The value system ruling our mainstream business world is still evolving around the idea that “having” initiates happiness, wealth and satisfaction. The decisive factor in evaluating whether what we have is a success or failure is usually what other people say or give to us. In the “having” value system our reasons to work what we work form our goals. Their fulfillment depends on giving something in order to get what we think we need. Mainstream business carefully calculates this exchange in order to satisfy the demands of the “having” value system.

Our reasons, aims and thoughts are the source of our words. They are our vehicles to connect with others so we can create actions and reach our goal. Naturally we all want to be happy, wealthy and satisfied. The “having” value system fulfills those dreams trough four treasured assets – money, power, prestige and respectability (MPPR). They are also the reason of many for being in business.

The four pillars of mainstream business communication

Money or The Secured Income mind set

Choosing money as the main reason for being in business focuses us in conditioned generation of cash. We enter into the “get mode” which involves manipulative selling activities we wouldn’t necessarily accept if it weren’t the need to secure some revenue. We are trapped in the illusion that once we have enough money we will be happy, relaxed and secured; we will be able at last do what we love; others will have solid reason to love us more, respect us more or obey us more. “Making money”, “cover the expenses”, “work hard to retire young”, “have a proper job and enjoy life when retire” are only few manifestations of the “secured income” approach. Money reasoned involvement in business takes all our time and energy. It puts us into the wrong job, partnership or business field. It prevents us to see that money is only one form of wealth, not the source of it. Accumulating cash will never be in itself the birthplace of happiness and safety. Striving to secure our income blocks us to experience true wealth in business where we are source and recipient at the same time. Where money is a consequence rather a motive. We can never share ourselves trough our work if money is the reason for doing it. We can enjoy both inner and financial wealth if our business communication is free from the desperation to somehow make money out of it. Imagine how our products, presentations, websites, advertising, pitching and conversations would look like if securing the income were not the reason for doing it.

Power or The “Who’s the daddy” Clinging

No matter whether we own a business or work for someone else there is always this aiming to influence others, to be more powerful. It seemingly compensates the inner impotence or feeling scarce inside. We gather more information, money or followers (admirers) so we can analyze, calculate, influence and manipulate others into accepting our “powerful” status. This type of potency is only an illusion because an inner need can never be satisfied from the outside. Striving for power keeps us in a needy, beggar like position. It prevents us from developing our natural resourcefulness where we are nurtured from giving our true best regardless the outside conditions. We don’t allow this realization in business because all our existent leverage techniques will have to either transform or completely disappear.

Prestige

The main source of prestige is money and approval, given by others. It gives us consolation and stimulates us when we feel inner incapacity to appreciate ourselves as we are. Aiming for prestige is relying on illusions that happiness is attainable trough outside approval. It creates utter dependency on implying repetitive harmful patterns like competitiveness. Competition is a non-creative race for prestige; it gives the futile feeling of being a winner; it is twisted motivational system, based on comparing. We cannot recognize it easily as such because we have been conditioned to compete and compare since we were born.

Respectability or what others will think about us

To prove our loyalty to what is decided to be a respectful image we have precise rules to follow, conditions to be guided by and price to be paid for. We consciously make efforts to look, speak and behave like the people we need approval from. We give up our truth to socially justified compromises. In return we get rewards, memberships, honors, promotions, nominations for being “the best” in this or that, sponsorships etc. We are acknowledged as a role model or example; we gain unlimited access to whatever is restricted to those who haven’t reached yet the required level. By entering “respectability game” we get ourselves dependent from appraisals, opinions and evaluations, based on cravings of the ego for flatteries and admirations, given from others. Aiming for respectfulness in our work gets us into a trap, covered with luxury cushions. It robes us from our natural ability to connect independently, shape and share our products and ideas with non-conditioned intelligence and creativity.

Admitting openly to others or ourselves that money, power, prestige and respectability (MPPR) are our reasons to work, means to disclose that something lacks in our life. It means also declaring our slavery because you can have MPPR only if someone gives it to you. The main purpose of mainstream business communication is to deliver those valuable assets and to hide the lack of happiness, wealth and satisfaction in our lives. Double-faced communication relies on repetitive connecting routines, based on the manipulation and dependency on information, fears and ego driven motivations. When the reasons of doing our work are MPPR we are bound to pretend and perform roles, which will have the right impact on the audience, delivering those valuable assets.  Double-faced communication in marketing, advertising and management results in total lack of individual authenticity. It prevents us from reaching our independent source of happiness, wealth and satisfaction.

