Canadian Small Business Women

Connection, Synergy, Community

Find YOUR Way

How is it December? I mean, did someone figure out how to collapse the space-time continuum? Hmmm…interesting thought. What would you do if you could? 

What if you could pick any point in your life, in your business, career, in your love life? 

What if you could go to a specific moment in time and shift ONE thing, without any of the messy ripple effects that science tells us would inevitably occur? 

What would it be? 

I’m a girl of the 80s so I have PLENTY of moments to choose from. 

I’m also a recovered marketer, which adds to the selection of vignettes that could be re-written. 

And, I have also spent about a decade ‘reinventing’ myself (part of the recovery process) often feeling as though I just couldn’t stop shaking the snowglobe…more rewrites. 

It’s an interesting exercise, one I use with my clients who are wrestling with finding their ‘brand’…of course, as a recovered marketer I don’t call it that; I use words that feel more human, like creation, contribution and so on. 

The process can be fun (and yes, it has been challenging for, especially for those who work with others in challenging places) but here’s the Endgame behind it and why it’s worth it. 

  • • 

We can’t stop time. 

We can’t go back in time. 

We can’t rewrite the past and…that’s the WHOLE point. 

It is the SUM of our experiences – the good, the bad and the ugly – that make up our unique, individual ‘creation’ or contribution, inside our business.

It is all the micro moments that we sometimes WISH we could rewrite that become the real point of intersection that can unite us with our customers. 

Whether the customers you work with are ‘B2B’ or ‘B2C’, there are elements from your journey that intersect with theirs. 

I work with a diverse array of business people – from coaches, naturopaths and plumber, to downstream business services – like graphic designers, accountants, virtual assistants – and beyond. 

And this has played out each time. 

It’s not necessarily the WHOLE of your journey but there is always, at least one moment, from within all the micro moments that galvanizes itself and gets woven into the core of your contribution, what we create in and through our business. 

I know what you’re thinking, this is business, not personal. 

Our customers choose us based on what we can do for them, based on our competency…nothing else. 

Hmmm…interesting thought and I think intuitively we know this isn’t the whole story. 

I also think it’s going to be something that gets put to the test over the next decade, as consumers (that’s us) really start to look at who they are doing business with. 

It’s not new, we’ve been seeing the shift for 20 years (maybe longer) and we’ve been feeling the tug ‘o war for decades…as businesses grew bigger and created arms length relationships, we adapted…we didn’t like it but we adapted…and we’re recalibrating each time something in the macro world shifts. 

  • • 

Let’s start with the seismic shift that Napster set off in the music industry, in 1999. 

One industry found itself turned upside down and inside out and for a couple of years after, there was a lot of uncertainty, frustration and polarized positions. The music industry just wasn’t prepared to have their world rocked, the way Napster rocked it.

Then, things began to settle and even as they settled, the impact created a ripple throughout multiple aspects of business (movies, DVDs and more)

New entrants came into the market, like Apple with iTunes. A tent was erected and the circus contained. 

If you look at KEY inflection points from 1999-2002, the metrics that I think are most important SHIFTED…specifically, Share of Revenue to Artists started to climb. 

Trendlines for those who are and have been directly connected to the creation of music increased. 

Last month, I shared some insights from a book written just after the 2009 U.S. housing crisis. I shared a few of the most important, relevant and significant parallels between what ‘we’ did and how our values shifted then, in the wake of that crisis and how many of those same shifts showed up in 2020. 

  • • 

So let’s tie this together. 

It’s the SUM of our experiences that point us to our contribution (and the community of customers we are best suited to work with) AND we cannot go back in time. 

We have tremendous power at our fingertips to look back through our recent (and ancient) past for wisdom and reassurance. 

Whether you look to 2009, 2000, the late 1800s and the Industrial Revolution or the 15th century and the Italian Renaissance; no matter what 2020 looked like we have every reason to believe that we are on the cusp of a creative period of time. 

That, those who are directly related to the CREATION of things, bringing their own key experiences into those creations (contributions, etc.) – the way musicians do – well, I’ll let you consider the likely outcomes.

In the Science of Getting Rich, written in 1903 by Wallace D. Wattles, there is a great line of text, he says: 

“You are to become creators, not competitors. You must get rid of the thought of competition. You are to create, not compete for what has already been created.” 

So what are the experiences that are indelibly connected to the work you do (or the work you want to do, would love to do and maybe even, feel that you are here to do)? 

How can those experiences enable you to CREATE something new, something different, something that has not yet been created? 

I’ll give you a hint based on what I found after a lengthy Eat Pray Love journey… 

There is nothing new under the sun…except you (and me) and…who we are is what we have to offer. 

