Your Next Step

As published in Inner Self Magazine Issue 26 page 15.

I went into a shopping centre on the same day that the share market crashed and the London riots hit their peak. I had my pick of the best car parks and probably encountered no more than three people and a dog.  Where was everyone? The few harried people I saw in the fruit market gingerly selected a few items and looked exhausted and beaten. It felt like the whole world had gone mad. The relentless Print, Radio, TV, Online and Social Media feeding of shock, fear and horror took its toll locally.

"As humans have moved into totally artificial environments, our direct contact with knowledge of the planet has been snapped. Disconnected, like astronauts floating in space, we cannot know up from down or truth from fiction. Conditions are appropriate for the implantation of arbitrary realities. Television is one recent example of this, a serious one, since it greatly accelerates the problem.." Jerry Mander.

Watching renditions of life on a screen whether television, movie, laptop or IPhone is one way to mediate an experience we haven’t actually experienced. The experience may be true or may be one that has been created and portrayed by actors to pretend that the experience is true. The bottom line is that for the majority of us, we ourselves did NOT experience it whether real or not. We merely witnessed a version of it on a screen - packaged up by a third party whose business it is to inspire us enough with elements in this experience to consume or declare a need for a product or service. This medium is very clever and highly effective in its mission.

In business, this medium is one of the most important tools available. In a variety of mediums, we craft advertisements for our target market and offer renditions of life that would stimulate interest in what we are selling. In our daily lives, we humans also each utilise this same method when we tap into our imagination or memory and retell a story to elicit a particular emotion or response. So it is easy to acknowledge the wealth of this methodology and its many benefits. 

In this tsunami of change we call 2011; we have been flooded at every turn with news of disaster, chaos, violence and loss. A type of mob madness, initiated by perceptions of fear, was responsible for both the August global market crash and UK riots. What we see presented to us via the media is not OUR truth but one version of someone’s story. Yet millions of people across the globe sustained direct or indirect losses as a result of these perceptions of fear.

At times it certainly feels like we have no control of our lives and of our businesses. We have two options however. We can either expend our energy protesting and blaming OR we can capitalise on these events as an opportunity to leverage change inside of our lives and businesses.   We can create our OWN experience by how we measure these stories, the benefits and drawbacks, how we take stock of all perspectives and create our own opportunity for transformation.

Let’s review the present business environment. Retail sales are down, people are saving instead of spending, and funding and lending is limited. So if you have a small business you may now be experiencing a lack lustre financial return at the moment. You may be feeling concerned and looking for ways to attract new business.

So while it’s quiet, start taking stock.  You’ve got time to get your Rs into gear – Review, Retrain, Redevelop, Recycle, Reuse, Reduce, Repair and Renew. An appreciation of the incredible resource that is our earth will remind you how money is actually worthless without an appreciation of the wealth in your life. Acknowledge that your story, your belief structure, your body, your mind and your soul are part of the earth, part of the tides, the natural rhythms, the planets and the elements. Align the values of the earth with family, community, work and your own. Appreciate what you have as it is right now. To appreciate is to effectively apply structures and strategies to manage your Resource, Time, Energy, Enterprise and Finances.

Review yourself. Why are you in business and not employed by someone else? Why this industry? Why this product or service? If you had the opportunity would you do something else? What does that look like? Could you utilise the skills you have developed up until this point in a new enterprise? What is it that you do right now that would serve a need in this present time of uncertainty, global chaos and fear? There is a story behind all your answers that is unique to you and can be used as an asset in your business.

We have no control over global share markets, finance and consumer sectors and mob madness. However we can achieve liberty from the madness and create our own perception of wealth in business by appreciating nature in all its forms – the structure of the earth, the behaviour of humans in share market crashes and rioting on the streets as well as the abundance of survival strategies that we have collected with the nature of how we all tell our little stories colouring perception like painting by numbers.

Column Name	What’s Your Story?
Article Name	Your Next Step
Author	Nichola Burton
Date	11 August 2011
Words	885
Topic	Business