Regenerative business
So why I am referencing this concept?
Because it makes so much sense… Over the past three years I have had a total revaluation of value and purpose after hitting mid life. The challenges that came with this transformative stage of life were multiple, as you may have read in my previous blog post ‘Let’s talk about self-care’. My journey has involved much reading and practicing, one of the resources I found was Samantha Garcia’s new book Regenerative Business. It is so good that I felt compelled to write about it and share my personal learnings, in the hope that this post resonates with you…
In the past year I have taken the bold step to create something new. Central to this change in direction, is building a framework for my business from the roots up, that nourishes me and is aligned with nature. This is a must for me.
I am learning to say a firm “No” to negative behaviours experienced from years of working within broken systems that put profit over people and often planet. I’m also processing a large amount of past trauma. There is re-programming process which frees me up to work differently, with kindness and care at the heart of everything I do. Now I design the eco- system that I work within. It is very liberating.
Yoga, nature, creativity, learning and connection were the things that I turned to at the beginning of this transformative journey. Yoga, as a philosophical theory, is the view that our minds and bodies are the parts of natural world that we, as persons, must take responsibility for, so that they reflect our interests as people. This is a circular idea, a non-hierarchical, holistic view of interconnectedness, a view that is about teamwork, nurture, collaboration, listening, observing and that responsibility or power does not only apply to one group or entity. It is a way of being, thinking, moving and believing. It was a process that enabled me to reconnect to myself, to my core values and to other people.
Creativity is also central to my core. Having a design background, I often pulled on the Design Council’s double diamond methodology within their Framework for Innovation. I see synergies between this type of learning and the practice of yoga. The Double Diamond helps designers and non-designers across the globe tackle some of the most complex social, economic and environmental problems.
Discover. The first diamond helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues.
Define. The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help you to define the challenge in a different way.
Develop. The second diamond encourages people to give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people.
Deliver. Delivery involves testing out different solutions at small-scale, rejecting those that will not work and improving the ones that will.
This methodology became the framework for the first ever global graphic design masters degree course that I co wrote and built for a UK University before setting up the School of Creative Wellness. This is my background, innovation in design thinking. Using creative thinking and practice to solve problems, big socio-political , cultural and environmental problems. The work coming out of the masters course is mind blowing. Harnessing creativity for good, for positive change. This philosophy and desire lives in me.
The predominant systems we operate in today often make life hard. They are mostly outdated, unhelpful, not progressive and often cause harm to people and to planet.
Another part of my research and reading looked at Metabolic, who look for leverage points within systems to create maximum impact. Striving for systems change, they are working to transition the existing global economy as rapidly as possible by working with influential decision-makers to drive sustainability stewardship and organisational change. At the same time, they are working to build parallel systems based on principles that are fundamentally different to the current one, in the form of disruptive new ventures and pilots of new governance and finance models. For any business or start up looking to disrupt outdated systems they are worth a deep dive.
Below are their info graphics explaining our current economy and the economy of the future.
Our current economy is linear
The process of “taking, making, and disposing” is at the root of many social, environmental, and economic challenges: we extract finite natural resources from the planet at an unsustainable rate, and create vast volumes of harmful waste, which is also lost value.
A new economic model for people and planet
The circular economy is an opportunity to reinvent the way we live and do business. It’s about redesigning our global systems – how we make products, how we produce our food, and how we manage resources – to generate new types of value, and solve human health and environmental challenges.
The economy of the future is circular
A circular economy is ‘waste-free’ and regenerative.
How do we apply that thinking to our lives, our businesses, our relationships macro and micro, globally and locally?
I have been listening to podcasts, reading books and collecting all sorts of resources and links. Research is something I love to do. All material gathered is in relation to my interests in new methods in business with a focus on wellness in its broadest sense. So when I learnt about an online ‘regenerative business workshop’ with Samantha Garcia & Simone Grace Seol I was beyond excited.
Simone captivated me at a time when I was in the early throws of creating something new. The following words from her website sparked something in me.
She talks about:
Congruence and Right Relationship - alignment with what is true and whole.
Congruence is the art of partnering with your brain.
It is the skill of partnering with the spirit of your business.
It is the quality of your outsides aligning with your insides.
It is stepping up to your chosen values and commitments rather than following scripts that have been handed down from dominant paradigms.
Simone’s podcast series is well worth a listen if you are building something new or if you wish to change the status quo in an existing venture or organisation.
Samantha Garcia has 10 years of experience in product development and Project Management with an emphasis in sustainable resources and conscience consumption and is the author of Regenerative Business. Samantha asks “What kind of impact could your business make if you integrated the most powerful systems on Earth: THE SYSTEMS OF NATURE?”
Garcia’s recent book Regenerative Business creates fertile ground within you to unearth and express your soul purpose. It stewards a version of you that’s fully in bloom. It’s creative, healing, and intentional, and it births a better world for future generations.
