BEE-ing Attraction:
What Love Has to Do With Business and Marketing

When my coaches, Jan Stringer and Alan Hickman of Perfect Customers, invited me to write a review of their book, BEE-ing Attraction: What Love Has to Do with Business and Marketing, I was thrilled to do it. I’m a professional, published reviewer after all. (My reviews regularly appear in ForeWord Magazine’s review section, a trade journal serving book publishing and libraries.)

It’s been a few months since that initial request. So what happened? In the interim, I recognized that I had gotten far closer to this book (and its authors) than I do in my professional capacity as reviewer. I had been using the essential (and brilliant) 4-part “BEE-ing Attraction” Plan process for so long that the “usual model” for reviewing simply would not be adequate. (I have also gone through their program and have been certified to offer this planning process.)

Let me tell you a story.

It’s been nearly a decade since I first came across the 4-part Attraction Planning Process pioneered by Jan Stringer. It was no coincidence. I connected with her first book, Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity with lovely synchronicity through her first publisher, Berrett-Koehler, a client of mine. She had co-authored (as Jan Brogniez) and developed this 4-part process that brought the seeming magic of attraction to a business audience, and it was launched out of Houston. Texas.

This 4-part Strategic Attraction Process, along with the fundamental idea that the very best marketing grew out of building great relationships, became part of the air I breathed.

As the years unfolded, I came into Jan’s orbit, signed up for classes and learned more about this 4-part planning process through my own practice of it and with regular reminder classes that the “Biz Goddess,” Jan, offered with her sweetheart, then husband, Alan Hickman, a brilliant cheerleader of a coach in his own right.

In 2009, Jan and Alan published a new, deepened message, BEE-ing Attraction: What Love Has to Do with Business and Marketing. Its cover includes the tagline, “A Guidebook for Developing a Heart-Centered Business and Life.” It’s a process that works (like magic) for all manner of relationships.

With their new book and my deepening understanding in applying the 4-part plan, now sometimes called a “BEE-ing Attraction Plan,” the planning process that had been a traveling companion became an intimate friend.

Illuminating the expansion of the concepts, the authors build from the idea that marketing is all about relationships (in the first book)  to its new iteration, “Building relationships which are heart-centered and feel good to you.”

The varied stories in this book, shared through the voices of clients, create a level of specificity, spaciousness, and hope for all manner of sizes, shapes, and intents of plans — whether around growing a business, renting a dream house, or connecting with a soul mate.

What Makes YOU Tick?

At the heart of their process, and Part 2 of the 4-part plan, is a deep-inner-connection process called, “What Makes You Tick?” The “tick” as it’s called for short, is the ultimate foundation on which your relationships stand. What makes you “tick” is like water to a fish — you may not recognize or realize that’s what it is. It’s what you bring to every encounter in your life, whether you know it or not. Its power grows from the idea that “like attracts like,” so what makes you tick is also what makes your most perfect client tick.

Say the authors, “The Bee-ing Attraction Planning Process is about shifting paradigms. You must first become what you want to attract.” This whole new paradigm is unfolding under the nose of the crumbling infrastructure of the old way of business as usual. In this all-new business model, collaboration and cooperation take the lead over competition. It’s about bringing your heart to work and knowing that what Tim Sanders said is really true: Love really is the killer Ap. It’s about Being, Presence, Attraction, and Manifestation in their highest and best incarnations.

For me, one of the most memorable take-aways, among many, “The qualities that impressed me in others were in reality resonating within me,” reports one client. This is a ray of hope for me and so many people like me who have second guessed ourselves for ages!

For recovering perfectionists, you may wonder why your results don’t look like the ones in the book. Yes, I did too. “What am I doing wrong?” you may, like me, be asking. When you are sitting on the aisle of a 737 jet at 35,000 feet, you don’t realize you’re moving at several hundred miles per hour.  So too, in delving deeply into playing with this Strategic Attraction Plan, it helps to surround yourself with what Julia Cameron calls “believing mirrors.” Only then will you realize the progress you are making. Far from sitting still, you may suddenly discover you are getting off the plane in another country, far from where you started.

That is the power of putting the 4-part Strategic Attraction plan to work for you. Simple. But not easy. The plan calls on its users to go deep and bring forth the answers to the questions with radical honesty. And in so doing, miracles and magic do happen.

With its success stories and practical guidance, plus detailed explanations of putting the plan to work, templates, samples, and inspiration for creating your own 4-part plan, this is a visionary and refreshing (woo-woo-free) approach to creating a heart-centered business that really fits.

