Wildly Thriving - Rewilding Principles For Business

Every entrepreneur has the power to change how business contributes to society and some simple principles gleaned from nature demonstrate the first steps. Rewilding business is founded in hope and trust in the power of nature to guide us into a brighter future.

Transcript

It seems so obvious to me that the idea of rewilding should be part of business that I often struggle to articulate why the concept is so important for us as entrepreneurs and for business as a whole.

But I will give it my best shot at this point in time.

Rewilding has emerged from conservation as a more progressive pathway where nature is allowed to restore itself through its natural processes of shaping the environment which repair and restore the degradation we have caused.

Rewilding restores diversity and diversity supports life.

It encourages balance between human activities and the well-being of nature.

Rewilding Europe says rewilding is about reconnecting a modern society both rural and urban with wilder nature.

So how does that play into business?

There is a long complex history of business exploiting nature for profit.

This has brought us to a point where species extinction is accelerating,

Habitats and ecosystems are failing and key environments that uphold the health of global systems are on the brink.

And this sounds very gloomy but if rewilding has taught us anything in the relatively short period of time that it's been around it is that nature has an extraordinary capacity to restore and recover.

It's the natural processes that hold the key.

Business ethics and approaches have created much of this mess so the reverse holds true.

Changing how we do business has the potential to restore.

Rewilding business begins with changing thinking and then actions.

This has to start with individuals because so much of the thinking has become ingrained in how we function as entrepreneurs.

Change this and so much more change is put on the table.

If we change how individual entrepreneurs approach business then the entire business dynamic will reach a critical mass of accelerating positive change.

95% of all businesses in the world are small or micro businesses.

They hold up our economies and employ the most people.

Making changes here has the greatest potential to bring positive change and deliver cultural transformation of business values and actions in the process.

There is something like 400 million businesses across the globe.

A tiny,

Tiny percentage of these are the ones that control the most wealth and have the greatest perceived influence,

Probably less than a hundred.

That's perceived power.

The real power lies with the small businesses that you and I have.

If we rewild our businesses all businesses will begin to understand their power to catalyze change.

But what does that look like in practice?

The truth is that it is an evolving picture.

We have to start at the beginning in each business and then walk the path that appears before us.

There is so much that we don't know but we will never know it unless we begin to make changes.

So I wanted to outline some changes that you can make really easily in your business to begin the rewilding journey.

And it comes down to simple principles we can adopt that nature shows us.

The first is rhythm.

Nature is rhythmic.

It has cycles and seasons.

These are visible to us every single day and night through the passage of time.

Lunar cycle,

Seasons,

The journey of seed to flower to seed,

Birth,

Death and so much more.

Nature is rhythmic.

Business is not.

It's full-on productivity every minute of every day.

And the more we move into a 24-7 culture of availability the more we move away from this rhythm.

The notion of productivity is societally conditioned.

How often have you felt guilty for taking some downtime?

Even a short breather in the middle of your day might have you worrying that you are losing out.

Real productivity includes quiet times of not doing.

It's in the not doing that we make space for growth.

How often do you get the best ideas when you're in the shower or walking the dog or cooking or driving?

That's a classic example of the need to not be doing.

In my business rewilding membership I give everyone a weekly prompt to take out into nature so they can make it part of their work day and this helps them to be more productive not less.

15 minutes of meditation at the start of your work day is productivity.

Regular breaks are productivity.

Downtime is productivity because it restores life force and prepares you for new surges.

We slow down to speed up.

Next we have the importance of the soul to business.

For conscious entrepreneurs this comes as no surprise but in the wider world the very notion is still totally off-piste.

I remember listening to Gary Vaynerchuk many years ago saying that emotion has no place in business.

I absolutely 100% disagree.

Emotion has a vital role to play in business.

It is the cold hard logic driven approach that has sidelined people and planet in the pursuit of profit.

Emotion keeps us connected to the truth of who we are.

If you take emotion out of business you will do what serves your bottom line at the expense of your own well-being.

You will not create the space to share who you are through your business which is why you were driven to start this journey in the first place because you know you have a vision and gifts that can help people and the world.

That's a matter of soul.

The expression of the soul is a master lesson from nature.

Without soul there is no meaning to your actions.

With soul every action has meaning purpose and vision.

It alchemizes your actions and ups the quota of positive energy in the collective consciousness.

The simple choice to move with soul in your business catalyzes cultural change on a massive scale and it makes you feel good and more empowered and when you feel good you do more good.

So it's a win-win.

Diversity is a strong principle in nature.

Ecosystems are a tapestry of life forms.

Each life form works with others to shape the environment and nurture health.

Every week I share a note from nature and recently one of those was that imbalance looks like domination.

