Posts for category ‘Holistic Wellness’

After decades where we increasingly bought in to the idea that “what’s good for Wall Street is good for America,” the financial crisis is causing many people to question the nature of business. Is greed and corruption merely “business as usual?” Or can business be a force for good?

In the bubble, a lot of people got rich gambling with other people’s money. And when those bets turned sour, the losses were paid for, not by the people who made the bets, but by taxpayers and by millions who lost their jobs. When combined with the cases where big businesses have contributed to ecological devastation, Enron-style fraud, and childhood obesity, there’s a lot of anger about the way business is being done.

But here’s the thing. Capitalism is far and away the most powerful system ever developed for creating wealth and raising our standard of living. Over the last 190 years, the real per person income level in the US has increased from $1,200 to $31,000. Our level of wealth has increased so much that we now drive to our protests.

Capitalism creates wealth – enormous wealth – and this wealth pays for our homes, education, health care, social services, and the many non-profits we donate to.

The problem isn’t that business is bad. In its own way, business is already a tremendous force for good.

The problem is that most of this good is being done unconsciously. It’s being done almost by accident, rather than as part of a consciously defined purpose. Relentless, ruthless competition creates profits – lots of profits – but these profits come with a price.

As its most commonly practiced, traditional business has three core problems.

It’s short on purpose.

It’s long on fear.

And it’s unsustainable.

Purpose. A colleague of mine does a lot of work with boards of directors. These men (and yes, they’re almost all older, white men) have lots of grey hair. They’ve risen to the top of their competitive ladders. And yet their biggest question is usually, “is this all there is?” They’ve often sacrificed everything to their careers, only to find a sense of emptiness and a lack of fulfillment.

The reason for this is that traditionally, we’ve compartmentalized money and meaning. For-profits are supposed to make money. Non-profits are supposed to make a difference. And that has left many people in business feeling successful put unfulfilled.

Fear. At its core, traditional business is fueled by scarcity and stress – two polite names for fear. Why do people get corrupt and greedy? Because they’re afraid there’s not enough to go around. In daily life, we don’t get greedy for air. We don’t try to hoard it, or store it away, because we trust that there’s enough for everyone. But capitalism is based on relentless, ruthless competition over scarce goods and services – and that creates fear. Feeling stressed about work isn’t something special. It’s an automatic consequence of being part of this system.

Sustainability. Capitalism’s greatest strength is its unparalleled capacity for economic expansion. And capitalism’s greatest challenge is its addiction to that expansion. Our entire financial system is predicated on the assumption that GDP will always keep increasing. Stock markets, debt and retirement funds all depend on this. So does our monetary supply. But continuous exponential expansion is unsustainable, and we’re rapidly reaching its limits.

Capitalism is a system with tremendous strengths – and with equally tremendous challenges.

So the real question is not “can business be a force for good?” The real question is “how can business be more of a force for good?” How can it provide more purpose, less fear, and more sustainability? And how can it do this more consciously, rather than as something we try to just fit in the cracks?

Now, that’s a question worth investing in.

If you’re a fish living in an aquarium, it doesn’t take a whole lot of ingenuity to discover things like food, rocks, bubbles, and other fish.

But it takes a genius to discover water.

In response to a recent article on conscious business, someone asked me “so, what do you mean by conscious?” And I got stuck. I couldn’t provide a concise answer. The whole notion of consciousness had become so core for me that that I was at a loss for words.

Then in my morning meditation today, I realized that the defining genius of some of my favorite teachers (such as Ron and Mary Hulnick, Steve Chandler, Ken Wilber and David Hawkins) is that like a fish explaining water, they’ve learned how to explain consciousness to other humans.

The picture below shows the ladder of consciousness. At the bottom of the ladder is death. As Steve Chandler points out, you’ve got to be a pretty good salesperson to close a deal with a dead person. And death makes it a lot harder to hit the quarterly numbers.

Just slightly above death is fear, along with its partners judgment and pain. Fear makes us stupid. It makes us un-conscious. At a physical level, it literally sucks the blood from our brains, reverses tens of thousands of years of evolution, and puts us into “fight or flight mode.” When we’re feeling scared, angry, hurt, stressed, guilty or unworthy, we’re in a very low state of consciousness. Most violence comes from this level of consciousness, as do most of the deeper challenges in relationships and business.

