I used to believe that doing things properly would get you where you wanted to go; and in business this meant treating people well, having great systems, knowing where you wanted to take your business, paying people on time etc. But even when I did all these things, there was often still a sense of struggle.

What I did most certainly didn’t always work, and it was certainly hard work, and lots of hours. Worst of all was not finding a ‘method’ that always worked. I did use methods, and they often did work — but sometimes they didn’t, very frustrating! There was no sense of consistency.

Perhaps most challenging, though, was my belief that if I was honest and hard-working, so would others be, and I would be ‘rewarded’ with a successful business.

So what do I mean by the soul? It’s variously defined as the animating principle in humans; the seat of the feelings; the emotional part of human nature. But in the sense in which I use this word it describes the deep inner knowledge of life itself, the indescribable essence that is seen in all life.

And I go further, because I think this spark of life is the essence of all things, so that is why I talk about your business’s soul. I believe that every business has a principle behind it of energy that fuels it, can contribute to the decisions you make, and enables you to have a certain self-confidence that no matter what outer circumstances are like, you will be alright.

As you can imagine, this kind of feeling can be very useful in turbulent times such as the world is going through now! And that you may be going through too. It doesn’t mean that you don’t do anything, just that the actions happen in a different kind of way.

When I began to align my own soul with what I perceived as the soul of my business, I began to operate in another manner entirely. Firstly, I began to trust that whatever happened was all right. So if I missed a deadline, or an appointment, maybe that was OK. And usually it turned out to be that way. There was nothing I could do about it after all!

Secondly, I took the pressure off myself. Being self-employed there was no-one else putting the pressure on except me. I could choose my deadlines for the most part, and change them if circumstances meant that was necessary. And I was usually the only one affected if the deadline was not met.

Thirdly, I vowed to spend time at the beginning of each day in silent sitting, where I would turn within and ask for guidance, and focus on what I did want, not what I didn’t, often in the form of visualizations. I was seeking a sense of ‘the peace within’, wanting to start work out of that place.

The transformation of RichThinkers as a result of this has been steady and continues to grow. One great outcome was the ease with which I wrote the outline of the RichThinking Way programme, almost as if it had been written for me. The name itself popped into my mind just a few days later.

If you choose to believe that all intangible things, like your practice, business or project has a soul, then that is what can nurture you, as well as be the essence of what you offer to nurture others. You then access a golden jewel in the heart of your business, which becomes the source of strength, love and all sorts of other yummy qualities that then gets passed on to your clients and customers in a similarly intangible way.

On The RichThinking Way all the classes are held within the context of this idea, with the intention to have you align your thoughts, feelings and actions together with your heart and soul, and the soul of your business. It’s a great mix! Find out more here.

What do I mean by this? Well, one of the things I do in this course is emphasise how ALL your feelings can contribute to the success of your business, and by all I really mean all! This can be be bit challenging when you think of those feelings that you’d rather not be having, namely the so-called ‘negative’ ones, in the case above, doubt, heaviness and terror.

Can you imagine having feelings of fear and that being OK? Or angry feelings and allowing them to be there? Or grief and sadness, and being with them while they are visiting? Because when these kinds of feelings are not at the very least acknowledged, they can cause havoc in not only your business but the rest of your life too.

I know you know what I mean, because part of the human condition is experiencing feelings that just don’t feel very nice. When these feelings descend (and yes, it does sometimes feel like they descend uninvited), it’s easy to feel completely out of control and wonder if it’s all worth the bother.

But one of the ways in which you know you are being rich in your life is to understand that when a feeling you’d rather not be having comes to visit, it is a sign to invite you to say hallo, and then begin the process of saying goodbye and inviting a more positive and nurturing feeling to visit.

This whole idea of visiting is important, because a visitor is exactly that, someone who usually comes as a result of an invitation. Even though you may think that the negative feeling has popped in without being invited, or even set up it’s bed intending to stay for a few nights, it has usually come as a result of what you have been thinking and feeling without realising you’ve been doing so.

That’s why watching what you think is important, because you can interrupt this potential visitor at an early point when you catch it lurking outside your front door.

However, let’s say it has barged in the door and is making it’s presence felt in your front room, or even taken over the whole house, so to speak. What I highly recommend in this case is to get to know them a bit. After all, they are there, and the more you ignore them, the more they are likely to make their presence felt, if not now, then by catching you unawares at a later date.

And that’s where Doubting Doris, Heavy Henry and Terrified Tanya came in. These were the names that some of the participants gave to their ‘visitors’ in the visualisation we did on this RichThinking Way teleclass.

What are the benefits? The real magic in acknowledging the presence of these visitors is that they all have a gift to give you. A gift? There’s no beautiful wrapping or gorgeous box! No, but if you’re willing to acknowledge their ‘presence’, then you’ll find the hidden ‘presents’ they have for you.

Next time you have a visitor of this kind, try saying hallo, or even making friends. Their gift is always one that will benefit your life, and therefore your business too. Many times it’s very specific to your business, and will contribute to the enjoyment and pleasure you get from your working day.

