Q&A@beBee with Deb Helfrich

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With Q&A@beBee, I ask some of the most interesting people on this network 7 questions. The result, unedited, is the most fascinating answers. Q&A@beBee is an ongoing series that gives us the opportunity to hear and learn from, and be inspired by, some of the most successful people, as they speak for themselves!

Today we hear from Deb 🐝 Helfrich.

1. What motivates you to get up in the morning?

For the last 20 years, my primary motivator to bridge the chasm from being asleep to awake, has been the nuzzle of a muzzle. Both of my dogs have been my alarm clocks and their pure energy, joyously ready to get moving, starts my day with love.

2. How do you spend the first hour of your day?

This absolutely varies. Although, counter to all the advice pushing us to leadership greatness, I have one tendency that I treasure. After I brave the elements 365 days a year to walk my dogs when their biological clock requires emptying, I return to my bed and climb right back in under the covers for a very conscious few moments of comforting pleasure. I often meditate, and sometimes I do fall back to sleep. And then when it is time to arise, my espresso maker starts things off on a delicious pace.

3. What are you passionate about?

The daily joy of life alongside a dog. Reading as a gateway to exercising not merely my brain, but my capacity to be a functional human. Having an open mind, even to my unconscious bias, so that I can stay as alive in each moment as possible. Championing uniqueness.

4. What is the most practical advice you can offer someone in business?

Always search for a Win-Win-Win compromise. Rather than only seeing negotiations as two-sided (and most of business is just a series of negotiations), look to the larger company, community, or ecosystem benefit to quickly bring both parties into alignment with a larger, and longer time-frame solution.

5. If you had the opportunity to ask a great mind any question, what would it be?

I would ask Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe how consciousness gains from disorder.

The Untethered Soul: Michael A Singer

7. Share a quote that inspired you.

From “The Untethered Soul”:
“You can do one of two things with fear: you can recognize that you have it and work to release it, or you can keep it and try to hide from it. Because people don't deal with fear objectively, they don't understand it. They end up keeping their fear and trying to prevent things from happening that would stimulate it. They go through life attempting to create safety and control by defining how they need life to be in order to be okay. This is how the world becomes frightening.
Your definitions of desirable and undesirable, as well as good and bad, all come about because you have defined how things need to be in order for you to be okay.
We all know we are doing this, but nobody questions it. We think we're supposed to figure out how life should be, and then make it that way. Only someone who looks deeper, and questions why we need the events of life to be a particular way, will question this assumption. How did we come up with the notion that life is not okay just the way it is, or that it won't be okay the way it will be? Who said that the way life naturally unfolds is not all right?
The answer is, fear says so. The part of you inside that's not okay with itself can't face the natural unfolding of life because it's not under your control. If life unfolds in a way that stimulates your inner problems, then, by definition, it's not okay. It's really very simple: that which doesn't disturb you is okay, and that which does disturb you is not. We define the entire scope of our outer experience based upon inner problems. If you want to grow spiritually, you have to change that. If you are defining creation based upon the most messed up part of your being, what do you expect creation to look like? It's going to be a frightful mess.”Michael A. Singer