Business and entrepreneurship: the missing half

Breaking silence on spirituality

An astute friend observed that, even if you could be 100% optimised in left-brain thinking, you’d still only be half-brained.

About a year ago I had an insight: that the the meaning of life is simple: it’s to evolve.

I love this idea, partly because it touches the heart of my own values and beliefs and partly because I hope it’s accessible enough that both “sides” can get on board with it. I use inverted commas here because it’s clear to me now that things I used to think of as opposites are not only connected, they’re integral. More polarity than polarisation. For me this is the essence of what spirituality is to work. Like the left brain and the right brain. That’s why I want to talk about it in a business context.

Why it matters

This photo was taken at a conference in Kenya in December 2024. If like me you’re celebrity-blind, it’s a (rather embarassed and bashful) selfie with Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. I’ve held back from posting it publicly, but I think there’s a genuine reason now. It aligns with something important that I think has become an open secret, something we can likely all point to, even if we haven’t consciously seen it.

It seems, at least in my circles, that spirituality is an invisible elephant in the room — conspicuous by the absence of its recognition. People like Jack it seems clearly recognise its importance and actively, sometimes publicly, engage with it, yet in the office nobody seems to talk about it, at least not beyond a socially-acceptable yoga class. Certainly nobody was taught at my startup school that it’s a vital element in building yourself into the version of you that can create a successful, enduring business with a positive impact.

I’m sure you can easily call to mind a character who has achieved influence in their career but, as Brené Brown would say, “didn’t work out their shit before working their shit out on others”. Epidemic levels of immature, unbalanced colleagues, fuelling crisis-level disengagement in the workplace is why I see personal development (stage 1) and spirituality (stage 2) as both business and human imperatives.

Placing attention on personal maturity doesn’t make the essential nature of work easier, but it does make it a lot less needlessly hard. Evaporating layers of dysfunction and drama enables an organisation to focus on the real objectives: to deliver (practical) and to grow (spiritual).

Redefining spirituality

Let me be clear, because “spirituality” has a muddled definition for many I’ve spoken with. It entangles with concepts including religion, institution, geopolitics and the abuse of power. Those are not what I’m talking about here. In this context, spirituality means anything that resonates with the individual and facilitates evolution beyond a perspective of serving a disconnected self. If you want an accessible way to redefine the word, think of it as the space you discover, in the process of working on your own psychology and personal growth, that seemingly was there all along. It extends beyond you as an individual and it’s about how you understand and engage with the process of life. It’s a richer, more demanding version of maturation.

To my knowledge, Jack is the first billionnaire I’ve met in person. I don’t know much about him, but based on what I experienced, he’s my kind of human. What I saw impressed me. Not the traditional fame-and-money kind of impressed, though that left an imprint, rather the way he showed up and how he engaged with life. Here was someone who could easily have been “too important” for the event, yet he sat in the room, alongside the other attendees, and listened with a level of attention and interest that no one else in that room, myself included, seemed capable of matching, especially when a smartphone was in such easy reach to scratch the itch of distraction.

To me it seems obvious he’s done a lot of work on himself. In spiritual language, “work” means engaging with the sometimes hard, sometimes confusing and regularly frustrating process of personal and spiritual growth.

Growth is the goal

Jack said something on stage that really stuck with me. To paraphrase, “the only way you waste a negative experience is if you choose not to learn from it”. If you resonate with the idea that both “good” and “bad” experiences help you grow (roughly translating to “gift” and “learning”) then you may recognise how incredibly pithy that sentence is. A single word in there shifted my understanding seismically: choose. It communicates that we have agency and that it really is our responsibility to engage with life and decide to trust that it’s working for us somehow.

Just after this photo was taken (and despite my embarassment) I was able to let Jack know how much I appreciated what he’d said. Like any real human I’m sure he has ordinary days and imperfections, but the person I encountered seemed crystal clear that his ongoing evolution is a priority and his responsibility, in service of humanity as well as his own goals. From this perspective, direction and continuous progress, rather than pretending and defending achievement of an end state, are what matter. Literally a growth mindset.

Spirituality in work

Expanding our idea of what’s valusble and generally accepted at work is a huge opportunity, not just for productivity, but for intrinsic human benefit. If “external work”, i.e. the practical stuff needed to deliver results, is additive to progress, then “internal work”, i.e. personal growth, is a multiplier. There’s no progress without practical action, yet at the same time progress will painful and slow if personal and spiritual development aren’t part of the equation.