At the top of the ladder is the power of the human spirit. Think Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, and the firemen at 9/11. Think “yes we can.” This is where creativity lives, as well as inspiration, joy, love and peace. When we’re living life from the top of the ladder, we’re at the top of our game. Ideas flow, synchronicity connects, and we’re able to see how even the most painful challenges in our lives have been gifts for our learning and growth. This is a place of profound but grounded optimism – what Jim Collins calls Level 5 Leadership.

This grounded optimism makes a huge difference. According to Dr. Martin Seligman, “I have studied pessimism for the last twenty years, and in more than one thousand studies, involving more than half a million children and adults, pessimistic people do worse than optimistic people in three ways: First, they get depressed much more often. Second, they achieve less at school, on the job and on the playing field, much less than their talents would suggest. Third, their physical health is worse than that of optimists.”

When we’re at the top of the ladder we live life much more consciously than when we’re at the bottom. We see how interconnected life is, and we treat other people and our environment with care and consideration. Not because we “should,” or because we want others’ approval, but because we genuinely want to. From this place, we naturally shift our focus from a single bottom line to a triple bottom line (of profits, society and the environment.) We create businesses that provide both money and meaning. We create conscious businesses – organizations that are aware of the ladder of consciousness, and focus not just on what they do, but also on how they are.

Organizations which are not only aware of the other fish in the tank, but also of the water they swim in.

Small business is big business. In the United States, more than half of all jobs are in companies of 100 people or less and more than 10% of all people are self employed.

Yet most small businesses fail.

Why is this? And what can you do about it?

The biggest problem is that most small business owners don’t really own their businesses. They act like employees rather than entrepreneurs. They love providing their services, but desperately wish they didn’t have to do all that “business stuff” that goes with it. They assume that 80% of their success will come from the quality of their services. When in reality, 80% of success comes from the quality of your business systems. It comes from the quality of your recipe for success.

Building a business is like baking a cake. It requires a set of ingredients and a recipe. If an ingredient is missing, or a step is left out, it doesn’t work. Yet most practice builders focus all their energy on just two or three of the ingredients, and don’t even realize they need a recipe. Then they wonder why business always seems so tough.

Small business guru Michael Gerber says that the fatal assumption most service providers make is: “if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.” In other words, we assume that all we really need to do is offer a great service and have great intentions, and clients will beat a path to our door.

But this simply isn’t true.

An employee asks “what do I need to do today?” A business owner asks “how’s my recipe for success doing today?”

An employee gets caught up in doing what’s urgent, and measures success according to how busy their day was. A business owner focuses on doing what’s important, and measures success according to the goals and key metrics of the business.

An employee builds a business through trial and error – by making all the mistakes themselves. A business owner constantly seeks to learn from others’ mistakes – by learning which recipes have worked for others, and which ones haven’t.

This challenge is particularly critical for coaches, counselors, healers and other service professionals. In fact, most practice builders have a hard time even admitting that they are a business owner.

If this resonates with you, here are three key questions to ask yourself.
1) Do I really want to be a business owner or an employee?
2) What challenges are standing between me and the business I want to own?
3) How can I get support with those challenges?

During the boom times, many people with employee mindsets managed to keep their small businesses and service practices afloat, without having to really learn how to own their businesses. That’s no longer working.

The good news is that there are tremendous resources available for small businesses and practice builders, to help you take this challenge and turn it into an opportunity. Here are two.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber – Required reading for small business owners
Selling By Giving – Conscious practice building for service professionals

I worked with someone this week who had become trapped by her yeses. In the name of friendship and caring, she had been giving away so much of her time and energy that she wasn’t taking care of her own practice and her own needs.

When we looked at this pattern, the challenge wasn’t that she was doing the wrong things, or that she was doing things she didn’t want to do. She loved what she was doing, and she loves giving to others. The challenge was that she wasn’t being honest with herself about what she was giving up with each yes.

She was pretending she could say yes to as many things as she wanted to, instead of realizing that every yes comes paired with a no – the no we’re silently saying to the other things we could be doing with that time.

This is fine if the things we’re saying no to are less important. But how often have you said yes to something just because it’s urgent, or because someone asked you to? How often have you said yes because you were afraid to say no? How often have you said yes out of fear of the voice that tells you “I should do this…”?

When we look at each request as a choice between saying yes or doing nothing, this allows us to avoid facing our fears and conflicts over all the things we “should” do. We ask ourselves, “Oh, it’s no big deal…I can just add one more thing to my plate, right?”

