Keys for Future Fit Leadership Giles Hutchins Episode 187

It's home. Yeah? We've separated ourselves from our soul, if you wish to call it that, our sense of spirit, our sense of connectedness from nature, from life. And so, we think we're separate from it. Leads to all sorts of problems. All the challenges that we're dealing in the world today stem from that problem, by the way. Um so, you deal with carbon parts per million without understanding that interconnection. You're lost. It's just silly. It's just a waste of time. We're shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic much of the time. You know, it's a real shame. I'm I'm not saying that there's not some really good work that happened in those spaces, by the way. There is, and it's all helping gather to the threshold. But, if you can't untwist that twist, you're always going to be creating more problems. So, when you untwist that and you start to then reconnect more deeply into your own psyche, into your soul, then you start to recognize that second fallacy, that actually we are nature, nature is us. It's just just this ridiculous to think that we don't and ever be separate from this sea of consciousness that we're in and that everything is divine. To use that word that we started our conversation with. And that everything, therefore, every little mini figure of eight, every little learning, every little notice of when I'm being triggered, or what's happening, or what is part of this divine learning experience. We're in it. We are on air, live and direct, all the time. And therefore, we have a humbling responsibility to get with the program of life. To sort of get the old tracksuit off a bit and go, "Uh uh." Kind of in my life now. Let me try and get with it. And that fuels the desire to have these practices. To maintain a quality of awareness in each of our interactions. Then we come into the recognition So, we've gone from self as separate to actually untwisting into self as participating in nature and that human and nature are one of the same. This book is nothing short of revolutionary, a compass for our times providing the formula humanity urgently needs to navigate the seismic shifts we face. Giles Hutchins masterfully unpacks the universal principles of nature and consciousness revealing a path to abundance that is as ancient as life itself, yet urgently relevant. Keys for future-fit leadership is nothing short of revolutionary. By bridging the chasm between mechanistic thinking and regenerative leadership, this work invites us to rediscover our interconnectedness, embrace complexity, and rise to the challenge of co-creating thriving systems. Leaders who dare to engage with this blueprint will not only future-proof their organizations, but will catalyze the shift towards a civilization in harmony with nature's rhythms. A must-read for anyone committed to shaping a resilient purpose-driven future, this book illuminates the way forward with wisdom, clarity, and hope. Giles offers not just ideas, but actionable tools to embody the transformation needed to heal our planet and ourselves. Giles, welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad to have you here. This is what, our third or fourth time we we've talked, and it's so good to see you. How have you been? Well, I am yeah, it's summer time as you know and we've both been extremely busy, which is nice. It's good to be doing what we're doing and we love what we're doing. So it keeps our hearts full. What's lovely about this particular podcast Mark is that since our last podcast, I've actually seen you in the flesh and you came here to Springwood and we had moments together in person, which was really really really divine. So thank you. You're most welcome and I'll tell you it was divine. So I've I've said it a couple times your your book regenerative leadership. I said, "Wow, boy, that's one of the best books I've read. It's got all the keys to wisdom." And then I I told you you know that that I used to think Jeremy Lent's book The Web of Meaning was the best book I've I've read and kind of found until I came across Leading by Nature and that just blew me away. Had everything compacted in there. Answered all the open questions. It gave actionable items. It guided me and and humanity who who has read it on this path to really heal ourselves in the midst of polycrisis, meta-crisis and find the path forward and now and in between that time I was in the in your farm in Springwood and ancient woodlands and doing forest bathing and and giving you hugs and drawn from your energy and spirit and really getting some top level coaching and good quality time where we could speak. Um And you came to the launch of Nature Works, didn't you? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Nature Works was probably then the one that threw it over the top. Again, you outdid yourself and such a such a beautiful work is is well. But, I don't know how you do it. You Now you've come up with all the combination of all your books, all your wisdoms, plus you've made it into almost an an atlas, an almanac, an encyclopedia, the universal guide with all your images, all your um diagrams and and showing exactly the path forward. So, now we're not just reading about it. We're not hearing just the ancient wisdoms and and how you relate it to psychology and the universe and the quantum and consciousness and and all other coaching styles through millennia to present day that that are out there from Plato and Socrates and Carl Jung and and Joseph Campbell who who I'm a big fan of as well and many many other greats. And then you bring it all together, you give us visuals, actionable items, you give us stories and uh in this great expansive volume, the ultimate guide. And I thank you the keys to future-fit leadership for one's self and for one's organization and those organizations that they find vital. And that's what we're here to talk about today. Um I I don't know how you outdid yourself again, but I guess it's based upon all those other writings that you have brought to this point. Um tell us what really just made you decide to to come to this point and bring this volume out and and what most people would probably hold a lot of these things close to the chest and and not really release them without tons of of money or some kind of ulterior motive, but what what's your reasoning? Well, yeah, thank you. I mean, what it I had many people saying to me, "Oh, you don't need to write another book. People are still trying to catch up with the previous books." And I and I had no intention of actually writing another book. These books kind of write themselves. They kind of force themselves upon me. But, um I had written Nature Works, as you know, and that's when when we met. And that had pushed the envelope. Uh I'd gone much deeper in what I shared. Um and in the hope that, you know, a lot of the business leaders I work with would start, you know, embracing that deeper wisdom more. And people really loved it and really responded it to it well. So, what was happening around after that, and it would literally was the summer when you came here. Already I had, you know, running workshops here, many people coming, practitioners, leaders, then saying, "Gosh, you've got all these laminates that you use when you're in the woods that you share. Um you know, can we have copies?" And then I'd send them the copies of the images. And then they would start asking me questions about them. And you know, so a lot of dialogue was happening after workshops, which is great because people are interested in the work. But, I was thinking, and I chatted to my wife, I said, "Look, I think I need to capture all of the images I've done. One, put them in a consistent approach because it's sort of hotchpotch, some of them from books I wrote wrote 12 years ago through to to now, so they have the same look and feel and and theme to them. And also bring that all together for people, so it's in one what I call post-conventional pedagogy. Um so, I started sort of sharing that idea with my wife because I I knew that she would be slightly resistant about me writing another book. Um and um she was on board with that, and she could see the value of it. And it So, it's really started off as a full-color book. Um and I wanted to do something, between you and I that Amazon couldn't print themselves because um I cut a long story short, a lot of books, you know, what Amazon do is they cleverly print them themselves, um you know, to maximize their margins. So, I went for a bigger book that was going to be full color that I knew had to have the high quality production from the local sustainable ethical provider I use. So, it wasn't going to be shipped from from China or anything like that. It was going to be high quality. And so, that it started like that as a sort of idea, but quite quickly mushroomed into a sort of full-blown, you know, other stuff, downloads, you then weave in uh other themes. I think I just love to write. It is an important part of my process. And so, really ended up being kind of three main reasons for writing the book. The first that um bringing all that content together, over 150 illustrations, most of those are are are new, haven't been produced before. And around all of those illustrations and frames, actually explaining them. You know, so hopefully people have got one place where they can go and get everything from sort of all the books. As you say, it's a sort of synthesis of all of that and a lot more, you know, there's it covers um new stuff as well. But then also um there's this recognition that on the journey, um you know, I've sort of have this vantage point now of I've been exploring and working in these whole domains of living systems, consciousness, and leadership for I don't know, 15 years now. Recognized as a a thought leader in many ways across the globe. And so, people, if I can help shine a light, if I can give some space to some of the others um coming cuz there's there's loads of people coming through on the journey. Um so, either people I coach or people I know who are doing really interesting things. And in that in the hope that also by them contributing their own stories, not only does it shine a light on there and and then help them with their own book writing projects and and have the courage to uh produce their work, but also give insight to other people reading it that actually this journey