Use your body to create powerful connections

How do you know the people you are connecting to are the best fit for you? Who are you surrounding yourself with?
There is a saying that goes: "Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are".
That is equally true for your personal friendships as for your professional partnerships.

One thing that most entrepreneurs have difficulty with is building a powerful team that share in their values and their company's mission and vision.
One of the reasons for this is because as the creators, entrepreneurs often get caught up in wanting to maintain control of all aspects of the company.  This leads them to forget that, like all other human beings, they are good at some things and not so good at others.  No one can be great at everything. (Unless of course you have a Greek mom, who is truly convinced you are God's gift to the world and will happily share how perfect you are with anyone she exchanges a few words with!!)

Another difficulty in creating strong partnerships is that all too often people tend to forget to pay attention to how they really feel about the people around them.
Like personal friendships, our professional team has to be made up of people we can openly talk to, feel comfortable discussing ideas with and who share similar values as us.
It's all too great partnering up with that Ivy League graduate who speaks eloquently, yet do you feel there is a free flow of ideas? Do you feel that your objectives are similar and you can discuss your projects comfortably? Are his values compatible to yours?

We have a natural and extremely potent tool for detecting if the person in front of us is a good fit.  This tool is called: OUR BODY! One way to find out if the people surrounding you are a good match, is to check with your body.

What sensations do you feel when you are in a meeting with your team or your partners? A great exercise is to notice how you feel when you are speaking to each person. Really pay attention to your bodily reactions.
There are certain people we speak to and end the conversation always feeling tired or sleepy (that feeling of being drained). With others, we might feel our heart racing faster, some excitement in our chest. Still, with someone else, we might experience that "gut feeling" that tells us to say this or that.
Listen to it! Respect it!

Our bodies have energy centers (the so called chakras), wheel-like vortices that receive and transmit energy and information from and to the universe around them.  In a more subtle level, our bodies are always tuned and closely connected to the world around us. We have to teach ourselves and practice, practice, practice paying attention to our bodily sensations because our body's energy field can pick up valuable information we are not able to pick up with words.

Next time you are speaking to a potential partner, to someone who wants to enter your team or who already is a part of your team, take time to consciously pay attention to your bodily sensations. Are the feelings in your body positive or negative? What would they tell you if they could speak? What shape would they take if you could see them? Can you attribute a color to this specific sensation?

Pay attention to your body! It knows and is constantly communicating to you who is the right person to connect to in any given situation. 

Messages From a Beautiful Girl

I was once told that if there is someone you love and a beautiful woman takes this someone away from you, she is trying to tell you something. It is important to see what she is trying to tell you as it is surely an essential message. I didn't fully agree with the lesson, but decided to keep my heart open to it nonetheless. Until it happened to me!

I am in the fortunate yet in all honesty, distressing position of trying to decipher the message! The same beautiful woman has taken not one, but two men away from me! Two of the last men who have drifted through my life were later somehow involved with the same beautiful woman. In this case, it is the same beautiful girl, but allow me to keep talking about a woman, as it surely has a more dramatic feel to it!

                                                      Image by Gerge Petty

Of course, analyzing the story from a place of less self pity, one of them she never really took away and the other was never really mine to take away, but still, it is a colossal coincidence, to say the very least!

Of all beautiful women in this world, how come it is the same one involved?

So now I finally decided to accept what they had once told me, and am trying hard to understand what it is this girl is unknowingly attempting to tell me.

Could it be that she is showing me that the men I go for are actually interested in going after young girls?  Is this the pattern I have chosen to reinforce my sense of selflessness and more specifically, my perish-fulness? I could put myself in a victim position and start going on and on about what this one did and what that one did, but the real issue here is me. If one is to empower and respect him/herself, one has to come to terms with the realization that all the choices he makes stem from what he values and what images he has of himself in relation to the rest of the world. So the secret is to always focus on the "I", not on the other.

                                                  

With the danger of coming across as a love doctor and the full awareness that relationships are more complex than we can possibly analyze in a few words, I ask all women out there:

Have you thought about which of your values you are honoring by being with or going after this particular man you are interested in? Have you thought about what familiar patterns he represents? Most importantly, if this is a relationship where you feel you are not fully respected, appreciated or "seen", have you pondered about what values you are willing to sacrifice just to say that you have a handsome man by your side? Sometimes, let's be honest, he isn't even that handsome!! By the way, this holds just as true for all men out there!

So my question today is: how willing are you to really look at your relationships or the people that interest you and identify the messages they present you with?  My message came in the form of a beautiful girl, how has it come for you?

Just to finish off with a message, here goes a spicy one:

"The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think".  Author Unknown