The Wisdom of Platitudes

You have probably heard, “Do what you love and the money will come”, “No matter what your plan is, the right people show up at the right time”, and “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

And you have heard me say, “Blah, blah, blah….”

I am writing because I was proven wrong this past weekend.  I will get to that in a moment.

First, I want to share how I laughed when the August issue ofO arrived a week or two ago.  As is my custom, I read What I Know for Sure first.  It was a piece on how Oprah has always followed her gut on her biggest life decisions.  I knew as I was reading the piece Oprah was speaking in part about the current tenuous nature of her creation of the OWN network. Currently, it does not have the best ratings, press or a very complete offering.  I can say the same thing about my Don’t Die™ brand.

I created and began marketing the first Don’t Die With Your Book Inside You workshop on June 14.  I had a modest goal of 30 participants.  That goal was set for two main reasons:  1)I wanted enough diversity in the room to make the workshop stimulating for the attendees and 2) I wanted it to be economically beneficial for me.  I chose Stillpoint Center for Spiritual Development as the location as much for convenience as I did for any business reason. 

What happened was the following:

Ten participants signed up.  Their hair was blond, their skin was brown, they represented countries near and far, there was no central spiritual or religious denomination.  Yet there was one thing they all had in common:   they came in for individual reasons and left 10 hours later knowing they shared more in common than any of them could have ever anticipated. 

After the first night of working together, one of the participants arrived with a gift for me.  In the gift bag I found two things:  a beautiful Thank You note to me for arriving as her teacher and a little bowl with the message To Teach Is to Touch a Life Forever.
Sometimes the business of personal development makes no economic ‘cents’ and yet investing in my passion to share the Don’t Die Spirit continues to make all the sense in the world.  Go figure!

Thank you Rose Pinard for seeing that before I did!