is completely wide open and there's no particular type. You don't need to be, you know, I often have sometimes people coming after the they they they sign up to a workshop and here and when I feed back at the end of the workshop, some of them tentatively share that actually they didn't know whether they should come. They're really glad they came, but they weren't sure whether they should sign up cuz they didn't think, you know, they were of the right level. And I'm like, right, okay. So, we need to kind of make it a bit more feel more accessible for people. Um uh because I I hope I've never, you know, inadvertently said that people need to be of a certain level. The door is open to anyone on this journey. And so, you've got 16 guest chapters there. Um from a whole variety of different people. People from Africa, from Japan, from Australia, from America, from Europe, all over the world writing different stories about the journey that they've been on and what does this mean for them and what are their challenges. So, I think that's useful. And I think the third reason is simply that now, as you know, Mark, is the time. I I would say now more than ever this year, 2025, next year, the next couple of years, every little thimble of hope is like a make weight that tips the scales. And the leaders, the pioneers, the change agents, many of them are tired, really exhausted actually, um and because of all the challenges we're experiencing. And and what I see is some people actually almost sort of go getting a bit downbeat with the level of change that's going on. Almost going, oh my god, I I I'm like, no, this is the time. Please, don't stop giving up now. We're we're we're right at the moment. So, the book is essentially about giving hope to practitioners and leaders. It goes beyond just giving hope. It's actually giving tools and actual guides that it answers a lot of the questions and I know just maybe a small fraction of the people who hesitated and wondered if they were at the right level to to come and experience it live with you or that they maybe weren't there. There was also a small percentage that kind of felt like maybe it was too woo-woo. There is this separation from the way we talk and the way you talk about nature, nature working, about leading by nature, by resonance and frequency and some of the quantum complexities that they thought is this too far out there? This is not the normal business terminology, the businesses usual terminology that we're used to hear of KPIs and and meeting our quotes and and and projections and is this in in the funnel and the tube and the pipeline of of the work and our ever goals of achievement, non-stop achievement. And that really is is something that I've run across many times. I'm sure that's a small percentage of them. But what are organizations and why is it not woo-woo? And how does that really fit in? You eloquently describe it many times in the book to make that distinguishment, but if you were to speak to those people saying it's woo-woo or not the business terminology we used at Harvard or Stanford or Princeton, what would you tell them? Sure. Well, before I respond directly to that question, just a bit of context. What we're having to do here is and all of us, communicators, leaders, people on this journey, is having to engage with quite a broad church, if you call it that. A broad set of people with different mindsets, different approaches, different biases and so forth. So, I think it's been what I've been constantly dancing with and I'm still dancing with and continue to dance with this inevitable dance is this edge between bringing in a language, bringing in a resonance that actually makes sense to people who are already going through the bridge and over over this chasm that you talked about from mechanistic into living systems, that already on that journey, one needs to bring a language that is guiding them even further. Um and yet also ensure that people who are wanting to maybe embark on the bridge or questioning, should I be embarking on this bridge, are not lost by that language, are not going, "Whoa, this is just completely too woo-woo." And that has been that is a continuous edge I'm I'm playing with and I think we all need to play with. It's it's it's interesting. And if we go too far one way, we we lose those others, but if we go too far the other way, we're almost just sort of just manifesting the very thing that we need to move on from. So, I think it is important to not just make the business case for sustainability in the old paradigm, which is what I used to do for many years as global director back in the day, where you were just essentially making the whole case based on you know, the same paradigm you're in. That said, there are business cases. There is plenty of evidence that we can bring to the table that will help satisfy those people gathering at the threshold, if you like, and to to think it why should I? But underneath it all, before I talk about the actual business case, is a deep desire, is a deep longing, is a essential love of life that we all have as human beings. We had as children, um we have as adults, but it's suppressed. And so, this is about creating a future that we want our children uh future humanity, we want life on Earth uh to be a part of. So, let's not forget that. Um otherwise, we make it about tweaking the existing model in a way that's acceptable to the existing model, and we don't really get very far, which is essentially, unfortunately, what's happened to sustainable business. Not in, you know, there's lots of good stuff that's happened to sustainable business, but essentially, since Rachel Carson's work in the '70s, and here we are in 2025, um we've now got some really good sophisticated methods of tracking carbon um and plastics in the ocean and so forth, but the actual uh consciousness underpinning that has has not moved um in the right direction. And so, this is talking about consciousness, which is quite difficult for the mechanistic mind to understand, because the mechanistic mind doesn't even have an understanding of consciousness. So, I wanted to give that as a context, but then to respond to your question, which is, well, how does one what language does one use to engage with people gathering at the threshold? Quite simple, you just use the language of the machine mind. And it's very easy, quite frankly, it's a very simple language. Um and I used to be in business, and so, I think that's important for people when they engage with me as a coach or as an advisor, that they know that I used to be a director at KPMG back in the day. Um I've helped transform all sorts of businesses, and I've helped them become more profitable. I've run many programs, which is a bit essentially about helping businesses become more profitable. So, I get that. I get the importance of profitability. And so, the simple, I would say, biggest reason is that the machine mind prides itself on efficiency and effectiveness. You know, that we all the time it's always about efficiencies, effectiveness. Even a new strategy is about how can we be most effective or most efficient and so forth. And yet, we often overlook that the single biggest inefficiency in our organizations today and there's now evidence from Harvard and many, you know, mainstream top-drawer places proving this that the single biggest inefficiency in our organizations today is that we are doing two jobs. One that we're being paid to do and the other job that we're not being paid to do that is distracting. It's pulling attention all the time away from us in our minds, every moment, in our meetings, in our decision-making processes. And that job that we're not being paid to do that is distracting us is the one of managing others' impressions of ourselves, propping up masks, holding back, getting caught in the corporatized self, the self as separate, which is a form of consciousness that is limiting what we bring into the workplace. And so, what we're actually bringing into the workplace as human beings, our biggest cost, you know, is actually a thin version of ourselves, a superficial version of ourselves, which is, you know, from a physiological perspective, it's high-beta brainwaves, it's dorsal system, it's a left hemispheric narrowed perspective, which, you know, is great for sort of getting the job done, but it's not good at thinking about why we're doing the job or, you know, the the ergonomics of of of the business or the fast-moving world that we're in. And so, the challenges that we've got today, which are increased volatility, cannot simply be met, cannot be dealt with with the level of consciousness that created them. Cannot be dealt with this level of consciousness that's superficial and thin. We can't deal with rapid change with that thin superficial consciousness. And our organizations ought to be recognizing, our leaders ought to be recognizing, that attracting and retaining high-quality talent, having people in the organization that open up their bandwidth, so they're more creative, more vibrant, more whole, more able to be purposeful is the number one critical success factor for being future-fit going forward. So, you you eloquently, not only in your illustrations and the images that you use, but in the way you describe it, you give multiple examples of the way we have been doing it, the very business way, and then you show on the other side what's the way to be future-fit, what's the way moving forward. And And you discuss the achiever to the regenerator kind of shift. And you you you put that in a comparison side by side what the difference looks like. And And the terminology and also that transition. I say many times in my uh talks around the world, of which all you're always ever present with your books and your wisdom. And And I refer many people to you. But I say we're not in the business of business. We're in the business of life. And this separation between work and life is pure It's never existed before in our world. There is no separation between work and life. If you're uh one person at work and one person in life, you're probably on the verge of burnout, bipolar, schizophrenic, severely depressed, or or psychotic because there's always this other mask or this difference between the two. And those two worlds have trouble balancing. It's also very siloed linear type of type of thinking that will never achieve those exponential those