What is Conscious Business?

Conscious Business is both an emerging, new paradigm (mindset and practices) for doing business and a movement within the world of business. While there a growing number of perspectives on what Conscious Business is, I am going to summarize what I personally consider its essence:

Being and Becoming More Aware

Consciousness can be defined as what you’re aware of, including where you are directing your attention to and what is driving you. It is your level of awareness and focus of awareness as well as your intent. Through human will, consciousness becomes manifest in action. In my view, Conscious Business is cultivating expanded awareness and applying it to business.

While heightened awareness of the external environment has always been valued in business, Conscious Business, in my opinion, places primary emphasis on the internal lens through which we view the world. It involves paying particularly close attention to and valuing what’s going on in our inner world. It also implies that the more we are aware, the better.

Focusing on the Inner First

I think the foundational cornerstone of conscious business is the principle belief that everything first happens in the mind. So if you want to do anything, it first has to happen in your mind. If you want to change things or produce a different, you first have to change something inside of you. It is placing primary importance on what’s going on inside rather than outside, first focusing on being rather doing, placing awareness before action. As such, individuals inhabit a “state of being” consistent with the future they are striving to create and act from that consciousness; an ideal “state of being” free of stress and fear.

Being Present

A key characteristic of this state is being fully in the present, for example not operating from past patterns or thinking about some future. This sometimes referred to as Presence (link to Eckhart Tolle) or mindfulness (link to Jon Kabat-Zinn). Mindfulness is increasing being accepted in the business, but my sense it has been often utilized as a means of reducing stress. In my mind, Conscious Business means utilizing meditation and other forms of mind training as essential practices not just to manage stress, but access more whole brain states of being where we are more energized and open and have access to more wisdom and intelligence. Needless to say, we are more capable and functioning at our full potential.

Love-based

Dr. Joe Dispenza characterizes an aspect of these expanded states as “elevated emotions” such inspiration, joy, wonder, enthusiasm, compassion. To me, Conscious Business strives to be love-based and does not shirk from using the L word in the context of business. Most business today is still fear-based, driven by a mind-set of scarcity, survival, threat and zero-sum competition. Implicit in being love-based, a Conscious Business understands the importance of integrating and harmonizing heart and mind.

Operating from a Realization of Interdependence and Higher Purpose

I think every Conscious Business tends to be built around a two principle framework of higher purpose and interdependence. It is based on a deep understanding that a business exists as part of an interconnected and interdependent ecosystem, which, in turn, is part of an ever expanding fabric ecosystems; that it operates as part of a living, dynamic whole and not as a separate entity. As such, a conscious business considers and aims to optimize outcomes for all its stakeholders: (customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, local and greater community, environment ). It creates “a game worth playing” for all players. This compels it to take a long term view of its action and impact.

Moreover, it is driven by a purpose that is greater than itself. It exists to be in service of a cause. It seeks in some way to provide benefit and value to human society and/or the planet. A conscious business may see itself as a force for doing good in the world or solving some particular global problem.