But in doing so, we’re lying to ourselves.

Because that one more yes is often the thing that shifts our motivation source from the loving self-discipline that comes with “I choose to…” to the pain based motivation that comes from overload and “I have to…” It’s often the thing that shifts our energy from love to fear, and shifts our choices from being based in freedom to being based in addiction.

It’s like sweets at the holidays. The challenge doesn’t lie in that first taste. It lies when we go for the tenth helping in a week. It lies in the tenth yes, where we commit to doing something we know is going to stress us out, because of our fears of what it would mean if we said no. (And what is stress? It’s simply a polite name for pain, fear and guilt.)

And notice the wording here. “The challenge lies…” Literally. To one extent or another, most of us are addicted to stress. And addiction always comes paired with denial and self-deception. It’s based in the lies we tell ourselves.

So as a practice, when you’re about to say yes to something, try asking yourself an honest question – “what am I really saying no to, if I say yes to this request?”

Or create a not to do list. And practice putting one thing on that list every time you put something on your to do list.

Because often times, what we do is much less important than how we are as we do it.

Love and light,
Brian

I do a lot of work with healers – both receiving treatments from them and coaching them on how to create a practice that provides both money and meaning. The frustration of patients and alternative healers with the western medical system is often topped only by the frustration of the M.D.’s themselves. Why is this? It doesn’t seem to be for a lack of money, science, skills, or dedication.

Instead, perhaps the core issue with our western medical system is the same as the core issue in personal growth and development. At root it comes down to personal responsibility. Co-dependence and victim consciousness creates sickness while ownership consciousness creates wellness and growth. This is true for us as individuals – and it’s also true for our medical system itself.

Let me explain. In working with an M.D. client, we realized that his frustration was based in the co-dependence that permeates so much of western medicine (and culture.) The disease is the perpetrator. The patient is the victim. And the doctor is supposed to be the rescuer. (These are the three roles of co-dependence.) The doctor/system is put on a pedestal, given total responsibility, and expected to fix any disease with a pill or surgery. The insurance companies are expected to pay for it all (oscillating between rescuer and perpetrator.) And if our expectations get violated, we sue.

But what’s missing here? What’s missing is patients needing to take responsibility for managing their own holistic health. If we want to live a healthy life, we need to learn how to embrace wellness at the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels. Luckily, more and more, people are waking up to this fact and are making this shift. Which is why the wellness industry (most of which is developing outside our insurance systems) is growing from $200 billion in 2000 to $500 billion in 2005 to an expected $1 trillion in 2010.

Personal responsibility isn’t something we can’t force or mandate. So if you’re a healer (in any form) and you want to be part of the wellness industry, part of your job may involve educating your clients on just how big and important this shift is. And an even bigger part of your job may be in screening clients for their level of commitment and personal responsibility – accepting that many aren’t there yet, while focusing on those who are.

For more on the wellness industry and how its developing, I highly recommend The New Wellness Revolution by Paul Zane Pilzer.

Love and light,
Brian

Happy New Year!

With the start of the new year, we often have a burst of motivation, which turns into a list of new things to do for the year. Yet most of us are already living very full, stress filled lives. And so instead of our new years resolutions feeling like self-loving, self-honoring choices, they often feel like a new list of “shoulds.” “I resolve to go the gym three times a week” turns into “I should go to the gym three times a week this year.” And “I resolve to meditate at least twice a week” turns into “I should meditate at least twice a week.” Instead of our resolutions being sourced from the freedom and loving self-discipline of I Choose…, they get sourced from the pain and guilt of “I Should…” Instead of our resolutions being a practice of self-love, we find them turning into yet another place where we’re attempting to use the Cattle Prod of Guilt to shock ourselves into action.

Remarkably, while we rarely realize it, most of us have become addicted to pain. We’ve become addicted to using fear, pain, guilt, and “shoulds” as a primary source of motivation. This is so common, we no longer even call it pain…we call it stress. And while this can work for short-term, acute needs, over the long term, it automatically leads to procrastination, lower self-trust and self-confidence, and disease.

Plus, when we get right down to it, are you more interested in changing what you do in 2008, or how you are? Is losing 10 pounds really what you most want, or is that more of a proxy for a deeper desire, such as self-love, self-trust, inner peace, or self-acceptance?