quantum results that we desire the way the natural world works in a very evolutionary quantum way. And so in in that entire process of what we've just discussed what you just unpacked for us and what's in the book, there's this underlying a couple underlying things that are important and one that stands out for me a lot is this evolution of life. Like we we have this idea of sustainability um but sustainability is not very sustainable. If we have an image of a point in time, a degree, a way of doing business that we want to sustain, that is so hard to do in a world that is in growing in an exponential manner every single day second of the day. If we only improve incrementally, if we use that linear siloed boxed approach, we are falling behind exponentially. And it's really this evolution. Why are we stunting that growth of evolution? And so you right in the beginning have you know we you and I speak a lot about regeneration and we have our own views of how it's being twisted and maybe even bastardized in some respects. You begin this book Keys to Future Fit Leadership instead of saying something about regenerative leadership. And I think you're starting with that terminology that business leaders and people can understand. And so I wanted you to kind of go in to talk about that evolution, why you chose that terminology and how that kind of um nudges us to see the world in a different way, to understand the concepts that will lead us into that um even though we're not coming out and saying, you know, regenerative leadership or keys to future fit regenerative leadership or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, it was quite conscious to um to actually bring in that term. It's a term I used um some years ago and and and others have used. I I had conversations at the time with people like Jeff Kendall um and Peter Hawkins, many others when we were exploring future fit and how important that was as a kind of term because um back to your point about meeting people where they're at. It you know to use adult developmental psychology, you've got this orange green teal turquoise sort of move across the bridge connecting back into nature, connecting into life, connecting into quantum. Um at the orange green level, who doesn't want to be future fit? Everybody wants to be future fit, you know, so the capacity to build in future fitness in your organization amid these increasingly volatile times is right up there. Uh even resilience I find can be a bit mm containing, you know, so sustainability and resilience, they can have a slight mechanistic feel to them. They don't have to. It's just there's nothing wrong with sustainability. It could go all the way if it wanted to uh just as as resilience could do, but at the moment how it's being framed is resilience is often sort of a risk management. How can we be resilient? How can we resist change? By building up some fat or having yeah, armor. Um whereas actually what we're talking about here is a fitness, a future fitness, you know, we're adapting, we are allowing ourselves to become more like a martial artist, like a aikido, uh dancing with change. We're going into a time of unprecedented volatility with a fitness. And what that does is two things. One, it's it recognizes that this is a practice, a fitness routine that we're all engaging in, and two, it can be playful. You know, fitness just then when we were you know, we were starting to loosen up. It's not resilience and managing control or or carbon measurement. It's not tight. You need all of those things, sure. But actually this is about hang on a minute, how can we open up to life? Because what we do find as we go through this journey is that life is giving us the answers if we just choose to see, we allow ourselves to tune in to life. Then actually everything starts working. And so to realize that nature is full of change, life is full of change. I mean, we kind of inherently know that and yet we've been programmed through school and education and jobs and so forth to actually resist change, to actually sort of manage change. The amount of heads of people in culture I've coached over the years who have said, "Yeah, but the problem is people don't like change." And then they leave it there as if well, that's just a fact. And it's like, "Well, no, let's let's just go into that a little bit cuz that might be where the actual opportunity is, you know, to actually allow people, you know, rather than just sticking with it and going oh, that's just an obstacle. That's just the way it is." No, actually let's let's let's work through that obstacle because this capacity to see change as something that's fearful is inherent. It that's the real challenge that prevents us from going through the bridge. Rather than starting to recognize that innate within life, within all of our lives, within nature is change and that could we imagine what life would be like without change? You know, it's it's almost as if we we we we almost wish to give our whole lives to this ego that's running in the head with all of its stories of fear and and control and oh dear, um you know, wanting to just stay in the comfort zone. But if we actually listen to that, our strategy would be to try and maximize our time on the sofa watching Netflix or something. Cuz then we're just completely sort of outside life, just sort of subsumed into no change and just No. We like adventure. We like exploration. We know that we learn and realize our brilliance through change, through tension. And so recognizing that life is full of change, is full of tension, is full of challenge, but that that can reveal our genius and allow us to become more human, allow the organization to become more than what it is. Uh plays to that orange green, and it's about future fitness. So, it's not saying you need to manage, you need to control, you need to limit yourself, which can feel a bit kind of green and a bit limiting and a bit kind of Oh, I've got these moral duties and I need to be holier than thou and Oh, dear. Oh, and it's going to affect my profit, which is bit of the green um meme, if you like. It's actually recognizing, No, we can a- allow ourselves to really enjoy We can engage in this adventure. And then the way we do that is by opening up to how life really is. And we recognize that we don't we can't manage change. These change management programs, I mean, I used to run many of them back in the day. Cost millions, many of them. Um hardly ever realized the value that we thought they were at the beginning because life had moved on as we were doing that It's It's obvious, actually, when you think about it, but we would have roll out these 2-year People still do it now. They pay millions to big consultancies and And you know, and then they wonder why their business has trauma at the end of it and that hasn't and the You know, it's just ridiculous. So, the ability to build in a capacity to dance with change is inherent in this idea of future fitness. And I think the second part is around regenerative, the word regenerative, um why I chose to keep that word in, cuz it's throughout the book, but not overplay it, is because I think a lot of business leaders these days are actually struggling with the term regenerative. Um, and for good reason, because it's quite confusing out there. I was speaking to someone the other day who, um, has actually believed that regenerative is essentially net positive. And you're like, "Oh my gosh." Well, there's many people in the regenerative movement that would shoot you for that. I I'm not a purist, so I'm not going to shoot you for that, but, you know, people are mis- confused. It's almost like it's sustainability on steroids, or it's just net positive, restorative, or whatever. But actually inherent in regenerative is this tuning into life. Is this working the way nature works. But a lot of people don't understand that, and so future fitness just gets us going on the journey towards opening up to life by going, "Okay, life is full of change. Life is full of tension. How can I allow my business to become more fit, more agile, to deal with this increasingly volatile time?" That's so beautiful, and I I think you summed it up perfectly. There's this this dance, and when even when we talk about sustainability, or to sustain something, it feels like you're tensing up, you're locking your movements. You've got to sustain a period in time. You can't travel, you can't eat, you can't do these things. I've got to sustain this. Nothing in or out. And you can only hold that period of time without that flow, that evolution, that dance, that aikido, that that flexibility to adapt, as you said, um, can be tiresome. You know, the uh, people can uh, try to do that, but then also, as as you mentioned, we're locking ourselves into non-evolutionary moments in time, because if we're trying to play catch-up to a standard, a regulation, a policy, um realize that those things, by the time they get rolled out, they're already outdated. There's been politicians, delegates, and people working on that verbage and that regulation and that policy for years before they even get rolled out. And if they do get rolled out, they're usually sometimes late because of the Brexit or because of a war or because of a pandemic or whatever. So, they're delayed before they're out. And then when they're launched, we're like, "Oh my gosh, I got to I got to keep up or I got to meet this new standard." But you don't realize that's already outdated. That's the way it was. And if we we don't want to be stuck in that time. We want to evolve and flow and grow and have that future fitness that no matter what policy, regulation, or or new model that comes out, that will actually set the bar higher and be ahead of the game in this regenerative process, um that is much different. It's a balance with how life works. It's an adaptability and and it's really this this evolution, this change. In In your book, you talk about this metamorphic process that goes through. And uh we've talked about it many times in business. And I think in some respects it's also seasonal. I would like you to describe uh to us maybe what how you see that and how that applies, this metamorphic process. Is that just a one-time thing that happens or is it more evolutionary, seasonal? How do you look at that? Well, we again, back to your initial question. We've got different horses for different courses. We