Sheila Winter Wallace BodyGateways

The New Marketing by sheilawinterwallace

I am sitting here, answering email, making phone calls, reaching voice mail, contemplating the joy of sleep… which, as I am in the process of writing,  I am not engaged in right now. Today, I actually do not know what the heck l I am doing or am supposed to be doing, etc. Who cares, anyway? I have followed up on all of the calls and emails for my next experience of Decloaking and Living Authentically… and now, I wait, wondering who else is out there, who is looking for me as both guide and guided. Not a clue. Truth be told, I get tired of waiting, wondering why my messages go so long unanswered, if answered at all – and why I can’t simply know, right now, in my own way and time, who is even thinking about showing up. And, in that same truth, I know that ‘it’ is a go, that women are coming from a distance to claim the more that each one already is…

So what is my restlessness really about? I want to connect with women. I want to freely ask for what I want. As a 7th level expression, I ask, ‘Who else’, and images and names come to mind – and I proceed to make the call. Some answer and some do not. My frustration invites a new knowing about mySelf. I am being answered all of the time. Kahea. I am My Call.

Even though I was in the retail arena, as an owner, for aeons, presumably knowing what it takes to ‘put myself out’ (are you picking up my resistance to such a notion?) to market products and associated services, I know that ‘it’ still, always and formost, gets down to my rapport. Unlike strategized and seasonal marketing initiatives based on promoting a ‘thing’ that will fulfill some presupposed need, I can no longer forget who I AM, in the face of the product/service making what I offer about the ‘thing’ itself. In truth, I AM the connection… in fact, I have always been. So now, it is no longer about hiding behind the guise of the ‘product’, be it tangible or intangible; it is about me believing in me and showing up to mySelf, as mySelf, for mySelf and, ultimately to/for others, as the most authentic ‘sale’ of all. And the joke is – I am not for sale; I AM mySelf. My value to others resides in genuinely Being Me.

Like a long-time client, now become a friend, has said about her experience of herSelf in my past cosmetic retail life, ‘It was never about the make-up’. Obviously, she got it… interesting that I would get so caught up, from time to time, in the details of marketing, that I did not. I would forget that I was the the medium, the whom, who was being searched out. My own authentic presence in bearing witness to each woman who walked through my door was the unique vibration that was really being searched for – not the product. That product, as an external ‘fix’,was simply a key to a deep and internal ignition… one that, most often, I bet, went unrecognized… even by the client herSelf.

I remember the story, told by a franchise owner, about a woman who walked into her store one day, seemingly depressed, looking for something, anything, not sure about what. The owner invited her to sit down to a ‘make-over’, no charge. The woman accepted the invitation. The ‘make-over’ completed, she said her thanks and left, looking a bit brighter. One week later, the owner received a letter of gratitude from the woman. In her letter, the woman expressed that, just prior to her ‘make-over’, she had decided to end her own life… it had not seemed worth living anymore. After her ‘make-over’, she changed her mind… it seemed that someone had given a ‘damn’… had cared with no strings attached. It seemed that her life mattered. She had started to re-think her life.

In my heart, I know that it was never about the product or the cosmetic ‘make-over’ for that woman; it was about the search for the more that she could become; her ‘make-over’ lay in that search. I think that is true for all of us. And this was not a one-way street, where one woman came to own her own importance in the grander scheme of things. In owning the truth of her experience in writing to the franchise owner, the owner also came to own and claim her own importance in her own world. Her intention for  creating business became awakened to something more…in remembering to simply show up, as Self, for Self. Bearing witness to each other, two lives opened up and then some…

Old school marketing has always focused on the product, spying on other and similar markets to ‘keep ahead’, protecting your client list (which, often means denying your client the ease of finding what she wants, where and when she wants it), creating complex and expensive advertising milieus, often with little result, other than accelerating resentment, dashed expectation and despair. What we want to ‘work‘ is not ‘working’. The marketing is all about the product… the ‘thing’ that is supposed to ‘work’… yet the associated feelings are not the domain of the product… they are the domain of the person who pays, in time, money, and hope, to get the ‘word’ out there. Maybe, it is the ‘wrong’ word. Maybe, there is no word other than ‘I’, other than ‘Me’.

Do we ever trust that? Can we allow ourSelves to trust that?

The old marketing paradigm does not work for me… actually, never has. Maybe, that is why I experienced such ‘trouble’, personal incongruency, with it, as a retailer. Truly, I did. Things had to be ‘done’ to ‘get’ clients into the store. What is a store, anyway? A cache of inventory. Marketing demands moving inventory, often alienating connection that builds trust. Gifts with Purchase, Purchase with Purchase… carrots focused on ‘selling’ the product as the the ‘thing’ to buy, not on ‘being’ the personal connection as the invitation to engage. As a retailer, if I was not meeting quota, then I was not ‘performing’, not ‘doing’ my job…. so many dollars per hour, per person; so many persons per hour ‘off their feet and on their seats’. (Yes, that was the adage, as I knew it in the cosmetic industry!) Continued and mounting disrespect in a low level game where retailer and client both become pawns in a ‘fight’ for dollars.

Marketing the ‘old’ way demands an external reference. The new marketing is not marketing; it is internal. It is Being Present to mySelf and bearing witness to all that I AM creating – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and drawing my own line in the sand for what is and what is not important to me in my life. I have always hated quota… and I am realizing, now, that I have continued to live in the resistance to it, which I have never owned for what it is and is not… to me.  Quota has become so entrenched as a mechanism by which we keep score – right down to getting those marks in school to make the grade. Meeting quota starts early. And, here, I find mySelf still putting mySelf under my own ‘quota’ gun – a pistol of my own design – and it is totally irrelevant. Wake-up call! I am done!

Meeting and exceeding quota is a cultural imperative in traditional markets/marketing. When I truly trust me, quota is irrelevant. I have decided to claim and to own the genius of my ‘resistance’ to the notion of quota. No wonder that I could never stand it… Quota, as a nominalization, to me, means expected, fixed share within minimums and maximums, performance… pre-supposed by the idiom of ‘enough’ as in ‘too much’, ‘right on’ and ‘not enough’. Talk about marketing to a ‘boxed set’. Not for me! No longer music to my ears! No longer a rhythm that I choose to dance to!

Furthermore, selling inventory for the sake of moving product, per sé, that, for me, is no more than a numbers game, will not light me up as representative of whom I AM. As such, it is never about inventory first, me second. It is always about Me, First, manifesting the inventory of my experience in remembrance of my truth. Inventory, as such, can be vibratory to our own awakening. Wanting to disseminate product as key to awakening the GodForce in Self and others is one thing… to do it, simply for the dollars that it can accrue, will yield a different result. While I consider it not good, bad, right, or wrong, I own that, for me, any satisfaction experienced in the immediacy of meeting quota for dollars, alone, has always been short-lived. It could not be otherwise, as there was, for me, in truth, a fear of ‘not making it’ that drove my results. Exhausting to say the least. Again, I am done.

Instead of marketing, how about this?

You be You… and I be Me. Connecting, trusting and co-creating… our manifestations, both tangible an intangible, authentically vibrating to the truth of whom we are.