Heart Centered Marketing Success for Empaths

Today’s Musings on Marketing and Magic starts a 4-part series on heart centered marketing and business and 4 specific ways of developing it.

Many marketing experts talk about heart centered marketing, or authentic marketing. But what does it actually mean to engage in heart centered marketing? How do you do it? And how can we cultivate it more?

The Four-Chambered Heart of Marketing

When I talk about heart-centeredness and marketing, I’m using one of the principles that my teacher Angeles Arrien, an anthropologist who studied and taught about perennial universal wisdom across cultures, called the four-chambered heart as the foundation. The four-chambered heart consists of open-heartedness, full-heartedness, strong-heartedness, and clear-heartedness.

Indigenous people believe that being in alignment with all aspects of the four-chambered heart allows us to sustain emotional and spiritual health, so the principle can really be applied to any aspect of your life. But I’m focusing on its application in our marketing and business activities here, and, specifically in today’s blog, on open-heartedness.

When we are open-hearted, we lead our life and business from a place of curiosity and generosity, a place where we are less critical and instead have increased access to our compassion and flexibility. There are several areas in marketing, and business in general, where we can track whether we come from a place of open-heartedness:

Open-Hearted Marketing: the Foundation is Compassion

Let’s start with criticality. Many of us can easily get caught up in criticality, judging ourselves and where we are in the process of business building: “I should be doing more”, “I should have more clients”, and so on. I don’t know about you, but none of this critical self-talk has ever helped me to actually move forward in any positive way. And, in that self-judgment there is also comparison involved. When I first started out with my business, I signed up for any business and marketing newsletter I could find that would offer me the promise of success and inadvertently I started to compare myself and where I was in the process of my business building to what these marketing “gurus” portrayed as their success and inevitably I fell short and my spiral of negative self-talk was set in motion. Once I started to learn to be more compassionate with myself, my process, and where I was with my marketing efforts in that moment, things started to open up for me.

Open-hearted Marketing: The Role of Curiosity

When we are living truly open-hearted, we are in a place of deep curiosity. This curiosity doesn’t have all the answers, but rather looks at what is true in the moment. I’m not saying that we let go of our expertise. People hire us as an expert who offers a solution to whatever issue they are currently facing. But we diminish our expertise when we think we already know what to do or say at any moment. I see this very often with marketing experts where everyone seems to have an opinion on “what you should be doing” rather than helping you discover what marketing approach is right for you and your unique being and offering.

Open-Hearted Marketing: the Need for Flexibility

Open-heartedness also includes being flexible. I often talk about how important consistency is for marketing success. And it is. Yet, we also have to maintain our flexibility so we evaluate our efforts and adjust and shift them where needed. This also includes flexibility to adjust to changes in the market place.

The more we start to access our open-heartedness, it allows us to access our full-heartedness, strong-heartedness, and clear-heartedness. How those apply to business I will explore in my next videos, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, I encourage you to track how open-hearted you and your marketing currently are.

Until next time, be magical!