Conscious Business: Like Water To A Fish ...

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.

Comments

[jeff.mowatt]

Hi Brian, I don't know where to start here so perhaps it should be at the begiining when the man who is now a colleague and a founder of our business pitched such an idea for a more inclusive economic paradigm at the US President for his re-election committee.

http://www.p-ced.com/about/history/

Skipping forward to after it had been deployed as a proof of concept project in Russia, and we've set up in London he gives an interview to a diaspora leader describing how the model could be applied to help the repatriated Tatars of Crimea.

http://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/economicdev.html

Moving forward, his microeconomic 'Marshall Plan' hit intended targets and started to create influence in October 2006.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/national/

Jeff

[jeff.mowatt]

To illustrated how this addresses economic, ecological and spiritual needs , Ramla Akhtar in Pakistan has independently created a detailed map of how a people-centered business relates to us and the community we share.

http://nextbyramla.com/pc-mob/

[inorbit]

It would be easier to be at the top of that ladder if the blood sucking capitalistic bankers hadn't ruined our econonomy with their greed. The 95% of us who aren't rich are screwed. Even those of us who didn't take out a mortgage we couldn't afford or run up our credit cards are screwed. Our 401Ks and stock portfolios that we so carefully saved and nurtured for our retirement have dropped in value 30+%. The bankers and stock brokers ignored all the advice they gave us about not leveraging ourselves too much, about not investing more than you can afford to lose in risky ventures.

It's one thing if you screw up your own life - it's another when you are rendered helpless by soul-less people with no integrity.

I still go out everyday for a long walk and enjoy the sunshine, love my family and I'm glad that I'm alive.
But, I will be angry at those bastards for a long, long time.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

You have every right to be angry.

While I have personally not experienced loss of wealth - since I never had much in the first place - I have experienced loss (of options, of happiness, of fairness, of people).

Here's my recommendation: be angry, and express your anger, because you are right. But don't be angry for a long, long time. You can strive to get back to the top of the ladder no matter what. It's not a wealth measure. It's a happiness measure. And if it's understood properly, it's a decency measure.

[Brian Whetten - Huffpost Blogger]

Hi Inorbit and Diogenes,
Diogenes - this is such a great point. There's nothing wrong with being angry, but if we hang onto it, it causes US physical, mental and emotional suffering. Over 90% of visits to primary care physicians come from stress (i.e. anger, fear and guilt) related disorders. Often times, the question "Am I right?" causes a lot of pain. Often times, a more useful question is "Do I want to be right (and angry) or happy?"

"Anger is like holding on to a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at someone. You are the one who gets burned." - Buddha

Inorbit - Again, this isn't to say your anger is wrong. And it's not saying you should just turn the other cheek and ignore the tremendous injustice in this world. It's suggesting that we can accomplish a *lot* more, both for ourselves and others, when we come from the top of the ladder than at the bottom. And it feels a whole lot better up there too.

[Sinick]

On the other hand, there are some people who are spirited and optimistic, but only for their own benefit. There are others who are spirited and optimistic who can't succeed without the checks and balances provided by a pessimist.

I am not inspired by it, I cannot reason with it, I don't have the courage to accept it and I fear for the gullibility of other men. In the end, I get depressed about the shallow effectivenesses of it, and then I die young.

There's much more to accomplishment than "yes we can." There are other intangibles such as being a good citizen that produces concrete results for all, in spite of a sunny face or the somebody's interpretation of "spirit."

[Brian Whetten - Huffpost Blogger]

Hi Sinick,
You bring up a great point. Naked optimism (optimism that isn't grounded in reality) produces naivete, spiritual bypass, gullibility and pain. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-whetten/what-does-it-mean-to-prac_b_189297.htmll)

Similarly, we tend to think that love means always being accepting and "turning the other cheek." Yet discipline is one half of love, and people at the top of the ladder are defined by an integration of polarities. They integrate both acceptance and discipline, optimism and realism (not pessimism), and body/mind/spirit. This both/and place is what Jim Collins defined as level 5 leadership in Good to Great.

It's not necessarily easy to get to, but it's exactly what our world needs a whole lot more of.