Inspiring Your Authentic Week

Posted: 26 Jan 2009 02:14 AM CST

Last year was a tough year for life on earth.

The challenges are all part of our learning experience and how tough it gets, is precisely how tough it needs to get for us to learn the lesson.

Many people feel that we have been in crisis, ecologically, for 20 years or longer. Some date their awareness of the crisis to 1962 and Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring".

What is important is for people to become aware of the crisis in order for behaviours to change. The ecological crisis signaled the end of the industrial era, the end of the era of the belief that humanity was somehow separate from other life, the end of exploitation. But too many could not hear the message.

Even as deserts expanded, ice melted, species went extinct we were blinded to the crisis by our apparent success.

It is difficult to persuade people of disaster when it looks so much like success.

So the crisis had to ratchet up a notch or two to be sure of getting people's attention.

And so it has.

Now we have both ecological and economic melt down.

We can choose to learn the lessons now - or face the next level of learning - social melt down.

Happily it appears that we are learning. The election of a truly remarkable, new generation of leadership to the presidency of the United States is both a symbol and an energiser of change.

This, I believe, is the watershed. This is the high point of our journey, we have clambered slowly and painfully over the tortuous path towards expanded consciousness. And, although it may feel like the pits, it is, in fact, the summit.

What we have learned is that we do not need to pin our faith in one man to sort out the mess. What we need to take his cue, and do what we have known to be the right thing all along.

We have learned that we are not apart from the rest of life, but inextricably of it.

We must now adjust our businesses, our organisations, our communities and our education to a new way of being. A post industrial model.

The Industrial Age was an essential step on the path, but it is now over. It was an age where costs could be externalised to society and the environment without being accounted for. It was an age where a majority of children only needed to be educated for obedience. It was an age when we fought each other and the planet for the illusion of control.

The new age now dawning is perhaps, "the authentic age". The age where humanity sees it's interdependence with other life, where we use our brains and our hearts to enhance our quality of life, rather than our muscles.

The role we must all accept is one of responsible leadership. Doing the right thing no longer means doing what we are told, but of accepting our responsibility as the most conscious level of life and nurturing the rest of it.

It is an exciting time to be alive. If you have not started already I urge you to start now in whatever communities you are part of, at work and at home. If we can build communities based on compassionate honesty, holistic innovation, nurturing talent, responsible empowerment and distributed leadership the rest will take care of itself.

If you would like to have a chat about these ideas and how they might affect your organisation - drop me a line - neil@authenticis.com

Please also note that my neil@authenticbusiness.co.uk e-mail address is no longer working. Please be sure to use neil@authenticis.com and to update your spam filters to accept messages from neil@authenticis.com.

With love

nx

Neil Crofts
Inspirer
authenticis
inspiration innovation motivation

+44 (0)7775 658534
neil@authenticis.com
www.authenticis.com