The Power of Intention
I was done. I used to adore my work teaching business writing classes. But after too many days of standing in front of corporate bosses from 8:00 to 5:00, entertaining them, teaching them, and almost begging them to write better, it grew tiresome. And the luxury of room service had been overwhelmed for a long time by the strong yearning to sleep in my own bed. It was clearly time to make a change.
I had learnt from reading and doing things that if you want to do anything great, you have to have a clear goal. I sat down one day with a pen and paper and closed my eyes. I asked myself what I really wanted to do with my life. It was easy and quick to answer: I wanted to talk—not about how to write a better business letter, but about how to live a better life. I jotted down my goal as soon as I opened my eyes: to start talking to people about how to make the life we want. After that, I started making the flyer that would include a lot of information on the first talk I intended to deliver on "Women, Power, and Happiness."
A few weeks later, Marci Shimoff, who is both a friend and a coworker, came to my office. Marci and I both taught business writing in the corporate realm, and we both had a lot of dangling modifiers to deal with. We were talking about punctuation when she suddenly saw my flier and took it off my desk. She almost yelled, "I've wanted to start a speaking business for the last four years!" And just like that, we started The Esteem Group, which was our speaking group.
We wrote down what we wanted to do first. Our goal was "to help women understand and experience their inner strength and value, so they can make and live their own vision." We had no idea how powerful those words were.
We started our speaking business, which focuses on giving women presentations that boost their self-esteem. One of our favorite resources was Jack Canfield, a well-known expert on self-esteem who Marci had studied under. That year, when his book Chicken Soup for the Soul became a national best seller, we quickly gained his permission to share stories from it with our readers.
Women and Chicken Soup turned out to be a strong mix. We could see how much the stories affected women, how much they impacted them, and how much they helped them make the changes they wanted to make. So when Marci came to me in January of the next year and asked me to co-edit a book for women, I didn't think twice. We sent Jack a proposal by fax. He remarked that sounded like a nice idea, but then we all got busy and forgot about it.
But Marci and I continued getting clearer about what we wanted to do: we wanted to touch the hearts of women all across the world. We wanted to motivate them, lift them up, give them a picture of living from the heart, and show them how great we can be for each other.
Finally, we flew to Los Angeles and met with Jack. We told him that we intended to touch the hearts of women all around the world with a Chicken Soup for the Soul book specifically for them, keeping our mission in mind and heart. Jack questioned us why he should let us execute the project when his office was already working on the second one in the series and had done well with the first one. At the same time, Marci and I looked at each other across the table and realized we hadn't planned anything to say!
We were silent for a second. All of a sudden, the words started to flow: We both taught business writing and knew the rules of good writing; I had a degree in journalism; we understood the "Chicken Soup" genre because we had used stories in our public presentations; we were connected to women through our business and thought we knew what they wanted; the women's market was huge; and finally, Jack and his coauthor Mark Victor Hansen couldn't write a book for women without women coauthors!
Jack didn't even think about it. He answered yes, and sixteen months later, Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul came out. It reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list in just two months. They had sold a million copies.
But we didn't really get what the numbers meant until the letters started trickling in. We quickly realized that we had done what we set out to do in ways we never thought possible. We got a lot of messages from women all around the world telling us how our book had changed their lives. Mothers and daughters who had been estranged made up; battered women found the strength to ask for help; women changed jobs, adopted kids, faced their employer, their disease, their phobias, and their mother-in-law. We traveled all across the country, giving talks and signing books, and everywhere we went, women told us their tales. We cried with them, celebrated with them, and most days we felt like the luckiest ladies in the world. That's how I still feel!
It would be an understatement to say that Marci and I worked very hard on that first book. The learning curve was high, and we had to write the book while continuing working on our speaking career and educating in the corporate world to make money. It was hard to find days when we were both in town at the same time! But we realized it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We had found the perfect way to satisfy our yearning.
I think that having a clear goal is a key to success. It's not the same as setting goals. Setting goals comes from the mind, while having an intention comes from the heart. Intent alone doesn't make things happen either. But when you really want to do something and are prepared to work for it, amazing things can happen. We don't need to know how it's going to happen, though. We only need to be aware of opportunities and be ready to show up and do what needs to be done.
Adapted from Health Communications, Inc.'s The Soul of Success: A Woman's Guide to Authentic Power, 2005. Jennifer Read Hawthorne, www.jenniferhawthorne.com. Jennifer Read Hawthorne is an author and speaker who gives keynote addresses across the world. She is also a co-author of:
Chicken Soup for the Soul of a Woman Chicken Soup for the Soul of a Mother
Chicken Soup for the Soul of a Single Person
A Second Bowl of Chicken Soup for the Soul
Diamonds, Pearls, and Stone: Wise Jewels for
