What is keeping you small?

What if the way you have learned to think, solve problems, work and build and run businesses is keeping you small? Linear thinking is the popular way that we apply to everything, but as it turns out, it’s neither natural, nor beneficial to the creation of value and our Happy Work. Thinking and acting along straight lines is the prison we have normalized. If we want to do work and build businesses that reflect who we are and fulfill us, we need to transcend our antiquated form of thinking in favor of another, magical one.

Follow on Linkedin: Olivier Egli 

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I'm your host, Olivier, and this is the Do Happy Work Podcast, where we look at work in a different, more natural, and more peaceful way. The way you think is keeping you small. It's keeping you away not just from the best work you can do, it's keeping you away from the best life you can live, and it's keeping you away from overcoming your own shadows. Hi, my name is Olivia Eggley. I am the voice of nature in business, and this is my podcast, The Do Happy Work podcast. A few years ago, I discovered that I was doing something. I was doing something with my mind that was preventing me from moving forward, from moving onward, from stepping out of the things that were holding me back, that were preventing me from overcoming patterns and stepping out of shadows and what have you. And mind you, I was on a career path that was really going skyward. I was doing everything right in the book. I was showing up, I was getting my promotions, I was doing all these things. I even ran my own businesses agencies and whatnot. But somehow I was still stuck in this place no matter what I did. This place is, of course, an internal place because what really matters is when you check in with yourself to recognize where you are. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, it doesn't matter where you are business-wise, it doesn't matter where your office is and what kind of logo or brand is on the backside of your business card. What really matters is when it the world goes quiet and you find yourself either on your couch, somewhere in nature, or in your bed falling asleep or waking up, where are you? Are you really on a trajectory that is infused with natural growth, something that you feel like is speaking out of you, or are you actually outside of that place, moving in business in the world, but not really moving forward from within? So as if you were just trapped in a rat race and just racing along everyone else but you yourself, for yourself, you're actually not moving an inch. And I was always fascinated with this discrepancy between the things that I was doing and that were happening in my life and the way I felt. And it wasn't until I really investigated the mind in a much much closer fashion where I didn't just take things for granted that were happening within my mind, but where I actually investigated the narratives that I had adopted and that were running on autopilot within me, that I realized, oh wait, they have something in common, something that actually does not agree with the things that I observe in nature. That is, the way we start thinking at an early age is linear. So we think in stretches of time. We think that everything we do, every job, every relationship, every day begins at point A and ends at point B. And then somehow our performance is about how we bridge those two points, those two dots on this uh linear timeline. And this comes from an understanding that we learned, not something that is natural to us, but something that we learned from our greatest teachers, mentors, our supervisors, our parents, who have you, that that's the way life works. You begin at birth and you end at death. And this is a narrative that's of course very Western, but it's really a narrative that pervades most of humanity. If you think about it, everything is broken down according to this line, this this clearly set line that just crosses our lives as if it was drawn with a ruler. And now we see lines in everything. We we see lines within our minds, we see lines as if they were cut and carved into our lives, our existence. And then, of course, when we employ that kind of thinking, we start dividing the world. Not just along this line, we also divide and segment it along those dots, those points along the timeline. And what that brings about, but also where it comes from, because it's kind of a closed loop, is deep judgment. It's a kind of a low-resolution way of looking at life because we feel so scared and so unsafe in this existence that we have to draw out our lives and our path within it with a straight ruler. It gives us a false sense of safety, security, and comfort in a world that apparently it has turned against us. Because let's be honest, that's that's kind of the message that we get early on. Early on, we get taught that this life is not safe and that you have to fight for what's yours, and you have to prevail, and you have to be a warrior, and you have to be a soldier. The path of the soldier that we learn is a straight path from conflict today to uh victory tomorrow. And in the very same way, we structure our work. And this is why we get nowhere, because that's not how life works. That's not how nature works. No tree grows in a linear fashion. We are taken by the idea that the tree grows upwards, and so we measure power, might, strength, and dominance, even as the height of a tree. But that's completely wrong. The healthiest, most valuable tree that contributes the most to the ecosystem is not necessarily and automatically the tallest one. It's about balance. It's about growing along the sacred circles that we even know when we cut through a trunk that there are circles that present themselves as proof, as witnesses of growth, which really brings home the idea of circular growth. Circles. And humanity has always been fascinated and magnetized with the circle as the symbol for perfection. The circle is understood as the perfect form because it represents infinity and it presents itself also as a kind of an accomplished form. Whereas the line that has no beginning and no end, but where we put dots and marks and goalposts along it does not have that. It is never accomplished. It always seeks itself, it always seeks to accomplish itself, but