“She was so beautiful and talented, it seems such a waste!” Megan cried. And of course it was. I reminded Megan of what her friend had said, just days before she passed away: “Never make it a labour, only make it a joy”. She was referring to the tasks involved in looking after her while she was coming to the end of her life, and referring to her husband, who had been so loving, kind, supportive and nurturing when she was in pain.

When I heard this sentence, I was very moved. ‘Never make it a labour, only make it a joy’. And we do indeed have that ability as human beings. We, alone, of all the animal species, can choose how we experience anything we have to do. It seems like we can’t, but it’s not true. We can.

Even though this story is in the context of death and dying, actually it has a far wider application. Megan’s friend gave me a great gift that day because I began to use that sentence in my own life and work. In any working day, there will always be tasks that you prefer over others; it’s the nature of the beast. You’ll definitely have tasks that you are more talented at doing than others. For instance, I love writing – it’s a joy to me to write these articles and any of the other writing I do. I can’t honestly say that I find dealing with technology a joy, though! In fact, I’m tempted even to say I hate it, can’t understand it and wish it could all just be done by someone else.

But in order to do what I love at a bigger level (bringing RichThinkers into the world more and more), I need to be able to use technology at a certain level at the very least. And given that I want joy in my working days much more than I want frustration, depression or bewilderment (all things I’ve experienced with technology!) it becomes something I have to choose. And this is what Megan’s friend meant by making it a joy, not a labour – choosing to do so.

How do you do actually choose to make something a joy? Being as conscious as possible about what you are doing at any one time is the first step. Then you at least have the opportunity to change how you are experiencing the task you are doing. When the focus is less on the task itself, ie the ‘what’, and more on the ‘how’ you are doing the task, then it is entirely possible to bring joy in – or if not joy, then maybe optimism, positive expectations, or enthusiasm.

But how to be conscious? How to do you get off the automatic track your mind takes you on, and be aware of ‘how’ you are doing a task? Almost sacrilegiously in our fast, busy Western world, it means stopping. Yes, stopping. Interrupting yourself. Keep stopping to check in – is it a labour, or are you enjoying what you’re doing? This is not a new idea; in Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh’s community in France, a bell rings every 15 minutes to remind people of what is truly important (coming back to who they really are); in the Course in Miracles, it suggests reminding yourself of the lesson every hour of the day; in the Brahma Kumaris Global Retreat Centre in Oxfordshire, two minutes of Indian music is played every hour, again with the intention of having people stop what they’re doing, and focus on how they are being – and all of this is to do with simply being more conscious and choosing to live a peaceful life.

In your working day, if you regularly see clients, use the time in between clients to stop. Consciously stop. Take 2 or 5 of the minutes available to you and check in with yourself, how you are feeling, what you are thinking, what kind of energy you are bringing to your actions. If you get stuck on your computer, set your alarm to help you remember to stop. If you work from home alone, divide your working hours up into blocks and include some ‘stopping inside’ time alone. When I first tried this, I came up against a great big wall of resistance. Everything in me screamed ‘Get on with it!’ ‘You must get it finished!’ ‘You can’t afford to take time off, not even
2 minutes!’ It was so obviously silly I had to laugh at myself. I persevered though, and found a calmness and sweetness in the tasks that I then did which was enough to make me want to do it more.

Could you ‘stop’ a bit more in your working day? What happens when you even think about it? If you try it, post here and let me and others know what happens!

It often looks like this: (run down them and see if any apply to you — or add your own).

• — lack of time
• - lack of clients
• - too much time
• - general worrying or fretting about one thing after another
• - bad-temperedness, being on a short fuse

• - comparing yourself to others and finding yourself lacking
• - wondering if you are mad to be doing what you’re doing
• - only able to see the down side of things
• - criticising yourself and others
• - frantic energy, moving from one thing to another without completing anything

• - feeling terror in your tummy
• - waves of fear pulsating through your solar plexus
• - shortness of breath
• - an overall numbness
• - a sense of disconnection

I could go on! You get the picture though, fear can show up in any way at any time, and it’s important to know how it shows up for you.

Even more important though, is understanding how this fear constricts your energy and literally gets in the way of goodness coming to you. When you are feeling stuck, blaming or critical for instance, there is simply no room for anything else. And when there’s no room for anything else, you are shutting out any kind of abundance, pleasure, joy, peace, connection and happiness in what you are doing.

So it becomes vital to make room for more nurturing feelings, consciously and deliberately, and thereby make room for that pleasure and abundance. This means the following steps:

1. Noticing what you are feeling. Name it, and put a number to your feelings on a scale of 1–10, where 1 is low, slow, dense stuck energy, and 10 is high, fast, clear and clean energy. (If you have difficulty naming what you’re feeling, visit the Feelings Vocabulary on the website under Free Resources).

