My secrets to winning in business are a bit unconventional: self-care and gratitude for others. As business owners, your biggest asset is yourself. Taking care of your mind, body and spirit is essential to be holistically present for others.
That presence also allows you to soak up the light, the gifts, in the moment. Through it all, your practices and goals always work better when you’re grateful and tap into the power of the collective.
To take care of business, we first need to take care of ourselves.
To take #shinebrightly to the next level, I’m striving to ‘be,’ to embody self-care, instead of ‘doing’ self-care. See, I already “do” a lot of self-care living: plant-based smoothies, juicing, healthy eating, yoga, you know, healthy things. To break out of this pattern, I took my self-care from individual action into the community.
For instance, I took a yoga challenge (40 classes in 90 days). I didn’t “win,” but I did 20 classes, and that was a win for me. The act of putting a gold star next to my name along with the 70 other participates was a joy-filled experience and I really felt accomplished. That’s when I began to feel the benefit of a group intention and the collective strength in numbers.
I also followed the lunar calendar for my business intentions, which is a moon-based cycle started by Ezzie Spencer aka The Lunar Abundance Creatress. In essence you follow the phases of the moon and experience how each phase relates to Lunar Abundance principles including setting your intention to take action, receive, and experience gratitude through to giving back from a place of abundance.
Again, following her Instagram account, and connecting with other people’s monthly intentions through hashtags and social media, I felt more intune and accountable with following my intention. 
I also tried Whole30, which lasted a Whole15, but I tried! And that counts, it really does. Whole30 is a very intense jump-start-your-system program all centered on eating clean, pure, and real food for 30 days. No grains, no sugar, no dairy. An entire system and food relationship reset.
Since my Whole30 experience, I’ve continued to enjoy RxBars (which is Chicago based!) and Tessemae All Natural Salad Dressings. I was floored by the amount of sugar in salad dressings, or anything for that matter. It was a positive experience and I fell off the bandwagon when we went to the old Playboy Hotel in Wisconsin for the last summer hoorah with my family. I mean, come on how could I not?
Beyond the results, the most remarkable facet of Whole30 is the community. The entire program is free, yet it’s extended into books and cookbooks, all because of the way the community has transformed into a movement. Go search #Whole30 on Instagram and you’ll find a massive network of people that have extended far beyond the official Whole30 brand, which already produces incredible social media campaigns, who are deeply committed to this intention of finding food freedom. There are holistically-grown accountability groups, bloggers, chefs, and recipe creators that have focused their entire approach surrounding Whole30. Now that’s an example of the power of collective intention.
After these experiments, I realized I’m more accountable to myself when I have a partner, and that might be true for you, too.
With these examples of self-care, it’s easy to see how collective intentions have tremendous personal impact. Whether it’s minimizing anxiety, finally finding peace with your body, losing the guilt in your relationship with food, or simply experiencing joy in everyday moments.
It works for business, too. Set an intention collectively and you can use community accountability to drive holistic growth through equal parts giving and receiving of support.
And one of the most beautiful things about collective intentions is that we can easily check-in, share, and cultivate community from anywhere in the world.
Which brings us to deep gratitude.
Gratitude for strangers, people on the street, your barista, anyone who looks like they need a jolt out of their ‘ordinary’ to be recognized for being the extraordinary person they are.
Mark Zuckerberg did this in 2014 when he vowed to write a thank you note every day. Why? He said:
“I’m a really critical person. I always kind of see how I want things to be better ….but…we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.”
The type of thank you I’m going to spread is looking deeper than what service or ‘work’ people provide, and share the unexpected, share an insight into who they are being, share some love. This is the ontological approach that my life and leadership coach training takes.
For example, the lady who bags my groceries at my local grocery store, instead of saying “thank you” and walking out the door (How many times have you said thank you to someone in service and you not even remember what they look like two minutes later? *Raising my hand.) I’m going say to something like, “Thank you for separating out my fruit, that is very thoughtful of you, I can tell you are really taking care of me today, and that means a lot. I hope you have an awesome day!”
Thanking someone for who they’re being is looking at their soul, spirit, personal essence, and thanking them for the kindness, joy, love, compassion, and light they are bringing into the world. Funny thing, most people in service jobs aren’t hired for their personal essence, they are hired to ‘do things.’ But simply by recognizing that they are people, and have a soul, and sharing a small moment of thanks, I guarantee you it will shake things up. It will jolt them out of their ordinary, into their extraordinary, and cause a ripple effect that can literally start a gratitude revolution.
Thank YOU for being a source of light, love and revolution in the world, we need more love revolutionists like you!
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