There’s a great many people who suffer from spiritufobia. Tonight, for example, we had friends over, and we started talking about the AA’s 12-step program, which, when you look at it, is pretty darn spiritual in nature. “That’s not for us”, was the instinctive reaction.
And when I tell some friends and family members about what I do and mention the spiritual angle, and how your startup should be aligned with the purpose of your life, they get visibly uncomfortable and start talking about more practical matters.
There seems to be some spiritufobia going on.
And I can totally relate to that. In fact, I suffered from spiritufobia myself for a very long time. Part of it was that my spiritual role models growing up were all pretty unhappy, so I had equated spirituality with being unhappy. I didn’t have Steve Jobs, Dalai Lama, og Mahatma Gandhi as my role models then.
But the biggest part, probably, was that I had no idea what it meant, other than it sounded pretty “out there”.
Now I know, and now I wear it as a badge, because it’s a great conversation starter. It parts the waters. Some people love it, and some people hate it, but it always gets a reaction.
Spirituality, at its core, means the understanding that we’re all connected. That we’re not little separate selves, but we’re all part of the one life, the one consciousness or awareness.
At a more practical level, it means noticing what is, being the awareness that notices thoughts, feelings, and personality, without being those. That simple but not necessarily easy little trick holds the key to all freedom.
When I first learned this by direct experience, which is the only way to experience it, I knew I’d found the key. In coaching, we tend to look at each belief individually, and do all this work to get to the truth about it, so we can reinforce that truth. Yes, the worst that can happen if you asked your boss for a raise is that he says no. Yes you are okay.
Noticing is a meta-instrument that can kill all limiting beliefs, all negative patterns. Not all at once, but in larger chunks, and with much deeper and more lasting effect.
Spirituality described sounds weird to a modern western ear. Spirituality experienced makes complete and obvious sense. There’s nothing to be fobic about.
Sometimes when I mention I do spiritual entrepreneurship to people, they think it’s all touchy-feely and want to emphasize how you really need to be rational and careful and grounded in reality.
And I agree completely. Nothing could be further from me than to suggest otherwise.
What I will suggest is that most of us are already way too rational, and forget the most important part. The rational mind is meant to be a servant, but all too often ends up being our master.
Some of my personal heroes are Steve Jobs, Mahatma Gandhi, and David Heinemeier Hansson (only one of whom I know personally – who is left as an exercise for the reader). These are people who are firmly grounded in reality. Steve and David are making big bucks (one perhaps a few orders of magnitude more than the other, but nevertheless). Gandhi changed the fate of an entire continent.
But it’s people that are also not afraid to talk about zen buddhism, passion and love. Well, I haven’t heard David talk about zen buddhism yet, but I know Steve has, and Gandhi was clearly a spiritual leader.
The thing about being passionate and loving what you do is that it’s not something you can just make up, it’s not a magic ingredient that you simply add to the dish that’s already on the plate. You can’t make yourself be passionate about something. Say you’re deeply embedded in some kind of dreary or not so dreary business, and then you read in 37signals Getting Real book that you have to have passion for what you do. Great, okay, so I start typing emails IN UPPERCASE USING LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!! to pretend I’m REALLY PASSIONATE? It doesn’t work like that, right?
Passion is something you discover within yourself. It’s something that’s already there, waiting for you to find it. And when you find it, you’ll see that it’s really powerful.
What spiritual entrepreneurship is about is ways to find that passion, and ways to stay within the power of that passion, that is, to notice when you’re inclined to compromise and to stand firm, because you know your values and your core beliefs really well.
If you tap into that power, then yes, you still need the rational mind, there’s still all the practicalities, but all of a sudden, they’re easy, they’re almost an afterthought, they’re just details. The important part is being in the energy at the source.
Sign up over here to find your passion
Good question.
The traditional view of startup life is you work hard and suffer through the lack of sunlight, sleep, family, fun, and friends, to collect the reward, the big payday, in the end.
The traditional view is that you’re constantly struggling, putting out fires.
The traditional view is that you go after where the money is.
That way of doing business is passé. It’s last century.
In the new century, business is about passion, love, and authenticity. It’s about money, too, but money is a consequence, not a goal.
So what does that mean, to be a spiritual entrepreneur?
It means that the vision for your business originates from the heart, and is in support of your life purpose or dharma.
It means embracing your business as an expression of you.
It means that your business is about how to use your unique strengths and talents and difficulties and shortcomings to best serve the greater whole.
It means healing old wounds, going deep inside to find the inner child that needs your love and attention, in order to receive the gifts that this inner child has for you. Gifts that contain the key to your uniqueness, without which you wouldn’t be able to do what you do.
It means using the principle of least effort, to let go of struggling, so that you may let your inspiration and intuition guide you on your way to success.
It means defining success not as money and fame, but as meaning, as being used for a purpose, as living your life fully. Success is about self-expression.
It means understanding that the energy with which you approach your business will be embedded in everything your business does, from the marketing copy to the product itself.
It means consciously using meditation and intuition to guide your work, and to allow for things to be different from how you envision them.
It’s a paradigm shift. The old paradigm is all about planning and control, based in fear. The new paradigm is about trust and intuition, based in love.
The benefits are tremendous. Your limited egoic mind will not be able to think of the grand visions that your heart will, if you open yourself up to it.
We’re told to be unique and remarkable, but when the mind tries to be unique and remarkable it just ends up being contrived and trite. Your heart is naturally unique and remarkable, if you’ll open yourself up to your whole experience, your entire being, both good and bad, egoic and divine.
That’s what it means to be a spiritual entrepreneur, and that’s the insight that I’m eager to share with you.
The first and crucial step is to start from the heart, and you can sign up to be notified when the program launches over at startfromtheheart.com.
This weekend I had the most profound yet banal realization: It’s not about me.
Allow me to explain.
I was a sensitive child, and my dad was, let’s say, not a terribly sensitive parent. Unavailable, temperamental, dominating. Somehow at the time I interpreted this to be about me, to be about how I was not okay, lovable, how I needed to be different.
Today, as a coach, I know that this is only too commonplace. For some people it’s very near the surface, for others it’s something they’re not aware of at all, but for probably 98% of the population, feeling not okay is part of their makeup. It’s in the way we’re typically raised.
But the realization came from somewhere else. I’m a two-time dad myself, now, the second child being a son. And when you have a kid of your own gender, it pushes some buttons in a way that you simply haven’t had buttons pushed before, so every so often I’ll get so frustrated and angry with him, I’ll want to punch him in the nose. Hard.
I do my best to restrain myself, of course, but it just suddenly dawned on me this weekend how insane it would be for him to believe that this had anything to do with him. It doesn’t, right? He’s completely innocent. It’s just me, it’s my childhood, my experiences, my job, my life in a new house with two small kids and two startups. It’s a stressful time. It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with him.
Yet somehow, throughout my childhood, I managed to always make things be about me. That I wasn’t smart enough or fast enough or happy enough or just plain lovable enough.
It’s not about me. And it’s not about you, either. Anything anyone else happens to think of you, now and forever, will ultimately never be about you. It’ll always, I repeat, always be about their projection, it’ll be about them, how they reflect themselves and their own self-hatred or self-love over on you. But it’s not about you.
Being frustrated in the presence of my son was the clearest reminder I’ve experienced so far that whatever your parents, grand-parents, teachers, or class mates thought of you had nothing to do with you. At all. Remember that. And make sure you tell your child that.
PS! I’ve been negligent about posting here lately. It’s not that I don’t love you. I’ve been more active over on twitter, so you might want to follow me there, but mainly there’s just been too much stuff going on. More on that shortly.
