In preparing for an entrepreneur ship class I’m teaching in a few weeks at UC Santa Cruz Extension, I was remembering that I began Brush Dance, thinking it was an environmental products mail order catalogue. I had studied the mail order business while getting my MBA degree and was excited by this business model (this was the late 1980’s.) In our second year of business, I noticed that though 90% of our marketing and nearly all our focus and energy were aimed at growing a successful mail order business, more than 50% of our sales were from stores and other mail order catalogs. Reality (i.e. our customers) seemed to have a clearer sense of the business than my idea of the business. We then spent the next year to two years transforming the business, from a mail order focus to a wholesale focus – our revenue doubled every year for the following five years…

This is a lesson that I continue to learn from – as a coach, a facilitator, and in relationships.

I was recently facilitating a retreat of CEO’s that was billed as a Zen retreat. This was a terrific idea, except that this particular group of CEO’s was not very interested in meditation, or Zen… I had to find out what they were interested in, what the issues were, and what really mattered to them, in that moment. This REALLY was a Zen retreat for me – needing to let go of my ideas and show up for what was actually needed.