by Tara Joyce | Mar 5, 2015 | Cultural Creativity, Pay What It's Worth Pricing
I’m so intrigued by what I’m witnessing. With time, I’m learning of more and more business experimenting with not setting prices. Their individual approaches to doing so are wholly unique, with nuances tailored to meet their specific business needs. What is shared by each however, is their need to identify and communicate what exactly they are asking for their customer to do, if their customer is not paying a set price.
How exactly does the exchange work?
What are my needs as the seller and what role does the customer play in meeting them?
What does the buyer need and what role do I play in meeting them?
What is truly being exchanged and valued between us?
While their answers may change with experience, in order to sell now, these businesses need to determine what they are asking for their buyer to do, and how to communicate it clearly. For as the buyer, before I commit to make a purchase, I need to understand what I am giving in order to receive what you are selling. I need to understand my end of our agreement.
Whether I set prices or not as a business owner, I need to have clarity around the question, “What am I asking for in my business exchanges?” It fortifies my integrity (and my customer’s) to establish norms, accountability and disclosure around my system for giving and receiving with them. The closer I get to knowing what I need AND what I’ve been asking for, AND how they may differ, the closer I am to creating my most value-adding and harmonious business exchanges.
In every relationship, business or not, in order for it to be healthy and mutually beneficial, I need to be responsible to my needs by identifying and communicating them. It is of deep service to my Self and to the person I am in relationship with to do the work to recognize my needs and to share them compassionately. For in growing my own awareness, I create space for the other person’s needs to be recognized too — by them and by me. Only when both of our needs are recognized and fulfilled is our relationship a healthy and sustainable one. And one where we can both trust and grow wealthy in our exchange of giving and receiving.
In your own business, do you know what you’re asking for? Are you receiving what you need? If you find there’s a space in-between, please take note of it. The more you learn about and explore this space of lack, the closer you’ll be to whole-ing it. It’s from this place of responsibility (to your own needs and your customers) that you can and will grow harmoniously together.
photo credit: Fibonacci Blue
by Tara Joyce | Feb 26, 2015 | Cultural Creativity
Can competing not help to better me, without needing to create conflict in my inner self and my outer world?
It’s not competition itself that creates conflict in my inner being, but rather the intention behind that competition. Competing because I desire victory, and being a winner at the hands of another being a loser, undoubtedly creates conflict. For I have unconsciously decided that I am not enough, and that I’ll be more if someone else is less. Competition, in this intention, is an act of being better than others, and reducing myself. It’s an ego concept that invariably creates distress.
However, if I see the value in the (competitive) action done for it’s own sake, whether alone (competing with myself) or in the company of others (competing against other competitors), it can bring out the best in everyone. In this instance I am doing my best — and wanting others to do the same. Which is rather empowering and transformational, and conflict-free.
The beauty of competing for my best self is the only person I am “beating” and surpassing is the older me, and I “win” by becoming a better version of me — and helping you to do the same. I don’t know of a more valuable and supportive outcome to create than that, do you?
photo credit: tableatny
by Tara Joyce | Feb 20, 2015 | Personal Branding, Self/Business Growth
My lower mind is the part of my mental construct that demands for me to be a fixed thing. It desires definition and certainty. It desires to pin ME down. Whereas my higher mind understands the freedom I receive from being nobody.
My higher mind sees the value of having no sense of self that is fixed. It has no desire to define ME. When I am free from this burden of desire, I am more wholly me. I am who I AM. Whereas my lower mind needs to attach to certain attributes; fortifying and grounding me — in my expertise, in my knowledgability, and in my desirability. It relishes defining me as a real somebody.
What value does tying myself down hold? Where can I go when I hold myself in place? I know I need not fix myself in place. I know I need not define ME. What I need is to practice letting go of the desire to be desirable. What I need is to accept ignorance is the path to my freedom.
In my desperation to be seen as special, may I find my wisdom and my power to be the nobody I truly am.
photo credit: Sam Simpson
by Tara Joyce | Feb 9, 2015 | Cultural Creativity, Self/Business Growth
We’ve created a culture of leaving people feeling as though they’re missing something. We’ve created a collective belief that, as a community and as an individual, we are not whole, nor okay.
We’ve created a commercial system that grows fat and comfortable on promoting these feelings of lack and fragmentation. We’ve bought the idea that we can consume something or someone that can leave us feeling more whole.
In the midst of our chaos of un-wholeness, we’ve created deep poverty. More than lacking material resources, deep poverty lives in our feelings and thoughts of lack — lack of ability, of confidence, and of agency — and our disbelief that we can make a plan and change our lives. This mindset can affect the materially poor and rich alike, and it’s from this place that we’ve created the material poverty of our world, and our cultural messages of lack.
Business and culture, excitingly, just as they helped shape these problems, are also powerful spaces to transform deep poverty. There is enormous potential within these spaces to create shifts away from these cultural and economic messages of lack and fear. In this moment, there is so much space and need for actions of abundance; we are desperately in need of people and businesses who actively invest in their own inherent wholeness, and ours. These positive entities are our tools for cultural and economic transformation, and their messages of abundance and of truth are integral for us to heal.
I invite you to take a moment now and feel that place inside you that believes in your own un-wholeness. Sense the amazing transformational power that pain contains… Trust that in working to heal your own beliefs of un-wholeness, you have the power to transform your whole world.
photo credit: Horia Varlan
by Tara Joyce | Jan 27, 2015 | Cultural Creativity, Self/Business Growth
I received this intriguing question recently from a reader; “Do you know where this (Cultural Creative) concept stands today?”
Where do we, the Cultural Creatives, stand today? From what I observe, we, and our ways of being and doing, are growing quietly. More and more of us are learning about “Cultural Creativity” and resonating with it, and feeling inspired to more deeply connect with their values and others who share them.
I notice that “Cultural Creativity” seems to have grown far larger than the words Paul Ray used (in 2000) to describe this growing culture and movement. There are many words, concepts, and ideas to communicate our ways of being and doing. The philosopher, Ken Wilbur, in my mind has done the most to forward the cultural importance of our consciously growing community. He has written, taught and grown extensively the concept of Integral Culture (and Theory) which is another, and more deeply explored, concept identifying the Cultural Creative way of being and doing. There are schools of thought (an Institute) for Integral approaches to such disciplines as Politics and Ecology.
Personally, I had the pleasure of attending an Integral Coaching program a few year back. It was expanding… and interestingly, it was dominated by Canadian Government employees. It seems the government of Canada is embracing Cultural Creativity in their thinking and approaches. I find that truly exciting!
Beyond Wilbur’s work, I see our Creative Culture emerging everywhere I look. New/old, more conscious approaches to things emerge each day. I can see now what CC’s needed to acknowledge and recognize each other (in 2000, when Ray wrote the book) was a authentic means for connecting in a global way, so we could truly feel our weight and presence. We needed the web, and the time-space to learn and understand its ability to empower us. And now, fifteen years later, it’s old enough that we’re beginning to figure out how to truly connect with each other here.
What do you think?
Where do you feel our Cultural Creative movement?
Email me, I’d love to hear from you.
photo credit: Glyn Lowe
