Life here in the U.S. is hard, and it’s probably going to get harder. (If you’re not in the U.S., I’m so sorry for how much our country is affecting the globe…)

There are incredibly destructive political and economic forces in motion through our federal government- and although one person has been the focus for all of this, the truth is that the mechanisms for what have been happening have been planned for and put in place over decades, with many people in power collaborating on it.

p.s. Yes, you can develop your business from this love.

Unfortunately… it was boring, academic, and wasn’t really going to get anyone’s attention. 

This is a really common struggle – boring headlines. 

Yet, my client resisted making a more flashy or catchy headline. Too carnival, too flashy, too much trying to get attention, and it felt terrible to them.

And I support their resistance completely. Not only does it feel gross, but attempts to “get attention” like that usually create headlines that feel forced, weird, and they don’t really work, because then they look click-baity.

So, let’s take a step back and help you understand what a headline is, and what it’s purpose is, and who it really belongs to.

First off, I want to say that there is an incredible amount of study that goes into headlines to maximize eyeballs and attention… and I’m not dealing with any of that. 

For your business, you don’t need a completely optimized headline, you just need one that connects with your audience.

So, what’s the job of the headline?

The job of the headline is NOT to describe your offer. It’s NOT to make a sale. It’s NOT to pull people in. Trying to do any of these things is a surefire way to tie yourself up in knots, and end up with something that feels forced and doesn’t work.

Instead, think of the headline as belonging to the audience, not to you. What I mean, is that your offer, or your content, if it’s well-crafted, if there is intention and love and care behind it, is here to help people in your audience.

People who need help, because they are facing something that isn’t working the way they want it to.

I say, give the headline to those people. What I mean by that, is that your headline should be an echo of the question or statement that your audience is struggling with.

So, for instance, with this article, I know plenty of folks who really struggle with headlines. And nearly everyone I talk to is asking, “How do I write a headline that isn’t completely gross, and yet attracts attention?”

Right? Right? Is that a question you ask yourself, at least sometimes? So, what did I title the article?

“Writing headlines that attract attention without being gross.”

I could have said, “How to write headlines that attract attention without being gross.” Or…

“Is it possible to write a headline that attracts attention without being gross?”

Or, “How in the heck do you write a headline that works, without being gross?”

All versions of the same thing. It’s a pretty direct echo of what the audience is asking. It’s meant to be a dialogue bubble, if you will, for what folks who face this problem are saying or asking.

What about more complex offers?

With complex offers, where you are looking at lots of different issues and nuances, it is more of a process, for sure.

So, for example, with our recent Heart Of Money & Power course, which covered a LOT of ground, here was the headline I used, and mind you the course has been filling for years with this headline.

“So much money and power in this world… Why is it hard to access your own power, and to have enough money to thrive?”

Nothing fancy, or hyped, or click-baity. It’s just a simple statement and question that I’ve heard voiced hundreds if not thousands of times.

It’s true that a headline does not have room for a lot of nuance. You do need to lean into a central or foundational question or issue, and then bring in the nuance within the content below.

Is there more to it than this?

Well, sure. You can get more focused and detailed in crafting of headlines. But, on the other hand, you don’t have to. This is a solid, good-enough way to write effective headlines. 

If you can let go of the pursuit of the perfect, and embrace the “well heck, that’s pretty good. Let’s go with that.” you’ll get a LOT farther with your business.

Your turn.

Do you have an offer or a piece of content that you want a good headline for? What is a defining or foundational issue that your offer or content helps your audience handle? And what is it that your audience is asking or saying to themselves about that issue?

Write it out. Write it in conversational language. Write out five different versions of it, and see what you think.

And, if you’re willing, share them! I’d love to see what you come up with.

with love,

Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

This is the kind of nitty-gritty help you get in the Learning Community

Our Learning Community is open for new members until April 10, or until we reach capacity.

Giving hands-on help is precisely why we are limiting capacity. We love, I personally love, digging in with members, and helping them- whether it’s tweaking wording in their marketing, or coming up with the overall plan, or figuring out how to communicate a price rise to current clients, or facing an emotionally draining issue of any sort within the business…

Or any one of a thousands things that goes into making your business really work.

There’s a clinic coming up later in April only for the members specifically on making your website really effective. But there’s also the multiple calls during the week to meet different schedules and different needs.

And… at the heart of it all, is spiritual connection, nourishment and healing. This is not just mechanical how-to. It’s about bringing your full heart in, it’s about honoring your spiritual, ethical self. It’s about doing business the way our hearts really want us to.

And yet, also, making the business work, really work, so you can depend on it to support you.

I think you’d have to look very hard to find this much support, this kind of unique, spiritually-centered loving care for your business, at this price.

I was talking to one of our clients recently, and we were discussing creating offers, and content, and marketing… the whole thing of making the business visible in various ways.

I’ve been studying it all for 25 years, and I’m not bored yet!

This kind of love for what you do is common, but it leads to overwhelming clients. Because you, as the practitioner, tend to know so darn much about what you do, you want to be really complete in how you share it with your clients.