What we believe that connects us in business is usually an illusion. Such a statement is able to confuse our structured idea about who we are and how we communicate with others. Before concluding that there are no illusions in your business life and move further with organized and predicted connecting patterns lets have a look at what we usually count on when connecting in business. You will decide for yourself whether this is your true face or rather well groomed comfortable mask.

 We’ve been advised constantly to use our personality in order to build trust and make more money based on that. We’ve been coached and motivated trough various strategies and methods to develop our personality around what we do and what kind of people is our target group. Often this is a calculated and rehearsed performance of a role, which suits the audience and delivers applauses in the form of sales, prestige, rewards or simply approval. It is accepted that in business we have to perform, pretend or even lie in order to get something out of it so we can allow ourselves a bit of freedom in our personal life. With the time passing in playing the chosen personality (role) we merge with this mask. We start to imagine that the personality we demonstrate is all we are, our individuality, our authentic face, our source of satisfaction.

 The seed of our personality is planted in us soon after our first breath. We begin to adopt the family conditions and beliefs and their external expression into the world. This first nutrition of our personality is always good intentional no matter whether the delivery manner was loving and caring or judgmental and instructive or both. It is something we are bound to receive in order to start living our life independently. Short after, the seed is watered by the social conditions and rules trough teachers, friends (and their families), books, media and all featured in it advertisement. By the time we start working we already have certain personality to rely on. There comes the business setting with all its requirements for strong personality (or at least some personality). It is accepted that the moment you start earning your own bread you are ready to live your life as a good part of the society. It is assumed that you know the rules (conditions). You are infused with the enthusiasm of dreams to follow and goals to achieve. You are geared with all the necessary starting tools like some education, value system, expectations about the future and strategies to get there established and approved from your family, society and business environment. Our personality is the adopted, learned from others outer expression of the conditions you chose to be your ground.

 The most harmful and widely spread condition we slave to is believing that what we do, own and appear is our only significant certainty in our life, our only way to connect. The mainstream business reality is entirely based on this setting. That is why many people spend money, time and effort to build and develop their business personality to match the demands of this race. It is like being an actor in real life – learn the lines, adjust the gestures, wear appropriate clothes, follow the director’s instructions (the rules of the race) and rehearse until you make it look natural. To maintain and develop our acting skills brings more tension in us than we would like to admit. There is another resource we can rely on to connect in everyday business life. It naturally supports us to communicate in a relaxed and effortless way. Our individuality is an infinite complex source of physical, mental and spiritual energy. It is accessible and available to all of us.

We have realized that any kind of business is possible only trough a variety of partnerships. This is a growing apprehension in itself, except that we overlook the fact that most of our present business partnerships are somehow precisely calculated trade of ego nurturing sale like activities rather intelligent flow of actions and ideas. Conditioned collaboration swaps values like money, power, prestige and respectability that often require all sorts of compromises and faking. Transformational collaboration is free (that doesn’t always mean you don’t get paid) exchange of individualities where wealth, resourcefulness, authenticity and independency are the center of the business communication. Read more

The “Look like” in communication

It is obvious fact that mainstream business communication evolves around influencing people and selling more trough fear-based manipulations (lies), presented in a caring or friendly way. This is a popular approach both in written and in verbal communication. Here is a quick snapshot of most commonly used fears, why and how they have been triggered and some words and pictures supporting the manipulation.

How fear based, non-obvious lying looks like in business communication?

• The fear of not having enough

The superficial solution to deal with that fear when we feel its influence is saving or giving less. That would compensate the different types of scarcities we suffer from. It is triggered “harmlessly” by widely spread greediness for saving money or time. The illusion that we are getting more though and at the same time we are giving less strengthens the impact of the words used to trigger that fear. Savings, accumulating points, reduced prices, cleverly presented bait-like discounts schemes together with beautiful pictures about what we can do with what we’ve saved and collected and how beneficial for all of us that is, makes us forget that even in business the balance between giving and receiving exists no matter whether we control it or not.

• The fear of not being accepted

This fear is related with the inner feeling of not being worthy and the need to be approved. Being a part of a group by taking same decisions like other members gives us the illusion that we are liked, accepted and therefore strong and capable. As a result we compare with each other and get influenced by manipulations of what “likeminded” people are doing. When that fear is triggered by the “neighbors factor” we don’t feel safe to make our own decisions and take responsibility for them. Our advertisements, websites, presentations and conversations are full of testimonials, “sold” labels, exaggerated or not statements about the amount of “people like you” already “enjoying” this or that. It leads us to completely ignore the fact that to be a resourceful part of a group you need only one acceptance – your own.

