Fur Coats and Gut Feelings
no bears were harmed in the writing of this
There is a woman I know who recently bought a vintage mink fur coat. She’s worn it religiously this winter and tells me that everywhere she goes people comment on it.
“Atleast 30 people in the last month or two have approached me to tell me how beautiful this thing,” she tells me.
She is a pretty unassuming realtor who is old enough to threaten retirement at every turn of a new year but not ready to throw in the towel quite yet. We sometimes talk about meditation, or natural health, or how she is an artist or how she used to hunt bears and pheasants. She is a woman who has lived many lives in this one and I almost can’t wait to be surprised by the reveal of yet another chapter of her life.
“You should carry business cards with you so that every time someone approaches you about your coat, you have one to hand out,” I tell her. Her eyes grow big as she responds that she can’t believe she never thought of that and I can almost see the wheels in her mind turning as she walks away.
It’s funny the things we don’t see for ourselves. I mean, that coat is really doing the work for her and she was oblivious. People are flocking to her because of a wearable piece of fur, and it’s not to throw red paint on it.
That’s really got me thinking, since she’s a realtor but this is applicable to any business; many say that sales is a numbers game. It’s dependent on how many cold calls you make and email drip campaigns and how many people are in your database and I certainly won’t argue that a large contact database isn’t useful. I mean these numbers; people have it down to a science. A quick Google search tells me that most statistics say it takes about eight phone calls before you actually reach a prospect/human.
What if it’s not a numbers game, though? What if it’s just…a game? In the most true sense of the word, with play and structure that is outside of the logical mind. With joy and heart and flow?
It seems to me this woman found something that made her feel a certain way that she wanted to feel, and so she bought it. Perhaps it was that it made her feel warm, or elegant, or eclectic, or sophisticated. Perhaps she doesn’t even have words for it, and she just has a knowing that she simply likes it. And without thought or hesitation, she allows herself to be in that feeling by wearing the coat. To be a wearer of a vintage mink fur in a Northern Michigan sea of Patagonia.
My point is, perhaps it’s not a numbers game. Perhaps it is the magnetic pull of being in your authenticity. There is something so incredibly captivating about someone who just walks into a stale office or the local natural health food store or the post office looking like they just returned from a weekend at a private chalet in Aspen. It almost demands your attention.
This is not me saying everyone should go out and buy a fur coat to grow their business. This is me saying that it perfectly encapsulates the work happening between my coaching clients and myself: entrepreneurs who desire to do something but also have a desire to do it in their own way but also believe they can’t/shouldn’t/aren’t allowed/won’t succeed. That they have to follow the models their industry lays out for them as far as doing business.
It’s not working for everyone, though. There are some people who wake up every day and make 30 cold calls without batting an eye. If you asked me to do that I’d toss my phone out of a two story building. If we weren’t in a two story building, I’d go find one.
In the meantime, I’m asking the question: what if your “zone of genius” is in your body’s response to truth? And I’m researching the answer to the question through the work I’m doing in my transformation coaching business.
I shouldn’t call it research. That suggests it’s still a theory and my belief in truth is far too deep and unwavering for me to only be theorizing about its affect on damn near everything. And the more data I collect, the more proof that I have of how authenticity / truth / whatever-you-want-to-call-it transforms your life, work, relationships, beliefs, energetics, reality, the more authenticity / truth / whatever-you-want-to-call-it and my belief in it becomes that much more real.
And yet such magic.
I actually have a client who is a high producing realtor. They want to grow their business by about 42% this year. They despise cold calling, they don’t want to do email drip campaigns, and hey’ve gotten pretty successful in only a couple of years without doing either. They’ve not done many of the things most realtors do in the normal realtor “hustle”. They’ve followed their gut, building relationships in ways that feeling meaningful to them, through avenues that felt exciting or joyful. And while they could have very easily hired someone like Jeff Glover, they hired me for one reason. Well, two reasons:
Their gut told them to do so.
I am a coach who teaches people to become fluent in the language of their body, its response to their truth, and in aligning their business and their life and creative pursuits to what comes through that fluency. To build their own model of doing business based on that.
It is really quite fun.
The point I’m trying to make brings me back to this woman with the coat. I doubt she’s cold calling. I just can’t see a seventy year old bear hunting woman calling you about your car’s extended warranty whether or not you’ve thought about selling your home lately but hey, I’m always open to the possibility that I am wrong. This coat, though, is such a symbol for the power of making choices that align to the feelings that arise in your body. Choices that align to your truth. Your joy. The ease that comes with that alignment. The magnetism that draws everything you want near you just because you decided to be yourself. People love that shit.
Sure, if she handed a business card to each of those 30 people that complimented her and got 3.75 clients out of it, statistically she’s doing something right. She’s playing the numbers game. But the fact that all she had to do was be herself? That that was her only job? That that was why people connected with her? That changes the game. That changes the business and marketing plan at its absolute core if you ask me.
Listen, I talk to people all day and everyday and I have come to the conclusion that people just want to get paid to be themselves and they feel really weird about that. Hell, that’s what I want too. I used to feel shame for desiring that. I thought it made me seem lazy or like an ego maniac. Like “hey my authentic self is cool, pay me one hundred trillion dollars.”
But it’s actually very kind and gentle and restful and full of ease to live and operate from a place that is so trusting in your own truth and your own self and god damn, we all deserve that for ourselves. We have been gifted with an incredible internal navigation system, and an ability - a knowing - of how our body responds to our own truth, and we get to, should we choose, to center that truth in our lives. To build an entire world out of it.
That’s the new model. Real fur coats and all.
Tallyho,
Jenny
p.s. Hey, I have a new social media account. Follow me on Instagram at jennybremercoaching and say hi hi hi.