Geertje Couwenbergh, the author, teacher, and founder of Potential Buddha spoke in the Intelligent Optimist in April 2013 about moving beyond Entrepreneurship into the more elevated realm of being an “Innerpreneur”:
By now, I’ve come to believe that innerpreneurship might provide not only me, but many of us, with a new model for thinking about work, money, life, and society. Being an innerpreneur means you see work not as time out from “real life” but as fertile soil where your deepest ethical and spiritual convictions can flower. Every innerpreneur’s business plan is founded on the awareness of connectedness – emotional, climatological or economic. The innerpreneur’s way of doing business is infused with friendliness and curiosity. Whether you’re a road worker, manager, writer or secretary, whatever you do can connect you to a sense of wonder at life.
For Couwenbergh, work has become a vocation of inner exploration and a path to higher levels of consciousness:
You might say that the only true work as an innerpreneur is to turn yourself inside out. You must drop the poker face of professionalism – that all-too-common excuse we use to lock ourselves into the harness of our on-the-job identity, whether it’s the strict boss, cheerful dental hygienist, loudmouthed construction worker or tormented writer. The innerpreneur wants to do her work as a human being first, then as a garbage collector, manager, or lawyer. After all, who are we without our Linkedin recommendations, our company car – or our rebellious I’ll -never-work-for-a-boss mentality?
Greetje believes that the path of innerpreneurship may even be the answer to finally remaking our economic systems into one’s that are more fair and equitable:
Still, grounding your way of doing business in a relationship with groundlessness, not knowing, and its partner, space, is incredibly powerful. It could even offset the crumbling of our culture’s economic – and ultimately, ethical – pillars. We’ve lost sight of the innerpreneur’s path. We’ve poured concrete over it and turned it into a five lane highway. Fortunately though, our hearts haven’t forgotten the path. More than that, walking that path – living our human existence fully – is our most personal and most shared desire.
-Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