Regenerative Business Samantha Garcia
Below are my key learnings from this workshop* in the context of my own personal journey of starting my business.
The workshop explored ‘How to die better’ (regeneratively).
How to restore - life creativity, longevity, wealth and Influence.
Simone began by talking about marketing as a social, ecological, environmental eco-system and how to increase creativity to transcend traditional ideas: to create new ideas, to cultivate progressiveness, to see things differently. Creativity is something I have cultivated for many years. Design and creative thinking are powerful tools for reframing and innovating. I usually have an abundance of creative ideas often to the point of overflow. The concept of killing things off was about to be unpacked, I was hooked…
Simone said “Choice is a skill we can hone’”. At a point where I am making many new choices in my personal and professional life, this resonated with me. I am typically very fizzy, someone with so many ideas, so many possibilities, sometimes finding it hard to focus things down. I also had an urgent need for change bubbling within me over the past few years. Change is hard. What tools helped me? Practices that enabled me to connect to myself, and to my true values, these helped me to make new choices to sit with my true self, to listen, to make smart choices that are right for me.
Viewing business and life as a work of art was music to my ears. A business ethos and idea is one thing, but operationally I was conditioned and lived through several decades where the joy was slowly sucked out of me. I also lacked confidence and was scared. It is easy for us all to look at sm and compare ourselves to others. This can be helpful to a point but is often a fast route to stagnation. I wanted something different but I didn’t know what that could be. So, my life had begun to lack joy, it was full of bureaucracy and broken systems, firefighting and overwhelm. So I began to slow down and explore how I can keep health, innovation and authenticity in both my personal and professional life. This came to me slowly, without pressure and incrementally.
Simone and Samantha looked at the definition of the action ‘to create’ - to come into being. Asking us to settle into this as a concept and as an exercise. Creativity is life, it is nature, and death is an important part of creation; deaths feed more life. Non-regenerative death is stagnant, for example: landfills of rotting materials, locked up, festering, piling up with toxic fumes. Regenerative death is poo, fertility, like a corpse becoming food: one piece of a larger cycle.
Our modern western relationship to the concept of death is death-phobic, but death paves the way to space, fertilising new being. It is cyclical not linear. So the workshop challenged us to embrace death strategically, using death as a tool. Think about how much trauma we hold in our body in todays society, how we can feel stuck or stagnant. Non-regenerative death behaviour includes existential dread, people not wanting to work with you, hiding, overwhelm, burnout, comparison, failure. Sound familiar? We are taught to operate within systems that foster non- regenerative death, we are exhausted, busy, holding onto outdated modes of operation, factories, assembly lines, operating like machines. The 40 hour working week is outdated. How do we change this?
Changing the system requires choosing intentional death, in order to restore life. My personal intentional deaths included walking away from my 25 year career, choosing mental and physical health and my family as my top priorities, fostering new skills and learning, new ways of thinking and talking to myself, enforcing rest, killing off comparison and killing off environments and constructs that made me feel bad. Killing off the idea of being perfect and reaching perfection. These are massive deaths and long overdue. Through intentionally choosing these deaths I created more opportunity for space to move, to think, to walk, to create, to play, to connect and to breathe. Don’t get me wrong it is tough, messy, uncertain. I became comfortable with my vulnerability, it became my medicine.
Samantha cited the fundamentals of intentional death as follows:
• Relationships - killing off those that don’t serve you
• Self-concept of self- creating new identities
Losing constructs and templates
Becoming scared, vulnerable and messy
Leaning into new cycles consistently
Seeing business as a place for learning, a school
Seeing business as a creative practice
Changing neural pathways
Building over time (iterative)
Understanding you are in a process of creating a body of work (not instant gratification)
Building a little at a time to create a strong muscle
Embracing spiritual growth
Consciously choosing what to kill off and knowing what this death is making space for
Taking action on ideas
Finding your voice by using your voice
Aiming to build a body of work
This is multi-dimensional work:
Processing trauma
Reconnecting to body and emotions
Un-shaming
Re-developing relationship with own creativity, inspiration and desire
Connecting with nature
Connecting with community
Becoming active politically
Having creative hobbies outside of business that have no connection to making money
I realised I have been actively doing this without knowing how to articulate it. My multi-dimensional journey involved: becoming a yoga instructor, walking in nature, setting up my letterpress studio, building connections with local community, writing poetry, foraging, having CBT therapy and trauma therapy, reconnecting to my desires and creativity, exploring new purpose without pressure, being present with friends and family. I started living in the real world, losing guilt and shame, feeling anchored and excited, creating new opportunities, new desires. This is all hard work and is incremental and, for me a continuous process. It takes time, practice and is cyclical.
