Can we talk about open-heartedness, sound business structures and duality a minute? When it comes to designing your business, you don’t have to settle for one or the other. You can and should have it all. After all, you deserve it, and so does your business!
I read a post by Danielle LaPorte about boundaries yesterday. This was the second post that landed in my inbox (I cannot remember the author of the other) that made me wonder if there’s a duality we’re unwittingly creating between depth, consciousness and open-heartedness (spirituality, if you will) and business structures and protections.
With duality comes judgment—open-heartedness = handshake above contract = better (or the opposite)—and the pressure to make a false choice. Here, the false choice between being open-hearted and legally taking care of your business.
As a yogi and a lawyer, I hold the challenge of honoring both in order to be in integrity with myself. And, therefore, I run into this false choice pretty often. I advise those who practice ancient arts they consider sacred, like yoga or Chinese medicine. I advise those want to stay completely outside of the legal system because it’s contrary to their belief system.
My thought on this is: embrace both. You need both. We all need both. And you can have both.
I believe that business (and life) demands (and gives you ample opportunity to cultivate) open-heartedness and fierceness (which is not the same as closed-heartedness). The thing is, if you don’t have any structures—if you don’t cultivate fierceness and firmness—you also find reasons to be resentful. Often, as we feel our way through, we swing one way or the other between no boundaries and rigid boundaries and back again, resentments meeting us at both sides.
This is why it’s the process that matters. The process of relationship forming and building matters. The process of creating structures, containers and protections to support those relationships matters. It is to this process that you bring consciousness and open-heartedness.
Do that, and you will not have to choose.