PRINCIPALS OF EVOLUTIONARY CULTURE: HOW YOU CAN GENERATE GREAT COMPANY RESULTS & YOUR HAPPIEST LIFE
It is our consciousness that creates our reality. If there were something in a movie playing that you did not like, it would be irrational and futile to go up to the screen and try to move characters around or change what they were saying. Indeed, you would have to go to the film negatives through which those images were being projected and change what were on them, to project a different result. Likewise if there are patterns showing up in your personal life you don’t like, it is irrational and futile of you to try to change the characters and events around you. Instead you would have to go into the consciousness, your consciousness, to find beliefs/attiudes/values that those results are being projected through.
The executive teams of a company, are the consciousness through which results are emanating. If you want a different result for the company, blaming the workers or the weather will result in a lot of drama, stress, and frustration, because the externals are a result, not a source, of the problems. The company’s performance is the effect of the problem, not the source of the problem. The source is the consciousness that created those results. The consciousness is the dynamics operating at the level of the executive team.
The essentiality of creating an evolutionary culture for us to thrive, is only just beginning to dawn on corporate America. Given the dominant role of corporations on the policies that dictate the quality of our lives, this dawning is imperative in accelerating the paradigm shift called for in our time. Arianna Huffington, ever cited as one of the wealthiest, most successful women in the world, speaks of the transformative moment it dawned on her. It was the moment she fell asleep at her desk, hitting & injuring the side of her eye. How can this possibly be success, if I am working 18 hour days and neglecting my family, and my own health, is the question that had her recognize that she’d been defining success as a ‘two-legged stool’ of money and power – it was not sustainable and missing the all important metric of ‘well-being’. She made many changes in how she worked and in the culture of work at the Huffington Post, wrote the book “Thrive”, and tours the country with programs to wake corporate America up to the importance of the third metric, should we truly thrive as individuals and as corporations.
THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION…
I ask in facilitating leadership teams is: what would your company be doing, and what would you be doing at work, that would leave you going home feeling great?
When a company engages the genius and passion of the executive team, the impulses towards brilliance and possibility are allowed to emerge in each of its members. The engagement in moving the company forward is whole-hearted, the commitment to mission and goals runs deep, the willingness to listen deeply to others and to attune deeply to the possibilities including when a course correction is called for is high, people feel safe to take risks in their offerings. That same engagement is then spread to the workers.
I also help the members of the team begin to connect the dots between the patterns that are getting in their way of robust involvement or the achieving of goals at work, and what is getting in their way in their personal relationships. Seeing that the change in consciousness of overcoming a sabotaging habit is the same whether it is at work or home, allows the individual to feel he is living his life, working towards well-being, and work is one of the places that most supports him in doing so. The improvement in results in the company parallel improvement in results in his personal life.
A bit about Evolutionary Consciousness
We’re in a unique moment in time. It’s a time of tremendous devastation and negativity, and yet a time predicted by the ancients as holding the possibility of ushering in a ‘golden age’ – a more peaceful and thriving world. Ancient teachings from the mayan calendar, Tibetan, Aboriginal, and other wisdom traditions have fortold of this time. Jesus as well, in Revelations, talks of the Day of the Seventh Angel – the 7th Sun – which is the Aquarian Age, which is the Age we have only recently entered – as a time ‘when the mystery of God will be fulfilled and time will be no more.’
The Ancient teachings are now echoed by modern day wisdom traditions, the spiritually attuned, students and masters of consciousness, and finding new bedfellows in a growing grassroots movement of experts of the gestalt of fields, scientists, and activists, who perceive the imperative for a paradigm shift if we are to survive our own rampant corruption and destructiveness. The commonality creates a new genre of evolutionary thinkers.
What Is Evolutionary Consciousness?
Evolutionary Consciousness is a point of view (and a movement) that we are in a moment in time that calls for an evolutionary leap. Although by definition we can’t know the details of that leap, we do know that it involves a leap in consciousness becoming aware of itself as the creative force of man-made reality.
Even though we are all intellectually aware that everything created by man starts with an idea, and comes into reality through the efforts and behaviors we engage to make from that idea a creation, we still operate as if we are victims rather than the co-creators of our reality.
Our entire development is by virtue of impulses to evolve; our very birth generated by the impulse to move into the birth canal. We did not know as infants only capable of lying where we were placed, that an impulse would come that would have us turn over for the first time, push to a crawl, pull us to a stand, let out a word, have us toddle into a walk, and somewhere around age 6 or 7 click in the ability to read. Those impulses are simply wired in our DNA.
Likewise the belief is that this next evolutionary leap is wired in our DNA, and the question is: how much more suffering and devastation will we create before that leap embeds in the collective? The view is that there are values we can hold that will facilitate the leap. For example, a value on paying attention to the impulses that arise within you, a value on taking risks in the name of growth/well-being, were the innate drivers of our development as infants, that either continue to be our drivers through life, or we experience anxiety and depression when those drivers are suppressed/subverted.