Could the individuals involved with your business be acting as meaningful feedback mechanisms guiding you back to a state of authenticity, sustainable fair exchange, maximum efficiency, stability, and productivity?
Could the supportive and challenging reactions from your employees, shareholders, and customers be guiding you to fulfill your most inspired yet reasonable business mission and vision?
Whatever is highest on your unique list of individual values, your highest priority, your most meaningful purpose, your telos, or your primary objective and its associated primary action step that is truly most inspiring and important to you, is the key to your most enduring intrinsic drive. It will allow you to spontaneously be the most fair, efficient and effective business achiever and leader you can be.
When your business day is filled with high-priority, mission-directed actions that inspire you, your day will not as easily become filled with low-priority distractions that won’t. Any area of your life you don’t empower through prioritization, others will overpower. Impulsive, compulsive, addictive, distractive, immediately gratifying, unfair and ungoverned behaviors are compensations for unfulfilled highest values or priorities.
When you are living congruently with your true highest value, your blood, glucose, and oxygen all circulate within and awaken your brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, or its executive functioning center. This neocortical area of your brain allows you to be most inspired, objective, reasonable, self-governed, masterful and foresighted in your business transactions.
Your ontological identity, your teleological purpose, and your epistemological area of expertise where you excel, all revolve around your highest value and the awakening of this most vital part of your brain. Spontaneous action potentials fire intrinsically in this area of your brain when you are focused on and acting congruently with your true highest value and most authentic self. And when you are reciprocally transacting fairly with others.
When you become distracted by lower-priority impulses or instinct tangents, by assuming they will be providing more pleasureful or painful outcomes, because you are injecting the higher values of other outer assumed moral authorities, your blood, glucose, and oxygen all circulate within and activate your brain’s deeper subcortical nuclei—your two amygdalae—also known as your desire centers. When this occurs, you will subjectively bias, distort, or generalize the interpretations of your business perceptions and transactions, you will over or under react to these perceptual distortions, and you will tend to exaggerate or minimize the people around you and minimize or exaggerate yourself by the law of contrast. Here you create either an overly exaggerated narcissistic autocratic, or an overly minimized altruistic democratic persona or imposter syndrome, which will lead you to ineffective, non-sustainable, inauthentic leadership and mismanagement of yourself and others, resulting in maximum futility.
When you exaggerate yourself and minimize others, you tend to project your higher values onto them and create non-sustainable futility through attempting to get them to live in accordance to your higher values. In your business, this overly autocratic approach can result in a non-sustainable strike and union formation by your employees, sell-offs by your shareholders, and withdrawals from your previous key and supposedly loyal customers, which result in lower cash infusions and reduced customer purchases, income and profits.
When you minimize yourself and exaggerate others, you tend to inject their higher values into you and create non-sustainable futility by attempting to get your altruistically sacrificing self to live in accordance to their higher values. In your business, the overly democratic approach can result in non-sustainable higher overheads, appeasements to low-priority distracting or scattering demands, entropic dissipative chaos and anarchy, and lower net profits.
When you exaggerate yourself and become more narcissistic and autocratic, you pay less attention to your employee’s, shareholder’s, and customer’s values and needs and project your own—narcissistically sacrificing theirs for yours. This, in turn, makes them withdraw and retaliate and eventually humble you to bring you back down off the pedestal into a state of more poised authenticity—where more equanimity occurs within and more sustainable fair exchange and equity occurs without.
When you minimize yourself and become more altruistic and democratic, you pay less attention to your own values and needs and inject your employee’s, shareholder’s, and customer’s needs into yourself—sacrificing yours for theirs. This, in turn, makes you eventually speak out and retaliate and then elevate yourself back up into a state of more poised equanimity or authenticity within and a more sustainable fair exchange and equity without.
When you do not govern yourself from within, you will become governed by others from without and become a follower more than a leader. Intrinsic governance is more empowering and powerful than extrinsic governance. Your medial prefrontal cortex governs or moderates your distracting amygdalae’s drama-seeking impulses and avoidance instincts and allows you to function more masterfully, temperately and with more reason, which maximizes sustainable utility.
The symptoms of your internal business employees and your external business shareholders and customers act as homeostatic feedback mechanisms, ultimately guiding you back to leadership authenticity and sustainable fair exchange. When you exaggerate or minimize yourself relative to these vital and special others, they respond by offering you conscious or unconscious negative feedback responses to assist you in equilibrating yourself back into a more evenly reflective and stabilizing state of authenticity.
A well-known corporation that was highly customer-centric, truly dedicated to most effectively and efficiently serving their ever-growing list of customers, initially flourished. Their primary product demand was significantly high and large sums of money began to flow in. Eventually, the employees were working ever-longer hours for perceptually insufficient pay and this perceptual inequity initiated an employee revolt and gathering and the initiation of a bargaining union to negotiate a more equitable exchange to re-balance the owner-employee transactional equation. Once the dispute was resolved, the shareholders saw a drop in their returns and withdrew their infusion of capital into the shares until the owner’s dividend provisions were elevated sufficiently to reinspire them back, and finally the owner was now reestablishing sustainable fair exchange among all of the individuals involved and the company grew to ever more massive proportions where everyone was more equitably rewarded.
The nature of human behavior is sometimes more subtle, governed, and moderate or sometimes more gross, ungoverned, and extreme. But it levels the playing field until nature fairly redistributes the economics until once again, supply and demand comes back into market equilibrium and all parties learn their lessons on the importance of sustainable fair exchange, or equity and authenticity, or equanimity. It humbles the proud and uplifts the humble until nature compensates for inequalities of perception and distribution. All business events are feedback mechanisms to guide us back into our truest intuitive nature where our most authentic being whispers appreciatively within to create a great enterprise without.
Dr John Demartini is a human behavioral specialist, educator, internationally bestselling author, consultant and founder of the Demartini Institute.
Drdemartini.com
