There are many ways to bring joy into business while maintaining professionalism.
Any of us will agree that building relationships, food, music, art, being surrounded by beauty, making a sale, playfulness, laughter, travel, adventure, and self-expression are highly rewarding and replenishing. For me, it's tropical rainforests. It's palm trees on the beach shading you from the sun. It's snorkeling amongst coral reefs and colorful fish. It's the exhilaration of canyoning and rappelling in a waterfall and ziplining between two mountains, Superman style.
Higher energy emotions create coherence in our brains, hearts, and guts and cause us to operate in flow, which allows us to access the ingenuity required to be of greater service in the world.
Hard work need not come at the suppression our needs. Sometimes the reward is a reset. We deserve to live our lives like they matter. We are responsible for choosing happiness.
Contrary to escapism, pleasure grounded in sobriety is an embodiment practice that increases our capacity to savor and be present with the spectrum and depth of feeling. It increases our emotional dimensionality and our feeling of being home in our bodies.
How do we return to the bliss of innocence? In other words, how do we remember why we're here and how to be human?
Feed your senses something delicious: beautiful spaces, cuisines, people, experiences, activities, scenes, art, music, water, sleep...
Take a moment to b r e a t h e and reset your nervous system.
Become aware of your posture, your orientation in space.
Detach from any emotion; let it pass by like a cloud.
Accept yourself unconditionally as you are right now. Release the expectations you have of yourself, including the pressure to produce something unique, groundbreaking, and Earth-shattering every time you create something new.
Give yourself time and space to rest. Rest can look like social media breaks, drifting from people that hold you back from evolving, taking a break from diet culture and giving your body what it needs to recover and rebuild. Rest can look like gently settling into your subconscious and unconscious, those lower frequencies of deep healing, drifting underwater to the dream world.
Do whatever feels most alive to you right now.
Reward yourself for having completed the task to a degree commensurate with the accomplishment.
Practice following your bliss. Continually make vows to fully immerse yourself in whatever you're doing.
Because the more deeply we enjoy and immerse in whatever we're doing, the more we become enraptured by being, the more lovely and magnetic our aura becomes and the more love flows our way.
How do you integrate joy into business?
By creating a business you're excited about, that nourishes your creative life.
By doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, setting your own hours.
By remembering to take breaks, allowing yourself to rest.
By aligning with your core work values.
By setting your own schedule and doing what you do best.
By varying your environmental stimuli and enriching your senses--books, museums, travels, people, etc.
Developing a business model, offer structure, and price point that affords you energetic protection and reasonable boundaries and replenishes you spiritually, energetically, ethically, and financially.
Showing up at your best place to serve others.
Creating a business aligned with your vision.
Why should we integrate pleasure into business?
Because it's a human thing to do.
To beat burnout.
To augment our own life force.
To increase the aura of our business.
To improve client trust.
So we can do more good in the world.
Pleasure is NOT pushing your body to the point of physical and mental exhaustion.
Pleasure IS about learning to give and teaching to receive.
Invest in your future self.
However you train your subconscious through your action and decision-making is the way you're going to tend to think and the direction you're going to flow--you're literally carving pathways into the future through your present. At some point, you're going to have to face the stretch and do the hard thing.
Having experiences that are new and opportunities to savor something that enriches your senses and causes you to grow is an investment into the mind you want to have in the future.
For we are never our past; when we align our present priorities with our future visions, we're able to create something amazing. We set our nervous systems back into harmony. We become actively responsive rather than passively reactive. Life begins to happen for us, rather than to us.
Joy helps us process faster and work more efficiently. Somewhere between the flood of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, endorphins, and the surge of electricity going up our spine, our experience becomes more vivid and vibrant. All it takes is a decision and commitment to making it happen.
Entrepreneurs are powerful change agents with the capacity to accelerate progress on this planet, with the added flexibility of being able to work anywhere in the world and devote their time to any venture of their choice.
The secret to pleasure in business is not the specific strategies and techniques you use but how you invest in and develop those irreplaceable human priorities: relationships, experiences, and health.
My question for you is… how will you integrate joy into your business?
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