Guideworks Business Planning

[Of course my guides did it.  Me do it?  Are you kidding me?]

Feb 14, 2004

Karen: I’ve been having an on-and-off dialogue with my guides re writing inspirational works from their, um, guidance.

My guides don’t think there’s anything wrong with my making filthy lucre from their words.

Isn’t this just an ego thing on my part?

Guides: Only if you make it one.

Karen: Of course they’d say it’s my choice, wouldn’t they?

Guides: You’re going to get an internal backlash for this.  [Internal backlash: a period of depression or anxiety following an emotional  breakthrough as the mind self-punishes for having it.  I used to get this a lot.]
 
Karen: Do I get a choice about that?  Nah, I’m too programmed.  First time I’ve ever had a truly conscious sense, a solid expectation, that I’d get a backlash for something good.  Because they’re warning me.

Guides: It’s just a backlash.  Eh!

Karen: Where do I start?

Guides: Setting a goal.

Me: Setting a goal?

Guides: Yes.  How much money do you want to make?

Karen: This is always how you do business planning.  I know that.  At the same time, I’m thinking, ‘You’re guides, dammit.  You’re supposed to be airy-fairy spiritual things, not ask me how much money I want to make!’

I did say they were practical, didn’t I? 

Guides: You feel money is something bad, don’t you?  Something corrupting?  Don’t think of it that way.  Think of it as the stuff that keeps the roof over your heads and the fridge full.

Karen: Enough to keep the roof over our heads and the fridge full.  $25,000 a year.

Guides: No extras?

Me: $50,000.  That’s how much I was thinking I could make with that other business thing. 

Guides: Why not $100,000?  That’s how much [friend] made, how much [wife of enemy] makes.  Isn’t this work as important as theirs?

Karen: My head is spinning.  I almost didn’t write this, too embarrassed.  You see how I know my guides are not me?

I can’t set a goal that high!

Guides: Why not?

Karen: .... eh....er.... I can’t make that much money!  I’m not supposed to!

Guides: [Another person I know] makes way more for sticking junk mail in people’s doors, is this worth less than that?

Karen: What am I going to say—‘No’?

Guides: What do you really want out of this?  Whatever you want, that’s what will happen, if you visualize it clearly enough.

Karen: I realized without them telling me—I have always made my goals too vague.  Except when it was publishing a book; then the goal was clear, selling the book.  And it happened.

I have wanted things, but backed off on them out of guilt or self-minimization.  Maybe the guides really mean, not whatever I want, but whatever I choose... at all levels.  Even if at a subconscious level I am choosing the opposite of what I want at the conscious level.  That’s what will happen—that is what has always happened.

I realize that I feel I cannot both help people and benefit myself at the same time.  I’m either screwing someone else or getting screwed, and I’d prefer to get screwed.  I’ve had a revelation about it—business is always give and take—but it hasn’t stuck, not enough to make me go big, yet.

Guides: You have to solve this.  [This is one of the very rare times in which they have said I have to do something.  Keep reading to find out why.]  Sort out your feelings about it... about money, about doing this sort of thing for money, about give and take, about what you deserve.  That’s how to start—sort out your feelings.

Karen: I need to learn the reality of win-win.  I need to learn that what my guides can offer... really is worth something.

Guides: If we can put a spark in someone’s mind that changes their life for the better—it’s priceless.  X number of people = priceless times X.

Karen: I’m cooking rice for myself, to eat with leftover chicken.  I’m just wanting to run away from the computer and cook it and eat it.  Avoidance!

I don’t even want to send this to [friend].  I’m embarrassed about it being suggested that I make a goal of as much money as her husband does.  I mean, wouldn’t she be offended?

Guides: Why would she be offended?  She’d be delighted!  She’s a friend!

Karen: Time for them to play shrink on me.

Guides: Why would you think she’d be offended?  Why would you think she’d think in such a rivalrous way?

Me: I guess this would go back to my family.  Somehow they always gave me a sense that if I was getting anything, I was taking it away from someone else, unjustly.  Also, this is... you know... spiritual stuff.  Airy-fairy.  New Age.  Worthless.  That’s what they’d think.  And I’m still programmed, I guess.  ‘How dare you think anything you could do would be worth so much.’  ‘How dare you try to make as much as so-and-so, who really deserves it.’ The attitude that keeps me in poverty. 

Guides: You have to deal with this, if you’re ever going to provide properly for your kids, if you want to put them through university, if you want to leave them with any kind of advantage.  [They know I do, hence the have-to.]  You have to get out of the I-can’t/I-don’t-deserve thing.  You are seeing the kids as extensions of yourself—undeserving, just as you are. 

Karen: Gods... Gods.... Gods.... it’s true.  And so totally, shamefully unfair to them.

But maybe this whole idea is totally unrealistic.

Guides: Were Robert Fulghum’s writings unrealistic?  How about Kahlil Gibran’s?  Or any other spiritual writings?  If Lao Tzu had thought his idea of writing was unrealistic, we’d never have had his writings, would we? 

Me: I don’t think any of those people were out to make money.

Guides: Fulghum kept writing even after his first book was a bestseller.  He wasn’t ashamed to make money.

Now maybe it’s time to talk about other motivations of yours.

Karen: You are amazing and the world could use hearing your wisdom.

Guides: And you have the ability to get our words onto paper.  [Or pixels.]

Karen: I want to run away from the computer again. 

[I did not accept their goal-setting suggestion at the time.] 

To be continued... though I might be so embarrassed I keep the dialogue to myself.  [Or not.]