• The fear of loss

This fear is strongly supported by the illusion that what we don’t have is always what we need the most. Its trigger is the feeling of insecurity. Being afraid that something is missing switches us on “scarcity mode”. Our business space is flooded with suggestive words describing that you are already missing to profit from whatsoever, that something is finishing, ending so you better make up your mind and do something about it.  Influenced by the illusion that having gives us security we get easily manipulated by written or verbal imaginative pictures that if you don’t do or get what is suggested you are loosing something important and you’ll never be able to have it again. The “missing” madness creates enormous nervousness. It makes us unable to realize that whatever we need is always available as long as we are honestly clear about what we need in every particular moment.

• The fear of the unknown

We are afraid to let things happen in their natural way because we are scared of the unpredicted unknown. Most often we “deal” with that fear by developing strong controlling communication. We dread being dependent on other’s people decisions so we’ve invented hundreds of techniques to “make things happen”. Manufacturing a sense of emergency is one of the most spread practices to trigger the fear of the unknown. Favorite “pushing expressions” are “I’m busy”, “As fast as possible”, “ASAP”, “Do it today” etc. They imply the feeling of “Now or never” and create very tensed “reaching the dead line” atmosphere. Playing the “busy mode” services us both in manipulating others and hiding from them our own anxieties about future. The emergency like business communication assists in getting us more money, power, prestige and respectability, but robs us from enjoying truthfully committed connections where only sincerity works. Being slaves to the limiting believe that “the truth doesn’t sell” we have paid already far too much to “being in control” approach in business. It is individual process to understand and integrate in our everyday working life that we are safe no matter what choices other people make.

• The fear of loosing control

The fear of loosing control often arises after we’ve tried unsuccessfully everything we know to influence a situation to fit our expectations and ambitions. It is easy to trigger this fear, because everyone likes to think that something or someone else does not influence his/her decisions. After all the disguised pushing in our advertisement, pitching or conversations we start playing indifference to suggest that obviously “the choice is yours”. Indifference is difficultly recognized as fear trigger, because we are conditioned to react when suddenly the attention and courting stops. To “regain” the control we either say “yes” even though we don’t actually want or we keep pretending indifference, depends on each end of the communication we are. Communicating trough the fear of loosing control to achieve your goals keeps our business connections on the surface where acting skills are more valued than honesty.

Selling our products, services and ideas became an obsession in today’s business world. We use our intelligence to find more sophisticated and difficultly recognized manipulations to “make them buy”. The easiest way to control someone is trough playing with his/her fears. So after all we are not that smart because we are still relying mainly on this approach in business communication. We are constantly exchanging places – today we let ourselves to be manipulated to buy something we don’t actually need, tomorrow we push someone else with “special prices” to meet our target on time. We often follow people who confidently and articulately lying. We take for granted what does celebrities say on commercials. We offer ridiculous discounts for our work to get noticed. We participate in chain lying no matter whether we have manipulated or we’ve been manipulated. Dreaming for more money, power, prestige and respectability completely twisted our understanding of what courage is. Hiding cleverly fears and look like a winner is neither brave nor powerful. Courage is admitting our vulnerability as human beings and facing our fears. This is an individual process, which will give us more resources to communicate in business honestly and share our work with integrity rather selling our products and services trough manipulating each other.

“Harmless” lying

All of us have witnessed at least once in our life how obvious lie can be interpreted cleverly and presented as a believable truth. Business environment is probably the only area where we highly value this intellectual skill. We give beautiful names to it to justify lying – persuasiveness to motivate people and make them do things, flexibility based on knowing the law and rules in order to find lawful way to go round them, strong influential personality, cleverness in pricing and rewarding schemes etc. Judging others about the ways they invent to cover a lie will not support us to connect honestly. Choosing to lie is a personal process as well as the reasons that provoked it. A tower built from many easy removal blocks can visualize this fact. We are the blocks; the tower is our dependency on money, power, prestige and respectability. Most often they are our main reason to choose lying as a vehicle to success. Every time a block is taken out the tower can crush if another block doesn’t take immediately the available place.

What is also a lie?

Covering skillfully an obvious lie is only one part of the harmful effect of lying. More damage happens from non-obvious lies or those, which are difficultly defined as such. Looking at them with acceptance will support us to understand our participation in the lying tower without judgment. Then we are able to choose intelligently (not intellectually) another, more independent type of involvement in business.

• I know I’m lying but…

When we choose consciously to lie we need to justify it first and then find an acceptable way to present it. The process starts within and by the time it gets out we are convinced in the truthfulness of the statement and the rightfulness of the actions to go with it. This is the most common way to stay within our comfort zone. We practice it so often that it became an automatic behavior for many.