  • • 

What I saw repeated over and over again, in the midst of all the micro moments of 2020 was that we are finding our way forward. 

We are finding our way, the way we did during the Renaissance, the Revolution, the 2000 music recalibration and 2009 shift, as a business community, as a community of local businesses and as a global community… 

…and, we are finding it, our way – our own individual, gloriously original way, in the midst of all those macro moments. 

And that’s the whole point. 

Listen to more in one of my first podcasts – Three Keys • Are You an Original? 

Explore more of how I support the smallest SMBs in the MICRO moments at www.becomingcoherent.com 

 

Tricia Murray is strategic guide, speaker, author, and podcast host whose core community is built around change-makers, agents of change and game-changers. She connects the smallest of SMBs to more, and her ‘people’ go on to create more, experience more and create the experience of more inside their business & beyond it.

Her hybrid approach incorporates DIY, group and 1:1 guided pathways each designed to strategically simplify that which has been made incredibly complicated, especially for solo and micro business owners. Her process is backed by universal and timeless wisdom from both science and spiritual traditions, and enables individuals to tune in, sync up and amplify the change they want to create and experience – inside the business & beyond.

Explore more @ www.becomingcoherent.com

Create the experience of more in an upcoming event • https://bit.ly/bci-events-triciamurray

Connect to more inside my Mighty Coherent Community

Link: https://bit.ly/bci-community-LI

Creating Coherent Change

Over the summer, I touched on a number of ‘soft subjects’, in part because there was a
harshness and seriousness to our world that I wanted to intentionally lighten .

Last month, I shared my belief that 2020 has changed the ‘game’.

And, when the game gets changed it puts us on a spectrum with crisis and chaos at one end and a stoic resistance to weather any storm, on the other.

Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum I found my own ‘coherence’ zone.
The bandwidth where I find clarity, understanding and consistently create and experience more – more health, wealth, meaning and love.

Inside that zone I am able to remain concerned and still consider how to create something new out of where I’ve been.

Inside that zone, we find our ability to tune in, sync up and amplify more of what works for us – for our business, our customers and our endgame – inside the business & beyond.

I believe we all have access to our coherence zone and once we find it, we begin to practice coming back to it, fine-tuning it and recalibrating plan A, B, C…from within it.

In a recent Instagram video, author of Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert shared that she has had a spiritual practice for more than 20 years and, “it’s times like this that we have been practicing for.”

Overnight, we have found ourselves concerned with and scrambling to consider, what’s
next.

Overnight, we have found ourselves trying to see further, see more of the big picture and see more clearly, what’s relevant and which pieces are MOST significant to our picture.

Overnight, we have all become disruptors being disrupted and recalibrating and redefining our individual coherence zones in the face of crisis, change and the shift.

SPEND SHIFT & THE SHIFT
In 2010, John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio wrote ‘Spend Shift’. It was an insight-led and data-supported commentary on core value shifts they saw emerge out of the 2009 housing crisis in the United States.

Their insights revealed five primary shifts that consumers made and the ripple effect. By their estimates, more than 80% of the population experienced those value shifts to some degree, which produced a growing sense of:
● Resilience – an indestructible spirit and eventually, optimism that magnified
opportunities
● Self-Reliance – people ‘retooled’ and returned to core traditions and they began to
redefine ‘more’ to mean better for their communities and themselves
● A Full-Life Focus – people adopted a nimble, adaptable and a more ‘mindful’
approach to consumption and living
● Cooperative Consumerism – specifically collaboration and creating new options
that solve new problems or old problems, differently
● Materialism to the Material – status shifted to simplicity; purpose and character
prevailed over PURE profit and charisma, and creativity and authenticity became
hallmarks of the new ‘good life’.

So why am I sharing this? And, why did I choose Spend Shift to kick start a whole new season of C360 Lunch and Learns with my community?

Because the game has been changed.

And when the game gets changed it means something has shifted. Something at the most subtle levels inside business and beyond – with us as owners/business professionals, with our customers/clients and with what we want from our business realm across a life 360.

As I re-read their thoughts, in preparation for my conversation this past month, one of
the things that struck me the most was, “…’we’ began to make adjustments long before anyone had even begun to talk about meltdowns, bailouts and foreclosure rescue schemes…Something deep inside of us knew we were on the wrong path and we didn’t need to be told to seek a better direction.”

(Spend Shift, 2010)

Now, if this is your first encounter with me, it’s probably helpful to know that I’m a self-defined scientific-spiritualist, in business and in life.

I value both and SEE both as opposite sides of the same coin, so a part of me wasn’t surprised to read that their ‘data’ and insights pointed to our deeply intuitive nature.

