The criteria used to determine what makes great leaders and brands is ever changing. Fortunately, there is a powerful learning environment available to us – Nature. Nature is emergent, adaptive, resilient, co-creative, receptive and responsive. Qualities we could all use a little more of. Think about what the brand of your company stands for.
Nature is an ideal learning environment to be better leaders and create better brands. Here are 3 ways to incorporate nature into your journey:
ONE) Science now shows us that simply being in Nature improves our well-being, creativity, empathy, agility, self-awareness and natural ways of being-and-knowing (intuitive, rational, emotional, somatic intelligence’s). After being in Nature for at least 30mins, are hormones change, our senses liven, brain synapse connections enhance, left and right brain hemispheres inter-relate more readily, and we are able to draw upon more of our natural wisdom. Experiencing Nature helps us explore our sense of purpose, look into personal and organizational challenges, makes us better at empathizing with different viewpoints, while gaining perspective on our stuck patterns and biases.
TWO: There is a revolutionary shift taking place, affecting how we perceive life and our sense of place and purpose within it. This challenges us at deep and partly unconscious levels, calling in to question how we create and deliver value in business and beyond. This transforms how we view life, from separateness (in business this manifests as viewing the organization as a machine, with compartmentalized problems) to connectedness (realizing the organization is a living system, that our challenges are systemic in nature and that our living organization is intimately entwined with people at all levels- economic, social and environmental). In Nature, we can take inspiration from living systems in terms of the patterns, processes, relationships and the Eco-systematic nature of life. Using this mindset you can create an abundance of creative innovation, resilience, purposeful living and agile emergent leadership.
THREE: To operate in today’s fast-moving ever-changing business environment, we need to call upon all of our natural ways of being-and-knowing. Those leaders who are better able to sense-and-respond effectively will not only do better in navigating these volatile uncharted waters, but will also create the conditions for their teams, brands & customers to perform more effectively. Whether it be dialogue around the campfire, reflective time in the woods, or applying insights from nature into business, nature helps cultivate and deepen our ways of being-and-knowing, so that we can call upon our intuitive, rational and emotional intelligences more effectively.