Conscious Business: Intelligence with Soul

by Karen Joy Fritz

Conscious business, as described by prominent voices in the space, means finding your passion and expressing your essence through your work. A conscious business seeks to promote the intelligent pursuit of happiness in all its stakeholders.

Of course business needs to be profitable – otherwise it’s not a business for very long!

Conscious business recognizes there’s more to business than profit though and takes intentional action to have a positive return on multiple fronts. You design it to keep all elements of your Soul values in action, visible to you and those around you.

So beyond that baseline of financial sustainability, what matters most? What can actually bring you that meaning and fulfillment you crave. A conscious business is very intentional about where time and money and attention get invested.

By recognizing the intrinsic value in the Soul of each client, team member, partner, vendor, and member of the community, conscious business includes the whole ecosystem from caring for the planet to caring for your people to caring for your purpose.

How does a conscious business do all that?

A conscious business uses a systems view to recognize the role of business to improve social, environmental, and personal experiences while creating financial results. People, Planet, Profit.

An unconscious business owner may continually try one new thing after another, wondering why the overall needle doesn’t move and feeling defeated. The continual cycle of trying the latest trend and focusing on the money is a direct path to burnout.

A fine bisque isn’t composed of just one spice. A great symphony isn’t composed of just one instrument playing louder or softer. It’s not a single dial to turn. When a business owner starts to follow trends and formulas, they go unconscious to this more expansive view of our role in the whole of the ecosystem.

With a systems view, conscious business realizes that it exists in a web of meaning and remembers to measure more than monetary gain.

Once you move beyond trying to pull one string to create your desired outcome, you realize the importance of creating a web of solutions. You can create a dashboard to reflect multiple metrics, both quantitative and qualitative.

How can I keep up with all that?

While that may sound complicated, conscious business actually simplifies your strategy.

It’s way more than thinking.

·        Conscience has to do with knowing the right thing to do from your head.

·        Compassion means knowing what’s right in your heart.

·        Conscientious has to do with doing it right from your actions.

Conscious business puts all that together and more – the way you show up in the business you do. Body, mind, heart, and Soul.

Bringing your Soul’s more expansive systems perspective of connections provides a more accurate model of reality. And the one underlying skill you can focus on as a business owner is to increase your capacity to be in contact with reality, with more of the influences more of the time.

Where does conscious entrepreneurship fit in?

To see where conscious entrepreneurs fit in, consider the fine line between passionate and crazy. Just to be clear, I’m batshit passionate!

Although many people identify entrepreneurs as those who are in it for a quick buck, already thinking about their exit strategy, the truth is most entrepreneurs start their business for a reason – a cause or purpose. And they’re more attuned to success beyond the money.

See, conscious entrepreneurs start out looking for innovation, to change the way things have been done (where business often revolves around following an existing model). That attunement to additional measures of success positions them perfectly to expand their capacity for a wider system impact in following the intentions of their soul.  

What is conscious business? And how do I start one?

Starting a conscious business starts within you. 

For far too long, starting a business was a matter of “what do people need and how can I make money at it?” Starting with market research, competitive analysis, all the way through streamlining delivery and minimizing expenses, every aspect of designing the business centered around external factors. The “responsive” business was really reactionary – at the effect of trends and social norms.

Then people started moving toward values-driven businesses. The problem is, values are fundamentally head models. They are generally inherited super-ego models based on existing cultures. What does our society define as a “good” person? As a “contribution”? What “should” I care about? Even if we think we’re digging deep to discover our own values, our unconscious mind carries the flag of past definitions of success. And when people start from the past, creating a new future is nearly impossible.

What is conscious business? How about a purpose driven business? One  that is going to be aligned with Soul’s intention? 

Not by most people’s definition of purpose. See, your purpose isn’t a project or a mission “out there.” When you realize your purpose relates to the quality of being that your soul wants to experience, you can bring that to any and every endeavor in your life. It’s not just one magical calling that you’re “supposed to” discover and implement. Which is something we spend a lot of time exploring around here. 

For us, there’s a more subtle layer. It’s also about using business as a path for personal and planetary transformation. 

What is the experience of myself I’m having in business? Of my Soul?

At Divine Navigation we begin by being awake to our own intentions and purpose and shadows. Noticing when we’re aligned. And recognizing when we get out of alignment and taking conscious steps to return to our internal guidance.

We claim responsibility for “this one wild and precious life” in the economic realm.

So, here are six steps to start a conscious business.

1.      Map out your Soul desire for the qualities of energy you’ll be bringing and experiencing. Knowing your internal Soul’s intentions has to be foundational.

2.      Choose where to apply those energies. Identify overlaps in your skills and interests to find (or hear) a calling for your Soul.

3.      Open your mind to gather ideas from existing business models (marketing, delivery, operations).

4.      Converge back in to allow those ingredients to come together, along with utterly new ideas, in unique ways your soul suggests. Recognize this is a continuous process of experimentation and adaptation as the web of the ecosystem evolves (and so do you).

5.      Frame your communications to keep your intentions visible. Everything from your marketing and delivery to your team culture is an opportunity to express your essence.

6.      Continuously expand your capacity to lead from your Soul’s intentions.

That’s clear but not always easy. 

Conscious business coaching

Conscious business coaching focuses on bringing forth your Soul’s true purpose in a way that provides profit as well as benefit to your people and the planet. Since this is not the “business as usual” model, old forms of coaching and business planning cannot anticipate the new way your Soul intends.

Space for Soul and intuition is crucial. Sometimes the next step is not logical.

It’s not necessarily about what’s going to be the most pleasant for us personally every fucking moment. Just recognize that sometimes the purpose of our business is to challenge us forward into our own development in alignment with our soul. Read. That. Again. 

Conscious business coaching understands the reality of human nature – specifically our own. With fierce compassion, we claim our strengths and recognize our shadows. Dancing with them consciously allows us to know when to reach out for guidance or ask for help, which parts of the business are our zone of genius and which are just in our zone of grunge.

Because the more we develop our Soul capacity to sustain conscious presence in our business, the more we empower our purpose to provide a sustainable future for the entire ecosystem. You might want to read that again, too.


 

Since 2011, courageous men and women around the world have chosen Divine Navigation and committed to the extraordinary and transformative experience of Aligning with their Soul-through their Divine Coordinates. We invite you to also explore the journey of Understanding Divine Alignment and It’s Life-Changing Benefits.