What are the skills that would be required if you were the ultimate entrepreneur?
What would be the difference between an entrepreneur and a Zen Master?

The ultimate entrepreneur would not only have the business skills, they would be able to see beyond the surface, beyond illusion to the truth.

The truth is revealed when you can read the energy patterns. Another step up from that is when you can influence change or control the energy patterns. Not to manipulate anyone, not to hurt anyone, but focussed on the highest good of all concerned. That’s the ultimate win-win.

However, before you learn to honour anyone else, you have to learn to honour yourself. So many people are out there to end poverty and change the world, but where’s the last place the want to go? Inside themselves.

For me, it’s not the lack of knowledge or business skills that hold us back and sabotage us. It’s our own negative thinking, negative attitudes, limiting beliefs and our past programming. Or, the way I would put it, our learned limitations.

To become who we truly are, we must be able to discern, to tell the difference between our essence, who we really are, what we’re here to do, what’s important to us, and our programming.

For me, there’s a triangle, and the triangle is healing transformation,   intuition/creativity/innovation and entrepreneurship:

All three are required and there’s another word that some people use, although not everyone, and that’s spirituality. A lot of people who are very spiritual would never use that word. For me, it doesn’t matter what the word is, for me it’s about how a person acts, how they deal with their life and deal with energy.

For me it’s all about authenticity. True strength comes from vulnerability. There is authenticity and integrity and there are two other parts…. You know in many religions and cultures it’s all about transcending the body. It’s very interesting but did you know that for the Hawaiians and Maori’s it’s not about going up, it’s about grounding yourself, being in the body, on the earth.  Being fully grounded.  It’s a very different approach.

It’s about being connected to source, your intuition, being grounded physically in your body and being real.

What I do is help you get in touch with your inner knowing.

You’ll get in touch with the truth which underlies all good decisions. How that truth informs my work with entrep, business people decision making, investors, traders
people into self development and those with major health challenges like ME and cancer.

Why don’t you come along to the introductory talks in London during September? There’s lots more details on the events page.

Innovation is closely aligned to creativity, even a ‘by-product’ in some senses.  Many organisations strive to be ‘innovative’ and yet operate with a culture which stifles a spirit of creativity and innovation.

Buckler (1997) suggests, innovation “is an environment, a culture – almost spiritual force – that exists in a company”.  Many people who have visited an organisation where such a culture exists: Body Shop, Google, Sony etc leave with a strong feeling that they have experienced  something very special and different from the norm.

However, in attempting to create innovation there are a number of factors which are both organisational, cultural and dependent on the skills of the individual.

In an article written by Ahmed Pervaiz and published in the European Journal for Innovation Management (1998), he outlines the following personality traits for innovation:
• high valuation of aesthetic qualities in experience
• broad interests
• attraction to complexity
• high energy
• independence of judgement
• intuition
• self-confidence
• ability to accommodate opposites
• firm sense of self as creative (Baron and Harrington, 1981)
• persistence
• curiosity
• energy
• intellectual honesty (Amabile 1988)
• internal locus of control (reflective/introspective) (Woodman and Schoenfeldt, 1990)

It’s not difficult to see why some organisations find it difficult to encourage innovation, when to be successful, they have to embrace diversity and allow the people in the company to exhibit and develop these aspects of their personality.

Let’s talk about intuition.

Where does your intuition come from? Does it come from inside you, outside of you? Do you pay attention to your intuition? Do you trust your intuition? Do you know that indigenous people only survived because of their intuition? Our ancestors relied on their intuition, their instincts, on reading subtle energy patterns. They knew where the animals were, they could sense when it was going to rain. Our intuition is a very sacred gift but most of us never use it. Because we don’t trust it. If you get a technical report on the internet, you download it you read it, ‘eat it up’.  But what happens when your gut says, ‘do something different’?  What happens when your gut goes against everything that people are saying and discloses something different. What do you do? Do you pay attention to it, or do you ignore it?

