I’m writing to you from Santa Cruz, where I am on the first leg of a whirlwind tour of California.

It starts here at Jesse Koren and Sharla Jacobs’ JV Retreat for the Conscious Business Leader community. Then, out to the Santa Cruz mountains for a top secret meeting about a community/land development project I am involved in and down to San Diego for a night of ceremony with the elders and then up to Ojai to meet with an artist I am supporting to build out the next level of his already successful online business.

In the meantime, we are planning for the big roll out of the complete Money Map Life Planning process, which begins with a training on 12/19. You’re invited! Sign up here to get the details first.

Now, before I get off track … I have something very important to talk with you about:

This week, I got a request from a reader asking for more business advice and less “love woes and breakups … feuding with your partners … bankruptcies … lawsuits … and loud gulps of water on your webinars.”

She went on to say “I just wonder how many of these types of off-topic emails I’m going to have to go through until there’s something of value that relates to modern marketing, business, etc. Perhaps I’m the one who’s off topic.”

So let me start by saying, Thank You. I so appreciate clear requests. I take them in, keep what’s true and, as Nicole Daedone (founder of OneTaste) says, poop out the rest.

What I took from your request is that I can write more specifically and directly about business and that would serve the audience. Received, heard and happening, starting today, now, here.

Aaaaannnndddd, dear reader, I think you are missing something very, very, very, very important.

Eyes Wide Open is all about building your life and business awake, aware and on your terms. It’s not about how to market better. It’s not even about how to make more money. It’s about how you can show up most fully as the person you truly want to be in the world, in every relationship you are in — business, self, life, love, etc.

So if it’s straight up marketing advice you are looking for, you are off topic. Though before you go, I would recommend you take this marketing advice very seriously:

BE ALL OF WHO YOU ARE AS FULLY AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN IN EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR BUSINESS, INCLUDING YOUR MARKETING.  {Tweet It!}

By doing so, you will attract to you exactly who you are meant to work with, from clients, to vendors, to team members, to prospects.  If you don’t like who you are attracting, see it as the perfect reflection of how you are showing up and before you change any marketing, change yourself.

If you can’t figure out how to bring all of who you are, look at where you are hiding the parts of yourself that you judge as “not good” or “ugly” or “bad”. Yep, bring more of that.

I write about my love life, breakups with business partners, lawsuits and bankruptcies because it is in the heart of those relationships and events that we can learn the most about ourselves and how to be in business. So perhaps go back and read what I wrote and look for the business lessons.

In fact, let’s have a contest. I’m going to reward the full Money Map Life Planning process to someone who can go back and mine my past blogs and love letter posts and share with me the three best business lessons they gleaned from my writings. This is a $4,000 program. But anyone can win it and learn a lot in the process. Read here.

While you are doing that, I’ll share the business advice I am most learning myself right now.

This first came into my awareness a couple of times this week, once with a new love interest and then when I got to speak with Liz Dialto as she interviewed me for her Entheos series coming out this Spring (I’ll send you an invite).

It’s this.

Bring your full “bitch” early on in each relationship. Whatever she looks like, the part that’s gonna come out later on anyway, bring her out early. Let your partner (business, love, life, whatever) see her early on so you can see how your partner is with that part of you.  If your partner doesn’t handle that “ugly” part of you well, even when he or she is resourced, it’s simply not a relationship match, move on.

If you aren’t down with bringing your full bitch, how about even just a little bit of upset? How about you even just stand up for yourself, or say that thing that you are biting your tongue about, or that you vented to your husband so you wouldn’t vomit it all over your business partner.

Bring it. Negotiate that agreement. Ask for what you want. Say what’s not working.

If the person you communicate to doesn’t respond in a way that feels in full energetic alignment for you, see it for what it is — not a match. Better to see it early on and make space for what truly is a match.

If you do not like how you are handled when you bring your full bitch, or your upset or your push back, walk away, fast. If you do not like yourself when you bring your full bitch, consider how you can uplevel without turning “her” (your bitch) off.

I have rarely followed this advice. I have turned her off, squelched her down, told her to “be nice” and worked my ass off to make relationships work that I could have and should have walked away from far, far, far earlier. Because I convinced myself, if I can just be better, if I can just contort myself this way or that, if I could just show up different, or if he could just, or if she could just… Stop it. Walk away. If the relationship truly is meant to be, it will be. You will reconnect when the energy is aligned. And, no need to stick in there and suffer in the meantime.

Right relationship is not without challenge, but the challenge isn’t in the other one, it’s in you.

And that’s one relationship you cannot and never will walk away from. So your #1 metric for whether to be in relationship with anyone – vendor, team member, client, business partner, friend, lover, spouse — is: how do they handle your upset? And, you cannot know that if you don’t bring it early on in the relationship.

The best way to do this is to bring your bitch (please note: bitch is used to represent the way you push back, share your upset or anyway that you stop being little miss nice girl) during the initial agreement-ing process.

I’ve often said something that may sound funny coming from a lawyer, but the most important part of agreements ISN’T the paper itself, or even the words on the paper, it’s the process engaged in to get to the terms. It’s about how you and the other shows up in that process.

Now, that doesn’t mean holding in your negotiator and not asking for what you want. Quite the opposite, it means owning your desires and your boundaries clearly, and in a way that they can be heard and received. If your desires and boundaries are not heard and received in a way that feels good to you (this doesn’t mean that you will get exactly what you want, but that you will be heard) walk away.  Better to know early.

And, if you find that you are losing relationships you really wanted to maintain and kicking yourself, then look within to discover where you are not bringing your bitch a way that is healthy or constructive and repair it. If you are bringing your healthy, constructive bitch, the right relationships will just deepen and the relationships that are not a match will fall away.

Namaste’ M*therf*cker.  😉 {Tweet It!}