It’s not Just a Business Sales Metaphor. It’s an Ancient Causal Ability in All of Us.
Rainmaking is not a metaphor. It is an ancient capacity in all human beings.
In ancient tribal cultures, rainmakers held a direct relationship with their creator — calling in the rain, or holding it back, with remarkable results. That is where this begins.
In the modern world the concept got borrowed, narrowed, and reduced to sales. If you bring in the clients, you’re a rainmaker. That definition is useful and important for success — and nowhere near complete.
The real question is this: what does it mean to bring something into existence that would not exist otherwise? In any field. Under any title.
Kim Greenhouse has spent decades doing exactly that — and observing people who do it without ever being called a rainmaker.
Her finding: this capacity is not reserved for a select few. It is in far more people than the world recognizes — unrecognized, unactivated, and misunderstood based on title, stature, and track record.
What Rainmaking Really Is — And Why It Matters More Than You Think.
Watch this short video to find out what Rainmaking actually is — and why it may be more relevant to your life than you think. It is a real capacity that lives in all of us.
Read the Full Verbatim Transcript: “What Is Rainmaking?” with Kim Greenhouse
What Is Rainmaking?
Good afternoon. My name is Kim Greenhouse, and I want to talk to you a little bit about rainmaking today. It’s one of the most exciting domains of possibility, at least in my life, and it should be in yours. Rainmaking is a very ancient concept that, at first when you think about it, sounds like an imaginary concept, a metaphysical concept — that it doesn’t really exist.
There’s no such thing as rainmaking. But what if I were to tell you that in the ancient tribes of the world, there really is? There are tribes which have a relationship to their creator where they pray, they do rituals and ceremonies, they talk to their creator, and it rains. They can even talk to their creator and have it not rain — as in for a wedding ceremony, or something else, some major event where they don’t want it to rain. So rainmaking could be about the cause and facilitation of something, but it could also be about making sure something doesn’t happen. They’re both rainmaking applications.
It’s interesting — the other thing I want to tell you about rainmaking is that even though it’s a very ancient concept, and the concept I just shared with you is about the relationship to a creator, a relationship at a divine level of intelligence, it’s also been translated in the Western world as: you make something happen, you push it to happen, you will it to happen, you work with others sometimes to do that, and it happens.
And in that way, examples of this have been in the motion picture industry. The rainmaker is somebody often associated with being the producer who brings all the elements of a motion picture together — brings the team together, brings in the money. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t; sometimes they bring everything else but the money. But whatever it is, it’s a coming together and bringing together of all the elements that bring something into existence. That’s a rainmaking application in entertainment.
Another application has been in the legal field. The legal field in the United States is where the concept took hold at first, to mean the rainmaker is the one who brings clients into the law firm. And so rainmaking in the Western sense got very much associated with sales. If you bring in the money, if you bring in the clients, you’re a rainmaker. And that’s a very important — and yet narrow — definition of what it is.
So I want you to know that the understanding of what it is needs to be totally opened up, from a very small aperture, a very small window for delivery, to a much more expansive, wider delivery — a wider window, if you will. So a rainmaker could be somebody who does one job and has one title, and delivers something in a totally different field. They may not be known for what they’re doing over here, where they have the title and the credibility — but they just pulled something off over there. They’re still a rainmaker.
I knew a poetry professor at UT in Austin, and she was an incredible poetry professor. But she flew all over the world and helped people completely transform their conditions in startups, in generating new types of commercial enterprises. She was amazing. And here she has the title of a university professor in the area of poetry — but what is this other part of her life that she’s doing, that nobody really knows about? Well, I’ve met her, and I was so impressed with her and inspired by her, because I could relate to her. I am a rainmaker.
And I believe in my heart of hearts that all of us have an ingrained divine capability that we come into our lives with. And it’s either very activated and exercised throughout life, or possibly dimmed or sleeping. Either way, there is an inner rainmaker in all of us. It’s just that we happen to pay attention — the people that we associate with are the “winners,” the people that are delivering, that are in front of our faces. But there are hundreds and millions and billions of people throughout the world that are delivering and bringing things to life and bringing things together that we don’t even know about.
And that’s what I want to talk to you about today. I’m Kim Greenhouse. I’m going to talk to you about more, as you click into these different sections of rainmaking.ch. See you in a moment.