can describe this in slightly different ways depending on where we're at on that bridge. And that's the beauty of and it's one of the reasons why I really love coaching cuz you get this sort of intimate relationship and you can work out what where that person or that team, that leadership team is, and then you can adjust, and then you can help them as they go through the journey in a very bespoke, tailored way. Um but for this podcast, I think I will I will sh- try and share all of the different levels. Um in reality, and this is where the illustrations come in. So, um that's one of the I I would feel that what people are saying about this book is it acts as a kind of almost like a coffee table textbook. They're sort of opening it up and then just reflecting on a couple of pages, and then leaving it, and then coming back to it a few days later, and just opening it up randomly again, and reflecting on it. Cuz So, these large images can can convey a lot, and they help activate the right hemisphere as well as the left hemisphere. And so, what I started to do, and the the the two um uh ladies, lovely people who helped me with the images, uh we did get to a point where they we we had to laugh cuz we thought we were getting a bit like You know the Beautiful Mind, the film? Um where you're sort of almost post-its everywhere. And it was I I I actually thought I I have to draw a line now, because otherwise we could literally go into um when you start to try and understand that actually it's a series of U's. The U is a really beautiful image. It's It's an ancient image, um but certainly Otto Scharmer's theory U has really helped activate that in the modern psyche. Um that's the U process of coming down, going going down the bottom, and coming out. And I play with that, and then break it into sort of sections. But then there's also the figure of eight image, which again is another ancient image, but panarchy and the people from the Resilience Alliance um more recently brought into the modern mind, and I've been using that in all my books. I think it's one of the most powerful tools around living systems. Um so, panarchy mixed with the U are the two images. Now, in reality, you've got and this would probably be for people a bit further along the bridge cuz it could lose people gathering at the bridge, is you have a U coming down and coming out and you have figures of eight within the U as you go down. So, you go down and do figures of eight seasonality. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. As you go through this metamorphic process and then you come through the out out the outside, which is in in of itself a big spring, summer, autumn, winter. So, it's like you have a spring, summer, autumn, winter with mini spring, summer, autumn, winters going in it. So, a figure of eight with mini figures of eight happening. Yeah? Now, what actually happens in reality, and this is where it gets very exciting with an organization or an ecosystem, is that sometimes these front loops going into um spring, summer, autumn, and then winter, the trick tricking, you know, um creating a a shift in the system can overlay with other shifts that are happening in the system. And that's where I feel actually the the the the future fitness uh where strategy um where organizational design will actually go in the future is trying to work out how we can allow these increase this metamorphic capacity. So, the organization is continuously morphing. It's no longer the image of the caterpillar to the butterfly. That's helpful at the beginning of the journey. We're now into continual metamorphoses. It's the reality. Ceasing and ceasing transformation all the time. We're allowing ourselves to become more all the time. And every year, use the analogy of the year with the seasons, is a metamorphic process. So, we've got nature to show us this. And every day is a metamorphic process. The day and the night. We're going to sleep. We just drop off, don't we? I mean, I I find it fascinating that with our wonderful minds how we still haven't really fully understand what sleep is, do we? You know, it's something that we all do every day. We haven't really cracked it with, you know, books that have defined it. So, off we go. We just sort of unplug and we go off into this world. There's a mini metamorphosis. And of course, then the week has been nicely designed. It's tried to maximize the spring summer productive part because we live in a a society of doing. So, we've increased increased the Monday to Friday as much as possible and even the Saturdays now quite a lot quite busy. But then the Sunday is that dropping and then you pick up again. And without those drops, without the opportunity to flick into the other side, we become unproductive. We become inefficient. We start to become thinner and the topsoil, if you like, of our culture becomes superficialized. The same as what's happened in monoculture farming, for instance. We become degenerative. And of course, there's a tendency in society to do that cuz we're just trying to sweep the assets for short-term returns rather than understanding how we build organizations that can truly thrive. So, the metamorphic journey is actually a U process of coming down, coming into winter. So, the back of that that figure of eight, the back loop where it comes out of autumn into winter, is a letting go process. Uh surrendering. And you find that at the center of all wisdom traditions. Die before you die. The inner turn that Plato talks about. It's everywhere. And and that inner turn can feel a bit depressive. It can feel a bit disorientating. It can feel a bit, "Whoa, what's going on?" Because you're letting go of all the things on that up loop, that spring summer period of delivering, being successful, and being out in the world, and people telling you what a good job you're doing, uh is changing. And we're going a bit more inward. Um and that can be the twilight zone of the evening time in the day. Or it could be that time between Saturday and Sunday when we're just starting to sort of get out of the busy day, or you know, whatever it is. Or if we take holidays or periods or plant medicine or vision quests, you know, these are periods where we're going off into another way. It's important, vital. Without that, we lose our genius and we can't deal with this adversity and we can't dance with change. So, we go through that process, but a big change in us happens uh studies say around every 7 to 11 years we go through these shifts if we allow ourselves to, but there's many reasons in society that we encourage arrested development. That band that was famous many years ago had a very good name, Arrested Development, which is the society almost encourages us not to go through a metamorphic process because then we, you know, move out of this stage of doing and we go into a deeper stage. Now, people then often think, "Well, hang on a minute, why would I want to go through a metamorphic process? Why would I want to go through something that's a bit messy, that I'm letting go and I'm ah that ah and I can't deliver as effective like Well, because this is what's going to enable you to become a far better version of yourself. Otherwise, you're just going to get stuck at a certain stage of meaning making and life is all about these expansive, breathing in and out moments of where we go through different stages of meaning making. And so, we don't have to go through those. Many people don't actually. Uh we get caught in just finding a foot version of ourselves and just seeing the job out until we get our pension or whatever it is. We've created a society that helps us be in that comfort zone, the Netflix, the sofa, the pension. And so, we just sort of almost stay with what we're doing uh and we don't really go through a change. But then life shows us because life is this essential, the most powerful learning program we have available to us, much far more powerful than any AI, Apple, social media channel. Um this life is going to knock if we're not changing, outside events will shock us or create problems for us, dissonance, um which at the time we're thinking, "Oh my god, I don't deserve it. Oh, this is uncomfortable. I don't want this. Oh, how do I get back to the sofa?" But actually, they're helping wake us up if we can make meaning out of them. They're helping us go into ourselves more to get perspective on what what what am I really doing? Why am I here? What is going on? And of course, we're seeing that play out in a bigger collective stage right now in the world. These, you know, I mean, I think it's becoming more and more obvious to people now that there are some major problems in the world. Whereas, you know, you and I have been talking about this for 20, 30 years, but, you know, 20 years ago, I'll be honest with you, when I was speaking about, you know, this vocal world, most people in the conference halls would sort of slightly roll their eyes and go, "Oh, this isn't really relevant for me." 10 years ago, um even then, people were like, "Oh, okay." But half of them were probably going, "Actually, you know, I can I can see this is important, but it's not really important now." Um now, I think actually people are going, "Okay, right, I get this. Um right. Okay, we've got to we've got to do something, haven't we? Okay." And so, that's that's good. We're waking up to the very situation that we created with these minds is now waking up. So, the very some spring summer period and autumn period is now starting to cajole us. Then we go for a shift in meaning making. And what I've explored because I've I've found when I first came across adult developmental studies years ago, um I actually pooh-poohed them to start with because my own philosophy has been informed by my own outer body experiences and so forth and this well, deep sense of sacredness of life and I I I very much valued um indigenous uh practices and and ancient wisdom practices. And when these sort of modern um adult developmental models came up, I was a bit like, "Oh, this is very mechanical. Oh, it's just making them into models. Oh, I don't like it." And I I realized actually over time that that was just the the green shadow in me that was kind of not liking it. But actually over time I I I got into the underlying research behind it and the powerful minds like Jane Loevinger and Clare Graves and so forth that actually really understood the human