Bring Your Entrepreneurial Dreams to Life

In the old days, at the birthing of our high capitalist civilization, we attached the notion of the entrepreneurial spirit to the great capitalists of the day, the Henry Fords, the Andrew Carnegies, the John D. Rockefellers. What fortunes they amassed as they changed the face of industrial society. Today, a culturally correct description of an entrepreneur points to starting up a new business, designing a new product or service, or finding a new market niche. Success and the mark of achievement are indicated by making lots of money.

In our civilization of false plenty, the economic metaphors tend to govern our lives just like the concept of "management." Managing is about how to organize something rationally, optimally, efficiently, and effectively. "You're not managing your life," people might admonish a "loser," instead of asking, "What are your gifts and talents?" and "How can you bring them to life, express them, enact them, give them to the world?"

Current thinking confines the idea and practice of entrepreneurship to business ventures. This greatly limits our appreciation of the broad sweep of risk-taking throughout life. It obscures the discussion about what lies within you, about your potential, your genius, your inner voice, much as the notion of scarcity has so denied the human capacity for creating abundance. Once again, the tremendous influence of economic themes over our lives, our institutions, our culture, the very ways we think and feel and talk about ourselves has greatly limited the emancipation of the human spirit.

In the history of humankind, the entrepreneurial spirit has never been confined to business ventures. Its scope covers all activities in which humans engage.

This article is not about the economic or managerial themes that dominate our culture. Entrepreneurs are not only, or even mainly, business persons. Do not allow the business metaphors to claim your soul. In principle, the entrepreneurial spirit may reside in each and every one of us. It may activate in any arena of human endeavor. In practice, we want to learn to release that spirit, to give it space for expression.

The entrepreneurial spirit at work

Entrepreneurship is about enacting and bringing your dreams to life. That is its “subject-matter.” It is about your wildest idea, about risk-taking, about getting a life for your own uniqueness, about being and doing what you are called to be and do. About that which you cannot not do and cannot not be.

As you search for its qualities in you, you might commence your search with this question: Do you recall your breakthroughs? That is what you are looking for.

That question begins your search. Remember those occasions when you went against the grain. Recall a time when you tried out something new, by yourself or just for yourself. When have you broken your own mold, found a bit of your own voice, despite what everyone imposed on you in the formation of your social biography? That's the entrepreneurial spirit in you coming to the fore.

Does your spirit touch you thus? Does it seek to help you break through the social boundaries? Does it goad you to try new things, to ignore the cautions of your culture, your world as it has been given to you? Does it urge you to err on the side of creativity rather than to succeed on the side of the habitual and the ordinary?

You have to ask it. How? By entering into the space where your spirit will speak to you, unencumbered by expectations of what you will hear. In other words, Empty, and Deep Listen.

Human civilization is rapidly reaching the point of no return, as our destructive and negating habits, institutions, and proclivities outweigh our creative, nurturing potential. We are in desperate need of great social inventions adventured by our human spirit which moves us to new heights, new risks, new modes of being and doing — the entrepreneurial spirit at work in us.

For some of us, the call is heard neither clearly nor frequently. The social biography has encased and suppressed the inner biography. The spirit has never been given its chance. For those of you whose social biography has been overwhelming, I hope that you will find one or another pry points so that you may open the door to your spirit and begin to create the inner space and, eventually, fashion the outer space for its expression.

That is why we began this search by opening the inner door first to our gifts and talents. These give us clues as we search for the call of our spirit. For some of us, the entrepreneurial potential is there, standing at the back screen door looking in on your life waiting to be invited in.

That special drive

Do you remember that old saying, “Born, not made,” applied to some special prowess or skill, as in, “Leaders are born, not made?” Are entrepreneurs born with a special drive that only the genes can supply? Or is entrepreneurship a call from the human spirit, perhaps yours? If so, what are its characteristics?

One quality of the entrepreneurial spirit is risk-taking. Who are the risk-takers? These are persons who break the mold, try out new things, create their own lives and make the curve rather than following it. Are the risk-takers in a special class by themselves, overachievers, reaching heights of accomplishment, performance, breakthroughs that leave the rest of us far behind?

Remember Henry Ford? He decided to pay his auto workers an unheard of 1914 wages of $5.00 per day (“Then they can afford to buy my cars.”) when the other auto magnates thought he had gone mad?

Second, risk-takers have the courage of their convictions, which means that their vision, their idea has to be translated into action. That characteristic is central to the archetype of the entrepreneurial spirit. If you don’t hold to the beliefs grounded in your spirit, who will? These days, we might assign that courage to a person who challenges the omnipotence of political or cultural correctness.

A third characteristic of the entrepreneurial spirit is to make your own opportunities. The person called by this archetype does not sit around, waiting for the world to come to her doorstep. He or she makes her own opportunities. These are the persons who seize the moment. They create their own emancipation from the mundane, the ordinary, the habitual.

