Something Greater Than We Could Create Alone

Something Greater Than We Could Create Alone

Partnership

When we unite with another, we create something greater than we could create alone. Coming together, we increase the talents and efforts we have available to create something meaningful. From business to friendship to romantic relationships, partnering with another can be a powerful tool for growth.

Everyone in our life is a mirror reflecting back the parts we love and dislike about ourselves. Partnering with another, we face our reflections. And it takes courage and awareness to look at them honestly. Denial, shame, and blame can often be easier routes.

The partnerships we choose matter. We need to be conscious and intentional about them, as acting from any other space can be hard to recover from. Rushing into a union. Preventing our self from entering into one. Looking to another to fix or complete us. Another looking to us to fix or complete them. These are all actions that do not serve our partnerships. Considering beyond our immediate needs to our intentions underneath, we prevent ourselves from creating dependent bonds.

Taking space to get clear on our intentions, we have the potential to choose unions that truly support and enhance the best of who we are. A union where we can face our true self, supported by our partner, is where we create the possibility for growth through our partnerships, as they offer us the ability to transform and to be accepted. Finding this interdependence with another, we sense the strength and fertility of its foundations, and we naturally invest in it and nurture it. Together, we sense we’re creating something greater than we could alone.

Forged from our clarity around what we need and want in partnership, and grounded in remembering we are our own source of happiness and fulfillment, we have the tools to shape healthy partnerships. In tune with our self, life becomes a collaborative effort, and much of what we do and who we are is enhanced through our partnerships.

photo credit: Redd Angelo

Performing

Performing

Performing

So good at the act that you forget what’s true.

So good at pretending that the unreal becomes real.

What you feel is under your control.

You can simply act it away.

A mask of neutrality.

Leads you to believe you might actually feel it.

You can ignore your feelings.

You can act forever.

Yet at some point, the inevitable curtain comes down, and the performance ends.

You are left with you; and the feelings you’re pretending aren’t there.

If only for a moment.

The act is over.

What then?

Who are you when your truth has space to be?

The question, terrifying.

Its answer even more so.

It lies in love and the shape of it.

What does your love and care look like when there is no performance to mask it?

photo credit: Ania

Emotional Littering

Emotional Littering

EmotionalLittering

Emotional littering is when I attempt to alleviate my own overwhelming emotions by disposing of them elsewhere, when I inherently know they’re mine to be responsible to.

In those moments, I don’t want to own what I’m feeling and how I’m reacting to it. Instead, I’m trying to drop my responsibility into another’s backyard. To put it on them.

I’m not making space for my stuff, and I’m attempting to alleviate this by leaving it for someone else to take care of. I’m pretending to not be attached to what I’m feeling.

I am emotionally littering. And in doing so—in not being responsible to how I feel—I’m giving away my power to feel differently. What a waste.

photo credit: Steven Pisano

The Art of the Ask

The Art of the Ask

The Art of the Ask
Value-For-Value
Pay What You Want
Pay What You Value
Gift Economy
Pay What It’s Worth

Collections of words. Collections of words that intend something similar, and yet different.

They all describe a concept. That you trust your customers to determine the value they receive from your work, and to give accordingly.

You can describe this concept, and your belief in it in many ways.

Value-For-Value
Pay What You Want
Pay What You Value
Gift Economy
Pay What It’s Worth

The words you use are a choice in how you design your communications. It’s your brand. Your experience.

What do you want and need to be valued in the exchange? How do you communicate your intent and the result you desire?

Value-For-Value
Pay What You Want
Pay What You Value
Gift Economy
Pay What It’s Worth

In the end, these terms may differ in their meaning but they describe one truth in their action. That you are a business that is choosing to create it’s own economy.

You’re criticizing the current economic system by creating your own system for valuing products and services. And it’s changing things.

Just as your life choices are creating the world you live in, your business choices are creating the economy you work and exchange in.

In trusting me to value you fairly, we’re creating an economy together where we step out of lack, and into a fair exchange of value, respect and love.

Value-For-Value
Pay What You Want
Pay What You Value
Gift Economy
Pay What It’s Worth

To start creating your economy, it starts with the ask. The intention of your action.

What do you intend to build with the economy you are creating? And how can you best express it?

What lies within the art of your ask?

photo credit: Iwan Gabovitch
for an inspiring talk on “The Art of Asking”, please watch: Amanda Palmer’s TED talk

Hello 2014!

Hello 2014!

photo credit challiyan

Happy New Year to you! I hope you’ve had a restful and lovely holidays.

I love the potential of this time of year, an old year ending and new one starting.

Being a naturally introspective person, and combining that with a cultural attachment to reviewing the year that has passed, I’ve often found I’m pressuring myself as the calendar year comes to a close to UNDERSTAND something about the time that has passed.

This year I decided to let that go. My attachment to UNDERSTANDing. I let the year just be.

And when I did, I found myself naturally, on New Year’s Eve, seeing the year behind me. I saw a year where I had transformed my relationships.

If there was something for me to UNDERSTAND about 2013, it was about relationship. My relationship with …attachment …release …my mind …my heart …creating …criticism …sharing …authenticity …perspective …recognition …authority …shame …and so much more.

2013 taught me that when I allow myself to change my relationship with something, I allow myself to let go of something holding me back.

I suspect you may have learned something similar.

Now we find ourselves starting 2014, and we are more centred in our self, and in turn, our relationships. Our structures have been fortified.

I don’t dare to guess what 2014 holds for us. For I know whatever I do dream up will fall short of reality.

But I do dare to plan. To continue growing more into me. And the power and love of what I am creating in this world.

For 2014 and always, I wish the same for you.

love,
TJSignature

photo credit: challiyan