Lost that Loving Feeling?

neonheartHello! Happy Valentine's Day! To celebrate, I bought my hubs some chocolate, opened the box before he got home and ONLY ate the pieces I think he won't like.

How's that for true love? No really, I think we're going to have a night of seamless.com and House of Cards. It's going to be great! And then he can have all the dark chocolate pieces in the box.

I will also tell you that I passed on getting him the kama sutra kraft paper doll card of a naked Valentine's couple with movable limbs. It was 50 bucks so I really couldn't justify it. Sigh.

ANYway, what I'd really like to talk about today is the LOVE.

Have you ever lost that Loving feeling? (thank you RIghteous Brothers for that fab song)

Yeah, sometimes we do lose the szhoosh for our work/life/creativity/relationships/quotidian life and it can feel really tough to get through (especially in cold and dark February).

But I discovered a little something about bringing back that Loving feeling...

It goes like this:

A few weeks ago I was super stressed out, super sick as a dog all day long and freaking out about being able to prep for and then attend a trade show to launch my organic perfume. I wanted out. I emailed the organizers. No can do, they said. I had a contract.

I ran the idea of bailing on the show by my client/friend Naomi Pabst (a gifted psychic). She said, "Sorry babe, you have a contract. But you need to find the Love."

Hmmm, I thought. The Love. Considering my perfume is called Adalene LOVE perfume oil (or balm for those of you who like solids), I thought that finding the Love should be easy...but at some point along the way I lost the Love and was just going through the motions. (Or not, as I was delaying doing the work necessary to have a successful show and instead watching Scandal and eating.)

To quote Homer Simpson, "Doh!"

But how rekindle the Love?

How many times have I woken in the middle of the night in love with some new idea, concept, product? How many times have I started the process of bringing that kernel into being and then...lost the energy, lost the motivation, lost the Love?

For me, more times than I can count. After a while, my notebooks sometimes feel like a graveyard of good ideas. They're kinda depressing.

So what would be different this time? What would be different with this product?

Having a little mandate from Naomi and God helped kicked my booty into gear and here's what I did to bring back that Loving feeling:

1. I had to stop being a perfectionist. I had a whole bunch of things about the packaging, the booth decoration, my own wellbeing, that I wished were different. But when I gave up fighting what was and just let it be, Love flowed more easily. All kinds of things didn't go how I thought they would with my labels and my energy, but instead of using up my energy criticizing and comparing to the image I had in my mind, I could use that energy to take the next baby step forward.

2. I dropped expectations. I had NO IDEA what the trade show would be like for me. It was an experiment. A test. I knew that all in I'd lose several thousand dollars at worst and at best possibly recoup my investment (over time). Because I didn't have quotas and desires and attachment to how it'd go down, I was free to bask in the Love during the whole event.

(Contrast that to a lady nearby who practically had a coronary when she found out that Anthropologie buyers had come by but not talked to her about her perfume. She was SUPER attached to that outcome, and not getting it was really hard.)

3. I showed up and I shined. This might be the simplest one. I did it. I took my product (no matter how unready it felt) to the show! I did the best I could and it really actually all came together and worked. Imagine if I had just bailed...I wouldn't be starting to figure out how to fill orders for two national retailers right now! Showing up makes all the difference.

I have been writing about perfume and business here, but I think I can apply these lessons to most anything where I've lost that loving feeling. An old friendship, my main man, my spiritual practice, a client's project.

Cool.

My greatest hope for you today and this weekend is that you'll rediscover the Love.

Happy Valentine's Day!