For those ready to step into, as client Doug Upchurch shares, “a different passion…[operating] from a different sense of ownership and power…” Bee-ing Attraction: What Love Has to Do with Business and Marketing is the perfect accompaniment.

Disclosure: Over the past year, I have gone deeply into this process, both through the Strategic Attraction certification training (so I’m certified to offer you this 4-part planning process) and during extensive coaching with Jan and Alan to build my sales muscles and refocus on what exactly IS my heart-centered business. If you would like to taste this 4-part planning process with me, send me an email at bjmiddendorf (at)gmail(dot)com, and we can open the discussion.

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• Delight Your People — Blog Challenge Post 22
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• The Right Guide
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Earlier this year, Danielle LaPorte published her multimedia masterpiece, The Fire Starter Sessions. I discovered this gem of  (and from) White Hot Truth (yes, this is the name of LaPorte’s web site) through the brilliant Ronna Detrick’s Renegade Conversations site and ezine. So that’s the meandering path I took to get to this entrepreneur’s treasure trove and believing mirror, allowing us to reflect back for ourselves our greatest power, insights, and opportunities.

The Fire Starter Sessions encompass an inspiring journey, with its clean design, vivid stories, video lessons/messages, and 43 pages of worksheets and questions that get you delving into your own flaming core essence, so you can bring those gifts from the core out into the world. It’s called a “digital experience.” LaPorte says, “This is about you defining your vocation, your work, your livelihood, your career, on your own terms.”  Lessons from her own entrepreneurial high-flying, interviews with thought leaders, and lists of resources round out the message.

Especially these past couple of years, so many people have been “trying” to play it safe life-wise, vocation-wise. There is no safe harbor anymore, if there ever was. And so, more timely than ever, comes this fiery voice of Danielle LaPorte, spilling out her White Hot Truth. I can’t say that our energies are a match. In fact, it seems an unlikely pairing, me and Danielle LaPorte in the same breath. And yet there is something so compelling in her message, something that makes me want to take out my eyeliner and put on high heels.

There’s deep truth-telling here, like in her discussion of “quality-easy” or what about this game-changer? “True strength is not necessarily about skill or adeptness. It‘s about vitality.” How many of us entrepreneurs choose to do what we’re decent at, even when there isn’t a spark of passion to be found any more? If you are suffering from such a lackluster approach, this is the antidote.

With its tagline, “Spark Your Genius. Ignite Your Business. Make it Matter,” this “digital experience for entrepreneurs” covers dreams and feelings, content, courage, and design in four modules:

• module 1: strength + desire: define yourself on your own terms
• module 2: identity + branding: you are not a box of cereal
• module 3: content + services + promotion
• module 4: reverie + courage

Most crucially, Danielle LaPorte shares the lesson of “How do you want to feel in the work you do?” This is absolutely at the heart of it all, and allows dreamers to pull on the dream that is their own — the one that fits just right. I also adore the thought that when something really fits, there’s an ease and grace in the doing.

The Fire Starter Sessions is a multimedia experience definitely worth checking out. Yes, I am an affiliate, and I recommend and believe in the value of this package. You can click on the links in this post, or click the orange box on the sidebar to learn more.

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It is so crucial that everyone WAKE UP!  The awakening and mindful action for the good of all and the healing of planet Gaia, Mother Earth, is long overdue. This is a clarion call to of those in the Cultural Creative Cohort.   It is more important than ever, and well past time, to get out of our own way.

[I've made some minor edits in the following piece so that it makes sense for 2010.]

How 50 Million Cultural Creatives Can Change the World: A Review and Consideration of The Cultural Creatives by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson

Do you ever feel like you just don’t fit in? Do you feel that people around you have a whole different set of values and beliefs? Do you find things important that aren’t on their radar screens, and vice versa? Are “getting ahead” and “looking out for number one” nowhere on your list, despite the best efforts of the media and consumer culture to persuade you otherwise?

When you speak of your dream — what you hope to accomplish — do you include relationships, concern for the planet and the next generations, social justice, sustainability, and your spiritual development? Do your dreams not look like what “everybody else” wants? Perhaps the mirror that will reflect you and your values back to you just isn’t in place — Yet.

It certainly isn’t available in the established big media companies, most corporate, education, and government institutions, or politics, where there is little or no support for people who dare to express such values. Surprisingly, despite your feelings of isolation, you are far from alone.

In fact, you may be part of a just-now-becoming-visible groundswell of cultural change. You may be a Cultural Creative. With the book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, Paul Ray and his wife and co-author Sherry Ruth Anderson are trying to hold up a mirror big enough to reflect this population back on itself.

