“What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last night as I was preparing for my talk today, my nerves started to get the best of me and I couldn’t articulate. I would start and then stammer, start over again and lose my thread, stop and start until I lost hope for the trying. I am proud and happy to report that my next choice changed everything- I stopped working so hard and just decided to meditate.

Finding quiet inside and setting my breathing to a steady rhythm was all it took to hear the small simple reply, just speak from your heart. Coming out of the meditation, the direction was clear and the note summaries made sense. I remember once reading someone say that meditation doesn’t actually take time away from what you think you should be doing, it adds time to your life and activities because it sets you in a true direction.

Today, I prepared by meditating again and rested in the calm awareness that I could tell a story about love that would make sense. I set off to the conference calm. The turn-out was smaller than expected. I realized once again, that it is rarely the moments we plan for that are the big life changers that we anticipate. The big events are usually the ones we don’t see coming, the ones that we don’t have time to practice for. Still I was glad for all the preparation and thinking time I put in because even when the images didn’t show up on my slide show, I was able to go with it because I was telling a heart story.

The skills we need to love each other are the same ones we use to create, because ultimately innovating and creation are acts of love. Applying the wisdom of positive thinking, the practice of loving communication and the will to persist and show up for the work that inspires us is both the gift and the secret to successful enterprise. The conference today was celebrating the magic and inspiration of innovating and the courage of being the entrepreneur who persists.

What I learned as I spoke from my heart is that this is the work of love and that every part of our lives that matters is first about our capacity to relate. Everything that matters most in life is a love story.