My intuition comes to me in whispers. It comes to me in feelings, senses. Your intuition is your greatest gift. It can be an early warning system. It can be an opportunity system. One of the guys I hired one time, told me he had worked for Dr Armand Hammer. Did you ever hear of City Service and Occidental Petroleum? Do you know how it started?
Dr Hammer would sit at his desk. He wouldn’t read the proposals, he would grab one from the pile and think, “No this one isn’t good.” Take another from the pile, “No this isn’t good”. Pick another, “Hmmm this feels interesting. I’m going to put that one here.” Reaches for another, “Wow this one’s a winner!” Placed it in another pile. He went through all the proposals he would receive and separated them by intuition – and then looked at them. One of his big winners was occidental petroleum.

For me, the ultimate entrepreneur, operates to some degree left brain, because they check out the figures, but where there real talent lies is their ability to read energy patterns to sense things.

Now, men are different from women. Women will talk about intuition, their feelings, men don’t have those things see…Men deal with gut feel. They are comfortable working with things that affect their logic. It’s all the same thing.

In our school system, what gets developed? Mathematics, English, Science, left brain, recite back to me, remember these lists…Do they want you to learn how to think? It is your intuition, your art, your music, your right brain, your intuition that is the key. Your intuition is a golden gift to you, but you know something, we’re not taught to trust it. Our intuition is our connection to infinite resources.

Let me give you another model. What sits on your shoulder? Your head. Your brain has three parts and I’ll talk about your conscious mind last. Let’s talk about your subconscious mind in computer terms because most people understand that. It’s a file cabinet. It’s a computer hard drive. You want to find out what’s in your subconscious, you hit search and it will find it. You want me to prove it to you?

Imagine biting into a lemon and tasting that tart taste of a lemon in your mouth? You see, I just did search.  You may not have bitten into a lemon for many years, but it’s still in there, just like every experience you’ve ever had. Every colour, every smell, every taste every sound you’ve ever heard is in your subconscious. Guaranteed. You just need to know how to use it. The subconscious does not assign right, wrong, good, bad. Subconscious is just a memory bank. It’s a computer hard drive that’s all it is. Super conscious? That’s your connection to infinite knowledge. Every answer in the universe is right there, in the super conscious. Are we taught how to access it? Oh no, you have to be a mystic to do that. You have to be a magician. You have to study for eons of time and only the guru’s in India can do it.  Not so. Every one of you can do it. Once you know you can do it.  All this information is right there, but who teaches us how to do it?

Creativity

Those who live by their ‘creative wits’, artists, composers, inventors and writers often refer to a sense of accessing or ‘tuning in’ to information from outside of themselves. Mozart spoke of hearing his music, fully formed. All he had to do was write it down. Great authors describe entering a reverie state and watching (on the screen of their imagination) the plot unfold – often in surprising directions. Our experience is that ‘ideas are in the air’ and it has proven by historical examples where breakthrough’s, inventions were discovered concurrently in different parts of the world. We have had personal experiences of ‘getting an idea’, and then seeing it in the market place six months to a year later.

Along with this sensitivity some have developed the ability to visualise to a surprising degree. Take the case of the inventor Nikola Tesla (inventor of the AC generator) who was taught how to visualise by his mother. When he was developing the ac generator he would build the device in his imagination, connect the wires and then ‘leave it running’ for two months. In his biography it is said that he could then (mentally) return, disconnect the power, dismantle it and examine the bearings for wear and tear. He would then provide his engineering manager with dimensions down to a thousandth of an inch. Irrational? Impossible? Not at all. He ‘knew’ what the correct dimensions were. That’s intuition.

David Gurteen, in an article “Knowledge, Creativity & Innovation” Published in the Journal of Knowledge Management 1998 said:

“Creativity is often thought to be a serious analytical task. This is not true. The starting point of creativity is the generation of new ideas. It is thus important to look at the process by which new ideas are created. New thoughts and ideas come from a kind
of thought-play of the mind. Daydreaming of what could or might be. It is a game – a fun game. Playing with words, concepts and metaphors. Playing what-if games. What if this were true? What if things were different? What if this limitation did not hold?”

Many organisations recognise the ‘playful’ nature of creativity, and have designed their offices to better facilitate this, using colour, sound, and pinball machines etc so that staff can break away from the linear, logical constraints often imposed by the traditional office environment.

How do you develop your creativity?