Category Archives: Abundance
Source’s Steps to Self Promotion or The Myth of Marketing
“The more you rely on the statistics that are offered to you as some real or true measurement of your worth the more worthless you are likely to feel in the long run because you will never be able to make those numbers big enough to keep proving what they never proved in the first place . . .”
‘Wisdom’ and Other Words To Live By From a Wet-Behind-The Ears Oracle
Every time I turn around these days I’m bumping into some new marketing guru’s seven steps or ten tips for making the world want whatever it is we have to offer. It seems it’s never enough anymore to be the creator of something beneficial or beautiful, we must also be willing and able to nearly make a full time job of peddling our product or service—or willing to pay someone who’s willing and able.
I admit I don’t like it. If I wanted to be a salesman I would have been a salesman, and I’ve never taken kindly to anyone telling me I have to be something I’m not. And yet there those realities seem to be, staring us in the face and daring us to be a success if we don’t bite the bullet, suck it up, and show off in the ways that the experts and their statistics tell us is necessary.
I’m pretty sure I’ll never be the Marketing Magician that so many insist I need to become. Just the thought of it exhausts me. And yet there’s the dilemma of how to be a successful, fulfilled writer or photographer or anything else when only a handful of folks may ever read or look at what I do. So I asked The Shower Team: What’s an alleged genius creator who’s also a reluctant self-promoter to do? How do I create a life—and work—that I love regardless of the feedback I do or don’t receive? How do I live and work and play and create joyfully and productively and genuinely not care what the responses to me are?
Here’s what we would urge you to do. Call it “Source’s Steps to Successful Self Promotion.” First, forget doing anything you NEED a response to. Do what YOU respond to. Offer what gives back to you in a way that you think will feel good. When you share anything at all, express anything at all, share it because you love it, never because you need anyone else to. The moment you feel you need another to approve, pause . . . pull back . . . wait until you have something to offer that you love too much not to offer it, where your enjoyment and appreciation of it is your only reason for offering it.
Be YOU, for the truth in this is that any lack of response you might perceive is actually a lack of response to your needing a response. The silence you sometimes notice in response to your efforts, is the silence of others who cannot give you what you seek. It is the silence of no one being able—or responsible—for making you feel good enough.
Check your reasons before you share. Ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” Then follow these guidelines:
- Share only what lifts you up.
- Share only what lights you up.
- Share only what makes you smile.
- Share only what you find beautiful or beneficial or compelling
- Share it only because it feels too good not to share it.
We would also add to this our view of the diminishing returns of your watching numbers as though they tell you anything of ultimate importance. We would call this the Myth of Marketing that has been gathering considerable momentum in your physical experience.
More and more of you are believing that your value is based on numbers, be they in the form of dollars or readers or viewers or subscribers or paying customers. This lie has crept so steadily and so powerfully into your consciousness and taken root in such a way that it is increasingly hard for any of you to see around it to the larger truth that who you are—your value—is never quantified that way by Source, or by the part of you that is aligned with how Source sees you.
Measuring your value this way will never bring you the true joy or satisfaction or fulfillment that you seek. Even some of your so-called spiritual teachers are now suggesting to you that your message is only as worthy as the size of your mailing list, that your self-worth is only as rich as what you are paid for offering it.
We cannot begin to convey how screwy that notion is from broader perspective, or the degree to which it is bound to trip you up sooner or later. The truth is you will never get where you want to be by assessing yourself this way or by this outside-in approach to quantifying your success.
We see and we understand the power of this trend that roars through your world. You observe it and you find it increasingly hard not to buy in to it (for as you’ve noticed, there is nearly always a price tag attached to the picture that has been painted about how to promote yourself). But we say to you, again and again, the numbers do not tell the story. Trust them and you will sooner or later come to see the illusion behind them.
The more you rely on the statistics that are offered to you as some real or true measurement of your worth the more worthless you are likely to feel in the long run because you will never be able to make those numbers big enough to keep proving what they never proved in the first place—that your worth is measured by the number ONE. That is, it is entirely about the ONE who offers whatever you are offering because YOU appreciate it, YOU respond to it, YOU care about it.
You are ONE with All That Is, and any gift you offer expands, moves, enlarges, delights, thrills All That Is and makes the Universe you inhabit bigger and brighter and better . . . and has nothing to do with anything you will ever find on a sales ledger or a site report or a royalty check.
Look for the true value that you bring to your world by joyfully offering you to that world, the you that no one in your world can effectively or truthfully tally, but that Heaven and Earth applaud you—and reward you–for being.
Well, I bet none of that makes it into a bestselling How To book. I both love—and am usually somewhat mystified by—the Team’s take on most of what passes for collective savvy in this ever challenging time/space reality.
I’m sure many—myself probably included—would argue it’s easy for them to pooh pooh marketing and promotion when they don’t need those subscribers or sales or royalties to expand what’s in the cabinet or refrigerator or to light up the rooms in one’s house with electricity. Still, I hate it when I can’t just pooh pooh their pooh poohing.
Do the numbers deceive us? Do we not need what we think we need ? Are we just myth mongers—misguided sheep following a herd that believes the grass is actually greener over there where that grinning guru of a shepherd is waving his state of the art staff?
