• All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.--Han Suyin

• Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.--Thomas Browne

• Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.--Alice Koller

• Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all life's greatest tests alone.--Agnes Macphail

• Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. … When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. --John O'Donohue (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)
• I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.--Peter Hoeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow)
• I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.--Brenda Ueland
• 
  I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.--Albert Einstein
• 
  I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.--Henry David Thoreau

• Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.--Pearl S. Buck

• Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet except the beating of your heart.--Jeanne Marie Laskas

• It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking . . . in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.--Franz Kafka

• It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse.--Max Nordau

• Language has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone, and the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.--Paul Johannes Tillich

• Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.--Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

• Like water which can clearly mirror the sky and the trees only so long as its surface is undisturbed, the mind can only reflect the true image of the Self when it is tranquil and wholly relaxed.--Indra Devi

• Man cannot survive without air, water and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.--Thomas Szasz 

• One must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.--Meister Eckhart

• Only in quiet waters do thing mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.--Hans Margolius

• Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.--Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)

• The person who has not learned to be happy and content while completely alone for an hour a day, or a week has missed life's greatest serenity.--H. Clay Tate (Building a Better Home Town)

• Solitude can be frightening because it invites us to meet a stranger we think we may not want to know--ourselves.--Melvyn Kinder

• Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.--Abraham Cowley

• Solitude gives birth to the original in us.--Thomas Mann
• Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.--James Russell Lowell

• ...solitude is such a potential thing. We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition...--Amelia Barr
• Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.--May Sarton

• Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone.--Thomas De Quincey

• There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.--Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (Earthly Paradise)

• To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare.--Kenko Yoshida

• Solitude, if rightly used, becomes not only a privilege but a necessity. Only a superficial soul fears to fraternize with itself.--Alice H. Rice

• Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.--Abraham Joshua Heschel

• Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.--Paul Brunton

• Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.--Hannah Arendt

• Solitude is the place of purification.--Martin Buber (I and Thou, 3)

• Talents are best nurtured in solitude: character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.--Goethe
• There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.--Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.--William Penn

• We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.--Philip Gilbert Hamerton (The Intellectual Life)

• We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...we need silence to be able to touch souls.--Mother Teresa

• What a commentary on our civilization when being alone is considered suspect, when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it-like a secret vice!--Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• What a lovely surprise to discover how unlonely being alone can be.--Ellen Burstyn

• When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness", the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.--Thomas Merton

• When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death--ourselves.--Eda LeShan

• Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.--Barbara De Angelis

• You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.--Wayne Dyer

In a recent interview I was asked to recall some of the more significant and memorable mentors and teachers who have influenced and befriended me over the years and who ever so gently guided me with their own acts of generosity, wisdom and often brilliant insights in their writings.

Very high on my list of such authentic human beings that I have met is Dr. Tom Sant, a self described, former stand-up comic,
university professor, software application wizard-entrepreneur as well as one of the best and most consistent business writers I have collected in my over 50 years of reading.

Case in point:  Dr. Tom’s monthly and always totally-nurturing content in his “Messages that Matter” newsletter proves the intent. Always helping the reader succeed. No strings, no upgrades for $, and notice the near absence of pitch or hype. Just pure nurturing-dimensionalized and, as usual, so very well articulated.

I rank Dr. Tom Sant among the greats, certainly in the early-adopting and evangelizing of the concept of nurturing customer relationships.
Right up there along with the 21^st century marketing legends such as Seth Godin, Geoffrey Moore, Don Peppers & Dr. Martha Rogers.

Read on and see for yourself why Tom has so long been placed so highly on the wall in my personal, ‘Helping Customers Succeed’,
Hall of Fame and he is always a must-read for me each month, like now. J

