Can Following Your Heart Transform Your Business?

Can Following Your Heart Transform Your Business? Hello everyone, I hope you are well. In today’s post, I will be sharing a guest post from Kat Byles, Founder of True Business School for creatives, leaders and changemakers who want to do business aligned with their true nature and purpose. She will explain why the heart is a better guide than the head of the industry. How following her heart transformed her own business. Use your heart as a guide to what you need to focus on in your business, plus five ways to listen to your heart to transform your business, including turning down the ‘volume’, getting out into nature, meditation, writing, and using breathwork.

Can Following Your Heart Transform Your Business?

Business orientates around the head, with the heart often dismissed as woo-woo, over-emotional, misguided, dangerous or weak. It is none of these things.

Business conducted from the head becomes distorted by misguided ego agendas, assumptions, limiting beliefs and what worked in the past. We can ignore our soul’s calling and creative expression in pursuit of profit, and our relationships and health can deteriorate as we burn out.

This is where I worked as a global communications director with some of the biggest names in the sport at just 42. Leaving my career behind, I followed my heart to Antigua and Barbuda. Immersion in nature restored my wellness and inspired me to True Business, a ground-breaking business model that leads with your heart.

Taking this radical leap of making the wisdom of your heart the creative engine of your business liberates your true nature and purpose. Who you are and what you are here for. It is home to your natural talents and gifts, creative potential, and contribution to the broader world, bringing you joy and fulfilment. You are free to bring your whole and authentic self to business.

Let Your Heart Guide You

As your heart guides you to focus on what matters most, resources of time and money are directed efficiently and effectively with minimal waste and distraction.

Your relationship with yourself improves as you reconnect with your values and meets your need to flourish. Then relationships with others deepen as you bring your true self and the heart’s higher nature qualities of wisdom, understanding and compassion to business relationships.

Bex Shindler, plant-based chef and founder of The Mindful Kitchen, was stuck by a fear of failing. Nine months after committing to following her heart, she was hired as the chef for the Black Eyed Peas. She had a fully booked diary of Ibiza retreats, fulfilling her purpose of providing compassionate food for the human world.

Simon Haas, a yoga philosopher and author, wanted to secure book reviews. By following his heart, he has become an international speaker at the United Nations in New York, yoga festivals in Mexico, Holland, France, Lithuania, and Costa Rica, selling thousands of books sharing ancient wisdom for the modern-day.

Maddy Cooper, the founder of a sustainability marketing agency, Brilliant Noise, was burnt out. Listening to her heart, Maddy reconnected with her purpose of creating a sustainable world for her children. She fell in love with her business, pitching and winning big global brands aligned with this purpose.

Five Ways To Listen To Your Heart& Transform Your Business

Turn Down The Volume

Cut out as much external noise-causing irritation, overstimulation, and stress to your mind as possible.

Turn off social media, news media, and newsletters from experts telling you this is the way to do it. Turn off phone notifications that constantly beep, interrupting your focus and flow, distracting, and pulling on your attention. Cut out stimulants, such as caffeine, that can amplify your thoughts, exacerbating unwanted, exhausting thoughts on repeat.

This doesn’t have to be forever. Now, turn down the volume to hear your own heart’s wisdom speak to you.

Get Into Nature

Step away from the computer and into the forests, rivers, oceans, meadows and trees. Breathe in the fresh air, move your body, stomp up the hill, get your feet on the earth or sandy beaches, and feel silky cool ocean water on your skin. Swim, surf, walk, climb, kayak, and snorkel. Let go of your busy, overactive mind and return to your physical body – natural rhythms rebooting your nervous system.

You may find solutions when working on a problem after walking around a lake. Through a plank of wood or along a beach. In nature, your heart’s wisdom and inspiration more easily reach you.

Burnt out, overworked, and crippled by thoughts, he was failing as a father. South African filmmaker Craig Foster began to immerse himself in nature through freediving. He encountered an octopus, which inspired him to pick up his camera again. He went to the sea daily, chronicling the life and intelligence of the octopus and their evolving relationship. This footage became the Oscar award-winning film ‘My Octopus Teacher, shared with millions globally on Netflix. The natural world opened Craig’s heart and restored his wellness. I began feeding him with creative inspiration bringing forth his life’s best work and educating us on the beauty of the natural world.

Practice Meditation

Ancient meditation practises us to connect deeply with our hearts’ calm, wise, sacred centre – our true self.

If your instant thought is like, I can’t meditate, I don’t know how or I can’t sit still. Take a moment to be the compassionate observer of your thoughts and feelings – no judgement, notice them. As the witness, you can step beyond your thoughts and feelings into innocence, like in the Rumi Poem: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Here you are curious, open and deeply receptive. Ask to receive your heart’s wisdom, wait in the quiet stillness, and listen. You will hear your heart’s calm, wise, deep, direct voice. The more you practice, the more you can discern your nature from your mind.

Get Your Pen and Paper Out

Journaling is a powerful practice for receiving your heart’s wisdom, intuition, and creative inspiration. It can help you become aware of any limitations, doubts, and fears, allow you to clear them, and connect you back to your heart’s wisdom and creative flow.

Julia Cameron’s book, The Artists Way, introduces the morning pages: on waking, three pages or 20 minutes of writing, a stream of consciousness to restore and revive your creativity. Try this. Or put pen to paper and journal around what is working in your business, focusing on what you appreciate and are grateful for. Soon enough, your heart’s wisdom will share your next step forward.

Just Breathe

Join a group breathwork session where a trained breathwork facilitator guides you through breathing exercises. And techniques focusing on your inhales and exhales to move beyond your mind and into your heart’s clarity and wisdom. Breathwork can also help you move through experiences of anxiety, stress, trauma, pain, grief and depression into a deep connection, love, and joy. To release stuck and stagnant energy-returning you to creative flow.

Try one or try them all. Find your best practice to listen to your heart. My favourite is a morning swim in the Caribbean Sea from our local village beach. With warm, gentle sunshine on my face, crystal clear, cool water on my skin, immersed in divine natural beauty, my heart’s wisdom is loud and clear.

Follow your heart. It knows who you are and what you are here for; it always serves your flourishing, creative freedom, and humanity.

About Kat Byles

Kat Byles is the Founder of True Business School for creatives, leaders and changemakers who want to do business aligned with their true nature and purpose. Kat helps people find their calling and create a company that provides wellness and creative and financial flourishing while contributing to humanity.

Web: www.KatByles.com  & www.True-Business-School.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katbyles/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/katbyles

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katbyles/