or as my old college roomy Deborah would say, “working with both sides of yo heyad”.

Saturday I met with a friend to coach her about strategies she can use to attract and bring in clients to her healing business. For the past five years, she’s been working as a system analyst during the day and getting a beautiful space ready with a business partner and fellow healer so that when she retired from her day job she could walk right into her business with the intent of just firing up and really taking off.

Welllllll……then the reality of what “is” bumped right up against her dream of what she wanted. For one thing, she has realized that the person she had invited into her business as her partner is very good in what they do but is not a business/marketing person and does not hold the same vision she does for expansion and growth and the future of the business. She also is tired of working so hard for what she wants. Just to get the license she needed for her business was much more consuming and tedious than she thought it would be. But she has kept going. She is persevering. In fact, the reason we met was for her to brainstorm a road map of sorts so that she can see where she is now and where she is going and what she will need to do along the way.

I’m very grateful that I have known two equally strong sides of this friend. On the one side is a very analytical, logical, person who is a fantastic systems analyst/developer that I would highly recommend for many a technical job and on the other side is a very creative, intuitive, bright, sensitive woman who has done her fair share of working on cleaning up “her side of the street of life”. What I realized when we were brainstorming was that she needed encouragement to work with both sides of her brain during this birthing time of her ideal.

As we were talking, I reminded her that our brains are here to work for us not for us to work for our brains. Becoming conscious of how we are working our brains is not unlike taking our dogs to obedience school. I’ve seen many a rambunctious dog simmer down once they knew who was “alpha” in the relationship and understood what their job was and how and when to do what was asked of them. Our brains are no different.

We set out a plan for her to write for thirty days (see Janet Conner’s book “Writing Down Your Soul”) and to ask the God of her understanding for answers to her questions such as what does she need to be paying attention to, how can she help herself better, asking for signs and asking for help along the way. We also came up with a game plan for her brain. One of the stop gaps that we noticed occurred for her was when she would dream about her new healing space and her business and then would put the kabash on herself in mid-flow with thoughts of what could go wrong.

I suggested that she realize that the part of her brain that was stopping her from brainstorming and dreaming with fear is the same fantastic part that makes her such a whiz bang systems analyst. So we came up with strategies she can use to acknowledge that part of her brain so that she can dream and understand that the dreaming was just a way for her to let her creativity out to see what she did or didn’t want to pursue. One of her strategies was to give herself a finite period of time (30 minutes) a day to dream/brainstorm and then some time to create a recipe for her day/week/month with concrete steps she can take to create her dream.

Years ago when I was working for a very respected elecroanalytical chemist, he decided to take a special drawing class so that he could exercise both sides of his brain. I think one of the exercises entailed him drawing something from an upside down position. That made an impression on me. He really could utilize both sides of his brain extremely well.

Maybe we aren’t all Leonardo di Vinci’s but then again…maybe we are! Who knows for sure until you really learn to work with both sides of your brain.