As usual I’ll leave the answers to The Team and see how long I can go without seeing how many “Likes” I just got on Facebook.
Parting aFLOWmation: “Value what you most appreciate, and it can’t help but appreciate.”
For more information about The Shower Channel blog please visit my home page. Previous posts are available in the Archives. Contact me if you have questions/topics you would like The Shower Channel to address–or to request a private reading/consultation.
Making Peace With Where You Are
'Wisdom' and Other Words To Live By From a Wet-Behind-The Ears Oracle
One of my favorite quotes is from psychologist Carl Rogers, who said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change.”
That statement has always had a sort of zen quality to me. It also continues to be a piece of the puzzle in my mind relating to things I hear or read about making peace with where I am. A while back someone wrote to me, wondering if I really buy into this business about the best way to improve a bad situation being to let go of needing things to be different in order to feel better
Always a sucker for a good paradox, I asked the Shower Team for neither the first nor likely the last time, “How do we let go of needing a bad situation to get better? How are we supposed to make peace with where we are when where we are sucks?”
Making peace with where you are doesn’t mean what you often assume that it means. You hear that and you interpret it to mean that you’re just supposed to be resigned to whatever fate you feel is being thrust upon you or that you are just supposed to grin like an idiot and babble affirmations no matter how miserable you are. A much better way to say it is, “Make peace with YOU—wherever you are.” Because the point is, that YOU are truly fine . . . truly okay . . . truly blessed . . . truly loved and supported . . . no matter where you are. No matter what you’ve created. No matter what kind of mess you feel you or someone else has made. No matter how long or hard you’ve been struggling. No matter how beaten up or abandoned you feel. No matter how worthless or stupid or inept or foolish you feel—or believe others feel that you are.
Too often what most of you try to do is to improve how you feel from the outside in. You observe the conditions or circumstances that you are experiencing and your knee jerk reaction is to say, “I’ll feel better when that’s different.” Or “I’ll feel better when this is no longer the case.” So you change your hair style or your wardrobe. You go on a diet. You buy a new house. You quit your job. You leave your mate. You try to extract what you think is the source of your discomfort. You move to another neighborhood or city or state or country. Some of you would head for another planet if you could—always trusting in the same illusion: that it’s where you are that makes the difference. “If I can just be over there, not here—everything will be fine. I’LL be fine as soon as I’m over there.”
It is very hard for you to hear us say, “It doesn’t matter where you are” and understand it much less believe it. You hear words like “wherever you go, there are you are,” and you laugh and you recognize some truth in it but then you go right back to shopping for your new clothes or your new partner or your new career or a better doctor or accountant . . . What we want so much for you to understand is that, while these externals may distract you from how bad you feel or in some cases, even allow you to take the much longer route to feeling better about yourself—there is a much simpler, swifter way for you to get your bearings and to feel the power that you always have to feel better no matter what’s going on in your life.
The simple truth that you have such a hard time hearing and believing is that YOU are never really a mess. YOU never need a makeover. YOU never need to be anything other than who YOU really are. And until you allow yourself to be at peace with YOU—apart from any circumstance or condition or situation . . . until you understand that YOU are blessed and adored and supported and perfect as YOU are, then you will be constantly striving for some other way to be. You will be constantly trying to remodel your life based on the mistaken belief that how your house looks to passers by has anything to do with how it feels as a home. You can create a showplace that anyone looking at from the outside in will admire and applaud. And it will still feel like an empty, hollow, cold, lonely space until you understand that YOU are the life in it. You are the warmth in it. You are the spirit that inhabits your life and makes it livable.
What you must understand is that YOU are your home, that peace is a choice you make . . . . . it is a recognition that what matters is how you feel in your skin and in your heart . . . and that everything you really want is right there where you are.
We understand that peace is typically not the first prayer you pray when you are in pain. You want relief. You want improvement. You want to feel better. What we keep trying to help you see is that you can begin to feel better from the inside out. A step as simple as deciding that you’re going to focus on feeling better rather than on how bad you feel is a powerful step in that direction. In the midst of your dissatisfaction or distress, take a minute. Take a breath, or two, or three . . . And let yourself feel the subtle but distinct shift in how you feel when you even slightly move your attention from how bad you’re feeling to how much better you’d like to feel . . . when you change the object of your attention from the source of your stress to the desire for relief.
When you understand that you don’t need anything to change in order to be at peace, that there are no renovations needed, no permits to apply for, no sins to confess and atone for, no sentences to serve or fines to pay, then you are free to change anything you want, simply because you enjoy the changing of it. It becomes a game you’re free to play because it’s fun to play it . . . not an act of desperation or a deception that anything going on around you in any way determines who you really are or a driving need to match your life to something you’ve seen in a catalog or a movie or an infomercial or a sacred text or a self-help book–or for that matter, a blog. Make peace with YOU, wherever you are because if you don’t, you’ll have no real peace, no matter where you are.
I’ve certainly learned the long and hard way that I can’t move far enough away from anything that’s holding me back from feeling the way I want to feel about my life. It doesn’t prevent occasional speculation about how much happiness money might buy or the difference any number of improved conditions might make in my overall outlook. But regardless, it seems worth the effort to see how much I can like the me in the middle of whatever it is I’m not liking.
First A Dream 