This sets the stage for an idea I resonate with deeply:

Work conceived from a place of knowing that it’s integral to human development and flourishing, evaporates the zero-sum perspective on work-life balance.

When you get clear that work and life are mutually beneficial, creating a bigger pie for each other, for the sheer delight and greater purpose of enriching life, it qualitatively transforms the left-brain activity we do. Rather than spirituality being “one more thing” to add to the list, it modifies the intent behind our practical action. It actually lightens the experienced load because working from this place generates energy, rather than sapping your resources.

That the side effect of this shift is both better business and better humanity just makes it all the more delicious. Knowing what’s possible provides me with fuel for the fire of determination to keep going when inevitable learning experiences come along.

How-to

If spirituality is something that feels icky to you, you’re in for a treat. It’s going to feel uncomfortable and, like cold water therapy, exhilarating. There are so many access points you can approach it from, especially these days, that you’re spoilt for choice. Here are a few guidelines I can offer to help you engage well with your journey.

First: get clear that that you’ll be going outside your comfort zone. Particularly in the early days you’re going to be developing the courage to do things you currently believe are mad, bad, a “hell no” or just pain silly. The work you do mentally and emotionally to get from where you are today to a point where you take a step into the unknown is very much a part of it. If you know the wisdom of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, you’ll be practicing it here. Getting better at being braver is a life skill you won’t regret working on.

Second: trust your gut. Some part of you intuitively knows what you need and if you give it space, it’ll find a way to let you know, often in a slightly comical or playful way. A note on intuition: I used to think some people had it and the rest of us didn’t (if it was a thing at all) but it turns out it’s trainable. The more you practice, the stronger it gets. That’s another life skill you won’t regret developing.

Third: I encourage you to expand your definition of “spiritual”. Pretty much any experience or practice that takes you beyond the ordinary can be an on-ranmp for you, especially if it feels consistent with who you are. If you’ve been moved by music, or felt something shift at a time of birth, death or marriage, you likely already have some sort of reference point to work with. We tend to put those moments away and get on with the day-to-day, but they hold seeds of a deeper experience, perhaps especially the bittersweet ones.

Getting started

In terms of where you might go exploring, I encourage you to expand what you consider valid. From traditional routes like meditation, mindfulness and prayer, to exploring manifesting, plant medicine and wisdom traditions, through to activities as simple as walking in nature and, believe it or not, playing sport (ever noticed how a good flow state feels transcendent?)

These all provide access points to something beyond the mundane, something which, when cultivated, connects you to a greater whole and restores colour and depth to life.

From that place it’s hard not to be a better, brighter, softer, yet also stronger expression of yourself. That version of you literally changes the world, just by existing.

Happily for those of us who like at least some evidence, there is research attention being invested. From the neurological effects of meditation, to subjects often considered a little kooky, such as creative visualisation and positive intention, the work is there, albeit (in the true tradition of science) not yet welcomed in the mainstream.

For me, I started with the placebo effect (and it’s remarkable cousin the Pygmalion Effect). When I looked at these head-on, I decided there’s clearly something not only magical but practical and useful going on. Science clearly knows that our mental world alters physical reality because we try really hard to control for it. That was enough for me to loosen my hold on the materialist word-view.

It’s taken me years in some cases to dismantle some of my mental fences: rules, warnings, beliefs and shame triggers that kept me “safe” from some of life’s profound treasures. Those beliefs were handed to me at some point earlier in life, but weren’t now serving my evolution. I’m glad to have made some changes and if this encourages you to constructively review your own boundaries, that in itself is progress.

Results

It’s more of a sunrise than a firework. Things probably won’t change overnight. You start small, you experiment, you learn, you try a next step. Often it feels like nothing’s happening, but there are unexpected moments when the process will give you a glimpse of results.

For me it’s when I notice I’m able to be braver on a human level in the face of an unexpected hard conversation, or when the human connection with a colleague continues long after we finish what we were working on.

At some point down the road you look around and realise you’ve created a brighter and warmer world for yourself and the people you touch. Growing light, reflected in the lives of others can be moving to witness. It’s like an ongoing achevement.

Most of us are intrinsically motivated when we’re doing good work with people we like and admire. Working to bring out that person in yourself so you can be that to others is a solid strategy for business success and personal fulfilment.