it also kind of always runs away from itself. The linear kind of thinking is in one way natural to us, but only in one way. And that's one aspect of the mind. That's intellect. Intellect, of course, requires the presence of time and space in order to function. But the intellect is only one aspect, and it's the smaller aspect of our mind. So if all we have and all we do and all we apply is linear thinking in our work, we actually don't use our mind completely and we paint the world a work in ourselves, really, really small. As a matter of fact, with linear thinking, you're unable to tap into your potential. It is not possible to bring all your gifts out of yourself if you are constrained by the ruler of linear thinking. And of course, when we have a strong intellectual mind, that kind of takes over and that is a problem because intuition, which was for a long time attributed to the right side of the mind, which is nonlinear in nature, it is a spiraling force. That one does not rely on time and space. That one is free to dwell in creativity, is free to source from a bigger source than ourselves, it's free to actually manifest, but it requires intellect, of course. So what I'm saying is that we need to have a circular way of looking at life, of looking at our work, of looking at our existence, and then use linear thinking to apply it on the daily. And those are two different pairs of shoes. Just like we know that uh the world consists of these two elements, the element of pure creativity and the element of productivity, we have to step out of being only productive vessels. We have to become balanced vessels that employ uh a nonlinear, a circular kind of thinking. But what do I mean by this? I mean that relationships that we have with ourselves, with life, with other people, with our work, they should not be linear. The linear customer journey is a man-made invention, it's not real. The linear hero's journey is a lie. The hero never learns and grows and moves on in a linear fashion. You know why I know this? Because life is messy. Life is full of up and downs and left and rights, it's full of sinkholes and full of glorious moments. Life is messy. Life cannot be portrayed in a linear fashion, so why would we? Why would we use customer journeys that are linear? Why would we think that everything has to act according to the straight linear plan? Abandon that plan. Reintroduce a circular form. Understand that your dynamics with your people have to be circular, which means you give and then you receive. They receive and then they give. Never send your clients down a funnel. Never send them along a straight path. Engage in a waltz. Engage in a circular movement, a movement that spirals ever bigger and bigger. This is relevant. I'm telling you, you have to engage in spirals. The spiral is actually the most magical form for me. And it's the most ignored form in business, which is really strange because spirals seem so natural in doing so effortless in doing what we all want. First off, they always remain centered on their center point, they always spin around their core. Second, they continuously grow outward, but they do so in an incremental, slow, natural fashion. They're not hasty, they don't break their neck and jump out of windows like the straight path does. It remains rooted like the tree around the core, but slowly moves outward. And what's funny is that if you even know just a little bit about geometry and physics and whatnot, you know that if you maintain the speeds at which you draw your spirals in your work, well, it takes you longer and longer to make a full revolution. And that's okay because growth slows down naturally. We should not, contrary to what we think out there in the businesses and the marketplaces of the world, we should not be hasty. We should not increase the acceleration of our work and our growth. We should do it in slow-growing spirals. Incidentally, that's also the most stable, the most firm way of growing because that's how the tree grows. This is how the trunk grows. This is how everything grows naturally from the center outward, not linearly, ever. It's always in a spiraling form. And then you can apply it every day, right now. You can start applying it right now. You can sit down and make a vow with yourself that you will catch yourself whenever you fall into a linear thinking models, and that you will start bending that ruler ever more, ever so often, more and more, until you engage in these spiraling loops. And it's important that you catch yourself because it's so easy to try to find false safety, false comfort, false security in these lines that we draw, and then just sinking hooks and tent poles and moments into them where we can measure our accomplishment and our progress. Well, you don't need to do that so much when you are on a circular journey because you always have this circle of accountability. You you come back onto yourself, you come back to the point of the decision, you have accountability baked in. And those are the businesses that I want to see out there. Those are the customer journeys that I want to see in effect. Those are the brands, and those are the products, those are the solutions, actual solutions, those are the relationships, the kinships, the fellowships that we need, not the ones where you have a dividing line that divides the reality of the brand from the reality of their people, but where everything is connected in this spiraling motion. And there's so much more that we could get into here, and I won't because I want to keep this for another time for now. I just want you to become aware. I want you to sink into the awareness of how the linear thinking model has not done you well, how it has kept you small, and where you could instantly start embracing a different way of looking at things, thinking about things, acting upon things, just by challenging the linear thinking behind it and bending the ruler into a spiral. And that's not abstract. And this is not spiritual hogwash either. This is geometry, this is physics, this is mechanics. Every bit of science supports what I'm saying here. And yet we're not doing it. We're still applying the ruler of division. Unification is what the world needs. We need leaders that bring people together. We need leaders that move in spirals, not in linear shapes. Until next time.