“This book aims to sharpen our collective awareness with an in-depth look into who the Cultural Creatives are and what their emergence means for them and for all of us…. We believe that their self-awareness as a culture will help us all, help our civilization to develop the fresh solutions that we need so urgently now…. We hope that the evidence and the stories presented here will support the Cultural Creatives to grow into the promise they carry, not just for themselves but for the sake of all of us, and for the seventh generation.”

I was eagerly awaiting this book, and it did not disappoint. It outlines the big picture crafted out of research studies done by Ray, a macrosociologist concerned with the evolution of culture. And it is enriched by the personal stories of how individuals are authentically living their values, contributed by Anderson, a psychologist focusing on the qualities of inner experiences. A myriad of connections fire up the “Aha!” reaction, page after page.

“Cultural Creatives,” a phrase coined by Ray, reflects a growing group of people who are, innovation by innovation, changing the mind of our collective culture and reshaping the way we look at the world in which we live.

Fifty Million People Walking Their Talk
Fifty million? The author likens it to a country the size of France springing up in the middle of our nation. It is all but invisible to the media giants who report only on phenomena they can see. Cultural Creatives, until now, have been virtually invisible, except on those rare occasions when celebrities spoke of values, only to be met with scorn and cynicism from reporters. Such reactions have, in the past, effectively silenced all discussion of values in our public discourse, except for those on the Religious Right.

I’d previously written about Paul Ray and the Integral Culture (Conscious Choice, January 1999). At that time, the statistician-sociologist had conducted a significant national baseline study in 1994 sponsored by The Fetzer Institute and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. This random sample of the entire country’s population gave him the statistical evidence to say that there were 44 million Cultural Creatives in the U.S. alone.

A separate nationwide random population sample was selected for a 1999 study done for the Environmental Protection Agency. It served as a follow up and confirmed the findings of the first study with a significant difference — the population had increased from 44 million to 50 million over a period of five years. In hundreds of values-based research studies over thirteen years, in five hundred focus groups, and in sixty depth interviews, Ray connected with and surveyed well over 100,000 people. His findings are a tremendous contribution, providing concrete evidence, which can be replicated, for the cultural shift we are experiencing.

Paul Ray didn’t start out looking for Cultural Creatives. In his role as market research consultant, he worked at American LIVES, where he did values and lifestyle research for a variety of products, companies, and institutions. About fourteen years ago, he started to uncover a consistent percentage of adults who didn’t seem to fit into the usual categories. He noted this seeming irregularity.

Month after month, they consistently appeared. He wondered if their responses had to do with personal growth or with psychology. Upon closer inspection, he determined that these were people exploring a new way of life, with shared values, lifestyles, and worldview. Authenticity was their watchword. In study after study, he found people committed to living their values, to “walking their talk.”

Are You a Cultural Creative?
Ray emphasizes that “Cultural Creatives are the isolated many, not the isolated few.” These 50 million people have constructed their own lifestyles where they have attempted to create a day-to-day congruence between what they do and what they value. In isolation from one another, working on their own, millions have come to the same conclusions and values.

What are the values? How can you tell if you’re a Cultural Creative? Ray and Anderson have come up with nearly twenty values and lifestyle tendencies that mark Cultural Creatives. According to the authors, you are likely to be a Cultural Creative if the following values are important to you:

• You love nature and are deeply concerned about its destruction.
• You are strongly aware of the problems of the whole planet (global warming, destruction of rain forests, overpopulation, lack of ecological sustainability, exploitation of people in poorer countries) and want to see more action on them, such as limiting economic growth.
• You would be willing to pay more taxes or pay more for consumer goods if you knew the money would go to clean up the environment and to stop global warming.
• You place a great deal of importance on developing and maintaining your relationships.
• You value helping other people and bringing out their gifts.
• You actively volunteer.
• You are committed to health and healing, sustainability, and psychological and spiritual development.
• You like the exotic or foreign, and enjoy experiencing and learning about other ways of life.
• You mistrust the cynicism and pessimism of the media.
• You want to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country.

Dubbing this a cultural shift, Ray says, “As the culture changes, people change what they think is real. They change life priorities. What we are discovering is that in this group of people — and it is a shift that is happening all over the world — people are sharing care about the planet. They care about ecology. There is a growing concern among this group for personal relationships, personal growth, and with spiritual development…. Once you catch sight of these deep changes and track them, you can discover a lot about what matters most to people and how they will act. Values are the best single predictor of real behavior.”