There is a good intention here! When folks do this, they don’t want them to suffer unnecessarily, or to miss anything. there is a desire to be complete in service to caring for people.

Here’s the challenge, though: clients rarely want to become practitioners of the modality.

One of the things to be honest about ourselves when we creating content for folks, in courses, or just simply in client education, is to ask whether we’re creating practitioner-level content, in terms of depth, breadth and completeness? 

If the answer is yes, the correct response is to stop it!

Think about how long it takes to become a competent practitioner, in whatever modality. How many classes, how many months or years? How much practice?

To become truly competent often takes years. 

Clients don’t want that. They don’t want anything like it. 

Giving the minimum as an expression of care.

I want to suggest that you start giving WAY less. Not as a way to protect yourself, or to be miserly in expressing your gifts to people.

No, I want to encourage you to give way less as an expression of deep care, of real awareness of how much your clients can take in, how much they can process, and how much they can act on, when they don’t want to be practitioners themselves.

This requires clarity.

In order to carry this out, it requires taking a little time to get clear on what outcome you’re wanting for people, and a real awareness of what outcome they are wanting for themselves.

Then, if you think through what is the minimum I can give that will get them that outcome, that can be a guiding light for you in avoiding overgiving.

Take a moment now.

Think of one of your offers, either one you’ve already created, or one you’ve been dreaming of. Are you clear what the client/participant would want from this? 

Once you are clear about that, and you have an awareness of how little capacity they might have to take in new information, process it, and act on it… what’s the minimum you have to do to help them get that outcome?

What do you notice? How does it feel to give less from a place of deep care?

with love,

Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

What do you do with them all? Trying to act on them can overwhelm your business, undermining momentum and confusing your audience.

 And yet not acting on them can feel like refusing the muse.

 Before I tell you what I recommend, I want to explain a spiritual reality as described by the Sufis.

 The Imaginal world.

 In Sufi cosmology, the Divine has many layers, or worlds, to our reality, and one of them is called the Imaginal world. In this world, images and meaning are matched up, and it happens very, very quickly.

 However, it is not a physical world, or one that carries any lasting reality to it.

For instance, a butterfly might be connected with an idea of beauty, and we get that in a dream. But it’s not a permanently assigned meaning, it just carries that meaning in that instance. Next time, a butterfly might carry a different meaning for us, like something be short-lived, or something being delicate.

Many of the meaning-image matches will serve a purpose in a moment, and then evaporate, like dew in the morning sun.

 You’ve probably experienced this, where you’ve had an idea come in, and then later… where is it? You can’t remember it.

 The miss-step in this situation is that many folks try to take these sparks of meaning, which are significant and impactful in their moment, and try to create something permanent out of it.

 Here’s some approaches I recommend experimenting with when confronted with many, many ideas.

 Appreciation.

Above, I mentioned dew in the morning sun. Sometimes things are meant to be savored, but not preserved. What if you could appreciate the ideas as they come in, but not feel attached to them?

 See which ones stick.

Sometimes there is something deeper or more persistent in one of these ideas. Watch for those that stick around.

 This is different than trying to capture or preserve everything. We can take conscious heart awareness and appreciation of the ideas as they land, witnessing them. And then, hours or a day later, we may notice that a particular one or three of those ideas stuck around.

 Write it down. Lean into it a little bit.

 Create content before programs.

Many people leap directly into trying to turn the ideas into programs, or offers, or entire wings of their business, and that can be exhausting and overwhelming.

 Just try writing an article, or shooting a video to share with your audience, or to start to build an audience.

 Or even just a short social media post.

 For those that last, they turn into realities.

If an article or post or video gets a lot of attention, and creates some momentum… maybe it could become a webinar, and then maybe a paid course or offer of some sort?

 If you sit with an idea for awhile and write it up, and it comes in more strongly, and you develop it over time, it may become part of your business, in small ways, and then in bigger ways.

 I know this is simple…

I see folks get so overwhelmed thinking that everything that comes in must be honored, and that honoring somehow becomes taking each idea to its ultimate expression.

 Please be kind and gentle with yourself. It says in my tradition that the Divine is closer to you than your jugular vein, that the Oneness from which we come and from which we aren’t separate in any way, knows our abilities and our capacities and our situation intimately, even better than we know ourselves.

 This Oneness would never ask us to be overwhelmed carrying out elaborate versions of each spark that comes in. Rather, we can delight in the endless creativity available to our hearts, and then follow nature, taking our time, noticing which seeds germinate and which don’t.

 I’ve mentioned how in the late summer the hickory trees in our woods will drop a LOT of nuts… all of them nonviable. The trees know which nuts aren’t going to produce a tree or nut meat, and dump them, while the living, edible and grow-able nuts drop later in the fall once they are done developing.

 It’s okay to let things go that may look beautiful, and may even be inspiring in the moment, but aren’t destined to have an enduring existence.