To: jim@nurtureinstitute.com Subject: Overcoming the Fear of Value Why is it that so many proposals and letters contain no value proposition at all? What are those writers afraid of? That is our topic this time. Regards, Messages That Matter Podcasts! Listen to audio podcasts of this newsletter. Blog! Read other Messages that Matter articles in our blog. Overcoming the Fear of Value Are you afraid of value? There's plenty of evidence that suggests most proposal and sales-letter writers are. For one thing, very few proposals even contain a value proposition. And for another, when I bring up the importance of putting a value proposition in your proposals, the audience pushes back—hard! I call this reaction "value paranoia." The result is weak value propositions that do little or nothing to move a deal forward. Here's an example of a so-called value proposition born of value paranoia: "We offer a full range of enterprise-strength, integrated technology solutions." Pretty exciting, huh? Makes you want to grab your checkbook, right? Or how about this one: "We are a true one-stop shop for all your financial services needs." I'll bet that makes you want to shout YES!, doesn't it? And here's another one—one that was actually used as the value proposition for an opportunity worth over $500 million: "We are committed to the success of the enterprise." Good grief! These are horrible. There's just no other word to describe them. For one thing, every one of them starts with "We," even though common sense would suggest that an effective value proposition should be focused on the buyer and what they care about. And for another, they contain no promise of positive results that can be tracked or quantified. Finally, none of them are backed up by even a shred of proof. These three supposed value propositions—all of which appeared in real proposals, by the way—are little more than marketing fluff. When I press clients to create a more compelling value proposition—"ABC Company can reduce total energy costs by 75 to 80 percent by implementing our solar energy panels"—they sometimes squirm in their seats. "What if the client actually follows up and holds us to our promises?" they ask. "Where will we find the baseline data against which to measure our impact? How will we ever get this past our in-house lawyers?" These are all good questions. But they are questions that can be answered by modifying your sales and implementation processes and presenting your value proposition in clear, careful language. They are not reasons to refrain from offering a meaningful value proposition. 1. What if the client actually measures our results? It'd be great if they did, assuming your products and services are as good as you claim. Why not make that part of your implementation strategy? Tell them that you'll work with them to set up the processes necessary to track results. Getting that data should make it a lot easier for you to win the rebid or the next phase of work. 2. Where will we find the baseline data against which to measure our impact? Ideally, you will get it from the client, but we all know that many of our clients aren't measuring current performance so they have no way to know what kind of impact our products and services have had on their operations. If the client can't provide the baseline data, how about industry associations? They often publish data that represents industry averages. Or how about getting your own baseline data by going into a new client immediately after you have won a deal and measuring the key parameters at the outset and then measuring them again after six months? If you do this half a dozen times, you'll have your own baseline data that you can use as a starting point with customers. You'll know the average cost of processing a check in the Accounts Payable systems from half a dozen organizations that are similar to your new client. You'll know how long it takes to process a data record in a legacy system compared to what it takes once your system is in place. And so on. 3. How will we ever get this past our lawyers? Lawyers believe that their job is to keep the company out of trouble. And they know that the primary sources of trouble are (1) clients and (2) employees. If they can just eliminate both sources, they will have done their job perfectly. Unfortunately, in the real world there must be a balance between the "excess of caution" that lawyers love to live by and the slight risk of doing business that is required to actually close a deal. By using weasel words appropriately—"this may result in…," "you could see an increase of up to 20 percent…", "based on current assumptions, we project savings of…"—you can protect the company from making promises that could come back to haunt you and yet you can still offer a meaningful value proposition. Value propositions are the means by which we motivate the decision maker to move forward. A strong, specific value proposition that offers quantifiable improvements in a core area of performance is the key to shortening your sales cycle and winning more business. Don't let value paranoia cripple yours. We can calculate a compelling value proposition from automating your proposal operations. Give us a call and we'll put some pretty impressive numbers in front of you—and no marketing fluff!   About The Sant Corporation The Sant Corporation enables sales professionals to deliver high quality content throughout the entire sales cycle. Our sales enablement solutions reduce the time it takes to locate the best sales materials and expertise within the organization. Our proposal automation solutions improve win rates by accelerating the production of persuasive proposals, RFP responses, presentations, and related documents. Businesses choose Sant to improve sales productivity and win rates, increase marketing effectiveness, and deliver accurate, personalized documents to their customers. See the Demo! Get the Book! ©2010 The Sant Corporation 888-448-7268 (USA) +44 (0)870 734 7778 (UK) Follow Sant on Twitter

My highlights and special appreciation for Tom’s steady logic.

Good Nurturing Jim

It is still somewhat beyond my ability to fully comprehend the fact that there are nearly a billion pairs of eyeballs peering at some web site, somewhere, 24 hours of every single day. And the odds are that some, albeit a relatively small, number of them will somehow stumble upon, or search for or even been referred to your site or message.

Have you noticed that, in the B to B sector especially, the vast majority of those orbs are there for the very same reason; there is a usually an acute
or congenital pain or a great idea or an incredible opportunity that is lacking a certain, missing ‘lynchpin’ to make the pain go away or to complete the circuit with an “Ah-Ha” that energizes the entire project to success.

