Aliveness in Marketing

Today I was thinking about how my relationship with marketing has transformed completely over the past few years, and have noticed a similar shift in many passion-centered clients, colleagues and collaborators. It used to be the dreaded "necessary evil" of running a business...and now it is an enthusiastic sharing (in moderation, and with conscious respect for others). The shift had to do with learning to engage, trust and truly value my calling, and letting go of the old baggage I had associated with marketing.

As an entrepreneur, when your deepest aliveness - your soul's call combined with your unique creativity in the world - informs your business and you believe in and value it with your whole heart, marketing shifts from being the excrutiating "have-to" into sharing something really alive and valuable. You feel and know you are in service of something meaningful and greater than yourself. Financial energy integrates with creative energy and service energy. Aliveness, meaning, creativity and income-generation come together.

Marketing, then - within the context awareness and honoring - becomes an enthusiastic sharing of this aliveness so that others can join in, participate, and add their creativity, passion and meaning to the mix. It becomes part of a larger evolving process - simultaneously generative for self, others and the whole. The old static "What's in it for me?" becomes a dynamic "What's in it for we?!" It is not a means to an end, but an ongoing process of serving something larger than oneself.

 

Comments

[Lynette Jensen]

Michelle, thank you, I agree. Marketing, and even advertising, is just communication, and the drive to communicate with each other is very strong in human beings. It helps us all cooperate and keeps us safe.
So, if as you say, what we are marketing is genuine, whether it's a product or ourselves, it can be a natural extension of our enthusiasm and authenticity.

[Michelle]

Thanks Lynette. I had to make some internal shifts to be able to really own that it is an extension of our highest service - as long as it is consciously centered in it. I like how you connect it with keeping us safe.

[Monisha Mittal]

Love your line, "what's in it for we." I really appreciate the 'turn around' you provide on marketing. I never thought of that. I have always valued marketing as a skill set but turned away at a young age based on what I perceived as exploitative outcomes for corporate goals. Your post helped open an important door here. Thank you.

[Michelle]

Thanks so much, Monisha. Took me a while to let go of the ways I had commonly seen it being used - and all my own beliefs about what is means to market something - to embrace integrating it in a new, generative way.

[Connie Ridgway]

I'm interested in helping with the Creative Emergence conference in which you said you needed helpers who then attend with no charge. I tried your link and it didn't work, so hope this gets to the right place.

Thanks,
Connie Ridgway, small business owner
Whole-person Counseling, Training for Therapists
202-966-8230
www.FullCircleCreativeHealing.com