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TAG | Write Synergies Guru
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.”
–Marcel Proust
What makes you “see with new eyes?” In late June, I returned home from a week-long retreat just a short couple of hours’ drive from home.The retreat, in a beautiful, sacred space, was filled with radiant and divine people. It was a magical time out of time.
(And did you know that yesterday, July 25, was Day Out of Time Day, courtesy of the 13 moons, Mayan calendar?)
So from this June 2010 time out of time retreat, with people I’d never met, and yet who became like long-lost family to me, I hesitantly returned to my ordinary reality. But I returned with new eyes that saw the blessings in my life for what they were: true gifts of support in every way.
Somehow when I returned to our cozy house and expansive, lush garden, I saw what had been there all along in a totally fresh, and yes, radiant, way. Where we’ve lived, rooted, for more than two decades, shines with a renewed vigor and magic, visible through my newly polished eyes. I said, while on the retreat, that I lived in a Shangri La, although in the middle of urban Chicago. When I came home, that is indeed what I experienced.
In seeing with new eyes, I strive for maintaining consciousness, for appreciating the blessings, for stepping into each day as a gift. It is easy to appreciate. What is harder, at least for me, is to take the mindful action steps necessary to expand my presence within this holy, sacred space of my life.
Several weeks after my return from the retreat, we (husby, teenage son, et moi) ventured to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a preserved segment of Mother Earth tucked in between heavy smokestack industries on both sides. Lake Michigan was still cold, but the day was hot enough that the chill felt refreshing. I spied hawk flying over the beach twice, bent on some mission. The smell of pine tickled my nose as we walked along hot sands to the dune succession trail boardwalk through the preserved wild lands inland from the beach.
Counting my years along the shores of Lake Michigan, I realize it has held my heart for more than three decades, as I bask still in her flowing and liquid magic, a grateful acolyte to these central waters of Mother Earth.
I’d love to hear how you are seeing with new eyes. Take a look into your own life, your own backyard or treasure closet. What do you see when you look with new eyes? Where can you gain renewed energies from looking anew at what is familiar?
My friend and mentor Susan Castle is leading another magnificent, eye-opening retreat, this time within the sacred space of Sedona, Arizona. I’ll be there. I’d love to have you along! Retreat spaces are very limited. To learn about Susan and this opportunity for learning to “see with new eyes,” I invite you to step into her circle. Click here to learn more.
I wish you Abundant Blessings that are available when you are willing to see with new eyes.
Warmest regards to you,
from Bobbye Middendorf,
the Write Synergies Guru
“I’d really rather just be doing the work that is mine to do, practicing my art or craft or therapy or career or profession. What is all this about marketing?!”
I’ve heard variations on this phrase for years — starting with the authors I worked with at the publishing company that employed me. They saw marketing, at best, as a necessary evil.
Now that I’m a free agent, hiring out to write and market and coach and strategize with and for my clients, I regularly come across writers, artists, healers, coaches, therapists, designers, attorneys, entrepreneurs, and even bankers who deeply dislike (hate?!) marketing. They see it, at best, as a necessary evil.
These are perfectly capable people who seem baffled when it comes to marketing. They tap fearfully into the seemingly endless supply of variations on “marketing.” There’s corporate marketing, database marketing, SEO marketing, LOA marketing, internet marketing, social media marketing, MBA marketing, marketing trends, marketing research, marketing segmentation, branding, Superbowl marketing, direct response marketing, B-to-B marketing, B-to-C marketing, and we haven’t even touched advertising or PR, which might be included if you talk about integrated marketing or its longer-winded cousin, integrated marketing communications.
Are you intimidated yet? Are your palms sweating? Is fight or flight kicking in? Maybe this is why you hate marketing. Where are you in all this foreign-sounding gibberish? Where is your heart? Where is your gift? Where, even, are your people?
At the most fundamental level, for Conscious Creators, soul-preneurs, world-changers, visionaries, healers, and others in the soft sell marketing community, it really is all about your people. It’s about you and your community and connecting the two. We can talk about marketing without even going past the letter “C.”