Case in point; Are you posting where they are most likely to find you? Search engines and specific search-words were the Merlin that worked the magic of clicks for us just a very short time ago. But with the constantly increasing improvement in technology, the soaring awareness of and the
ever growing successes with this formula led to swiftly increasing costs and an even further dilution of value of the tool. Notice:

The winners in this race seem to have all figured out the solution. Accepting the forecasted, quantum, growth of the web phenomonon, smart internet marketers began leveraging their content and offers made to the visitors who have and will continue to receive real value from the eye-time they have invested. Facing the radical shift from a home page that offers predictably, brilliantly, blatantly self-serving blather  and continuously extolling your supposedly unique virtue, values, products, services, their people, totally saintly commitments and promises and almost super-human qualifications, sadly giving scant attention to the actual pains and hopes the searcher is seeking to remedy and BTW, will quickly continue to do so until someone simply and immediately #1 Links the viewers pain directly and that emphatically articulates the #2 Appropriate Pleasure/Success/Solutions offered and does so precisely in that order. Doesn’t Personal-Pain always go first?   Remember the old sales admonition and formula? (NDIO X CR) = ($) or Number of Deals In-On X Closing Ratio = Revenue and $. Can you, will you, dare yourself realign your home page to one of actually helping viewers succeed and not just helping visitors buy your product? Good Nurturing Jim New Chart: In-House Marketers Rank Search Engine Marketing Challenges

“Almost anything in the world can be bought for money, they say---except the warm impulses of the human heart.
They have to be given. And they are priceless in their power to purchase happiness for two people, both the recipient and the giver”. David Dunn

My more nurturing friends often send me amazing, out of print, articles and even books that articulate and describe the actual origin and the very nature of human nurturing. One was called “Try Giving Yourself Away” a small book written by David Dunn in 1950. The title and opening sentence stopped me cold.

It was the dimensionalization of Nurture Marketing for me. It was reading his simple yet powerful words was where I was vividly reminded of  the important discovery that nurturing was very much like the very spirits of ‘Giving Yourself Away’ and ‘Think and Grow Rich’ both integrated and blended into an agreeable philosophy, an automatable assistant that helps you stay in touch processes and an authentic and affordable way to excel at Nurturing Customer Relationships.

Like many people, I was raised to look at life as fundamentally a matter of getting, far more about surviving starvation, illness and nature itself than any thought of spontaneously helping someone else, anyone not in your family, at least.. Ask any, early childhood born boy, landing on any, mid-depression 1936  dirt farm, way out in the country, no electricity, no running water thus no inside-the-house plumbing, will learn quickly that personal survival is the only answer and you are the only resource at hand and that was it. I learned that lesson well and somehow was blessed with at least that one more lesson that no Nun or Priest or leader ever taught me; that of the very idea of giving myself away and going the extra mile first came to me quite by accident and very suddenly and understandably by surprise and had such an impact on me that it shifted my aim and stayed with me hopefully for the rest of my life.  Thank you David Dunn and the venerable Updegraff Press.

1.     
Fear not the out of print alert at Amazon. Used copies are broadly available and affordable on eBay and elsewhere.
Full text of "Try Giving Yourself Away"

 - 2:13pm

"Are you the David Dunn who wrote us that nice letter a year or so ago about ..... "It never occurred to me until I read Try Giving Yourself Away that one ...
www.archive.org/.../trygivingyoursel031988mbp/trygivingyoursel031988mbp_djvu.txt -Cached - Similar

2.       Try Giving Yourself Away by David Dunn (Used, New, Out-of-Print ...

Alibris has Try Giving Yourself Away and other books by David Dunn, including new & used copies, rare, out-of-print signed editions, and more.
www.alibris.com/.../Try%20Giving%20Yourself%20Away - Cached - Similar

"Once there is a certain degree of presence, of stillness, and alert attention in human beings' perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit of every creature, every life-form, recognizes it as one with their own essence, and so loves it as them." Eckhart Tolle

Good Nurturings

Jim

 It has long been my habit to ask CEOs, nearing the end of my half-day presentations, to rest a minute and think about nurturing things that they actually do for people;  like family, friends, employees, customers, centers of influence and even clients they would like to attract. I then invite an open, brief discussion asking those willing to share, to tell their own stories. Thankfully all were recorded and archived and someday perhaps will become the raison d’etra  for a mew book, tentatively entitled; “Natural Nurturers in Business and Ways they Nurtured”. Contributions gratefully accepted and appreciated with acknowledgement and an autographed, first edition copy by way of gratitude.

One member eagerly raised her hand, practically leaped from her seat and asked to go first. Wish granted, she explained how her father, who founded now her company, nurtured a young daughter about business. gave her and read aloud to her each evening, every word of Napoleon Hill’s famous book, “Think and Grow Rich”, a book first published in 1936, in the very depths of the great depression, at the personal and very-urgent requests from and endorsements of Mahatma Gandhi, Andrew Carnegie and then President Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justices. She explained that his 24 year study of the personal success secrets of the then wealthiest and most successful men of the industrial revolution. All funded, carefully researched and catalogued, what were then the ultimate laws of success, and all of this when she was a just a green-freshman in high school.