Everywhere I go there are people in the workplace suffering from burnout. Systems and structures that are not creative or indeed human centred, often reactionary and not preventative, inclusive or collaborative or good in the long term. My particular connection and focus is with peri/menopausal women, the highest percentage of people who take long term sick leave or leave the workplace due to multiple pressures hitting at once. This is what happened to me and this experience has been the root and birthing of my new business.
A 2019 survey conducted by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that three in five menopausal women—usually aged between 45 and 55—were negatively affected at work. BUPA found that almost 900,000 women in the UK had left their jobs because of menopausal symptoms.
I see women on dog walks, at the school gates, in coffee shops all struggling to maintain a healthy work life balance and the systems, organisations and people around them failing them, not supporting them. Businesses must make space for this type of multidimensional work described in this workshop, to cultivate healthy environments to work in that are run with compassion and due care, to increase staff retention and allow all employees to thrive. The School of Creative Wellness helps individuals and businesses on this journey.
Samantha then went on to talk about three key pillars:
1. Processing:
Processing trauma, un-shaming (we are often trapped in binaries of good and bad) how we see ourselves are filtered through these binaries
Look at impulse outside of these binaries, what is the bud of creativity that lives there? Do this with every aspect of self
Free up that space that used to be shaming
2. Activation:
Reconnecting to body and emotions
Re- developing relationship to creativity
Developing creative hobbies outside of work
Liberate creativity from commodification
Inspiration
3. Connection:
Nature
Community
Politically active
Relationships fuel us
What is around us - local
Conversation
Pay attention to the things around us
The workshop then moved on to explore what to choose for intentional regenerative death:
Composting:
Ask yourself - what are the things that could be thrown away?
Giving to the earth and giving to other creatures to fuel
Decomposing - fertile- new use
Death item- fertile - new growth and understanding this cyclical process
Controlled Burns:
Burn down parts of business and life to create fertility to create a thriving eco-system
Always ask the question: Do I need to burn this down or would a 5% change be enough to re-align?
Listening to what feels off or stagnant:
Replace ‘what I should be doing’ with ‘joy of doing’
Build a body of work over 1 perfect thing:
Show up - seeding - keep showing up
Remember kindness whilst navigating
Embrace new ways of doing things and experimentation as learning
Work with intention over running away
Constant emergence
Natural creativity is is prolific and wasteful:
Fecundity: aligning the creative process with nature and understanding when you have abundance, things have to die or you intentionally have to kill them
Killing your creations:
Having creative outlets outside of work
Seeing a larger timeline
Deciding what will live and what will die
Having support to tell you no
Enforcing rest
Trusting:
Trusting there are always an infinite amount of good ideas
Trusting the choices you make are good
There is no imperative to take action on them all at once
Plug into collective current of creativity
It’s ok to do less:
Don’t just think about next quarter, think about timeframe as longer, and do one thing at a time.
* This is my experience from a live workshop so to get the full experience, information, tips and wonderful ideas get yourself a copy of Samantha’s book here .
For me personally, this is about continuous practice, ritual and is a constant cycle, not a linear process. By that I mean putting creativity and joy at the forefront of my work. Through actively cultivating fallow restorative times and active growth times. I believe that burn out is due often to us working in patriarchal systems and cycles of ‘constant productivity’ which are simply not sustainable. So, aligning with nature and natural cycles where things root, grow, bloom and pollinate and die is the way forward. Tuning into my own personal cycles in my body, when I need rest, when I am on fire and at peak productivity, and planning around them. Active pausing and listening to my body, to my environment, to the people around me. Putting this into practice, in both personal and business contexts, was the birth of the School of Creative Wellness.
A heart-centred business…
My business is about leaving society better off in my own small way. It is regenerative in nature rather than consumerist/capitalist, don’t give a dot about people or the environment, type of commerce. Rejecting burnout cultures, work them hot and replace when burnt out - all that badness, was an intentional burn for me. I had no choice, I could not continue as I was, I was not living a happy or healthy life.
This is a new era for small business and entrepreneurship and we have a blank canvas to create new models that are innovatory, sustainable and for the good. This philosophy should be applied to management, leadership, HR and developing new services of real lasting value. The world is in crisis and needs radical human centred changes. Regenerative business is a circular way of being, with a focus on good. It takes strong leadership and collaboration to enable such approaches to systemic change. In my small way I am part of this change, and wish to help others in the process.
My focus for the last 12 months has been to remain calm and happy whilst growing something new. Through creating new patterns and rhythms of working that are healthier and more enjoyable and unlearning unhelpful thinking and habits. This has become the foundation of my business - to help businesses and individuals reset, reconnect and thrive through my wellbeing services of yoga and breathwork, retreats and creative workshops. To create and hold the space for creativity and innovation with a heart centred approach. There is a lot to unpack in this post. I would love to hear if you feel any resonance with this blog post and how you may wish to apply some of these approaches in your life and work.