Marketing is all about your Community. You can call it your circle, your clients, your customers, or even your audience. You can even go past “C” and call it your tribe. It’s all about your people. Well, what about them?
Marketing is all about Connecting. Connecting is a two-way process. You connect with them, and they connect with you. How do you connect? From my perspective as The Write Synergies Guru, I’m partial to making the connections via words.
But connections come in every sensory variety. Music connects. Visuals connect. Paintings. Sculpture. Movies. Architecture. Movement connects. The healing touch of massage therapy connects. Even the tantalizing smells from your local cafe-bakery make a connection.
Marketing = Connecting + Communicating. So you make this connection, and from this connection you communicate. As with connecting, above, all your senses have their ways of communicating. But unless you’re right in front of the bakery or the painting or on the massage chair, the actual connection is tough to maintain. Distance isn’t a friend for these ways of communicating.
That’s why words as a medium (though imperfect) can paint the sensory details in a way that makes the communications possible over long distances and across time and space. Words can connect. Words can bring alive the connections across the world.
Words may be stories (Jeanne Kolenda is a master at stories with a purpose.) or metaphors. Words may be how-to or checklists. Words make up the books, the info products, the blog posts, web sites, brochures, business cards, press releases and even the 140 character tweets that are the currency of our communications.
Words weave the background texts of our lives. Words, both spoken and written, are how we communicate!
You mean marketing is just about talking to people? In the broadest sense, yes. That’s exactly what marketing is.
Connect with your Community by Communicating your Content. We prefer, all things being equal, to do business with people we know, like, and trust. How, in this digital marketplace, do we learn to know, like, and trust strangers?
The bakery cannot communicate its smell across the city to connect with bread-lovers in another neighborhood. But our words, imbued with meaning, with the content of our expertise, shared appropriately and clearly, focused on helping our people address whatever issue they face, packaged in a way to be useful, our words can communicate valuable content.
Marketing is that remarkable bridge, weaving together you, your heart, your creation. It weaves these “Cs” of Community, Connection, Communication, and Content into your message and beams it to your people in a way that they can hear it, can take it in, can process it. Suddenly the two-way span back and forth across your bridge is open.
They walk across the bridge to you. You meet them on this bridge constructed out of words that communicate your content and connect with your community.
I call myself The Write Synergies Guru. Why guru? I made it up, though I have a genuine, if tenuous and academic, South Asian connection. I took Sanskrit at the University of Chicago for three years.
So did I choose this name just because of a connection with one of the most ancient, sacred languages?
For me, the key is in the term “sacred.” Because the work I do involves creating a sacred vessel around my clients and our conversations. Drawing from the deep and sacred roots of Sanskrit, I place myself firmly in a lineage of teachers whose work touches on the deep inner fire. Drawing out the soul of a client or their project and sharing it in words is a sacred trust.
I have taken “guru” as part of my public persona, not to attract mindless followers, but rather to invite into my circle and sacred space mindful, visionary people who are committed to becoming ever-strengthened in their own mindfulness, awareness, and consciousness. In essence, those who want to become their own gurus and their own best teachers, reaching out to exactly who or what they need as a resource in any given moment. They themselves become the sacred vessel.
But have I erred in taking this name? After all, many so-called gurus seem to have earned the bad rap they mostly receive these days. Guru means teacher in Sanskrit, or revered one, and that “revered” part is probably where things get dicey. Teacher, by itself, is pretty innocuous as a title, even in Sanskrit. That doesn’t give the term “guru” a free ride necessarily. I guess you just have to be mindful and discerning in choosing the gurus you hang with.
On being your own Guru
The following quote gets at the essence of my point: “You are your own teacher,” Mr. Gumucio said he was told. “You are responsible for your own experience.” This quote came from the New York Times story at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/fashion/25yoga.html?ref=style via a twitter reference by @zenpeacekeeper.
