Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in.
So this is pleasure month. It's May and somehow it is already the second week, I don't know where time is going. I feel like time speeds up in the summer, in the spring. Everything gets faster and brighter, more exciting, more full. At least that's true here for me.
Today has been what should theoretically have been a very spacious day and is absolutely, positively not. I'm racing. I'm tumbling from thing to thing. I'm even recording this in a tiny little gap between other things that need my attention and my time. I'm trying to decide if I should do this or that at every turn.
But these are the good problems to have, right? Like, this is what happens when we have an abundance of pleasure before us. The problem I've been having all winter, the one of "nothing seems good, nothing seems tasty, nothing seems enticing," is fading. And in its place, we have an abundance of pleasure. Which is an intensive's best environment, I think. I think we do best when everything looks good, when there's almost too much on the table. Because it forces us to really choose. We are- sometimes we can multitask, but really, really we're brilliant in the deep dive. And a deep dive means focus. And focus means knowing what you are doing and what you are not. And so it means letting go of things.
We just had a full moon, which is traditionally the letting go of things moon. That always surprises me because fullness makes me think of taking things on. But no, when your arms are full, you have to pass things by, you have to put things down. Even intensives- we only have so much capacity. We only have so much that we can do, and if we ignore that, well- that's not pretty.
So when we have an abundance of perfect things, an abundance of possibilities, and we see this so often in our own marketing. I know who I want to work with. I want to work with small business owners. I want to work with people who are still shaping the culture of their organization. I want to work with people who are ready and nimble to pivot. That's who I like best in this work. Because to my way of thinking that's where the most effective outcomes are.
I can help you work on changing the culture of your team in a ten thousand employee company. Yes. But What if we could change the whole company? What if we could catch that ten thousand employee company when it's still five or ten? Or twenty? Or fifty? What if we could change the way people think? Change the things people value? Change the things people prioritize?
What if the company itself, as its own entity, prioritized meeting people's needs. Prioritized ethics. Imagine how many more people wouldn't quit. Imagine how many people would stay and stay because it was a glorious place to work. Imagine how much loyalty you would build by being in true relationship with the people who worked there?
So my imagination makes me pick one. But my imagination also can imagine how organizations of ten thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, or more, could be transformed and could transform the world. Because that's a lot of people, that's a city worth of people. Imagine if an entire city prioritized- by culture, by default- prioritized what I'm calling psychological ergonomics. This is not my term. It just seems to be out there. If someone specific coined it, I can't find it.
Psychological ergonomics. Adapting the environment to the person. Not adjusting the keyboard height, but adjusting the systems and the rhythms and the expectations so that they work well with the people who are there. Assuming that the people are the most important thing.
Because of course, people are more important than the institutional structures that they're hired to uphold.
So how do we meet our own needs and the needs of those around us? So I can imagine how that impacts everybody, right? Like I have had several inquiries about doing this in a dating context, or a romantic context. And I've had a lot of people talk to me about how it changed their relationship with their child or their mother in law or their grandfather.
Understanding how being an intensive or an expansive changes your approach to the world. Understanding what it means to be an intensive in charge of anything. In charge of something. Understanding how our sense of our own rightness is both a blessing and a curse, and how it affects how we interact with other people, and how we can use that. and everything else, to make a better world. To make a better world starting with the world that we actually have control over.
And so I look at everybody and say, what do you have control over? How can this help? It can help everybody. And so marketing feels incredibly diffuse. Because I can imagine how it works for everybody. The question is, who can imagine with me? Who can join me in that imagining? Who can come with me? And who can make the space and the time and the money to really upend that part of their world? Not everyone can.
If it's a question of money- that's why I have low-cost and free resources. If it's a question of time, that's why I have asynchronous resources. But who can make it? Who can be in this all the way and really see what the fullness brings them? And that's how I narrow my marketing.
I was just in my coach's marketing workshop, and, you know, he was talking about how you can't market to everybody, which is old news. Everybody knows you can't market to everybody. Some people do. Except they don't they just market to a different specific somebody. They market by their personality. They market by their attitude. They market by, by how and who they are. They find their specific somebodies.
And it's not about psychographics and demographics. It's not about do I work with companies over or under five hundred people, or fifty. It's about: are you the right kind of quirky to work with me? And that's where intensiveness comes in. That's where intensiveness comes in. Because most of the people who want to make this work for them are intensives. So mostly, I work with intensives.
I work with small organizations that are ready to change, that are willing to do things really differently. I had the great privilege of working with the New Fashioned Company, which is exactly like that. That's why it's called that. They're this exquisite, boutique PR firm. And no, they're not paying me to say that. And they're really committed to values. They're really committed to ethics. They're really committed to disrupting the way it's always been and doing it better instead. And that is the key characteristic.
If you are a manager, if you are an owner, if you have enough say over your world to do things better; to do things differently; to find the new way- this can be part of that. There's so much, there's so much goodness possible. And it's deep, sweeping cultural change. But we got to start somewhere. We got to start in one corner. We've got to start with one perspective, one person, ten people, fifty people.
I bet there are at least a few hundred people who know what I'm talking about now. I wasn't sure that would be true when I wrote my book. I hope there are a lot more than that. And I dream of even more. But I can't hold that dream very well when it's dark and cold, and my brain has curled up in a corner and refused to come out. So I'm feeling that dream again now. There's so much pleasure, green, joy... how do we pick?
Start with the pleasure. Make the list of all of the pleasures. And then- and then- allow pragmatism to come in. Where can you be most effective? Where can you be most joyful? Where will you be most whole? What will serve the world?
Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you soon.
