Posts for category ‘Love Beyond Belief’

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

Hello community,
We’re preparing a conscious business manifesto, and we would love any feedback you would care to offer.

Please find the current draft at www.consciousbusinessnow.com.

Then please feel free to join the discussion on this topic, by posting your comments below.

Love and light,
Brian

Have you been feeling insecure or worried with all the financial challenges going on right now?  I don’t know of many people, including myself, who haven’t been experiencing at least some fears about money and security.  In fact, the more I’ve been seeking to sit with those fears and understand them (whether mine or others’) the deeper they seem to go.

And I think I’m just now beginning to really understand why.

There is fear in the air, in the water, in the ground.  It’s bigger than our individual fears.  It’s the fear that comes with gobal, systemic, deep change.  It’s the instinctive reaction we have when confronted with the need to either “grow or die.”

In my community, people regularly talk about 2012 as the dawn of a new age.  We speak with optimism about a quantum leap in consciousness.  We connect with a sense of hope and evolution that’s bubbling across the land.

But in doing so, we tend to skip past a fundamental truth.

Every great strength comes with an equal challenge.  This is the nature of spiritual evolution, because our strengths are what allow us to grow, and our challenges are what push us to do so.

This realization begs a question.

What challenges are so profound they could push our entire civilization to evolve?

We’re beginning to find out.

I had an epiphany today, where I realized just how much larger this crisis is than what I’ve been allowing myself to imagine. It’s going to be presenting much bigger challenges than most of us are prepared to admit.  It may literally challenge the very foundations of our current economic paradigm, requiring us (among other things) to embrace a new, more loving, more effective way of doing business.

Does this resonate with you?

If so, please stay tuned to this exploration of conscious business, and please also feel free to visit www.sellingbygiving.net and register for the free practice building kit.  The first CD directly addresses the question of how to do business in a more loving, more effective way.

Also, feel free to check out http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization – while I disagree with some of his proposed solutions, his diagnosis of the challenge is profound.

Last week, we explored the core strength and challenge of capitalism. We looked at the coming collision between the “unstoppable force” of exponential economic expansion, and the “immovable object” of sustainability demanded by the planet’s finite resources.

And we asked a question.

What will Capitalism 2.0 look like?

(If you missed it, last week’s nugget is available at http://ecoaching.corecoaching.org/?p=48)

This question fascinates me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Here are a few of mine.

I’m guessing Capitalism 2.0 will embrace the following.

Money and Meaning. Gen Y regularly gets accused of being lazy. But my sense is that the deeper issue is an unwillingness to devote their lives just to making money for the sake of money. They want their jobs to have both money and meaning – a key feature of Capitalism 2.0. When we only focus on survival and success, desire will sooner or later turn in to addiction. Sustainable capitalism requires explicitly supporting people, companies and marketplaces in making the shift from focusing just on their physical needs (i.e. money, desire, success and survival) to also embracing their spiritual needs (i.e. meaning, growth and giving).

An Increased Shift to Services. Value creates money – not the other way around. And there are two ways we can expand the economy – by producing/consuming more products or by producing/consuming more services. Buying more couches isn’t sustainable. Investing in personal growth services is. If you’re building a practice offering life-enhancing services, but you’re afraid to charge a lot for them, ask yourself the question, “what else would my clients spend the money on?” If you don’t charge as much as you can for your services, and your client buys couches with that money instead, look at how much your choice just cost the planet!

Long Term Focus. Greed happens when desire turns into addiction. By definition, addiction means making what’s important today a higher priority than what’s important tomorrow. It means over-prioritizing our immediate desires. And a key component of capitalism’s current addiction has been Wall Street’s obsessive focus on quarterly earnings and annual bonuses. Capitalism works much better when decisions and compensation are based on 5, 10 or even 20 year windows.

Valuing Consciousness. A related question is “what is conscious capitalism?” And a simple way I’ve found of answering it is by rating an organization on two dimensions.
1) What is the purpose of the organization? Non-profits traditionally embrace meaning at the expense of money. For-profits traditionally embrace money at the expense of meaning. CSR and social enterprises are initial examples of organizations seeking to embrace both.
2) How conscious are the people in the organization? This is a complicated but vital question, because what we do is often less important than how we are as we do it. However we measure it, consciousness rates the beingness we have as we do business.
Conscious businesses can be at least as profitable as unconscious ones. And they’re much more sustainable.

Evolving Notions of Ownership. As we currently view it, companies are owned by their shareholders, and their primary purpose is to increase the wealth of those shareholders. This notion goes to the heart of what has made capitalism such a powerful force for economic expansion. And it goes to the heart of what is turning this strength into an unsustainable addiction. It’s what has allowed Wall Street to hold Main Street hostage with insatiable demands for increased quarterly earnings. In contrast, I would guess that Capitalism 2.0 will involve an evolved notion of ownership. Think for a second. Who owns the US government? Who owns the Catholic Church? Who owns the planet?

Reinvention of Production. There’s nothing wrong with consumption of products – as long as we can find ways of making this process sustainable. How can we rebuild our system so that the true global costs of each product are factored in, and each company is responsible not just for the cost of production, but also for the cost of renewing the source and waste of that production?

Interesting…

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. To learn more about how to bring together money and meaning in your business, please feel free to visit www.sixfigurepractice.net/introcds.html.

During these busy holidays, it’s easy to either skip over gratitude, or hold it as a “should.” Particularly during the current crisis, it’s all too easy to get caught in an inner conflict between the piece of ourselves that says “I need to be afraid, in order to keep safe…” and the piece that says “I should be grateful for what I have, if I’m to be a worthy person…”

So let’s talk about the power – and joy – of gratitude.