That quote, “You are your own teacher…You are responsible for your own experience,” is really at the root of being your own guru. It means being aware and mindful of your own experiences and what you need.
So in creating this post, I was intrigued to find my good friend Michael Toms at New Dimensions Radio has a show on exactly this topic: Michael has interviewed Jeff Brown taking about “finding your own inner guru.” You can check out the replay at http://www.newdimensions.org/flagship/3340/jeff-brown-finding-your-own-inner-guru/source: (It’s free till June 9. After that. it’s just $1.99 for an MP3.) I am a donating member of the New Dimensions Global Broadcasting Council. Your support can help keep this national treasure of recorded wisdom going.
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Write Synergies: What It Means — Blog Challenge Post 25
4 Comments | Posted by Bobbye in Synergies, Writing
Write Synergies. It’s the name of this blog. (Oh yes, along with copywriting. We’re getting to that tomorrow…with the case of the missing keyword…Watch for it!)
Write Synergies: It’s the name of the book that’s under construction, the process, the sub-processes, even the author, who calls herself (for heaven’s sake) the Write Synergies Guru. More on gurus coming too.
Needing to write a blog post to explain what Write Synergies means indicates that the name isn’t ideal. Maybe the people in the #blog30 challenge have been especially kind and have kept an open mind to explore such a non-keyword-named blog. (thank you.)
As I pondered how to reinvent myself once again –to rename this body of work, at one coach’s suggestion — (I’ve been doing reinventing rather regularly. To hear about my lifelong commitment to reset, listen to my BlogTalkRadio interview with Nina Price on her show, Push the Reset Button.) — What happened? A client said, “You know, that word synergies, it’s a perfect description of how it was, what happened, what you did, when you worked with me.” Whoa.
For the moment, I’m back to this word that no one understands–Synergies.
So, for the down and dirty explanation: Synergies = Energies + Synthesis. Synergies means energetically putting something together that’s greater than the sum of the parts. It encompasses the energies around bringing things together in new ways. (Remember the equation: thesis –>antithesis–>synthesis.) It brings together the opposites to create something brand new.
Bottling up the synergies magic through and with words.
Those hidden (or not so hidden) synergies are what I help people uncover in their own creative vision. Sometimes it’s something they didn’t even know was there.
The Write Synergies process supports conscious creators at any place along the spectrum of the creative process: in tapping their vision; in writing and polishing up their creations; with their copy, the message of the creation, so it connects; in their communicating and outreach to their tribes; even in finding and connecting to the tribes…And to do that, I write. I listen and write. Write and listen.
For people looking for the courage to call themselves writers and authors, who want help, mentoring, support, inspiration, and encouragement in their own writing process, I serve as coach, teacher, and guide.
I write for people and about their projects and creations. We collaborate on writing so my conscious creator clients build the strong inner foundation that will support their outer work of bringing their creation, book, web site, newsletter, or healing venture fully into the world.
I use words, written words primarily, to help my people generate results greater than the sum of the parts. I help people bring their creations to life and to light. I listen and write souls (and their gifts) into authentic expression. (To do this, I have an extensive toolkit of expertise and experience. Again, a topic for another day.)
No matter where you are in a process of writing and conscious creation, you may need support, a sounding board, someone whose expertise resides in all the many manifestations of the written word.
Write Synergies is an alchemical, transformative process that moves with you along the path of your heart and soul, to where you really want to go. I love being your guide, joining you on your creative journey.
And for my new friends from the 30-day blog challenge, #blog30 on Twitter, I want to acknowledge all the gifts and greatness of your expressions and messages in the conversations over this past month. Thank you. You are truly owning your greatness in the world with the unique manifestation of YOU!
Nina Price calls it “reset.” It’s that after-40 moment when the opportunity or the challenge is to recreate and reinvent oneself for enjoying the new half of life. Nina is host of Push the Reset Button on Blog Talk Radio. Through a couple of different connections, I find myself scheduled for an interview on her show on Saturday morning.