psyche. When you read their original findings, been sort of changed into, you actually realize that it was very much corroborating my own experiences, which is that when we go through this quite powerful shift in meaning making, we open up to life. We become back in tune with how life is. It's a remembering of this more ancient animist way. And we almost have what we call it more like a human animist rather than this mechanistic humanism that we have at the moment. And so that I thought, "Ah, great. I get it." And then I started seeing it in different ways. And so the shift, if you like, from the orange, let's call it orange summer autumn delivery, green sort of autumn shift, there's some problems going on in the world, we need to be think about sustainable business, we need to think about well-being, we need to think about diversity inclusion, then starting to fall into winter, starting to blame, "Oh, business is bad. Oh, what are we doing? Oh, let's blame the Russians. Let's blame the Americans. Let's blame Let's just blame some you know, and and deal with the the problems that come with that falling in. Then that green back loop, which is a process of individuation, of starting to open the self as separate into self as participatory, starting to sense into life, is very mushy and and marsh-like, boggy, gets stuck in it. And lots of people can spend their whole lives in that. We don't have to come out the other end because the other end then has to involve us a rebirth, which is just as challenging for the ego as the death. And then the rebirth, which is what Easter used to celebrate in the in the traditional cycles of the year, you're then coming out of that Valentine's and Easter stage, and you start to come into a different stage of meaning make. And what I found on that next front loop coming around the figure of eight is the teal turquoise piece, but mainly teal to start with, which is the future fitness, agility, uh ability to deliver one's soulcraft, uh to have not just a shift from me to we, which is quite popular in the green phase, but a shift to me and we, and recognizing that we've got to take self-responsibility for how we're being, and we can't subsume that in the collective. We can't expect governments to come up with rules and regulations for us, and that's the answer. Uh that actually we've got to be part of this. We are participating in life, and the quality of consciousness we have is vital. And yet, we are these communal beings, and that's what we've learned from the green stage, is that that we're participatory, and that therefore these organizations, collectives of people with shared purpose, are powerful, are really important for creating the future fit futures that we desire. And so therefore, gosh, let's create organizations that are actually really authentic, that actually don't just focus on brand, that actually have a culture, and have a value proposition set that really resonates with why we're here. And so that then becomes this next stage that we're now seeing emerge. I mean, a bit of it still um a a minority a a low minority of people, but the more and more I'm seeing, the more I coach, and that's hence the guest chapters in the book as well, more and more people are navigating that whole figure of eight. Orange green teal. And you could argue that even just the green bit has another figure of eight in it, a full figure of eight of just green. When you're in the summer of green, you're really just loving, you know, whatever it is you're doing, you know, well-being of work, mindfulness, um sustainability, um corporate responsibility, all of that. I'd say probably more people are in that piece now than they were 20 years ago. But they will get to a point where they go through their own journey and start to now dip into teal, another figure of eight. You go down the U, you hit the bottom, you come through into the shift from achiever into regenerator. So, that's just a just a sliver of it. Just a sliver of the book, but it also goes very deep. I want to go even deeper for just a second, um on it and and and touch upon a few more aspects. So, you uh in earlier in your comments, you said that, you know, most the majority of people kind of go through that shift every 7 years is is what we're seeing, and um a lot when I was doing the coaching probably back uh um almost 20 years ago, I could see the shift that it was back then it was about every year uh people were saying, "I need a new project. I need a raise. I need a new job title. I need something new to happen." And that that that their their phases were in the work environment about yearly, but that majority of people would start to feel this anxiety or this kind of unease around around 7 months where they say, "Oh, some you know, I got to go to work today." And all all this because nothing was happening. There was a stagnation, this this lack of evolution, this lack of regeneration. Um you and I both regenerate every single day, and I don't think we would make it as long as we've been in this industry without that daily that daily process as well as that very um the the ever-rescent ever curve of the eight fig figure eight going down continually on this presencing into the future which is the big uh uh um figure overall that it's really a daily process. Um having said all that, a lot of and we've also talked about church or religion or cults or belief systems they tend to say, you know, here's the book and this year we will go through every chapter of the book and you need to work on faith and repentance and and belief and and prayer and all and all these different aspects of of whatever structure it is and after 5 years, after 7 years you still haven't received that that what you're talking about, that teal level. Uh you haven't gone through the process of enlightenment. You haven't become the priest or the guru or the enlightened one. But you keep going back to the beginning. You keep repeating that um ad nauseam by by going into this and just continually doing a restart every every day going back to the basics. Um after one, two, three years, shouldn't we have mastered the basics, the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs so that we can transcend into that teal? How do we do those processes and distinguish that we don't want to hold people captive to a hierarchy, a guru, a church, a religion, but we want to empower them with the tools to get to that point where they're regenerating themselves every day and applying that to their organizations that every year they go through that process to be future fit. And I when I read your book, when I see all the tools you provide, I don't see, oh, you need to go back and study this. You do that. It Once you've mastered it, you're on that path of daily regeneration. And so, I would maybe like you to go just a little bit deeper with that. And then I have another question afterwards about getting into the inner development a little bit deeper. Well, look, there's lots of ways I can answer what you've just you just asked. So, I just I'll just start with this. Just because we were then talking about adult developmental psychology. And sometimes it is useful to have some form of framing. And one of the frames I talk about in the book is this divergence and convergence that creates emergence. It's a tension we find innate within life. So, the opening divergence, the closing convergence, creates the third, which is emergence. How nature flows. How the heart beats. It's how the tides come in and out. It's how life works. It's everywhere. The breathing in and out. And so, you know, that structure of convergence as opposed to the sort of creativity of divergent is important because we need both. So, it is finding the right sweet spot. each of us, this is the beautiful thing about life, all just slightly different, but the same as well. You know, it's the same same but different is the lovely expression. Um, is that we each have our own little unique harmonic of how much divergence convergence we kind of like. And of course, depending on the phases of the moon, our menstrual cycle, how we're feeling one day, what water sign we are, whatever. And it it could be anything. Um, that changes as well. So, it's not like on Tuesday I'm going to have the same configuration of my divergence convergence as I did it. So, all the time we're wanting maybe a bit more structure or a bit more creativity and freedom and so forth. So, it's important to recognize that. But to come to your question now, which is that how do we ensure we've got the I think it's important to recognize what adult developmental psychology talks about is this sort of nested levels. A bit like Think of them as nested Russian dolls. You know, you've got one small doll and you've got a bigger doll within that, and nested within that, and then or circles that are breathing in and out. And we have that capacity open to us. And by the way, that teal turquoise capacity is something we can all feel at any point in time. It's not that we only feel it after we've gone through all of these figure-of-eight journeys. It's available to us. It's just that we may not be able to have it readily available to us on an everyday environment in stressful situations, unless we've developed more of a practice. So, it just becomes more of a center of gravity as a meaning making. But it's always there. We might have an epiphany. We might have a moment where we go on holiday and everything just feels a bit different. We're just sensing a bit and everything's a bit strange and time slows down. But that's a a teal turquoise experience that we've just had just like that, you know, just because we've just had a quick shape shift. Or we've had a dream, a premonition, anything, synchronicity. So, those things are happening all the time. It's more how do we make them more available to us regularly? And and your daily practice helps there. But it's also important to realize that we have to have these nested Russian dolls in us. We can't just have the outer layer. It almost collapses in on itself, and then we just create the nested Russian dolls again. So, we need those. And what adult developmental psychology talks about is those levels. And one of the levels in there is as well as this sort of opportunist, you know, you know, seeking out, needing to, you know, essentially serve the self, is the the the the diplomat kind of amber type who wants to fit in. And you get that quite a lot in in business teams today, and I'm sure we've all had that in our time, where we just want to be part of a a clan, and we want to fit in and so forth. And that's where religions have have done quite well and have served a a place, or cults, or certain type of organization so forth, because you get those people who just want to fit in. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you're able to then still develop your meaning making beyond it. So, um it's when you get stuck in it and then start complaining about it and your life experience is kind of drained because of it. That's the only problem. Um and then the the level after that is that expert. And that's quite dominant actually in areas like sustainability, uh in other areas that are are essentially progressive. You even find it in the regenerative movement quite a lot I found. I've noticed people who are really get quite expert in their particular area. But as a result of being so expert, it almost becomes quite siloed. They don't realize cuz they're talking about living systems and interconnecting that but actually the mindset they're bringing has become quite siloed. You know, everything's about food for instance. Uh the food's vital. It's the beginning of everything. And regenerative food and if we could just solve that and you can usually people who are caught on, you know, the one particular area. Uh and and that's fine because actually that gives us a passion. And that drives us and it cultivates a craft because through that expertise, we really hone our craft. We become excellent at whatever it is. Regenerative food, regenerative medicine, whatever it is. So, that's okay. We need it. There's nothing wrong with any of these. It's just acknowledging that that might also then be creating a shadow. And so, we go through these stages and I think at any point in time in our lives if we've got a practice built in like you're talking about, we've got to recognize that it's important to then make sure that these levels are, you know, alive actually. Um so, for instance, take an example for me, you know, I need to ensure that I I am still, you know, aware of the expertise in whether it's regenerative or living living leadership or or leadership and organizational development. So, if I come across something and it pops up um about organizational development for instance, I'm interested because it's part of that craft. That if I was just approaching it from an expert achiever level, I would either be going, "Oh, okay. How can I maximize that into my value proposition?" Or I'd be looking at it and going, "Well, I don't really agree with that. You know, it doesn't You know, it doesn't quite They're They're not quite living And you get that quite a lot with that expert level. It's kind of all right, you're you're a bit Notice it inside ourselves. And that's the power of all of this. Your your practice, notice. It's very simple. It doesn't cost anything. It's the capacity to constantly notice ourselves and go, "Well, what's going on there? Why am I getting a bit funny about that that I'm reading? Is there some jealousy underneath that? Is there some judgment underneath that? What's What's actually going on there? And how can that inform me about my own blind spots?" Cuz this is what this is. We're bringing awareness to how we are seeing ourselves, seeing the world through all the time. Consciousness. And that consciousness, that attentiveness, what I call in the book intentional attentiveness cuz it calls on intention and attention. Is then That's all our ask is. Each day we wake up, we have our practice, we engage, and the practice is life actually. Meditation is life. You know, it's not just a Let's go and do a quick half hour. The whole thing is the practice. Even this conversation is part of the practice. It's not set apart from the practice. We're We're in it. And so then the day becomes this sacred journey to constantly notice all these little areas in myself and others. Um when am I judging? When am I not? And then it becomes fascinating actually. It becomes part of this fitness routine, future fitness. You know, it's baking it into dancing with each day. Absolutely love that and how you um picked up on that so because it's a huge process. I mean I used to be very religious and and and um have gone through many many of those cycles before this feeling of never being able to achieve that enlightenment that the guru that I was never good enough that I could never fully regenerate myself to to transcend to that higher level or that I needed more time. You need some more years of practice to do that. Uh nature is evolutionary every single minute of the day. It's It's growing in a very exponential manner and with that incremental improvements or incremental change every day. If we don't do that regenerative practice, we're actually falling so far behind from that evolutionary journey. And that leads me to the the next insert of uh your book that I would like to to read and ask the question kind of more on this inner development because I've I've had to deal with it this past year even more so. Um in my journeys last year I uh in October I spoke at the inner development goals summit in Stockholm, Sweden and you know I I what I do with the United Nations and outer development goals, the sustainable development goals. And then we were talking about the inner development goals and since that time there's been a lot of discussion and I thought this this section in your book really kind of talked about it, but I want to even go deeper. Let me just read this um uh real quick. Imagine if all or just 50% of this creative energy investment, human ingenuity, and infrastructure was re-siphoned towards encouraging a more soulful engagement with life and deepening our connection with others and the world around us. Creating regenerative futures like regenerative farming, food production, energy systems, health, economics, well-being, nature connection, and life-affirming business. None of this is actually that difficult for us to do. The tools and technologies all exist, but the appetite is far too engrossed in outer infatuation, ungrounded from inner connection. Now, the way I I read this and is that we separate ourselves from that outer development, the lived environment, the lived experience, the physical touch of how we live life on Earth, that development, outer built environment from that inner world, that inner development, that inner environment. And again, like work-life balance is pure inner and outer development separation is pure They are one, they're connected. You cannot say, "I'm going to work on the inner development this week. I'm I'm going to meditate, go to church, I'm going to say some prayers, I'm going to really maybe have a plant medicine journey and experience. And then, on Monday, I'm going to get back into that outer development, building that world in the construction company, going to do a regenerative farm, or whatever it is." Those two are inseparable and need to occur every single day. We're boxing and putting things in silos, and I want to know how you deal with this and how you bring those two together. And I I I I I read in your book uh that the tools are there. I just wanted to hear it from yourself how you merge those two worlds. Yes, and thank you for reading that piece out. I've I've It's nice to I didn't think I've ever heard anybody read it out to me before. So, sitting, listening, and and especially your voice, your dulcet tones. So, thank you. Um this inner the separation of inner outer is vital. Um it's really at the the the fundamental. I talk about um three fallacies that essentially we are engrossed in today today largely engrossed in not all of us all of the time, but largely as a society we're engrossed in these three fallacies that we're still unfortunately teaching our children today. It's just a part of normality. And it's very far from normal. In fact, it corrupts life. It's it's dangerous. And so, these three fallacies are first, the self as separate, uh second, that humans are separate from nature, and the third, that heaven is separate from earth. And I particularly use those phrases, heaven and earth, cuz of course it conjures up all sorts of What are we talking about heaven for? You know, what the hell's going on here? And it to to demystify what I really mean, and that is actually they all interrelate with each other. And I'll briefly go through them because then we'll talk about how it relates to your your question there. So, so self as separate, we're we're we're caught in a worldview which is essentially encouraging our egotism. Which is this sort of, you know, the the ego is a thing, a part of our psyche that is produced by these brain frequencies between our ears. Sort of vibe. That's how mainstream psychology understands it. And that now we know, I mean, science shows us this that that's woefully inadequate, but mainstream still can't kind of get its head round this quantum complexity perspective cuz it shatters these illusions, and that creates whoa. It's almost like the the armbands come off and we start drowning in the ocean. We're like, "Oh my god, I can't deal with it." So, um when we realize that the self isn't actually this sort of sense of ego that creates a sense of separation that gives us our judgments, our fears, and our insecurities, and it creates all the I don't like that opinion or going on there and all of that. Uh we need we have that and we have it for good reason. In the playground or school, early jobs, or maybe at home, whatever it was, things have happened to us that have hurt us and we've had to create this strong sense of ego to be able to defend and to be able to operate in this other wide, fluid, and connective world. There's nothing wrong with this. It's useful. It's actually very important tool on the journey. Comes a very important tool for the soul when it's used at the soul level. But at the moment it's not. It's completely ungrounded from the soul. It doesn't even understand the soul. The soul is not even registering. So we're completely caught up in this slight bundle of really diseased psyche, you know? And and we think that's it. So we're back into this little superficial, thin version of ourselves. And that's the self as separate. Creates all sorts of problems. Creates individualism. Creates neo-Darwinism, the