Self Promotion

When you are in your own business or a soloist, branding and self promotion are intrinsic to your endeavours.

Looked at with too much deliberation, these can feel daunting. Done with a sense of humour and adventure, they can become a most creative form of self-expression. It can be so rewarding to get yourself out there and see the results.

The term ‘self-promotion’ has an egotistical ring to it, so don’t see it that way. Focus on who you are, what you love, what you want to share and the people who respond to your message. You will end up promoting yourself extensively in an authentic and graceful way.

Since the release of my book INSIGHTS in November 2007, I have had the joy of promoting, publicising and marketing it. A book is newsworthy, so it gives you an angle with which to approach the media and have your say in them.

The joy for me has been in doing so without attachment. I don’t expect anything from anyone and have put myself under no pressure to make anything of the book. It’s pure fun, the kind I love.

I wait until I am in the mood to speak to people about my book and business and act on my PR list then. I don’t make it into a job, I let it be what I really want to do.

I respond immediately to an idea when it comes to me, like when I’m driving or reading and I think of a radio station or editor or publication to approach. When someone makes a suggestion and it lights me up, I act on it.

If you look back over the last year, I have probably put in just 2-4 hours of work a week into book promotion and the benefits have been remarkable.

It has built my personal and business brands enormously, and done the book justice. INSIGHTS has received about 30 exposures in magazines, newspapers and on radio and television so far, and, with my enthusiastic yet serene support, they are still coming thick and fast.

So, take the pressure off and put yourself out there, how and when you feel like it, just the way you are.

The Global Economy and The Law Of Attraction

A reader asked me to comment on the law of attraction and how it might relate to the global economy, so here are my thoughts.

I have watched The Secret a few times and encountered its message in various places over the years. It gives you a warm feeling and does tap into something fundamental and part of the way things work in the universe.

The sense that we attract into being what we attend to with feeling rings true. We are essentially creative beings, whether we are aware of and deliberate about it or not. It’s not the whole picture by any means but it is part of it.

So how does this relate to the current global economic and systemic collapse?

First, we have brought on what is happening. We have attracted it with fear. The collective consciousness is largely fear based and the way we conduct ourselves economically and otherwise is based on avoiding our fears of not enough. Of course, we thus induce them.

A minute minority manipulating the markets for grotesque individual gain at the expense of the whole is not a trusting and connected way to live. Everyone else taking their place in the power structure isn’t either. Greed and subtle slavery are two sides of the same coin, the one currently being flushed down the toilet.

In terms of sorting things out, I don’t feel the law of attraction has much value. It is based on bringing about what we want and is, in that way, quite infantile. The obsession in people development circles and the world generally with getting what we want is outdated and the root of the problems we now have.

If we are aware of what we really want, not a mass of desires but a state of harmonious well being, then maybe we can use the law of attraction to bring it about. But we are much more likely to confuse our desires for what we really want and bring about more unbalanced living.

What we really want is already here. It is our true nature. We need to settle into it, disentangle ourselves from the world we have created from fear and wanting and identifying with the ego and its images, and find our formless selves.

From here balance will restore itself and we can begin to live intelligently.