2. Make a decision you want to change that feeling. This means a willingness to haul back the energy that is going into making you feel bad (the critical thoughts, the blaming, the shortcomings or whatever)

3. Deliberately and consciously reel in (yes, as in a fishing line!) the energy that is taking you, and keeping you, where you don’t want to be on any longer. Keep bringing it back towards you. What does this look like? Just imagine actually going fishing in a river. You cast your line out into the waters and keep picking up nothing. Just an empty line. Criticising yourself for choosing this particular piece of river, you continue to get precisely nothing on the end of your line. Getting angry with the fish doesn’t work either, and nor does blaming your colleague who doesn’t seem to be having any trouble. There are fish out there, she’s getting them, so why are they not jumping on your hook?

You reel in — but this time you do it differently. You reel in not only your line, but your negative thoughts and feelings too. You bring them right back in, and let them go behind you into the river or onto the grass; wherever they go, you are not going to let them be cast out again.

Instead you project out thoughts and feelings that are more true — you are getting where you want to get to; its not fair on yourself to compare yourself to someone else in entirely different circumstances; you do have a great gift within yourself, and the right people will be able to recognise that.

4. Deliberately and consciously direct your thoughts and feelings towards what you do want (just as if you were casting your line again, into a different part of the river). Keep your positive energy out there by using thoughts and feelings that support you, not distract you.

5. Remember the truth — you are always protected, your sense of your own richness is deep inside you, you cannot know that this situation happening right now is not the next step in your liberation.

6. Breathe with awareness as you keep focused on the truth of your situation - not the apparent truth in the physical world but the real underlying truth within your heart which beats with passion and peace, even when the waters around are turbulent and seemingly empty of fat, juicy fish.

7. Be grateful by looking at what you DO have not what you don’t. Again, deliberately focus on the things, people and experiences that ARE working in your life, that ARE contributing to your business, that ARE nourishing and sustaining you.

Once you’ve got to the end of this (and it can take only a few minutes with practice) then you’ve created the best conditions for movement and change to happen. (ie the fish noticing your bait and being hooked).

Finally — let go of all of this happening in the way you think it ought to! You’ve probably heard this before, and it certainly is easier said than done. But it is important and you can do this by simply acknowledging what is happening within you in the present moment. Bring your mind to now, right now — and be grateful for that too.

I had to face this this very morning. One of the things that happens to me when there’s a lot to be done, and especially if there’s a deadline, is that I immediately go into ‘practical’ mode, organising in my mind exactly what has to happen when, so that all the jobs get done by the time I want them done.

‘Practical’ mode in my case means starting as quickly as possible on whatever I think is the most important thing to be done, getting it out of the way, and then going immediately onto the next thing. To be fair, this has often worked for me in the past — I’ve got an excellent track record at achieving things, and I’ve often felt proud of being someone who ‘makes things happen’.

But recently I’ve been experimenting with a new way of managing my time. Instead of going head first into my ‘to-do’ list, and working my way down it (or actually, to be honest, picking and choosing things off it, regardless of their importance!) I have started to consider the benefits of stopping first. Yes. Stopping, even before starting on a task.

Even as I write this I can hear my mind screaming in frustration: ‘Don’t be daft, you have masses to do — get on with it!” and ‘This idea of stopping is just stupid, what you really need to do is what you’ve always done, and just do it — like Richard Branson says”. Or even ‘You’ll never manage it, this stopping thing! You’ll be thinking too much, so why bother? Just get on with things, you’ll get there eventually”. You can see how insidious my mind is! And perhaps yours does something similar.

But I’ve been practicing this on and off recently, and again this morning, before writing this very article. And here’s the thing: by being disciplined enough to ignore my mind’s little messages, and sit down on my meditation cushion, light a candle and begin to allow myself to enter into my heart and soul, I create a sacred space for my work to be done in. And that brings magic into it (not to mention a sense of sanity!)

Instead of the frantic energy associated with getting things done, I bring peace and quiet. Instead of fear that I’ll miss a deadline, I bring in a quiet sense of focus that allows the work to be accomplished in often much less time than I thought it would take. Instead of being snappy to people around me when they interrupt, I remember to ask if anyone wants anything of me before I begin my work, and am more patient when interruptions do happen.

Of even more benefit, I have honoured my heart and soul, and therefore the heart and soul of my business too. Mmmm…as I read this I feel nourished in my heart, and that’s what stopping is all about.

And there’s still room for my practical side too, because as well as stopping, I use a prioritisation list (see my article The Placemat Prioritisation Process) which helps me to get clear on what has to be done in the first place. It’s tempting to just use this technique when there’s a lot on; but if you really want to maximise the enjoyment of your working day, then I recommend stopping before you even look at your list.

Every time I do this I have a sense of satisfaction because I’ve honoured my self as well as the jobs needing doing; and guess what — I nearly always experience more time, simply because I stopped first and brought a clearer, stronger, more in touch energy to the work that is beckoning me!

So if you want to experience more time, I recommend trying this out. And let me know what happens…