If you’re more interested in the latter, then how about making some un-resolutions this year? An un-resolution is a set of expectations, self-judgments, or to do items, that you agree to release from your life. Typically, we find our to do lists filled to overflowing with things that are urgent but not really all that important, at least not in the grander scheme of things. Take a look at your to do lists. What are three things that really aren’t that important, but which you have been “shoulding” on yourself with? Are there any patterns that are sourced out of a sense of people-pleasing, or a fear of rejection, rather than a sense of self-honoring choices?

How much of your time is being taken up by things that are nice to do, rather than being sourced out of your core priorities and values?

And are you willing to release any of them this year, in order to make space for the things that are truly important to you?

If so, I support you in making a list of un-resolutions for the year. Then out of the space that this creates, listen to your heart. Maybe it will tell you to add some new, self-honoring choices to your list. Or maybe it will tell you to just rest in the being-ness and glory that you already are.

Thank you for being part of my life, and I wish you all the best in 2008!

Love and Light,
Brian

I just returned from my 20th high school reunion, where I was invited to give a short speech to a group of current students, faculty, parents, and alumni. What a difference 20 years makes! My senior English teacher almost broke down in tears when she saw how far we’d all come, and it was a beautiful experience to go back and reconnect with my roots after all this time.

I took this talk as an opportunity to go back and think about what I would have wanted to hear in high school, about how to work with my insecurity and issues. I like to joke that in high school, I was the one that the chess team made fun of. (In talking about this, they agreed, while also being shocked at how much I’d grown and changed). So I had a lot of material to work with. And in doing so, I realized how much these secrets of high school are also some of the key secrets of life.

Some of these secrets:

- Everyone is insecure in high school, but we tend to think that A) we’re not supposed to be, and B) we’re the only one who feels this way. The challenge and secret of high school (and life) lies not in how many challenges and insecurities we have – but in how we face them and deal with them. A key choice point in life is whether we see our challenges as excuses for blame and victim consciousness, or as opportunities for learning and growth. And this is particularly important, because…

- Suffering equals pain times resistance. We all have a certain amount of challenges and pain we will face in life. However, when we fight, deny, or repress our challenges, they get worse and worse and worse. Instead, when we accept them, embrace them, and strive to learn from them, they dissipate fairly quickly. Facing our pain and fear takes courage, and courage is like a muscle that we build through steady, consistent practice. Courage isn’t being fearless. Courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyway – and our insecurities are there as an opportunity for building courage.

- And of course, “I’m rubber and you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.” Out of the mouths of babes. This grade school taunt turns out to be stunningly deep wisdom, because every time we judge or accuse someone else of something, this is a direct reflection of our own insecurities and self-judgments. Every time. If you feel bad because others are gossiping about you or teasing you, take a minute to think about what they’re making fun of you for, or accusing you of, and then hold a mirror up to these judgments. If someone is teasing you as clumsy or ugly, this is reflecting their own insecurities about not being good enough. If someone is pretending to be all righteous and pure, while accusing others of sin, this is a reflection of their own self-judgments and repressed urges. And the same thing goes for your judgments of others. This is called “The Mirror,” and it provides one of the most powerful tools there is for increased self-awareness and wisdom.

- Others’ upset has nothing to do with you. For the most part, we’re only focused on ourselves when we’re upset, but because of The Mirror, we think that our upset is “out there.”

- Similarly, your upset has nothing to do with them. For when we’re running “I’m upset because…” we’re also avoiding personal responsibility, and pretending to be the victim. But when we play the victim, we’re also giving up our personal power and personal freedom, because if the problem is “out there” then where is the solution? Also out there – when the only person we really can change is our self. (These last two secrets are part of the 7 Secrets of Emotional Intelligence, available for free at www.corecoaching.org – reading time: 45 minutes)

- And finally, the myth of falling in love. The story is that “if I fall in love, that means I’ve found my soul mate, and we’re going to live happily ever after.” When the truth is we are programmed to fall in love with those who can teach us the most – often by triggering our deepest unresolved issues. Like it or not, the more that we have unresolved unconscious wounds, the more that we will be attracted to people who trigger those issues, and cause us to replay the very situations we swore we’d never get involved in again. In order to break this pattern, we have to learn how to love ourselves, and how to move from co-dependence to inter-dependence.

You can view a (crude but effective) video of the speech at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6uYAxZ4Juk (viewing time: 10 minutes)
And if you have any adolescents or young adults in your life who might get value from this, please feel free to forward it to them as well.

Love and light,
Brian