One of my clients, “Joyce”, had been in a 60-day email exchange with a Fortune 500 company. After choosing not to follow-up anymore, the company emailed confirming a date for her presentation and agreed to her full speaker fee.
Another client, “Alice”, with zero corporate consulting experience, received a call for a full-day consulting opportunity. In less than a week she was on a plane to an international tropical island (where the consulting opportunity would take place) and had her five-figure payment in her bank account.
Yours truly noted that her fall speaking calendar looked a little lean. Ten minutes after this reflection, a dream speaking opportunity showed up—with an offer to present at an invite-only conference alongside some of my favorite TED speakers and Super Soul Sunday guests.
All of these opportunities manifested last week. And behind them was one simple practice—surrender.
While surrender often gets conflated with fatalism or apathy, it’s actually a very active, positive and considerably more spiritual practice.
Surrender means you:
- Create a specific, evocative vision for what it is you want.
- You feel your way into that vision through breath and meditation so you experience the reality of that vision in the present moment.
- You declare you are ready for the miracle, and then you turn it over to a higher power, to the universe. You get out of the way and let the divine do the work.
When Joyce stopped playing email ping pong with her prospective client and prioritized creating the presentation she wanted to give, the company finally stopped treating her like an overzealous job seeker, engaged her like the professional she is, and put her on their calendar.
To appreciate the full miracle Alice experienced, first it’s important to understand her backstory. Although Alice has enjoyed tremendous visibility in her service-driven business—including a handful of celebrity and influencer clients and multiple TV appearances—she has consistently under estimated her value and undercharged her clients. As a result, she is often in a feast or famine business cycle. This last month, it’s been a bit of a famine—and with a hefty tax bill on the horizon Alice was experiencing tremendous anxiety. Rather than default to her usual habit of reaching out to previous clients and offering a special where she under charges even more than usual, instead she surrendered. Big time. She got down on her knees, asked the big guy upstairs to show her a better way, and within a couple of days she got the call that radically and positively changed her financial situation—and her sense of her own value.
And in my case, after I made the observation that despite a busy fall I’d like to call in a couple of additional speaking opportunities, I closed my eyes and meditated. In that meditation, I reconnected to the power I felt earlier in the month delivering a keynote at a college women’s empowerment symposium and allowed that vision to evolve. As it did, I expanded my vision (and felt it deep in my bones). I saw and felt myself sharing the stage with a few of my favorite thought leaders. As I mentioned earlier, when the call came almost immediately after, two of these people’s names were mentioned as being in contract negotiations for the same event!
Now, I’m not suggesting that if you create a vision of yourself speaking at TED or being interviewed by Oprah your dream will automatically become a reality in less than 24 hours. Surrender is not about manipulating an outcome. Sometimes the vision won’t come to pass if it’s not in alignment with your higher good.
I learned this in the lead-up to getting booked to speak at the UN last year. (I had been hustling hard for another speaking gig, and when I finally stopped chasing the event organizer who was playing games with me, something even better than what I wanted showed up.)
Consistently booking quality speaking and consulting opportunities requires clarity (of your message, your value and who you want to serve).
It requires focused effort (to generate leads, get in front of decision makers and move interested parties from interest to agreement).
And above all, it requires surrender.
I’d love for you to practices the 3 steps to surrender I outlined above and apply them to your own speaking, business and visibility desires. And in the meantime, let me know what you are turning over to the divine in the comments below.
Know somebody who may be hustling a little too hard for their results (and to feel worthy)? Share this post with them!