The entrepreneurial archetype calls you to an inner action, to an inner risk that is yours to claim if your spirit calls and you respond. Is it calling you to that inner space where your intention emerges to be and do differently, newly, freshly, creatively?

Is this you? Is this your core? Do you feel the blood rushing to your head, your lungs bursting, your heart beating rapidly? Of course, these are metaphors only. The rush of venturing an enterprise of the soul differs from one person to another. In the very moment of initiating a risk, you may well exhibit inordinate calm as tranquility of clear purpose pervades your very beingness.

These are clues. The inner risk is this: that you will lose, or at least threaten, something that has become very dear to you in your social biography. It may be a belief. It may be a habit. It may be a personal relationship imbedded in your life. The call of the entrepreneurial puts the habitual and accepted relationship between your inner biography and your outer at risk. That’s the nub of it! The dynamic balance between your inner and your outer biographies will unbalance. It will shift. For a moment or a longer period until mending takes place, they may fly apart. I can’t tell you what is the substance of that risk, its content, its meaning to you. Only you know, and by now have investigated and recalled your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your gifts and talents. If you have come this far in your search, know now that expectations fly out the window. You are with your spirit, in deep dialogue. Listen.

posted by Warren Ziegler @ 9:29 AM 0 comments

Environmental Partnership with the Sustaining Spirit Archetype


There have been a lot of discussions about the state of the environment and what national reforms should be made to address the issues that affect our health and wellness on this planet. In addition to national reforms, there is also the need of individuals to become sustainable partners with our earth and our environment. Can we humans render our planet sustainable? The partnering questions are: Can the earth, in all of its expressions and manifestations, sustain itself, including we humans? Will we let it? Will we get out of the way to let the earth do some of its own self-healing? And will we enter into partnership with it?

The response to all of these questions is the sustaining spirits call to partnering with the earth. The sustaining spirit carries its powerful call and invitation into the external world, not only to people, but to the very earth itself, to its spirit, from the minutest microorganism to the huge mountain ranges and oceans of grandeur and omnipresence. They all enter into dialogue with us humans because spirit, theirs and ours, acts in a multidimensional reality far beyond the solely cognitive, far beyond the realities we have chosen to construct.

Most of us are part sustainers, of one kind or another, in one situation or another in order just to keep things going and to maintain the minimum level of our beingness through thick or thin. We call that survival, which does not perhaps differentiate us from other species. It is an ecological principle.

But is sustaining the same as maintaining? The sustaining spirit calls us to a land far beyond maintenance and the status quo. It is a new land of creativity and even transformation, wherein we have so changed our ways of living that a visitor from another star system would see a different set of people, culture, economy, and ways of living, being and doing. This is more than a gradual shift to the environmental perspective. A remarkably reflective spirit, the management genius and futurist, Peter Drucker, has for years called this a discontinuity, a systems-break, where the birth of a new system is generated by and from a space inside us for which the usual statistical, logical, or behavioral accounts no longer suffice.

In the early 1980s, I did an envisioning workshop with members of various environmental groups and associations in New England. Hundreds were involved for a couple of days of hard work. Their compelling images of the future looked mostly to the external size of policy, program, and institutional reform. A much smaller number of environmentalists understood that changing our social habits of waste, and the trashing of our nest, habits lodged in our social biography, would require some substantial inner work that might be best invited rather than forced.

In enspiriting, the inner and the outer biographies are inextricably interwoven. It is a whole new kettle of fish that requires us to revisit many of our most hallowed traditional and cultural beliefs:

• That all truth is objective


• That evidence is the only aspect of human experience to which we should give credence


• That there is a kingdom of God and there is a worldly kingdom, and they dont have much or anything to do with each other


• That scientific psychology and psychiatric intervention are the therapeutic antidote to spirits absence in our lives


• That the sacred is a very small portion of humans experience of their world rather than pervading everything we are and do.

What this means is that the self-nurturing and the nurturing of others go together. Discerning this interlock is a powerful clue to the sustaining spirits presence in you. We all need the self-nurturing. One way or another, your spirit is ready to partner with you. But are you ready to partner in the world beyond your inner biography? Such is the call of the sustaining spirit.

I believe we are called to listen to our spirit tell us a new story about ourselves. I believe some members of our species have been doing that since time immemorial. I think its time now to raise the level of consciousness about our spirit so that it becomes manifest in each of us, and in the world. Not everyone is ready to do this, but more and more are ready. Are you one?

Nowhere, to my mind, is this new spirituality, as people like to call it, more clearly in tune with our predicaments, challenges, and threats than in the case of the archetype I call the sustaining spirit.

Notes from When Your Spirit Calls: In Search of Your Spiritual Archetype

posted by Warren Ziegler @ 9:22 PM 0 comments