The New England Holistic Chamber of Commerce

By Noelle Southwick

New England Bureau Chief
(Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut)

Tara Crawford Roth and her friend Sandy Currie had an idea to have a meeting of holistic practitioners since they did not find people who thought the way they did about their businesses. That idea is what led to the New England Holistic Chamber of Commerce, now with 3 locations in Fall River, MA, Providence, RI and on Cape Cod, MA.

They are a growing non-profit organization. Their mission is two-fold. First is to create a
community in order to network with a diverse group of holistic practitioners and secondly to teach business skills.

The Founder

When I spoke with Tara Crawford Roth I understood her passion is for holistic practitioners to succeed. “We all need their services,” she added. Tara grew up in a family of holistic practitioners. She recognized that many of the people she met in that community lacked the business skills needed to create a thriving business. Now Tara offers her skills as a business coach to those who are following a similar path.

She says that there is a limiting belief out there in the holistic community that making money is not spiritual. However, people cannot offer their valuable services if they cannot earn a living at it. Tara works with a variety of business owners to shift their limiting beliefs and allow prosperity to flow.

Currently, Tara is working on a book, due out early next year. It is titled, Minding a Business, Creating Profits that Match Your Passion. The book is a success manual for holistic practitioners covering what is needed to create abundance in business. It covers everything including financing, marketing, what blogging can do for your business and much more.

The Chamber

Currently each of the 3 NEHCC locations offers monthly meetings. The speakers at each meeting cover a variety of topics focused on building a successful holistic business and there is an opportunity to speed network. At every meeting participants are coached on how to give an effective “elevator speech”, a brief description of what they do. Those in the holistic community are often not skilled at self-promotion and need support finding ways to speak clearly about what they offer. That support is offered at the meetings.

Some topics covered at recent meeting include: The Highest Level of Success as a Holistic Business with Dr. Mark Mincolla, Tapping Your Passion to Fuel Your Business with Laura Turlington and Luca DiMatteo, Catapult Your Holistic Business- Write a Book with Lisa Tener
and Marketing on a Shoestring with Lisa Almeida. You can get a schedule of upcoming events on their website or emailed to you through their newsletter.

In addition to becoming part of a growing community of support membership in The New England Holistic Chamber of Commerce offers many benefits. Some of the benefits include admission discounts on all events, a classified listing on their searchable website with links to
members’ sites, and an opportunity to be in their speakers network. Additionally they offer an expo twice a year for their members to showcase their services and products.

Tara’s Networking Tips

I asked Tara for some networking tips. She gave me these suggestions:

• Go to events where your ideal client is most
  likely to be there.


• When you introduce yourself start with what you
  do, then your name.


• Be authentic. It is the most
  important way to drive appropriate people to you.


• Always bring business cards with you, especially
  to networking events.

The Future of the Chamber

Tara has a vision to have locations throughout New England. The New England Holistic Chamber of Commerce is looking for local support to further expand and to see that vision become a reality. If you think you might have what it takes to create a local chapter for the holistic community in your area, contact Tara through the New England Holistic Chamber of Commerce website:

www.neholisticchamber.org.

The New England Holistic Chamber of Commerce offers an opportunity to grow a successful business with the support of other business owners & also a place to find business support from like-minded individuals.
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The New England Holistic Chamber of Commerce

When Good Relationships Go Bad

By Victor Cattermole

Asia Pacific Bureau Chief

The global economy is crashing and it all appears to come back to the US market. When things go pear shape we always want to have something to blame it on, that way we can justify the position we find ourselves in. This month in a tongue in cheek look at the global situation my sense of humor can’t help but challenge the establishment.

Arguably if we look back on the state of events the order could look something like this.

· Mid 2006 USA accuses North Korea of printing the Super Dollar (fake US currency)

· Early 2007 US Treasury orders companies and financial institutions to cut ties with Banco Delta Asia, alleging ties with North Korean Government and being used for money laundering.

· North Korea and US throw stones at each other like a couple of little kids over who is allowed to have nuke toys.

· US subprime mortgage market implodes.

· October 2008 global share markets crash.

The bottom line is the US didn’t like the fact that North Korea had nuke toys that may be better than their nuke toys. So in a little tantrum the US said “we aren’t going to let you print our cash any longer” so they stopped the North Koreans printing the fake currency. The end result was not enough fake US dollars in the system and the whole economy imploded on itself.

Sometimes we can’t see the real value of relationships until they are gone. Here were all those poor North Korean people slaving their hearts out printing US dollars to support the American economy but the pride of that big nuclear toy was too important to see the bigger picture.

I say lets the get North Korean printing presses going again so the whole fake financial world can get back on its feet. It’s time to patch up that relationship clearly the whole global market needs it.

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Posted to THE NATIONAL NETWORKER. To subscribe for your free newletter, go to www.TheNationalNetworker.com. For the complete National Networker Relationship Capital Toolkit and a free RSS feed, go to: http://thenationalnetworkerweblog.blogspot.com.
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When Good Relationships Go Bad

There is No Financial Crisis

by Adam J. Kovitz, CEO, Founder & Publisher

Adam's section is brought to you by Salesconx.com

I thought it important, this month, to pre-empt my current series on Monetizing Relationship Capital to discuss a topic that is on most everyone’s mind: the “financial crisis” occurring in the U.S. and seemingly, the rest of the world. Of course one might wonder why a publication about networking would even care or would have anything to say on the subject– what does networking have to do with economics, anyway? The answer is simply…EVERYTHING!

Fact #1: All Business Networking is About Money

One of the things I do with my audiences when I speak is poll them on how important networking is to their job or place of business on a scale from 1 to 10. Roughly 85% of my audiences feel that networking is between an 8 and a 10.