However, I confess I was completely unprepared to read about it in this book. Their data and their insights made it clear that there was a shift, which preceded the changes that surfaced and the crisis that ensued.

Now, most of us believe that ‘we’ didn’t cause the crisis our world has experienced in 2020, but the underlying principles remain as it relates to OUR corner of the world – our business, our customer relationships and our life.

We have experienced a crisis, the game has been changed and the shifts that we need to make, in order to continue to create more and experience more, can only happen if we make them one degree at a time.

In 2010, I saw changes taking place inside the business I’d help build for the better part of 15 years.

By 2012, I was in full-on crisis mode.

Our instinct is to move in 180º. To seek a revolution – or revolutionary outcomes – and that ultimately has us trying to change everything as we react to what we see happening around us.

In an instinctive reaction to the crisis that emerged around me, I did take myself 180º.

I quit a 15 year career in business, sold my ownership stake, spent four years in degree studies related to psychology, sociology and world religions; trained as a yoga therapist, started my first business, closed my first business; and, in the process created one crisis after another.

When all was said and done, I found myself coming full circle and landing about 30º to 45º off where I had begun.

Doing similar things for different people.

Doing those things differently and gradually, one degree at a time, creating something new out of where I’d been.

After the single longest Eat Pray Love journey on record I share with people today that, Every crisis creates change; but not every change needs to bring us to the edge of crisis.

So how can we create coherent change and unlock more in the midst of the shift:
1 – Step Back. See More. Not everyone entered this crisis in the same place so what this means for you specifically, will be different than your neighbour, your business partner, your spouse or for me. And that is the BEAUTY of finding your coherence zone.
2 – Tune In. Let Go. What is clear to you, what makes sense for you and what feels like a strong, consistent signal for you – maybe yours alone. As I tuned in, I needed to let go of a LOT that simply put, wasn’t creating more and wasn’t enabling me to experience more.
3 – Dare to be Different. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~Margret Mead. DARE to do something different, to do something differently! Dare to BE different; because different is what makes the difference. Dare to believe that even as the game has changed – maybe even because the game has changed – you can now change the way you play it.

Connect to More •••
Join a Mighty Coherent Community @ https://bit.ly/bci-community
Unlock More in a C360 Lunch & Learn @ http://bit.ly/bci-C360-Lunch-Learn

 

Tricia Murray is strategic guide, speaker, author, and podcast host whose core community is built around change-makers, agents of change and game-changers. She connects the smallest of SMBs to more, and her ‘people’ go on to create more, experience more and create the experience of more inside their business & beyond it.

Her hybrid approach incorporates DIY, group and 1:1 guided pathways each designed to strategically simplify that which has been made incredibly complicated, especially for solo and micro business owners. Her process is backed by universal and timeless wisdom from both science and spiritual traditions, and enables individuals to tune in, sync up and amplify the change they want to create and experience – inside the business & beyond.

Explore more @ www.becomingcoherent.com

Create the experience of more in an upcoming event • https://bit.ly/bci-events-triciamurray

Connect to more inside my Mighty Coherent Community

Link: https://bit.ly/bci-community-LI

Infinite Games & Endgames

Last month I met reality head on…I don’t try to short-circuit or side step the fact that in 2020 the game has been changed and it leads me this month to talk about the game itself – specifically in Business.

In 2019, Simon Sinek released a book called the Infinite Game and it was through his perspective as an anthropologist and business consultant to some of the most recognizable brands in the world that he shared,

“Business is an infinite game”

For many, many, MANY years I was playing an infinite game as a finite player…I didn’t know it, I tuned into that reality over a period of time, which I describe as my Eat Pray Love journey. I also sync’d up with sort of a how-to manual that enabled me to change the game I was playing and in may respects, become a different kind of player.

I share more about one strategically simple piece of advice we are ALL given as children that helps us understand how the game becomes finite in nature, and how to start to shift it one degree at time.

And a little of what I learned as I climbed out of a version of the game defined by competition, conflict and scarcity was that I was being pulled to create the experience of more for others.

Connect to more in 1:1 Strategy Call with me and assess if you’re being called to climb higher, create more or change the game you’re playing.

https://bit.ly/Calibration-Call-Tricia-Coherence

 

Tricia Murray is strategic guide, speaker, author, and podcast host whose core community is built around change-makers, agents of change and game-changers. She connects the smallest of SMBs to more, and her ‘people’ go on to create more, experience more and create the experience of more inside their business & beyond it.

Her hybrid approach incorporates DIY, group and 1:1 guided pathways each designed to strategically simplify that which has been made incredibly complicated, especially for solo and micro business owners. Her process is backed by universal and timeless wisdom from both science and spiritual traditions, and enables individuals to tune in, sync up and amplify the change they want to create and experience – inside the business & beyond.