 This way, you can focus on the ones that really are meant to root and reach for the sky, taking your business with it.

 with love,

Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

I’m not going to predict any more…

It’s been a few weeks that I’ve confidently been stating that the website is almost ready to launch. We keep running into technical issues, and the truth is that I made the announcement prematurely, before truly understand the scope of technical detail that needed to be handled.

And boy oh boy, did that realization feel terrible! Oy… but, good people are bringing their best to this project, and it will get done!

In the meantime, I’ll let you know that yes, soon(ish) you will be able to join our Learning Community. And, soon(ish) we will be offering a home study version of the Heart of Money & Power course.

If you aren’t wanting to wait, and need support, I do have small group coaching space, and some individual deep-dive business assessment slots available.

You can see details here: Working with Mark (Scroll down to “Two alternatives to long term work)

 Or here: Mark’s Small Group Coaching

 And, as always, love and love!

In our Learning Community, on a group coaching call, someone mentioned that they really wanted to get clients… but they didn’t want to be pushy.

Take a walk with me in the woods, even though I’m surrounded by ATV’s reving their engines, and neighbors practicing with their guns for hunting season.

How does your heart feel now? What do you notice within yourself?

with love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

The Learning Community will be opening for new members.

We’re in the middle of redoing our website- the design won’t change much immediately, first we’re redoing all the backend systems, some of which very badly needed replacing. We’re finishing up today, with testing over the next day or two, and if all goes well, everything will be rock solid.

So, next week, we’ll be inviting folks in to join our Learning Community. In March there’s a coaching clinic on Crafting Your Offer, to support you in, yes, crafting an offer that works for you and is profitable, and helps your clients. There’s a Deepening Call on Clearing Neediness. And March 21, there’s a Virtual Retreat for going deep.

Plus all the regular support that is happening. I will tell you that we have made the decision to cap membership at around 225 members. Right now, if you’re on one of our group calls and raise your hand, you almost certainly get called on. If you post in our online group, you get responded to. You don’t get lost.

We want to preserve that, so we’re capping the membership, and we’ll only raise it beyond that if we fill up, and see we can care for everyone, and we can bring in any additional resources to support folks.

So, if you’re thinking about joining us, take a look, and as long as you’re on this list, we’ll let you know when we open.
Here: The Heart of Business Learning Community

Which got us onto the topic of filters in marketing. That’s a fantastic topic, but today I want to talk at a more fundamental level, because some folks are inadvertently using their marketing as a way to push people away, rather than invite them in.

Let’s talk about it.

When you look at your own marketing with this in mind, did you combine the filter and the invite, or is your marketing an open-hearted invitation?

with love,
Mark

p.s. Six Month Business Boost
In the video discussion above, this is the kind of miss-step that can hold a business stuck at a certain ceiling.

Yet, iterating, with heart and care and clarity, can make your marketing so much more clear and strong, and way more effective.

There are all kinds of unconscious places that businesses get caught up like this, plus the spiritual/emotional tangles where folks give their power away, or otherwise block their business from working.

If your business is stuck in the low-to-mid five figures, and could use really active, hands-on help to iterate not just one thing, but all the various aspects of your business that may be creating unwanted friction…

May I suggest this six month business boost?

There are only five spots. If you think maybe one of those spots is yours, take a look at the page above, fill out the application, and let’s talk!

(This blog space is dedicated to caring for you and your business. I have and will continue to speak up politically in this space as well, but I also don’t want love and care taken away from your business, and here is where I want to give your business love and support.)

I was on the February planning call in our Learning Community, and one of our members was talking about feeling shaky in their business. Now, there’s more story than that, but I don’t to break confidentiality.

What I did want to bring to you today is that it’s not uncommon for someone to feel shaky about their business. And yet, misinterpreting that shakiness can create a lot of unnecessary problems.

I want to show you my yet-to-be-built grape arbor (planned for the spring), and talk about feeling shaky in your business.

How does this land on your heart? What do you notice? What becomes possible?

With love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

Small groups are powerful.

I’ve facilitated truly small group coaching for years now. And by “truly small group” I mean six or fewer in the group, with guaranteed focus time in live calls, and availability for support between calls.

Generally these groups are for folks that beyond the very beginnings- meaning the business is exists, and has some flow, but maybe not enough, and not dependably enough, and there are things that the business needs, and there is healing and strengthening of the heart the owner needs.

In fact, I used to run two groups, but I slimmed down my client commitments a few years ago, and have only run a single group for at least two years now. 

I’m thinking of opening a second group once more. It would meet twice per month for 90 minutes, it would max out actually at five members, not six.

And like I’ve done forever, the first part of each group call would be a spiritual immersion/teaching, to help strengthen and anchor sovereignty, and guidance, and connection to love in the context of business.

Incredibly nourishing format, real connection and guidance.

If you’re interested in having this kind of spiritual and business-saavy guidance during this bumpy time, and you really want, or need, to depend on your business to support you, I’d love to hear from you.

Reply to this email. Or, you can fill out the form on this page.