Where Did Cultural Creatives Come From?
Currently, we live in the Moderns’ world, which has been developing since the Renaissance. Its main assumption is the march of progress. Its watchword is growth. The Modern worldview is so much a part of our cultural assumptions that, like fish in water, we often cannot quite “see” that it is actually a worldview,  not an absolute reality.

The Modern worldview has given us many benefits, including the medicines, air travel, and computers that we take for granted. Yet the single-minded focus of the Modernist agenda has generated intractable problems, including planetary devastation in the service of corporate growth. What Ray calls “Traditionals” respond to these problems by hearkening back to some imaginary “simpler time,” generally with the help of religious fundamentalism. Thus, Traditionals are often opposed to Moderns. Their mutual opposition comprises what the media refer to as the two “sides” in the “culture wars.”

Cultural creatives are part of a heretofore unacknowledged third group whose growing presence has been consistently reflected in Ray’s values-and-lifestyles surveys. This group is neither interested in the get-ahead, materialistic lifestyle of the Moderns, nor the zealous nostalgia of the Traditionals. Cultural Creatives are, by and large, people who have learned a different way to look at the world. Many of them emerged from the ranks of approximately twenty social movements over the past forty years.

“These movements changed our minds,” notes Ray. “They reframed the arguments. They weren’t just out there to grab their share.” Rather, they undertook a process of cultural mind-change, addressing the culture’s core values and lifestyles. “In fact, every facet of the American worldview and every one of its values has been affected by what the new social movements (and the consciousness movements) have taught us over the last forty years.

Cultural Creatives have been involved in more of these movements than the average population,” says Ray. The cumulative effect of all these grassroots movements is that they have shaped people who have built up trust in themselves, who do not have to look at the socially sanctioned arbiters and “authorities” for answers.

According to the authors, Cultural Creatives are accustomed to asking questions, and hanging out in a space of “not knowing.” Thus, they are able to ask tough questions and disrupt the status quo. Traditionals and Moderns perceive this ability as dangerous to business-as-usual, and they are correct.

The authors chart how social movements of the 1960s have “changed our minds” about a complex array of ethical issues — from environmental destruction and nuclear proliferation to civil rights and the role of women in society. They conclude, however, that we are hardly in a moral sewer. Rather, they argue that we are actually more moral now than we were during less conscious eras, eras to which the Traditionals or the Religious Right want to roll back the clocks.

As Ray and Anderson note, “Our moral concerns now are much richer and more complex…. Many problems that were tolerated or simply accepted before the 1960s are completely unacceptable today.” In fact, the authors contend that social activism and inner searching, both psychological and spiritual, are converging. Many Cultural Creatives are active, involved, and interested in a combination of three or more social and consciousness movements; the authors identify a 40 to 80 percent overlap among trends and movements.

This involvement is complemented by independently constructed lifestyles, in which people live in concert with their values and worldviews. In short, Cultural Creatives show a capacity for direct experience and the ability to reflect on that experience. The next step, then, is developing a community where they can share deep values and make the changes they see a need to make.

Connecting with Cultural Creatives
Paul Ray’s research has been instrumental in providing the underpinning for a number of organizations that see their constituencies as Cultural Creatives, or those businesses that serve the needs of Cultural Creatives. It shows that the market for this unwieldy group is growing at the tantalizing rate of 10 to 20 percent per year.

Natural Business magazine predicted that this new “Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability” (LOHAS) market would have $230 billion in U.S. sales for 2000, encompassing such business categories as sustainable economy, ecological lifestyles, healthy living, alternative health care, and personal development.

While journals like Conscious Choice served the consumers and activists who comprise the new market, Natural Business has created a business-professional trade magazine geared to companies and industries serving them. The mission of the Natural Business LOHAS Journal is “the promotion of sustainable business as a way to fundamentally alter the landscape for economic, social, and environmental change.” Its aim is to educate readers “about the growing LOHAS industry and to inspire innovation, creativity and dialogue between the companies and individuals that make up this diverse market, fostering a new paradigm of sustainable business practices that can help create positive change.”

[The Boulder-based LOHAS group just finished its annual meeting in late June, 2010. LOHAS market size numbers, depending on the source, are said now to range from $290 billion - $350 billion in consumer sales.]

In the best sense, their book, The Cultural Creatives, embodies a need that the authors so eloquently describe. “Because we are living in the time of the Between, we dare not be lulled into listening to the old stories over and over again. And that means that those who carry the wisdom for our time cannot be simply storytellers. They’ll have to be story-listeners, story-evokers, artists, and teachers of every sort who can call forth the stories we need now.”

