Soul of Success

Intention I was fried. I had once loved my job leading business-writing seminars. But after too many days standing in front of corporate managers from 8:00 to 5:00, entertaining them, educating them and practically willing them to write betterwell, it had gotten old. And the luxury of room service had long been overshadowed by an aching desire to sleep in my own bed. It was definitely time for a change. I had learned through study and personal experience that if you want to do something great, you have to start with a clear intention. So I sat down one day with paper and pen at hand, closed my eyes, and asked myself what I really wanted to do with my life. The answer came easily and quickly: I wanted to speaknot about how to write a better business letter, but how to live a better life. When I opened my eyes, I wrote down my intention: to start speaking to audiences about how to create the life we want. I then launched into designing the flyer that would describe in detail the first presentation I wanted to give on Women, Power and Happiness. A couple of weeks later, my friend and colleague Marci Shimoff was in my office. Like me, Marci taught business writing in the corporate world, and, like me, she was up to her eyeballs in dangling modifiers. We were discussing some fine point of punctuation when she suddenly saw my flyer and grabbed it off my desk. Ive been wanting to start a speaking business for the past four years, she practically shouted. And just like that, our speaking partnership, which we called The Esteem Group, was born. The first thing we did was to write down our intention. Our mission was to help women understand and experience their inner power and self-worth, so they can create and live their own vision. Little did we know what power those words contained. We began building our speaking business, specializing in self-esteem presentations for women. One of our best resources was Jack Canfield, a renowned expert in the field of self-esteem, with whom Marci had studied. So when his book Chicken Soup for the Soul became a national bestseller that year, we immediately got his permission to share stories from it with our audiences. It turned out to be a powerful combination: women and Chicken Soup. We saw what an impact the stories had, how deeply they moved women and how much they helped them with the changes they were trying to make. So the following January, when Marci approached me with the idea of coediting a volume for women, I didnt hesitate. We faxed Jack a proposal. He said it sounded like a good ideaand then we all got busy and let it drop. But Marci and I kept getting clearer about our intention: We wanted to touch the hearts of women all over the globe. We wanted to inspire them, uplift them, give them a vision of life lived from the heartand show them the magnificent support we can be to one another. We finally flew to Los Angeles and sat down for a meeting with Jack. With our visiRead Hawthorne, Jennifer is the author of 'Soul of Success', published 2005 under ISBN 9780757302367 and ISBN 075730236X.