In nature the domination of environment by one species is an indication of disturbance and imbalance.

Predominant thinking in business is market domination.

We see this in the handful of mega corporations who've hoovered up many smaller businesses under their umbrella.

Their objective is to gain the widest possible market domination.

Nature works differently.

It specializes.

It chooses to nail its niche and be very specific.

This is why we have so many species that are at high risk of imbalance because the ecosystems they live in are so finely balanced that disruption that we wreak throws out all of the interdependencies.

A healthy environment for your business is a diverse one.

The diversity comes from understanding and listening to your specificity.

The unique blend of skills,

Perspective and passion that drives you and then designing your business around this rather than what the market thinks it wants or what it's been told it needs.

Markets are dynamic.

Consciousness is constantly evolving.

You shape the environment you are in by being part of the diversity and creating a complex web of what I call neural pathways for your business to thrive.

Diversity is intrinsically linked to another core principle of purpose.

Soul-led business has purpose.

There is something that you are called to create and enact and it is a calling.

It's not something you can overlook or deny without causing deep discomfort within and you might try to stuff it down and ignore it but it will keep coming back.

Every part of nature has a purpose within an ecosystem to help shape it and create the conditions for life to thrive.

The long-held tenet of profit above all else has little place in a rewilder business.

It is soul before profit that counts.

Maintaining a focus on purpose will create conditions and opportunities you could not have imagined to grow with your business in new and exciting ways.

Competition is a big word in business language.

What's the competition up to?

How can we get ahead?

How can we edge them out?

This is staple fare of boardroom conversations.

I find it deeply ironic that despite this focus it has long been known that when businesses of a similar type locate in the same area,

Everyone does better.

This is why you will find car dealerships amassing in a particular area or phone shops or clothes shops.

Competition is an illusion which has come from a deep-seated fear of scarcity.

Nature is naturally abundant and that abundance flows when there is collaboration and cooperation.

When we adopt the principle that all life forms are contributing to overall well-being,

Then we begin to value the diverse landscape our businesses operate in.

We stop feeling threatened by the competition and start to see the opportunities for everyone to thrive.

In this context there is no cost to giving unless we are close to receiving and that is the breath of life.

Together we rise may be overused but it is also very true.

As a business designer one of the things I see most commonly is how businesses are approached as a set of independent parts.

I guess this is where my journey into energetics began,

Seeing the business as a whole life force rather than a series of functions.

We label up our functions and separate them out.

This is a tendency that we have seen in science too,

Especially around the creation of pharmaceuticals.

A compound is extracted from a whole plant for example to concentrate the action of one part of its whole being.

In business we might focus on social media marketing for example.

So's intensely that it becomes the entire focus and there are many many far too many messages out there from businesses about the secret thing no one else is talking about.

These are never panaceas because every business is different.

The notion that there is one thing that you can do or change to put you on a different path is a nonsense.

It overlooks the critical importance of the whole life force.

In nature when we block the flow of energy of the whole decay follows.

Rewilding is at its core the process of restoring energy flow.

It restores vitality.

A business is a form of consciousness,

An active presence in the web of life.

It is a whole not a series of parts.

Focusing on the parts at the expense of the whole dissipates the energy and the potential of the business in the medium to long term.

By seeing your business as a whole you can begin to work on it as an ecosystem in its own right.

Each part works together to bring vitality to the whole.

Business ecosystem planning,

An approach that I use,

Restores the flow of energy between the functions to bring about vitality for the business and that lays the foundation for individual activities and strategies for growth that feed the whole business.

The final principle I want to touch on here is well-being.

Rewilding is centered in the well-being of people and planet.

A rewilded business follows this philosophy.

If we choose to track back all the injustices in the world where the well-being of people or planet is compromised there is a bottom line at the core of everyone.

A healthy environment is essential for a healthy business.

The megacorporations are not healthy.

They may have a healthy bottom line but they aren't healthy.

They may hold the dominant narrative in business but that does not detract from your power to change the status quo.

Nature demonstrates every time we give it the chance how quickly it can establish well-being for all.

So consider yourself an agent of nature restoring well-being to a deeply disrupted and unhealthy environment.

Choosing to value well-being for everyone and every form of life that is touched by your business instantly transforms the narrative from I to we and me to us.

The road to global well-being can be very short indeed if we challenge ourselves to rewrite our inner narratives and conditioning,

Challenge the status quo and live and work by our values.

All change begins within because it is when we make those changes within that the reality around us changes in step.

The seed of rewilding business is taking responsibility for how we each individually think and act in our businesses while seeing and giving credence to our individual role in the well-being of the whole.

We are all part of life and how we choose to live our lives transforms the experience of all life.