What’s in a Name?

I’ve been a little absent from the post, over a week since I last wrote!  Well, it’s September and for me, it feels like everything needed to be done yesterday.  Sigh.  I will get over it and be present to right now.

Fortunately it’s a joy writing this and receiving comments from you all.  So something in me feels so much lighter by just being here, writing.  It is an important signal, that lightness.  It means that I have love, joy, and ease when I do this and doing more such things creates a life full of love, joy, and ease.  It really does add up well.

I’ll answer a question one of my readers posed recently. The question is where does my business name, ‘Joi Works’ come from, how did I choose it?

Well, it began with my desire to have a name that expressed a quality of spirit.  This was about 11 years ago and back then, my tag line was ‘moving body mind spirit’. When those are aligned, joy is present and so I wanted that to be a part of the name.  But using ‘joy’ didn’t feel quite right, for it has its own meaning and I wanted my business to have its own name.

Well, you probably won’t guess where I saw ‘Joi’ first.  It was the name of a British band that happened to fuse some Indian sounds with pop/rock music.  As soon as I saw the name, it felt right.  As I sat with it, I also realized other connections for me (synchronicity often seems to follow something that is right).  Joi is closer to ‘joie’, the French word for joy and I liked that since I do speak French and love it.  It also coincidentally started with the first letter of my own name, ‘J’, and ended with the last letter of my last name, ‘i’. And in the middle was a circle, wholeness. Hmm, that felt perfect.  A colleague of mine pointed something else out that I hadn’t noticed right away.  He commented on the circle as wholeness and unity while the ‘i’ outside represented individuality.  Yes! That fit as well.  A lot of my work begins with the individual and bringing them ‘out’ to express and be their hightest selves.  And that, to me, also creates communities of strong individuals connected together in wholeness.

So that is where Joi Works originated.  Oh, the ‘works’ was to create a sense of action and  movement. My business represents ‘being’ (Joi) and expression (works – Joi works when it also becomes action).

My logo is being updated right now and I look forward to sharing it with you soon!