We all engage in business networking for several reasons:

• More business
• Better resources
• Sharing ideas
• Better job opportunities/promotions
• Accomplish a goal.

And while we can say we network for these reasons, we’re really networking to affect our business’ bottom line. All the above reasons lead to either increasing revenue or decreasing costs. And of course, when we either make money for our company or save our company money, we are usually recognized in a positive manner, increasing our own personal Relationship Capital.

Fact #2: Money is not an End Result

We live in world where we all want money. In fact, most of the people I meet want more of it tomorrow than they have today. After all, it helps to have Financial Capital to pay rent or mortgage, go on that trip we’ve always wanted, get our kids a proper education, buy that sports car, etc. Yet one has to ask, “is it really the money I want, or what money buys me?”

Most of the time, what we really want with money is freedom, convenience, security, respect, the ability to “make a difference” or “give back” and peace of mind. What’s interesting here is that there is a strong link between money and perception, considering that all the above items are abstract concepts that mean different things to different people.

The point here is that money is merely a proxy or middleman by which assets are transferred. Money is considered the hard tangible stuff that we can see, feel and touch, while what it buys us (no matter how material) represents a “touchy feely”, intangible ideal.

Fact #3: Money is Just a Game We Play

Remember the game Monopoly? The idea is to use your money effectively in order to buy properties (named after famous locations in Atlantic City, NJ) in which you charge your opponents rent, which increases when you invest in houses and hotels. Of course the one with the most money at the end of the game is the winner, and in true Darwin-esque style, the one with the money has effectively crushed their opponents.

Now if I asked to play you in a game of Monopoly and said that you can start with all the money as long as I can start with all the properties, who would win? The answer is usually the person with all the properties…why? They are assets and can be leveraged for money. Therefore, the person with all the money finds themselves over time playing the game in a money pit whereby they constantly must pay rent.

In all, there is a game (albeit a sophisticated one) that we play each day to earn money or save money. Quite often, the game occurs in assessing fair value of assets. Why is it that some economists say that my legal tender dollar that I have in my pocket is now worth the equivalent of $0.27 while my Morgan silver dollar which is no longer legal tender is worth $18? Why is an original Picasso worth so much more than a lithograph of the same painting? What makes two people with similar sets of skills and knowledge worth different salaries?

In sales, there is an expression, “people buy emotionally and then rationalize their decisions rationally”. What this says is that the “emotional” sell is based upon our own independent value judgments too sophisticated for any analytical stock market model. In this personal “stock exchange of the mind” we make our own valuation (“sizing up”) of what a person knows and who they know. They only exception might be in the case of a commodity and even this can be argued.

The True Crisis

So when we look at today’s facts and figures on our global economy, housing markets, price of energy and unemployment, we have to ask ourselves, if this is the game we’ve created, then why do most of us feel like we’re losing? Does anyone really want to play a game that is broken? If the game is broken, is it time to get a new one?

I’ve heard a lot of pundits and experts talk about how this crisis has caused a lot of our “feel good” factor to suffer. Again perception plays a role in our financial well-being. If you had a team of unmotivated, uninspired and depressed individuals and another team of motivated, inspired and emotionally-secure individuals, which team would most likely get the best results?

The obvious answer is the team with the most positive mindset will do the best – there is a lot to be said for morale. But still the question must be begged: Do we need money to be happy or do we need to be happy to have money?

What then is the real crisis here? Is it financial as we might choose to believe, or is it a perceptual crisis?

In a recent conversation with my good friend (and TNNW brother-in-arms) Douglas Castle about this subject, we spoke about religious figures like The Pope and the Dalai Lama. Douglas noted that these folks may not have a lot of money and probably don’t need it, but their support network is enough to keep them going. In other words, they have enough Intellectual and Relationship Capital to support them in their endeavors. So does this mean that because they are not heavy on Financial Capital they aren’t happy? No!

I am not suggesting here that we should or shouldn’t try and emulate either of these individuals, but I am suggesting that we often overlook our own greatest asset and it’s not our house or our car…it’s ourselves. If we are in prime condition (internally and externally), Intellectual and Relationship capital will flow and provide us with all we need for years to come, whether there is a perceived shortage of money, oil, jobs, etc. or not. In fact, while money, oil and jobs can come and go, no one can ever take away your own Intellectual and Relationship capital unless we chose to have it taken away.

The danger of Financial Capital is that it can cause us to focus on the external, imaginary reflection of what and who we know to the point where it becomes a crutch. When that happens we loose all our power to affect our situation and often shut out others who can help.

Fortunately, while it seems as if money, oil, jobs, etc. are scarce, there is no end to the number of networking opportunities that exist, or the number of ways that we can change our current “financial crisis”.

It’s time for us to look within and find creative ways to change the game we’ve created. Remember…it took a network of individuals years to build the game, it will take another network of individuals to change it. The question is whether or not you’ll take part in it.

The Emergence of the Relationship Economy

Relationship Capital is the cornerstone of the Relationship Economy, which RNIA defines as an “economic system in which Relationship Capital influences the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services.” I am proud to have contributed discussion of the Ten Laws of Relationships Capital to the upcoming book The Emergence of the Relationship Economy, now out as an eBook and in hardcopy. With a forward written by Doc Searls (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame), it is being considered a “must read” for anyone responsible for the strategic direction of their business. If you would like to purchase your own copy of The Emergence of the Relationship Economy, please click here.

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Posted to THE NATIONAL NETWORKER. To subscribe for your free newletter, go to www.TheNationalNetworker.com. For the complete National Networker Relationship Capital Toolkit and a free RSS feed, go to: http://thenationalnetworkerweblog.blogspot.com.
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There is No Financial Crisis