Awake is not a company, it is a way of life, a way of being.
We are what we do.
What we say and how we say it is also doing.
And the we in what we do matters a great deal.
It is the why, the who, the how, the what … that is the stuff of being, and productivity, indeed as we shall see, is the stuff of the flow state. And of maximum performance.
Management then simply becomes facilitating the flow state for the we. The team, the company, the community. Together, if we can create the flow state, then we are being productive and are maximizing ourselves.
Management then is the awareness of all the things that take people away from their state of being, their state of maximal performance, their most fulfilled, their natural state of flow.
People want to be in the flow, we all want to feel that feeling of being completely absorbed in what we do because we are so engaged in it that we entirely lose ourselves. We want that deep satisfaction that comes from deep within, from the deep knowing that we have done our absolute best and anything else can’t be helped. We want that feeling, we want to feel useful and plugged in. We want to be part of something greater than our personal, limited selves.
We want to unleash our true potential into the universe, and want to feel totally satisfied in being our fullest selves without reservation, while being accepted and appreciated for what we offer.
So to understand performance, one needs to understand fulfillment, and to understand fulfillment, one needs to experience the flow state, know it, cultivate it, maintain it, make it the natural state.
There are many ways to experience the flow state, adventure sports and the associated adrenaline rush is an example, various drugs can do it, meditation and yoga can induce these flow states of higher consciousness where the mind disappears and the wholeness of reality is experienced, one’s sense of self is no longer present, and one is, as they say, tuned in.
So once we understand the situation, we can create all the necessary conditions for the flow state to occur, during normal hours, doing the thing we do most of our waking day aka “pursuing productive work”.
Understanding how something works is critical to doing a lot of it.
Understanding productive work requires one to understand productivity, and its direct relationship to creativity. We’re about to talk about creativity, because this is the formula for corporate success … indeed, all success, innovation and creativity in each and every moment of the day.
Would you want your team members, much less yourself, to do things that were monotonous, automatic, or repetitive? Aka, these boring things, they are not new, not creative. And if something is not new, it is old and repetitive, it surely can be automated, and is surely not worth the time and energy of our humans, the precious we power we talked about?
So to maximize success is to maximize creative work, new work that the competition is not doing.
What else is innovation?
Of course, one keeps in mind all the various parameters that one must, every “management” theory explains all that. Again, let us make this clear, all that dead knowledge about how to manage, the processes and all that, it is of the past, the mechanical process of management, not the freshness, the alertness, the aliveness, that is needed in the now, in the heat of the moment, in the fog of business war, and yes, every moment.
This alertness can only come from being in the flow.
Old ideas and processes are the opposite of flow and of creativity, and thus of what we seek – true productivity.
It is this precious resource, our inner and innate creativity, that we must mine out of our being, bring to the surface, so it may express itself in ways that one can only hope to do by force of thought.
What brings out this flow?
Only the awareness of this very process of productivity and creativity can bring it about. One can not find it, but it find out. One can not plan output maximization, for the flow is itself the reward, because it begins and ends with total fulfillment, and there is only raw and real output..
The rest of goal setting and the coaching process is in the context of this awareness. And the thing of paramount importance, how to stay in the flow state, how to stay aware of this process, even during difficult times, particularly during tough times that all companies go through.
The leaders who can do that, who can maintain the flow state of their teams no matter the times, those are the aware leaders, those are the leaders that consistently produce incredibly creative work, they are the ones who seem magically productive.
So this is what the Awake MBA represents and teaches, coming soon to our world of entrepreneurs and executives and leaders across all levels. Stay tuned in.