way in which we even view evolution. So, you know, you hear often in that sort of green movement, that back part of this spiral we talked about, how people go, "Oh, well, actually, you know, Darwin didn't talk about the survival of the fittest. He talked about fitting in." And that fitting in is important because it's not about actually the fittest being the strongest and beating the other and so forth, which is that orange vibe. We've now moved into the green, which is the fitting in, understanding our niche, and how do we interrelate at an ecosystem level. Great. But actually, that's only part of it. Actually, even that fitting in is a simplified version of reality. What we now know about reality, and reality is obviously going to going to going to know even more and more over the years, but, you know, what we now know about reality, prove through science, you know, it's there, it's proven. Studies show this and brilliant minds like Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger and, you You Nobel laureates have proven this. so it's not woo-woo at all, it's science, is that actually the mind and matter are interrelating all the time. So, every time we have this matter, this energetic particle, which is a concretization of mind essentially, we have um mind pervading it, informing all the time. So, we have the psyche pervading everything. That the mind isn't created between the ears. We have this powerful transducer here, transmitting, receiving here, and in the heart, and in the gut. But, we actually find that every single cell is a little transducer. Every little cell in the body has its own consciousness, 37.2 trillion cells, we think, in our body. The vast majority aren't even human, by the way. So, we've got this seething excitation of life in the body, which is completely conscious, all working together, self-organizing, not needing commands from the top-down hierarchy structure here to get the job done, just dealing with things, self-organizing, swapping themselves, going, "Oh, I'll help out the liver now. Oh, I'm going to pop over here and do this." You know, so it's just happening. And that's just life. It's happening everywhere in the world. When we open our minds to that, we realize the neo-Darwinistic understanding of we need to fit in, I need to adapt to external change to fit into the ecosystem, is actually quite simplified, because actually, we're not just reacting to external change. The self as separate is not reacting to something external to it. The self is participatory. The The semipermeable membrane of the cell, and the semipermeable membrane of us with our mind and what we're picking up on, and the frequencies that we are immersed in, is interrelating and co-creating with change. So, change isn't outer, change is inner-outer. So, even the way we view change has to change. And that is quite a big thing for the mind early on in the bridge. It's like, "Oh, this is a load of waste of time. I can't deal with this. This is silly." Um but actually, as you walk through the bridge, you go, "Oh my god, bloody hell, this is vital. In fact, we're not going to be able to deal with change with that old mindset." And it becomes really core, which is that actually the living being, let's say the acorn becoming the oak tree, becoming itself, has an essence in it. Yes, that way it becomes is going to adapt to its ever-changing environment. It still becomes the oak tree. It doesn't suddenly not become the oak tree because, you know, um there's some bad smells in the air or the soil changes or whatever. You know, it just adapts. It it it it that's an inner outer dance. And that's going on all the time in our organizations as living systems, in ourselves. So then the inner this process of becoming more true, more aligned to who we are, suddenly becomes quite important. We've We've been caught up in just outer I mean, you have to deal with change and oh let's scan the system. Let's get the Let's get as much information as possible about how the world is changing, big data, AI, track everything, you know, satellite everything. And then we can try and manage and control change. It's like this wanting to control. It's that self a separate because it's fundamentally insecure. That's the point to remember. And I've coached all sorts of people from billionaires right the way through to people who are really struggling to make a living. And I can assure you, it's not about how much money you have. We all have this insecurity. This insecurity is woven deep into the Western psyche and unfortunately now near global psyche, which is a shame. And that insecurity, as far as I can see from my own experiences and near-death experiences and working with all of these, you know, thousands of people over the years, is is rooted in this sense of separation from nature itself, from life itself. So that brings us onto the second fallacy, which is that actually we have somehow managed to twist our psyche into self as separate has become so twisted and caught up in itself that it's actually almost forgotten its home. Yeah? We've separated ourselves from our soul, if you wish to call it that, our sense of spirit, our sense of connectedness from nature, from life. And so, we think we're separate from it. Leads to all sorts of problems. All the challenges that we're dealing in the world today stem from that problem, by the way. So, you deal with this carbon parts per million without understanding that interconnection. You're lost. It's just silly. It's just a waste of time. We're shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic much of the time. You know, it's a real shame. I'm I'm not saying that there's not some really good work that happened in those spaces, by the way. There is. And it's all helping gather to the threshold. But, if you can't untwist that twist, you're always going to be creating more problems. So, when you untwist that and you start to then reconnect more deeply into your own psyche, into your soul, then you start to recognize that second fallacy, that actually we are nature, nature is us. It's just just it's ridiculous to think that we don't ever be separate from this sea of consciousness that we're in and that everything is divine, to use that word that we started our conversation with, and that everything therefore, every little mini figure of eight, every little learning, every little notice of when I'm being triggered or what's happening or what the is part of this divine learning experience. We're in it. We are on air, live and direct, all the time. And therefore, we have a humbling responsibility to get with the program of life. To sort of get the old tracksuit off a bit and go, "I'm kind of in my life now. Let me try and get with it." And that fuels the desire to have these practices. To maintain a quality of awareness in each of our interactions. Then we come into the recognition So, we've gone from self as separate to actually untwisting into self as participating in nature and that human and nature are one of the same and then we're into this um heaven separate from earth, which is that big fallacy and there's reasons why even bring in the word heaven. Um which is that we have essentially outsourced, just like we've outsourced the self and and consciousness and all of these aspects. We make everything the outer and we go, "No, okay." We've done the same with God or the divine. We've made it something out there, probably a uh uh you know, a a white man with a maybe someone who looks like you, Mark, you know, so I I I Yeah, I get that a lot, mixed between Jesus and Farrah Fawcett. Boom. And they they you are up in the sky, um completely separate from nature. Um in fact, nature's probably fallen and if anything, you know, cuz we're a bit better than that, you know, and it's you've got these very weird um things which are actually people try and say have come from these ancient mystic texts. They haven't. It's just that we're reading the mystic text completely wrongly from a different wrong part of the bridge. So, we take these powerful texts and twist them with our opinions and make them into justifying this view. It's not you have to read them with a a much more mystical perspective and then you realize actually these texts are actually teaching you something about this journey that we're on, you know, the the death rebirth of Jesus for instance in the cave. It's it's very easy to see once you start opening your eyes. It's everywhere. Go into a church, look at the stained glass windows and you're in. You're into the imminence and transcendence. This is the divine experience of life. Heaven is not out there. It's not something to be attained if you pay the vicar or that you blaspheme and have to self-flagellate for a certain period of time and you get to No, you have to have practices, you have to be aware of your own consciousness and be in that state of attuning to life, but actually it's here in the moment. The imminence as you know the phrase I use in the book is to be more intimate with the imminence and more transparent to the transcendence. Then we're open and we allow ourselves to open to nature's wisdom. And what flows in then starts to serve us. Then our sense of purpose shifts from the ego self as separate, how can I fit in, how can I get a good job, how can I look good on stage, how can I sell more books, whatever the analogy, into actually why am I here? I'm here as a conduit for consciousness. Gosh, I better improve this antenna system. I better see the body mind as a powerful instrument and actually get it working better. And every day is now an opportunity for me to tune back in to this frequency and work with it and work with life. And we each have our own unique little radio sets, our own unique gifts that we then bring. So we then we start to live into our dharma. And then aspects and themes like dharma become much deeper than the purpose movement about making mission statements. It becomes something totally lived in the moment. So I hope that helps share a bit about your question. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's spot on. There's a beautiful quote I I'm love Carl Jung and psychoanalyst says, "The one who looks outside dreams. The one who looks inside awakens." And then you you follow that up with "Bearing in mind that life is full of change and tension tension, the sooner we get with the program of dancing with change and learn to play with the tensions, the better. Not just for our own future fitness, but for those around us in the systems we seek to become future fit, aka regenerative. Both leadership development and organizational development are process of becoming immersed with the context of life's ever-changing, always becoming nature. And I I just have to say it again, in a world that is changing in an exponential manner or changing exponentially, if you only improve incrementally, you will fall behind exponentially. You talk about quantum complexity. Is some of that what you just finished discussing with me? Is some of that in there or is that really talking about something even further? Uh and do you do you want to touch on that before as we go into the tail end and wrapping up our conversation today? Yeah, sure. Well, there is a table in the book, a whole big cuz it's a big book, a whole table that that helps clarify uh mechanistic materialism on one hand and quantum complexity on the other, which a lot of people have said they found very useful cuz it kind of it's got lots of different things to show how quantum complexity brings in a different way of leading, a different way of attending to life. And pretty much the whole book is conveying quantum complexity, but in a practical way. My earlier book, The Illusion of Separation, a few books back, uh I think it came out in 2014, so over 10 years ago, was more sharing the philosophy and psych- psychology and science behind quantum complexity. And who knows, maybe in the future I might uh go into that a bit more, but this book was mainly more for for leaders and practitioners, certainly consciousness. Really, what we mean by consciousness, I find a fascinating subject, So, I could imagine myself writing more about that in the future. But, um yeah, no. So, there was a glossary in the book as well. As I think it's worth pointing out. Massive The glossary itself, some people have said is is a book. Um and some people are just using that glossary in their work to go, "Right. Okay. Da da da." And so, there's some definitions in there that help, I think, bring meaning to what we mean by quantum complexity. Um but at a quite simple level, in terms of the organization, the shift is from organization as machine to organization as living system. Uh to recognizing the organization is full of these messy human relationships, but also, you know, their relationships across the business ecosystem as well. And that we're in tuned in that systems within systems within systems. And that we work with that living organization by looking at developmental, always learning, emergent, always changing, evolutionary, always purposeful. And we work with those, and we can create them more aliveness in our organizations. So, that's one aspect of quantum complexity brought to leadership and organizational development. I think another aspect is that vertical development. You know, the path that I was uh show- sharing with you is applying that to leadership development. There's tools that I use that are uh grounded in, you know, thousands of leaders have been through these tools that show these stages in meaning making. And then, I help guide leaders through journeys that actually take them from that achiever to regenerator. And what does that What does it mean when I'm a leader at the regenerator stage? How am I dealing with complexity differently? How am I able to keep a handle on the profit um and all of these different aspects? How do I also have these nested Russian dolls within me? So, I'm not losing sight of the fact that we're in a difficult time, but I'm actually be able to thrive and dance through it. So, those are the the sorts of challenges I unpack in the book. As always in in all of our discussions, um and you've answered it several times before, but I would like you to answer it again. You know, I'm doing a social experiment. I've asked over 3,800 people live on video. I've recorded it for specific reasons. The burning question, the big question, what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? And in in that entire process, I've always found out that having your own why, your own purpose for existing, your own ikigai, having your own solid foundation with the tools to regenerate yourself daily, that those people have this quantum leap experience, this daily process of keeping pace, an evolutionary pace with the natural world. And so, my question to you is for you, not anybody else, not what you teach others, what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? I think that falling in love with the sacredness of life, I think for me and then for others around in humanity, as we fall in love with life, things like chaining down the rainforest, putting plastics in the ocean, all start to unravel. And so, for me, the mother of all problems isn't capitalism or consumerism or carbon parts per million or even climate change. It's actually far upstream from that. It is consciousness. And that quality of consciousness for for me has to be rooted in this deep sense of the sacredness of life, of this life experience, and of all the more than human lives that are here. I I I have to say I've never lost, and I don't think I ever will. I can say perhaps this with the most certainty in my heart that I've always had this immense love for in It's not just the sunsets and the sunrises. I mean, I find them awesome. I thought it's sort of like, "Whoa, gosh, you know, especially when you're on a a call and the sun's rise is happening or something." You're like, "Oh, yeah, I need to focus on the call, but wow, you know." Um but the just being not just in nature, you know, it can be in the city, it can be anywhere. I I I love good architecture as well, but you know, seeing the the the leaves unfurl uh in spring. I mean, it's just a simple little thing. Seeing the um the Indra's net with the spiders gossamer in the morning with the sunlight and that watching the rainbows. Recognizing that just a leaf or just a blade of grass when we cut the lawn, just one blade of grass is more sophisticated than anything that we'll ever design with AI. And more sophisticated than anything that we've designed so far on this planet. And I think we we we we miss that sometimes, you know, we get caught up in TikTok. Uh and and silly things that are sort of grab our attention because we've lost that deeper love and therefore our attention gets caught up in self support and then gets easily distracted. And so we're distracted. Latest fashion, what job I need to do, not really realizing who I am. Um how I need to keep up with the Joneses. That's a phrase we have in England, you know, you have to keep up with the next door neighbor. They they've got a better car than us. I think I might We need to work a bit harder so we can get that car. Driving capitalist consumerism at the moment because we've got this distracted attention. So bring that attention back in, which fundamentally for me is rooted in a deep love of life and an awesome experience that we're in, which also just happens to be the most exquisite tailor-made learning experience for my own self, for you, for every one of us, to help us become more conscious, to get back in tune with life. Giles, I love you. You're a great brother. You're a good man, and and you've you've shown me that the way of being to know thyself. As you were speaking, I was got my little microscope. I've got a couple of them that I picked up because when I was there your farm, I looked at the lichens on your ancient trees of Springwood, and you have some of the most beautiful life and and things around you. You you've created a space and environment that um is beautiful, and it's open and available to all of us. We don't have to come to to you to see it. Sadly, it is disappearing, and it's not always easy to find, and sometimes we need the guide and and the person to to give us the tools to to help us to think and look in a different way and to see and open our eyes to to go inward and awaken, and you do all of those things, and um I really thank you for that. I thank you for your friendship and what you're what you're doing for the world. Highly recommend everyone get your book. Um Uh uh for your organizations, for yourself, it is the universal guide. It is the cumulative novel. You also get some forearm strength by by holding it it it it it is um it is amazing. Um then if that's not enough, get out there, get to Springwood, come visit Giles, and go through his experience, it makes it even that much more real. Um uh and important. I I just came from Asheville, North Carolina not too long ago. And they have some beautiful forests and and things there that even though they had the destruction, I had I had these with me. I was looking at the lichen on the trees. I was looking at the leaves and the life around and it was just just beautiful. I I thank you so much for being on this podcast and for all that you do. I I know you're not done. Your wife's probably going to kill you because you're going to come up with some more books, but the world needs it and I I know she'll forgive you really soon. Um because you guys are are are really uh moving the needle forward to get us on the right side of history, make sure that we're future fit and um that we all have that that deep connection to life and nature. And you, when I met you, I mean I I I knew this online, but to actually meet you in person was was really, as I say, it it was it's one of those moments in my life. And um I knew that you also were this fellow walker who had this deep love, deep connection with life. I could see it in you. And it sometimes you meet people in your life where you you you kind of know that you've had previous life journeys before and you you almost wonder I don't know I wonder what we were doing in some other previous life journey. It certainly felt like when I when I met you. So, having these conversations with you is just is just lovely and thank you so much for creating this space, for doing the work you do. You're out there. You're relentless, Mark, and and you know, the world needs every handful, every little thimbleful of hope right now. So, thank you so much for what you do. And yes, I I feel this lovely kindred ship and friendship with you. So thank you Mark. Thank you so much. Have a good day and greet all the family and say hi to Springwood for me. I miss it. I'm going to come visit you again soon.