I’m coming out of the closet on the book I’m working on, the one whose content is supposed to be unfolding right here as part of the blog challenge. That is, Write Synergies: Creating the Map for Your Journey. [anyway, that's the current iteration!]
And in the interview, we’re also going to talk about my various reinventions of myself, what I call Bobbye 6.1, along with the Sanskrit Factor, Interdisciplinary Arts, and how writing can be a perfect companion for finding the vision and the inner gifts waiting to be expressed. Writing is also the key to bringing that inner vision quest out into the world. The key to constant reinvention is continually learning, creating, and trusting your own inner connections. As the Write Synergies Guru, I share how to use the writing process to become your own guru and live your legacy so you don’t die with the dream and vision stuck inside.
Nina has posted the show description and my bio at her page on Blog Talk Radio. I hope you will log onto Blog Talk Radio on Saturday at 11AM central time for a dose of reset and reinvention with yours truly.
Signing off on #blog30, day 3 of Connie Ragan Green’s Blog Challenge!
The Write Synergies Guru took her sweet time in getting up a sign up box and special report on this site. It’s up there now. See? Over to the right? And it feels like an accomplishment long in the making. Check it out: The Write Synergies Path to Owning Your Greatness: From Inner Journey to Outer Expression.
All I can say is that it takes as long as it takes. And still, there are likely refinements to the process. It’s all an experiment anyway. (Dale Dauten’s book from years ago, called The Max Strategy, was one of those business fables that provided this very useful perspective–it *is* all just an experiment anyway.) Let’s just see what happens.
A bit later, I will be co-presenting with Judith Sherven and Jim Sniechowski to the Soft Sell Marketers Association members–all about press releases.
It’s all experiment. It’s all process. It’s all about learning and curiosity and open-minded, open-hearted explorations.
Sivers (of CD Baby) reported on this band’s tribe-building experiment http://sivers.org/livecd . In the post titled “Emphasize meaning over price = More paid sales,” he calls for others to try it and report on their results. While this is focused on bands, I’d say, the more Conscious Creators who try it, the better.
All Conscious Creators — including visionary writers, authors, publishers, speakers, healers, and caregivers, as well as visual and musical artists — might glean some new marketing mojo by experimenting with this method of “connecting to the heart of your fans” for creating powerful resonance, building relationships, and building the greater community. It might be your social media experiment in generosity. And generosity can feed and grow in myriad ways.
As the Write Synergies Guru, I have to say that building community around generosity and authenticity are the keys to generating results greater than the sum of the parts, so ramp up those synergies!
My thanks to Terry Madl, Renaissance Man Extraordinaire, of Strange Attractor Press, for bringing this link to my attention.
When Judith and Jim, founders of the Soft Sell Marketers Association, asked members last week for a title for their daily newsletter, I played around with the bits and bytes on my keyboard and sent them a list of possibilities. They found one in my list that really resonated with them. A couple of days later, they responded enthusiastically, and on April 1, they published the newsletter with its new name, “Your Daily Heartbeat for Soft Sell Marketing.”
It’s great being able to make a contribution to a community that is doing so much to create a soft sell platform for internet marketing, providing a focus on selling as spiritual service. I see this as a powerful marketing trend that is growing exponentially. I so admire Judith and Jim for pulling back the curtain to reveal the realities of soft sell marketing on the internet. They do it live and in person at their Bridging Heart and Marketing Conference. (More on that at http://bridgingheartandmarketing.com/blog/)
It was also great to receive their public acknowledgment. We all like that! And they sent me a new PDF e-book on all the ins and outs of testimonials as a thank-you in appreciation for my contribution. We all like gifts!
Of course, what we all like most of all is to use our own gifts, to bring those gifts out into the public sphere and to see the gift of our brainchild succeed. One of the passions of The Write Synergies Guru is to name things. Capturing the essence of a book or newsletter with a great title, developing headlines that reach out and resonate in the heart of readers, helping clients own their greatness and express their authentic gifts…well…these are things I do for fun. That’s the best gift of all.
