What do you want to succeed with? What is deeply meaningful to you? To what do you want to contribute?
When we are in touch with our dreams and our inner motivation, and from this, encounter different contexts with curiosity and a willingness to contribute, unexpected results and value can arise. One group that stands strong in this is entrepreneurs. Behind the entrepreneur’s creativity lies the connection between seizing opportunities, solving challenges, and creating value for others while the business itself develops.
We can all adopt the entrepreneur’s mindset, which is effective regardless of context or role. A metaphor that can help illustrate this is to see oneself as a personal company. If I, figuratively speaking, resign today and come back to my organisation tomorrow as an entrepreneur, what do I do then, and what questions become important? Who is my customer, and what does she want to achieve? What opportunities and challenges does my customer have? Is there something I can offer? What do I want to achieve and contribute to? This shift in perspective also creates a shift in energy. What was previously problems and obstacles become business opportunities for the personal company. The one who was previously my boss is now my customer. We know that this shift creates a new interplay between the part and the whole, where both parties grow.
Gaia Mindset Learning
A present holistic view, where we integrate different perspectives, provides a platform for moving forward – even in the most complex environments. Such progress requires that learning is at the center, as we can seldom solve new questions and problems with the previously known solutions and answers. Our contemporary world, the constantly shifting landscape, the significant challenges that almost all businesses face today, means that the time before knowledge starts perishing is getting shorter. It becomes crucial that we see ourselves and each other as developable and constantly growing. I need to value the ability to experiment rather than provide ready-made solutions.
One way to grow and connect with what is meaningful to me is to develop the ability to be aware. My awareness strengthens when I am in touch with the present moment and with what is happening in every moment – both internally and externally. With increased awareness, I can see things more clearly and make more active, conscious choices. It helps me to let go of old thoughts and behaviors and continue with lighter steps and greater confidence towards what is important to me. Awareness gives me access to the central insight that I am not my thoughts and feelings, but I have thoughts and feelings. When I can pay attention to myself in this way, I provide conditions for personal growth and direct more energy towards what is both meaningful to me and creates value.
For the entrepreneur, it is obvious that she herself is the only one who can take responsibility for her development. If we continue to play with the idea of the personal company, I need to ask myself: How do I ensure my continued learning? And what does my research and development department look like? How do I ensure that my company is innovative and relevant? How do I create a learning culture for myself?
To learn is to grow
Learning can start in many ways. Inspiration makes me explore new knowledge. Taking responsibility challenges me to new insights and other ways of working to achieve results. Challenges create action, increase urgency, and make me stretch towards what I may almost not believe is possible. Curiosity gives me the courage to embark on an adventure towards unknown destinations. It also challenges me to see things from someone else’s perspective by asking questions rather than drawing my own quick conclusions.
To translate our exploration into action, we can use our creativity. Then we gain access to imagination and can visualize, think anew, and imagine things beyond the possible obstacles we may see in the present. To make creativity effective, we also need to concretize and manifest our ideas externally and invite others to share them. It is then that our curiosity, desire for learning, and idea generation are translated into new solutions and paths forward.
We also need learning that not only strengthens our skills but also creates increased maturity and stronger judgment, learning that means we meet life’s challenges by continuing as adults to gradually develop our ability to lead in complexity, create meaning, and self-reflect. It’s simply a journey where we continue to grow throughout life, we get twenty years of experience instead of one year of experience twenty times.
Growing as a person enables us to reach new levels of complexity and perspective awareness, i.e., an increased ability to see broader and deeper, to highlight aspects that I have not noticed before. It is a way of taking ourselves and what we want to achieve seriously. We become leaders not only in our own lives but also in the contexts we choose to operate in.
What we propose can be summarized as follows: an approach where you start from and identify with the whole you are part of, focus on your own and others’ learning, co-create with your surroundings to build sustainable value, and see yourself and those around you as leaders.
You can read more about Gaia Mindset here. In a series of blogs over the coming months, we will present different aspects of Gaia Mindset, both from the perspective of the thriving individual and of the resilient organization.