Mercury Retrograde – 10 Ways to Engage « Astro4Business Intersections

Mercury the Trickster stops to fasten his sandal.(Wikimedia Commons)

Hello, everyone.

Three times a year, Mercury enters its retrograde phase for three weeks. Mercury retrograde is an opportunity to turn our attention from our normal “pedal to the metal” style of thinking to a more reflective and inwardly-tuned focus.

This may sound inefficient but it’s actually an important part of our mental cycles to pause and review whether there are red flags that we’ve been moving too fast to notice. The trepidation people often feel when they hear that Mercury is moving into retrograde motion stems from ignoring the cues to take a break from direct action and forward motion. One of Mercury’s guises is the Trickster and he does have a way of getting our attention if we won’t occasionally slow down.

Retrograde Mercury signals a time when information from our unconscious mind can rise to the surface and come into conscious awareness. While we’ve been moving full-speed ahead, our deeper self has been grappling with the issues and challenges that we don’t have time to address in our busy business lives. With retrograde Mercury, solutions born of connections, synchronicities, and impressions that we may have missed along the way have an opportunity to present themselves. New information will emerge if we stop trying to figure it all out with our logical, left-brained minds.

So if you don’t take direct action during this time, what do you do? We obviously don’t want to just drop the ball and say, oh, Mercury is retrograde so I’m going to the beach for three weeks. (Or do we?) While we put our current plans on the back burner, this is an excellent time to examine past actions and correct any loose ends that may be sapping our energy day to day.

The RE words are an excellent place to start. Here are 10 actions you can take while you let your creative thoughts simmer for a while:

Rebuild – Yes, I mean that computer system that you almost implemented but is still hanging everyone up with bugs every day.
Recall – If you’ve got your own company “sticky accelerator” this is the time to ‘fess up to your customers and have them let you fix it.
Recap – This is an excellent time to look back at your financial, marketing, or production efforts and see where the gains and losses have been to date. Charts, graphs, and spreadsheets can tell the story of the past.
Receive – I’m thinking about Accounts Receivable. Do you know where your receivables stand, how many days past due, which customers are behind? This is the time to get clear about what is owed to you and to have the frank discussions with your customers to a committed repayment plan. Don’t worry – it’s good for them with Mercury retrograde to clean up their debts too.
Reciprocate – Do you owe somebody a favor, a dinner, a hand? Have you been meaning to show someone how much you appreciated their recent help? Now’s the time to express your gratitude in a tangible way.
Recommit – What are the half-done projects that are sitting in file folders waiting for your attention? Now is the time to review them and either recommit to them or put them away for good.
Reconcile – Is there someone in your business or local environment that you’ve been at odds with, someone whose support you need? This is the time to make the move to right the misunderstandings from the past and begin again.
Reconsider – Look over the past few weeks. Is there something you categorically rejected but keeps coming up in one form or another? Get the facts in front of you again and see if there’s something you missed or new information that makes a difference to your decision.
Refine – A great time to look at your systems and processes and refine your approach. What can be done better, more efficiently? What can be automated? Can you reduce the scope while making it even better?
Rejoin – Clubs, associations, charities. Have you let yourself become too busy or disheartened to attend to this aspect of your work? Are you still attending but your attention has wandered? This may be the time to rejoin, to give and receive, and to support your colleagues through this challenging year.