Marco Houwen has long been the “Internet and Cloud guy” in Luxembourg. His atypical career led him, after 20 years in ICT, to support leaders at the heart of their entrepreneurial process. He does this, in his role as Strategic Life Coach for Senior Executives and Entrepreneurs. In each issue of TransForNation, he will share with us a few insights on how to BEcome better leaders for tomorrows world.
=> MARCOHOUWEN.COM

“For some time, I pondered on how to combine my understanding of spirituality and entrepreneurship/leadership and finally found a way to share my insights, by using the term “the spiritual entrepreneur/executive”, as a vehicle to challenge mindsets, provoke thoughts and inspire actions.
The team of TransForNation have given me this amazing forum to share my thoughts three times a year with the industry I grew up in and which I cherish.

DID I HAVE A PRIVILEGED MEETING WITH GOD? NO, I DID NOT!

In our society, when we speak of “Spiritual Entrepreneurship” or “spiritual” in general, most people tend to relate these terms to God, religion, the Holy Spirit or Jesus. When I speak of “Spiritual Entrepreneurship” I am not talking about spirituality in religious terms. Rather, I’m talking about the spirituality which comes before religion, the spirituality which resides in each and every one of us.

Some people define this as the NOW, others as FAITH, or as simply BEing! When I speak of spirituality, I’m talking about the relationship we have with ourselves, the way we listen or not to our body, the way we handle or not our negative thoughts, our relationship with our conscious and unconscious fears.

Unfortunately, there is no “ready to apply” blueprint here, no one-size-fits-all. It is up to ourselves to find our own definition of what “spirituality” is for us, as individuals.

WHY DO I LINK ENTREPRENEURSHIP TO SPIRITUALITY THEN?

The foundation of spiritual Entrepreneurship is the principal of BEing versus DOing:
We are living in a societal framework in which we learn and are driven to DO and then to BEcome: We DO a good job and then we will BE rewarded. This has an obvious result: we are DOing all kinds of things, just so that we can BEcome somebody.
It has the huge downside, that we are mostly miserable during the time we DO, as most of the time we long to BEcome to find fulfilment. That is explained in our society with phrases like “No pain, no gain”.
This creates a large number of negative thoughts, of doubts, fears and anger, which have a negative influence on our own lives and the lives of those around us.
My question to all of us is: “How much more efficient, ethical, sustainable could your life be if you start to look inside and find the inner balance of BEing before you focus on DOing?”.

Furthermore, I am convinced that all entrepreneurial creation should have ethics at its core, and this starts with the Entrepreneur him/herself. Social Entrepreneurship tries to do that. However, there is a fundamental flaw, when it comes to where we draw our power from. Do we draw our drive from outside va-lidation or from inside ourselves? So many times we see people sacrifice themselves for a cause. Our society strongly encourages this by giving these people a large amount of positive validation for their actions.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I have the greatest respect for anybody who supports and helps others, it is one of the foundations of our society. What I want to point out is that it is all a matter of our own perspective: do we sacrifice ourselves to obtain external validation or do we sacrifice ourselves because that is who we want to BE?

The sustainable pursuit of happiness, joy and fulfilment for an Entrepreneur and for that matter anyone, cannot be done successfully by focusing purely on the outside realm, we have to look inside ourselves and
find all of these attributes there.

Stay tuned for the next Trans-For-Nation magazine.

Till then “BE who you really are!”