One chapter in that old book especially struck her in a way that she said had literally changed her life forever. It was, “The Power of “Going the Extra Mile”. That simple secret, she avowed, had propelled her to honors status through high-school and in college. After college she joined and quickly grew through the ranks of her father’s company to become it’s President. It really demonstrated the true power to her of ‘extra-mile’ philosophies and strategies, she said.

To ensure that we walked our talk, we decided to arrange a personal visit with each new customer, about 90 days after delivery of a significant order, for a very unique and positive update and discussion, first about their relative satisfaction levels with the first order. Quickly diagnosing and restoring any glitches or accepting the usual, all-clear we took a break.

Following coffee, she said, the meeting shifted to her personal attempt to tangibly and memorably demonstrate their extra-mile philosophy in a meaningful and helpful manner. She intentionally brought her chief of engineering / design along and invited a comparable one from the visited firm.
Requesting a graphic overview of their full processes, she said, they usually discovered a few things that could make a real difference in the results and profits. Once in a while, she acknowledged, that they would collectively find several new applications for their solution.

Then she paused and smilingly asked of her group, “That nurturing enough for you folks?”

Have you, could you, will you adopt the idea of nurturing an extra-mile philosophy in all your ventures and all your interactions?
What might happen if you truly became an authentic, ‘helping customers succeed’, nurturing kind of company?

You can sometimes find the brightest inspirations and ideas from some of the astonishingly prescient business books and studies from the early nineteen- thirties, the early industrial revolution and reports such as “Think and Grow Rich.

Good Nurturing

JIm

Some Suggested Nurturing Reading: A list to get you in the mood for writing nurturing messages that really matter to your reader. Please forgive any authors or others who may belong on this list. You are seeing only the very early seedlings sprouting in this garden.
Always glad to have another shovel in the garden. BTW. This list came purely in the order they came into my mind. Perhaps, one day when new submissions wane, I promise to revise the order of listings in accord to your responses and comments.

 “Nurturing Customer Relationships” Amazon and at www.nurtureinstitute.com
          Jim Cecil-Eric Rabinowitz with Carol Ellison and Karin Rex

“101 Best BUSINESS LOVE LETTERS”   101 best ways to say thank-you and make it feel like you really mean it. eBook 

           Jim Cecil and Jodi Rabinowitz with the assistance of members of Nurture Institute Writers Guild, www.nurtureinstitute.com

“The Art of the Handwritten Note”—A guide to reclaiming civilized communications

           Margaret Shepherd, Amazon

“”Words of Love”--- At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. Plato

       Sophia Bedford-Pierce, Amazon

“Business Notes”---Writing Personal Notes that Build Professional Relationships

            Florence Issacs, Amazon
“Business Quotes” --- Thousands of Pithy Business quotes selected to improve your bottom line, or, at the least, your disposition.

            Bud Carter   www.businessquotes.com

“Try Giving Yourself Away”--- In which is set forth that happier way of living which all of us so earnestly seek and so few seem to find….This is a great pity since the secret lies within ourselves, and its magic can be enjoyed every day without price.

            David Dunn, Amazon

“Care Packages for the Workplace”---Dozens of things you can do and say to regenerate spirit at work.

            Barbara A. Glanz, Amazon

“Walk The Talk”---We judge ourselves mostly by our intentions but others judge us by our actions.

            Eric Harvey and Al Lucia, Amazon

“The Art of Thank You”---Crafting Notes of Gratitude

            Connie Leas, Amazon

“Love Letters” --- It is chiefly-perhaps only- in letters that one gets the mother of pearly shimmer inside the oyster of fact.

            Michele Lovric, Amazon

“Passionate Love Letters”---Each letter you send me penetrates more deeply into my heart.

            Michele Lovric, Amazon

“Turned-On”—Eight Vital Insights to Energize Your People, Customers and Profits.

                        Roger Dow and Susan Cook, Amazon

“Hug Your Customers”---The Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results.

            Jack Mitchell, Amazon

“A Cure for the Common Cold Call” 101 Best Nurture Tips and Tools

            Jim Cecil, www.nurtureinstitute.com

I rarely post an entire submissions from another blog. This one is an exception.
It is always good to have a champion of nurturing naturally in ones corner.

We, not often enough, find a person in life who really gets what you are espousing. Bud Carter has inspired and influenced me from the very first meeting and continues to this day with his ever growing library of pithy quotes (www.Businessquotes.com) and his passion for helping others succeed..

I hope you will  forgive the blatant self-promotion but I wanted it cast in the eternal digital cement of the Internet with my thanks for his continuing endorsement and support. And not just of me but as well for the numerous VISTAGE resource speakers he has nurtured and  assisted in spreading messages with which he agrees.