As the authors observe, “Cultural Creatives must get together and do things. It’s time we made a new civilization. The promise of the future lies side by side with the threats.” Through their book, Anderson and Ray have begun acting upon their values with credibility, power, and a profound sense of artistry. They offer hope that planetary salvation, although not assured, at least may be an achievable possibility.

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So asks Seth Godin in his latest bestseller, Linchpin. I could go on and on about it. In fact, I have pages of notes, quotes, and inspirations. His latest is an impassioned plea for all of us to recognize our genius and use it — specifically in the workplace.  There’s a lot in here that dovetails with the message of “The Write Synergies Path to Owning Your Greatness,” of living your legacy and sharing your gifts with the world.

Seth Godin is speaking directly to the hearts of millions of dispirited working folk who walk around half alive most of the time because they thought their whole self was not welcome at work.

But stirring things up the way he does can be scary when so much in the work world is becoming commodified. (That old race to the bottom, lowest-cost goods and services achieved by finding the cheapest labor.) But some people and businesses manage to sidestep that commodification.

The story we’ve all assumed is that customers want the cheapest stuff. But maybe there’s a crack in that facade.  Don’t we see at least a few who are wanting something extraordinary in their customer experience as well? Some customers even seem willing to pay for that something “extra,” the unique and human, the creative, the “art.”

Seth Godin highlights that something extra as “emotional labor,” (from the work of Arlie Hochschild) and points out that this “emotional labor” may be the one thing that we are most suited to  provide. We are potentially geniuses, due in no small part to the emotional labor, the connections we make, the tenor of our interchanges when we allow our brilliant selves to shine. Yes, we have to come out of hiding and invisibility.

The “emotional labor” that we put into what we create becomes the basis of the art of our lives and work, the basis of the new maps of the territory that are so needed, the much-needed emotional connection in the exchanges of our work lives. Sounds good.

BUT for the Resistance. The heart of the book, the longest chapter, and the one Seth Godin actually “begs” his readers to read, is “The Resistance,” running 49 pages. Why do we regularly and systematically fall back to the old, seemingly “safe” habits of invisibility, of not standing out? He attributes this problem to what he terms “the lizard brain,” that has seen to our survival as a species for hundreds of thousands of years.

And this is exactly what we don’t need to do now. The lizard brain is leading people down the wrong path — the path of busywork, of doing what doesn’t matter, and not producing much of anything that does matter because we are so intent on keeping our heads down and staying invisible.

Seth Godin has trained himself to ignore the “lizard brain” and “ship.”  “Shipping,” in this context, is getting the work out there. I’ve been in business for myself for a decade now.  It’s moderately easier to “ship” as a solo — Getting the client work done and out there. It’s also somewhat easier to stand out as a solo and harder to hide. It’s much easier to take Seth Godin’s message to heart, because as solos, we are our own team. We have to create the gifts and the art, the indispensability as we serve our people, our “Tribes,” a term I’ve embraced from Seth Godin’s previous book of the same name.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

The publisher I worked for (before my foray into the entrepreneurial life) published some books from Seth Godin’s original book packaging company, eventually some by Seth Godin himself.  This decade-old connection reminds me that we in corporate businesses and entrepreneurial ventures alike have been holding our collective breaths, waiting for permission to show up fully.  We’ve been hiding out. Someone has pulled back the curtain on Oz. And it’s time to stop hiding.

Revel in the gifts of insight, the art, the perspectives that Seth Godin shares in his most personal book to date. The message ties back beautifully to one of his blog posts, “You Matter.”  Read it. It’s powerful. I mentioned this post in my blog earlier too.

The sign of a great book: Like a jazz combo, lots of improv and riffs flow from the central starting point.  That’s a big part of the gift that Seth Godin has made to us at the beginning of this new decade.  In his own blog and those of his circle and tribe, the ideas continue to flow, to be refined, discussed. We experience the concepts in motion, with people taking action, mobilizing around the insights to bring them off the page and into the office, taking things further.  It’s his gift, and it’s a big one. Get the artifact  — the book Linchpin — and enjoy the gifts. Don’t forget to continue the conversation.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

( If you click, you will be taken to the book’s Amazon page where I, as an affiliate, will get a small referral percentage if you purchase.)

More full disclosure: I was among the early recipients of the book to review in exchange for a donation to the Acumen fund.  Admittedly,  I’m late in “shipping” this commentary/riff/review.  But I hope that won’t stop you from exploring the gift that Seth Godin is offering. It’s high time we bring our whole selves to our work, and truly give our gifts and own our greatness.

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