Shannon Bailey shares feng shui success story

by Clarissa A. French

SBJ Staff

Shannon Bailey, a Springfield native, Kansas City small-business owner and Avon Spirit of Enterprise Award winner, will be the featured speaker at the Alliance of Professional Organizations' fall mixer Sept. 30 at the Mid-America Cancer Center Auditorium.

Bailey's presentation, "A True Story of Business Success Through Feng Shui, the Ancient Asian Art of Placement," details her experience in redesigning her struggling small business, Third Stone From the Sun. Since its feng shui makeover, the store is thriving and Bailey has established a second career as a feng shui lecturer and consultant.

The daughter of longtime Springfield advertising-agency owners Gary and Janet Ellison, Bailey graduated from Kickapoo High School in 1989 and attended the University of Missouri at Columbia, where she met her future husband, Mark.

The newly engaged couple was beginning to plan the future when Mark was severely injured in an automobile accident. After years of extensive medical care and support, the pair married and moved to Kansas City.

Bailey's dream, shared by her husband, was to have her own store. In 1992, they opened Third Stone from the Sun, a retail shop offering jewelry, beads, and a rock and mineral gallery.

Initially, everything went smoothly, from finding a location to setting up shop. But once the store opened, the problems began: trouble with people, time and cash flow. "I really didn't know if we were going to make it," she said.

A friend said she should look into feng shui. "He handed me this book on interior designing with feng shui, and I said 'OK ... this is an interesting solution to my business problems.'" And it was.

Feng shui is "looking at your space as a metaphorical mirror of how you are creating your life on the inside," Bailey said.

A person's home or work environment is the most physical manifestation of what's going on inside the individual, she said. "Kind of psychology from the outside in."

Bailey said she can walk into a strange room and pick out the one object in it with the biggest story behind it, the object with a history, good or bad. Such objects can be positive or negative influences, based on whether their significance brings you up or pulls you down, she said.

The application of feng shui is practical, and one need not buy into a spiritual concept to use it, Bailey said.

Feng shui first came to this country with Donald Trump, who Bailey said discovered he couldn't sell properties to Asian clients without feng shui design. His attitude was "'I want to make a buck and I don't really care.' And you don't have to," Bailey said. "It's about putting you in the best possible position to accomplish the most you can in the shortest amount of time: Work less, make more and where do you put yourself to do that?"

In the office setting, one of the biggest feng shui mistakes is workstations set up so employees face a wall, with everything happening behind their backs, Bailey said.

The psychology is basic: Working with your back to the world breeds defensiveness, she said. Deep down you perceive that others are "talking behind your back" or "getting ready to stab you in the back."

A simple feng shui cure for the problem is to put up a mirror in the workstation so the person can see and feel connected with what's going on around him. Mirrors, Bailey said with a laugh, are "the aspirin of feng shui take a couple of mirrors and call me in the morning."

The Sept. 30 Alliance mixer begins with refreshments and mixing at 5:30 p.m., followed by the program 6-7 p.m. Admission is $5, and reservations must be received at 885-9205 by Sept. 27.