Gratitude – like honest service – is one of the highest vibrations on the planet. Fear and judgment are two of the lowest. So it doesn’t work very well to try and “should” our way into gratitude. It’s like trying to use darkness to create light. Instead of forcing gratitude, we find that it’s something that naturally occurs within us. It’s part of our truest nature – when we open to it, and let go of the fear and judgment that has been keeping us in the dark. Gratitude is joyful. It’s a song of thanks.

And it’s also powerful.

The spiritual law of attraction dictates that like attracts like. Put another way, “where you focus is where you go.” While we often think that the way to a happy life involves focusing on the things we want to avoid, or the things we’re doing wrong, negative focus creates negative results. Over the long run, the more we focus on what’s wrong, the more we’re going to experience the exact things we’re trying to avoid. Because of this, a core key to life is to focus on getting more of what we do want, rather than avoiding what we don’t. It involves holding a positive focus, particularly with our inner thoughts and judgments. This tool is illustrated by the following Native American story, as told by Ether Acosta.

“A grandson told of his anger at a schoolmate who had done him an injustice. Grandfather said: ‘Let me tell you a story.’ ‘I, too, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But, hate wears you down and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me: one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But the other wolf is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of then try to dominate my spirit.’ The boy looked intently into his grandfather’s eyes and asked, ‘Which one wins, Grandfather?’ The grandfather solemnly replied, ‘The one I feed.’”

Gratitude is one of the most positive vibrations there is, and so connecting with our gratitude is one of the most powerful practices there is – not just as a way of being thankful for what we already have, but also as a foundational step in opening ourselves to more.

Interestingly, like with discipline, many of us have gratitude paired with judgment, scarcity, and fear. For example, I’ve found myself regularly thinking that “I should be grateful for what I have instead of wanting more” and “If I’m grateful for what I have, then this means I’m resigning myself to how things are right now, and I’ll never get anything more from life.” However, these statements aren’t accurate. Like Love, gratitude is not a choice between either being thankful for what we have or receiving more. Instead, it’s one of the fastest ways both to be thankful and to open ourselves to receiving more.

As some concrete tools for practicing gratitude, you can keep a gratitude journal, make a regular gratitude list, or create a family ritual where you teach the abundance that comes from gratitude, and then invite each member to state three things they are grateful for. Or you can work with the five core disciplines of spiritual psychology – acceptance, loving self-discipline, self-awareness, healing and self-forgiveness – as taught in the soon to be published book (really!) Love Beyond Belief.

“If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.” – Meister Eckhart

Happy Holidays!
Love and light,
Brian

P.S. These nuggets are now available all in one place.  ecoaching.corecoaching.org – check it out!

“What is the meaning of life?” This is one of the great philosophical and theological questions. People have wrestled with this one for thousands of years, debating and arguing over their different ideas. And people will likely continue to do so, because this question isn’t one that our minds can really answer.

But when we move out of our heads, and into our hearts, we actually find that it’s pretty simple.

The meaning of life comes from growth and giving. It comes from growing, evolving, learning and changing. It comes from embracing our challenges, while also putting in place a level of support that’s equal to those “difficulties” so that we can learn from them rather than crumple in the face of them.

And it comes from making a difference, from giving love, and from serving others. When we give from a place of “I should” or “I have to,” we may experience our giving as a sacrifice, and deplete our own cup in the process. But the more we’re able to give freely, from a place of overflow – the more we give from a place of “I choose” – then we find that the more we give, the more we receive.

Does your life feel empty at times? If so, seek out your learning edges, seek ways to connect with the love you have inside, and seek to give from the overflow of love that is always within you.

Love and light,
Brian

As we grow up, we tend to develop a deep association that discipline means punishment. And when it’s sourced out of judgment and fear, this is accurate. Yet we all tend to believe that we “should” have more self-discipline. And so we end up in a battle between the parts of ourselves we believe need to be fought and punished – and the pieces of us who fear that punishment.

The way out of this dilemma is to learn how to shift from pain-based discipline to loving self-discipline. Because when it comes form a place of care and free choice, we find that discipline is one half of love. While love involves being accepting, it also involves holding loving boundaries for ourselves and others, and enforcing them when necessary. One of the biggest keys to this is learning how to be impeccable with our word. And when we do so, we discover that when sourced from a place of love, discipline means freedom.

We tend to resist these ideas, because we’ve been trained that our “bad side” needs to be punished or destroyed. If we look at our movies, books and stories, we find a steady stream of good guys killing bad guys, of heroes slaying dragons, and more recently, of heroines joining in the fray. Our earliest forms of morality are based on an “eye for an eye”. Some of our deepest instincts crave a justice of punishment and retribution. And some of our most basic aspects delight each time John Wayne delivers justice through the barrel of a six gun.

However, as Joseph Campbell illustrated in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, there’s a deeper meaning to these many versions of the archetypal “Hero’s Journey.” In the hero’s quest, the purpose of each trial comes not from the form of each triumph, but from how the trials push the hero to grow. For the real “dragons” the hero (or heroine) must overcome are their inner doubts and fears.

Similarly, our real tests are inner, not outer. And while we can choose to be ruled by a justice of retribution, we can also subscribe to a higher law. We can choose to grow through a justice based on restitution, forgiveness, loving boundaries, and grace.

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. If you are finding value in these e-coaching nuggets, please feel free to forward them on to others, or invite them to subscribe at www.corecoaching.org