can learn more here in the meantime. And please do not hesitate to connect with me should you feel I can be of support to you. I’d love to help.

I’m Obtaining My Real Estate License…

I love property. Homes. Land. It’s in my blood. My parents run a residential real estate brokerage here in my hometown of Toronto, and its within this business and industry that I first learned to design and develop marketing communications. My husband and I are interested in growing into investing in property and developing a vacation rental and property management business. To aid in this vision, I’ve been in real estate school for the last year and I’m now in the process of obtaining my real estate salesperson license.

What I’m coming to understand about the innerprneuer within is she’s diverse with interests and I no longer feel the need to tone this down, nor deny it. What I’ve needed is the space to expand into each of these varying interests and to allow myself and them to grow from there.

As ever, I continue to transform…

xo,

photo credit: Jian Xhin

Accept Yourself (A Loving Reminder)

Accept Yourself (A Loving Reminder)


Dear lovely,

You are cherished and adored. Be not afraid of anything in your world and know that you have done so much to heal and whole yourself, to be who you truly are. The more you are able to unite all parts of you, the happier and more fulfilled you will be. Accept yourself.

If another can not accept any aspect of you, it is for them to bear, not you. You are not responsible for the things others can not accept about life and the world. It is not about you; it is about them and the truth they are avoiding. Love yourself, know yourself, and trust that is enough. It is.

You are precious resource and your world needs you for the next leg of our journey. Now is the time for your to create what you have dreamed of. Now is the time to feel the love and joy that is created from your heart-centred action. You are ready to be all that you are. There is no need to withhold or withdraw. Life is coming together. Trust in this.

xo,

Giving Space to Your Creations

Giving Space to Your Creations

There is immense value in leaving, and then returning to, your creations. With a little bit of space, your expressions feel all the less personal. They no longer feels so fully created by ‘YOU.’ Giving space to them leaves you feeling less like they’re ‘YOURS’ and more like they are a living breathing thing on their own. Like a child, you can only do what you can to birth them into the world and to nurture them, yet once they’re here, they are their own creation to grow.

Try to recall the value of space the next time you’re creating something. Pay attention to how much it benefits you—and your creation. Make your thing, let it be born, and then return to it—a day, a week, a month—later. Give it time to grow. Notice how time and space support you in detaching from it and the ‘YOU-ness’ of what you’ve made.

The act of creation is highly subjective. It needs to be in order to get you so deeply entranced in its action. Once your initial expression has been birthed however, being more objective it is of greater value. Moving into a space that is more neutral, things open up for you more. You can see the value and the limits of what you’ve created more clearly. You can be fair. Giving space to what you create, supports you in supporting it to expand more skillfully in the world. Letting them go, they grow.

photo credit: Diego Hernandez