Explore more @ www.becomingcoherent.com

Create the experience of more in an upcoming event • https://bit.ly/bci-events-triciamurray

Connect to more inside my Mighty Coherent Community

Link: https://bit.ly/bci-community-LI

Strategically Simplifying ‘MORE’

Last month I began a conversation…albeit it was still largely a one-sided conversation until you stepped into my Mighty Coherent Community. That is not atypical for where “Business” on a whole has evolved over the past 150 years…and some of my key resources tell me that is going to go through some pretty significant changes.

Great! You say…it’s not like we all haven’t been through multiple waves of change and that’s just 2020! Change is inevitable and intuitively we crave it…but the sheer volume and pace of change has become more than most of us really know how to manage and that became evident in 2020…I don’t know a single person who wasn’t impacted by the edge we all came to this year – myself included.

My extensive journey, training and mentoring over the past decade in ‘becoming coherent’ was put to the test this year and I recalibrated time and time again, inside the business & beyond it.

So I want to invite you to check-in…how are you doing? I mean really doing? Just between you and the wall…

Are you doing more, struggling to make it all work or are you able to be really honest with yourself and acknowledge that you might be standing at the edge of chaos?

I’ve stood at every one of those edges and found that there is indeed more beyond the edge AND we can strategically simplify multiple things to step us back from the edge, or move us beyond it, which I touch on in this month’s video.

Connect to more on October 15 **apologies, the date was changed after the video was recorded**

Link: https://bit.ly/bci-events-triciamurray

 

Tricia Murray is strategic guide, speaker, author, and podcast host whose core community is built around change-makers, agents of change and game-changers. She connects the smallest of SMBs to more, and her ‘people’ go on to create more, experience more and create the experience of more inside their business & beyond it.

Her hybrid approach incorporates DIY, group and 1:1 guided pathways each designed to strategically simplify that which has been made incredibly complicated, especially for solo and micro business owners. Her process is backed by universal and timeless wisdom from both science and spiritual traditions, and enables individuals to tune in, sync up and amplify the change they want to create and experience – inside the business & beyond.

Explore more @ www.becomingcoherent.com

Create the experience of more in an upcoming event • https://bit.ly/bci-events-triciamurray

Connect to more inside my Mighty Coherent Community

Link: https://bit.ly/bci-community-LI

Relationships, Introductions and What Ifs

This is my first conversation with this community…the community of Canadian Small Business Women. Of course it’s not the first conversation I’ve had with Canadian businesses – I come out of a 20-year career in communications, business strategy and architecting customer relationships where I worked with some of the largest businesses in Canada (and the United States), including Mark’s Work Wearhouse & Harley-Davidson. Over time, however, I found myself gravitating to smaller (and smaller) businesses and today I am a Strategic Guide to some of the estimated 70-80% of business owners who are ‘solo’ or working with a team of less than 5-10 employees. 

In this initial conversation, you’ll find what you might expect the first time you meet someone…a little about me and then I turn the microphone over to you so to speak. That’s the essence of strong, two-way relationships. It can’t be all monologues and broadcasting; there have to be purposeful pauses that create the opportunity for dialogue. So I’m going to ask four specific ‘what if’ questions, just as I would if we WERE talking 1:1, and would allow me to get a sense of where you are today – inside the business & beyond. 

Now, ‘what if’ is a tricky question…95% of the time we ask it – there is a connection to three things I mention in this video that have come to shape the culture of Business today and the paradigm, which surrounds a great deal of that culture. 

I think it’s only fair to share what else you might expect over the next few months, my ‘endgame’ if you will. My endgame here is strategically simply, to coherently connect you with a few things that create more inside the business so you can experience more beyond it. 

Tricia Murray is strategic guide, speaker, author, and podcast host whose core community is built around change-makers, agents of change and game-changers. She connects the smallest of SMBs to more, and her ‘people’ go on to create more, experience more and create the experience of more inside their business & beyond it.

Her hybrid approach incorporates DIY, group and 1:1 guided pathways each designed to strategically simplify that which has been made incredibly complicated, especially for solo and micro business owners. Her process is backed by universal and timeless wisdom from both science and spiritual traditions, and enables individuals to tune in, sync up and amplify the change they want to create and experience – inside the business & beyond.

Explore more @ www.becomingcoherent.com

Create the experience of more in an upcoming event • https://bit.ly/bci-events-triciamurray

Connect to more inside my Mighty Coherent Community

Link: https://bit.ly/bci-community-LI

Stay Social with Canadian Small Business Women: