Archive for the ‘Conscious Business’ Category
Take a Full Time Role as a Garbage Collector
Friday, May 11th, 2012I cannot acquire integrity
Friday, May 4th, 2012
Do you serve life?
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
Unleashing true brilliance in an organisation
Monday, April 16th, 2012
Look at any organisation, team, family unit or business, and you will certainly find the following.
Interpersonal conflict
Lack of clarity of purpose, direction, project parameters etc
Blame of others or the system
Miscommunication
Conflicting worldviews, perspectives and cultures
The amount of energy that is lost to these communication and people issues is immense. Loss in time, energy, effort, inefficiency, focus. At a rough guess, say a 40% loss of available energy for every person involved. Often higher.
As a simple exercise, think of what is consuming your mental and emotional energy right now? Is it creativity, innovation, problem solving, design, relationship building….all desired…or is it worrying about Sue or Paul, or the boss, or why people will or won’t, can or can’t, or why didn’t she do this, deliver that, understand this, be on time with, why the leadership says this and does that….? And countless other issues that we now see as the norm.
What is the cost of a 40% loss due to poor interpersonal, communication and leadership skills? In pure dollar terms, every opportunity you have to make $100 is reduced to $60. That hurts. But that doesn’t even take into account the stress, sleepless nights and endless conversations to try to reach resolution…
There is a cost that is less obvious but very critical. The cost of brilliance.
If we have a higher competency in our conscious communication and leadership tools, reducing significantly the interpersonal conflicts and lack of clear communication, this allows another element to enter the fray. Something even more powerful. When clean communication is present, more intelligence is able to be expressed. Not just because the garbage noise has been reduced.
But because when two or more people sit with each other in a clean space, the field of access is opened in a transpersonal way. (Beyond people)
This is the basis of collective intelligence and synergy. The space between atoms, particles, objects, ideas, people…is available when the friction is reduced. Here lies genius, innovation…breathtaking brilliance…the kind of outcomes most organisations and innovative entrepreneurs aspire to.
Take your $100 and get $1000 or more.
Like…? What’s not to like.
Invest in conscious communication and leadership tools if you aspire to this type of true brilliance. Do the math, it will end up being a wise investment.
Caveat; the success of any intervention depends on the interior condition and intelligence of the intervener.
Photo Credit: SantaRosa OLD SKOOL via Compfight
Emerge through emergency
Thursday, April 12th, 2012
The most powerful moment
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
Personal Power
Monday, March 5th, 2012
This is about ‘you’.
Not the ‘you’ you are. But the ‘you’ you want to be.
The all-powerful you. The all-knowing you.
The you who you know deep down you could be.
The you at your most dynamic. The you with foresight, with authority, courage, integrity, dignity, heart.
Easy words to type. Much harder ones to live up to.
You may already have some of these qualities, at least some of the time. You may also be brilliant at what you do. You may be rich, successful, respected. But whoever you are today – you can be much, much more.
Because, like all humans, you have the potential to be.
I know that ‘you’. I have come to know him or her over 25 years of intense training, exploring and innovating in the realm of personal development. I take a systemic approach and use big picture thinking that stretches from the cellular to the universal. In simple terms, I empower my clients and students to cut through the white noise, the BS, so ‘you’ shine brilliantly and enduringly. I look forward to doing the same with you.
I only work with a very small and limited number of extraordinary leaders and entrepreneurs from around the world for a minimum of 12 months and often for years. This allows me to maintain a clear intimate focus, and helps my clients receive my best coaching and mentoring. At times, I also work with their leadership team. And through my global partnership in The Constellation, we work with institutions that seek to address the future with true vision.
The journey to fully -realized personal power may not be an easy one. But it doesn’t have to be a lonely one. I will be there with you, every step of the way. My initial role is to help you to identify and recognize your other ‘you’. Then, through a combination of learning, reflection, feedback and refinement work with you to embrace your authentic core, to become that real ‘you’.
To achieve meaningful change requires commitment from you – commitment that I will match. I will also bring rigour, truth, respect, compassion and leadership to this quest.
It will require great efforts. But it will also bring great rewards. Together we’ll align your integrity; develop your listening, emotional, physical and spiritual intelligence; encourage advanced communication; increase your ability to read the most subtle signals from people, from systems, and from the world; expand your perspective beyond what you saw as possible; improve your health and vitality; increase your self-belief and your self-awareness; remove constraints; learn new
skills and equip you with new tools.
I have already done the same for many others; clients who will vouch for my expertise in these areas, should you decide to take the next step.
If you believe you are ready to discover who ‘you’ really are, take that step.
I look forward to hearing from you….
And please comment on this piece. I am not normally one to do heavy promo stuff in this blog. This is an exception. I worked for several months on this, crafted in the main by a wonderful professional word smith, Tim Hall. With input from a few others, Amir, Michael, Laurent.
I was once told that when we hide ourselves and our gift from the world, we withhold the possibility of supporting other people in their own journey to the good the true and the beautiful.
My work is my gift…what is yours…would love to hear..
PS. The photo is my daughter, taken about 7 years ago.
Why do we find integrity so hard?
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
R.Buckminster Fuller
Today a client asked me…what is the opposite or dark side of diversity? The place where it is acceptable to malign a person for their colour, or sex, or religion, or..? He was asking because in his world he has been observing the dark side of humanity manifest under the aegis of the continuing global financial crisis. People finding it acceptable to get away with seriously bad behaviour towards other human beings, given our current circumstances. In organisations where the sky is falling because the model has already changed but people are denying it, the ground is treacherous. Toxic undercurrents are a sure diagnosis for immanent collapse.
This week in Australian politics we have been especially privy to the dark side of humanity. Deception, extreme narcissism, covert agenda’s based on power, greed and hubris. More toxic undercurrents…more denial…more deception…immanent collapse.
In my own life I have recently allowed myself to fall under the spell of another’s deception. I know within this is a rich seed that bears a gift. For now, I am a little bruised. How easily seduced I am, still, by some bright shiny object or promise.
I found myself wondering what the threads are from this week in my world…deception, treachery, hubris…and in my contemplation I came back to my life’s work.
I think of my hero and guide, Bucky Fuller. His message always rested on the stone of integrity. Integrity is the Essence. It is the song, the one song, the Universe, I have adopted as my own stand in life. In so doing, it asks much of me, often challenges me to the soul of my existence. Yet it is also the key to freedom..the real kind…soul freedom.
Why do humans find integrity so hard?
Flipping through Chip Conley’s latest book, Emotional Equations, here is his equation for integrity.
Integrity = Authenticity x Invisibility x Reliability.
Authenticity is the merging of self awareness and courage. Self awareness is a life’s work. Few people take it up as a committed practice. Courage, well, courage is derived from ‘cour’ for heart. Courage takes heart, vulnerability, and action. It is not the same as bravado, which all bluster minus heart. Our world is full of bravado. We are enchanted by courage because it is so rare, especially from our leaders. We long for it…as we long to be courageous.
Invisibility is the act of being in integrity no matter who is watching, and especially when NO ONE is watching. It is grounded in humility. It holds service to others as its source code. Our personal agenda is secondary. Again, rare…precious…extraordinary when you encounter it.
Reliability means that you are your word. What you say is what you do is who you are. You keep your promises to yourself, and to others.
This is the work of integrity. Every aspect is required. It is great big huge work. It is the most important work on the planet.
Or so I think and feel…
But I would love to hear what you think…? Do our schools, institutions, governments consider integrity as important enough? Do we invest in integrity like we invest in growth strategies or productivity? What needs to happen for this to be so?
The death of wisdom. Learning from experience is a faculty we fail to practice
Monday, January 30th, 2012
Bold statement. Usually not so true for positive deviants who have a tendency to suck the learning juices out of every experience.
Lets look at the facts. We no longer study history. Or those who do are kept in dusty corners of old Universities. How do I know this? There has been historical precedent to a collapsing economy, not just in the 1930’s but going back time and again from the beginning of time. There has been historical precedent for pretty much every version of war, going back to when man first sneezed. Even when we look at climate change, there is countless examples throughout history of humanity of the perils of treating nature and natural systems with disdain. Is any of the ‘expert’ voices out there referring to what history has taught us?
We do not have any eldership in our ‘modern’ day communities. Tell me how much wisdom has been passed down from your family elders in your life time? What have you learned from your grandparents, or even your parents? Where is the collective wisdom of our elders? Lost in a nursing home somewhere were we can’t ever find it. We think we are superior to our elders. That they know nothing because they didn’t have an iSomething, or connection to the internet. So we remove them from sight, and mind, failing to see the significant contribution they have to make. They know how to survive in hardship and depression, tools we may well need. What else can they teach us? What about how to grow old with dignity, how to make peace with death, how to read signs? (not the obvious ones) There is a beautiful movie, Bab’aziz, that has as its central story the gift of wisdom past from an old Sufi man to his granddaughter. What tragedy is the loss of this heritable wisdom in our culture.
We ignore wisdom of indigenous communities. We scoff in our arrogance, that they know nothing. But in their knowing nothing they survived and thrived for far longer than our little thrive moments which have been few and far between. How could anyone navigate across the vast Pacific Ocean in canoes without any instruments save for those supplied by nature? Stars, currents, wind, birds. Dumb luck, or some highly evolved navigation system that might offer us a few opportunities to learn from natural systems? What have they to teach us about paying attention to the instruments provided for freely by nature? Whole learning systems are literally dying as the elders die. Lost to us.
Our leaders of industry and politicians are far to wrapped up in the short term future to even lift a wisdom muscle that might involve considering the past. This is obvious.
But what about you? Do you take time to reflect, not just on your past, but on the past of your elders? History, ever given that a good look? Even simple reflection on the lessons you have learned from today, from your joys and pains, frustrations and humiliations? Do you use these as your school of daily wisdom?
As someone who occasionally delivers learning programs into organisations, I don’t need to see the studies on where real learning is gained. It always comes with experience. With getting our hands dirty, our hearts broken, our ego’s dented. Every day is an opportunity to learn. Even better if learning is facilitated through reflection, inquiry and some form of witnessing and reflecting back by another who holds the fullest expression of your truth as worth investing in. This is the work I mostly do that I love so. How valuable is this…better than a Harvard degree? Hell yeh. The school of the crucible of life.
Take a stand for your own wisdom. Cultivated over a lifetime, seeded by your ancestors, attended to daily. The world will thank you for it.
Tell me how you are cultivating your wisdom, or where you see communities learning from their elders in our ‘modern’ world.
SOPA, The Year of the Dragon, WWIII – Black Swans and no this is not what you think.
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
2012 will be the year of people. Regular people. Mothers, fathers, youth. Tax paying, hard working, making ends meet kind of people. People from wealthy countries, not so wealthy countries, black people, white people, gay and straight people. People will find their inner dragon.
It started loudly as the Arab Spring, and then it shifted to the USA and the Occupy movement. In Europe the fastest growing political group is the Pirate Party, started in Sweden, made up of mostly 18 to 30 year olds against online censorship. It will move at the speed of light, in totally unexpected ways. Because people are waking up to the power they always have held as a collective.
The politicians and power mongers are not reading the signs. Their hubris and arrogance is making them the blind. They forget that money does NOT buy everything. Never has, never will. The illusion is that money will buy votes, that money makes blind, mute, deaf slaves. But they have forgotten history. In their hubris and arrogance they have forgotten that people, the masses, us, do have a voice. We can say no. And when the workers of the system refuse to show up for work, the system breaks down. I am not speaking of unionism. And I am not a socialist. I am speaking of the power of people collectively protesting to no longer being slaves to a system that is being kept alive for the few. Of the travesty of greed and pride run rampant. Of the acceptance of evil as a normal day to day thing. Evil – like it being perfectly acceptable for some people to have all the gizzmo’s in the world made by hands of enslaved children. Or, evil like the rape and pillage of earth, making the local people’s environment toxic, and inhabitable.
Everyone knows that the system is broken. Broken. What people forget is the power they hold in their voice and action to stand up and speak.
I watched the great TED produced 13 minute video clip by Clay Shirky telling the truth about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). His final words where that even if SOPA was defeated, it would return.
The fight would not be over. Be prepared for the next round.
Now here is the truth.
If any version of SOPA clears the American legal system, we are looking at WWIII. Not the usual war with guns and military, but the turning of the rest of the Western world on the ‘mighty’ USA. And lets face it, the USA already has much of the non-Western world as enemies. I am not sure anything less than this type of global uprising of people will break the bubble of delusion that holds the USA in their own minds as this place that is an exception to the rest of the world. A place where they can get away with the very things they accuse other countries of. (Like electoral fraud, invading soverign nations covertly, rendition, war crimes…the list is long)
(To be clear, there are very wonderful, magnificent, brave people in the USA, people working their arses off to stop this kind of behaviour. I am speaking of the country as a whole… of the archetypal USA full blown in its shadow.)
When nations like Australia, New Zealand and countries in Europe, the usual allies of the USA, see their citizens arrested in their own country by the USA because of ‘their’ ‘copyright’ laws, then all the hell of Pandora’s box will be unleashed. When corporate USA thinks they can control the internet anywhere in the world, they better think again.
Like it or not, the internet belongs to no one country. And no one company, despite Googles efforts to change that. The internet is the defining invisible force of our next stage of humanities evolution. It is the boundless, freedom finding, liberating energetic network that transcends ownership. It has its shadow, as does all things. (Fraud, legitimate piracy, the ability to shred an innocent persons reputation in seconds, for example.) But for any country or company to attempt to ‘own it’ will create such wrath from the rest of the world.
There has been so much talk about 2012, about the Mayan calendar ending, about this time being the most important time in humanities history. Frankly I find this just a lot of distraction and noise, a place for people to focus their energy and make a shit load of money, continuing to encourage the type of fear that keeps people from thinking and seeking clearly.
History demonstrates that every single time in history has had moments of extreme crisis, where humanity reached a critical threshold. This is not the big one, it is simply another one. Can we stop the spin and get on with what needs to be done. We have too much work to do to spend any energy at all thinking this is the BIG time in humanity. All this does is continue to affirm our need to be ‘special’. This is a hollow egotistical need. It distracts us from our real purpose.
I suspect that what will knee-cap us will be the Black Swan. It will not be the usual suspects. Sure, the economy might fail. It has failed before and we survived. And god knows the financial system is in need of collapse in its current form. The EU might collapse and…people will survive. The Middle East might turn into a seething sess pool stirred on by the USA via Israel. Yep, this has been going on for the history of humanity. I am not glossing over the tragedy of all of these things that seem pretty certain to unfold.
Mother Nature will rise up and say enough, in her usual fashion, reducing humans to acknowledging that she has the kind of power that humbles us all. She is angry at being raped, pillaged, and treated with such flagrant disrespect. Her gizzards have been sucked dry, her skin scared and polluted, her oxygen poisoned. If she were one of our children we would be screaming foul to all four corners of the Universe.
But will anyone expect the world to turn on the USA? All of the world? I don’t think anyone sees that in the future. SOPA could do that. In an instant.
We are no longer working in linear time. The splitting of the atom changed all of that. We are moving at the speed of light, and at this speed institutions we thought impossible to fall can and will.
Interesting times, yes. We need wisdom (which won’t be found from our elected leaders), and is not something we have much of. We threw wisdom away when we made our elders elderly, and stopped learning from them. When we stopped being students of history, where the follies of man have been documented in one form of other for all of human time, and to which we have way too much arrogance to pay attention to.
The signs are all there. The cards have been played. Now it is up to us…how will we play our hand?
The perfect metaphor for this time is the lone man standing against the tank in Tiananmen Square. Each of us holds this potential, to stand up to. On this day, January 23rd 2012, the dawning of the year of the Chinese Water Dragon, we the people are called on to find our inner dragon. Lets hear the ROAR.