• I’m a good man, therefore…

There are many family and social conditionings about what does it mean to “be good” which are imposed over us for centuries. Often we automatically follow them because they are accepted as rules and we haven’t got the courage to question them. No statement or action is considered as lie if the outside world labels it “good”.

• I’m not aware, so…

Someone who is not even aware about the everyday lies he/she is involved in is completely detached from reality. The consumer approach provokes unconscious, childish participation in daily life. The focus is on “having” as a source of happiness and lying is simply a harmless game.

Why fears provoke non-obvious lying?

Instead of condemning lying however it looks like we need to understand with maturity why we do it. We are all suffering from many fears. Some of them are easy to admit because they are not threatening our finances or image. Others, which have the most influence on our ways to communicate in business, are sophisticatedly covered with all sorts of lies. Most of the harmful ways to connect in business are nothing more than a defensive (hiding) mechanism. Lying is the easiest way to disguise our fears. Instead of exposing fears and their harmful effect on us we decided to use them to manipulate others so they can give us something to calm down our own uncertainties. Our sales techniques, influencing trough advertisement, difficult conversations solutions and dealing with conflicts are based around playing with fears each one of us is experiencing more or less. We have learnt how to recognize them and how to push their button and create the desired action. So we have ended up exchanging beautifully wrapped lies rather participating in independent interchange of resources.

Communication based on manipulating fears is difficult to be seen and admitted as a lie because it delivers money, power, prestige and respectability. Those are highly appreciated valuables in business. That is why we see this type of lying “harmless” – it gets the job done, it reaches the goal. Until we don’t see the painkilling effect on us we will keep being dependent on fears of not having enough, of not being accepted, of loss, of the unknown, of loosing control.

Pride is often the defense mechanism of a vulnerable person. It covers human vulnerability in such a way that we feel numb. Exploring vulnerability in business and writing about it might look naïve and unrelated to the nature of all business activities. Excluding and repressing essential human qualities while working makes us numb for at least eight hours a day for about five days each week. We don’t need complicated calculations to see that most of our time we are frozen in our pride however it looks like on the outside. That prevents us to connect in our business wholeheartedly. 

The three most common manifestations of pride

• The Advisor

It can be observed in people who are very perceptive and wise trough experience, which gives them the feeling of superiority. They would advise and help if asked, never directly influence you. They are often put on a pedestal because of their profound and practical support given to others. This reinforces their feeling of self-sufficiency and prevents them from sharing personal struggles and asks for assistance. The advisor manifestation of pride is very subtle and hardly admitted as harmful mask because giving available resources without demonstrating it is seen as generosity rather as ego comforting numbness.

• Uncle Scrooge

This manifestation of pride often goes together with statements like “I’m not good enough” therefore “It’s not worth to share”. Embracing this mask involves denying the significance of your own participation in everyday life. It feels like being a part of software and you proudly execute a given program. This is a widely spread victim like way to avoid exposure.

• The Humble man

It is observed with people who don’t recognize and diminish their own experience and wisdom. They believe “others know best”. They have participated  in all relevant to their work courses, they like coaching, read self development books and apply methods, which are promoted to be beneficial for many. They are proud to sound and look like encyclopedia of others people knowledge and experience. There is nothing harmful in being informed. The damage comes from gathering borrowed knowledge but never live your own experience, which matches your needs and present situation.

How pride manifestations participate in business?

Each one of the proud ways to hide from exposure, e.g. to be vulnerable appear in all of us – sometimes simultaneously, sometimes one of them prevails. In different situations we pick the most comfortable mask of pride and we act accordingly to the role behind it.

The advisor is gladly spreading wisdom while his brain is bursting with worries about his own problems. He enters giving type of relationships without even recognizing that sometimes it is needed to be on the receiving end. His pedestal is so high that he cannot mix with the crowd and to be honest …what for? The others might only harm him with their ignorance or superficial suggestions. Uncle Scrooge will be safely instructed and advised without even asking for it. He executes duties, orders and demands which excludes him from the natural exchange of human’s experiences and resources because he doubts the worth of his owns. It is difficult to recognize this type of inertia as such because when we enter that role we look fairly busy with our duties. The robot-like everyday life is killing us but often in business this type of “effectiveness” is so much appreciated that becomes one of the main reasons you have “the job”. The humble man acts like distributor of others people practices. Stays proudly knowledgeable on the surface of his work, giving borrowed opinions with informative taste. He will often recommend latest courses, books, methods backed up with encyclopedia like information. He will never muck his hands therefore there is nothing worth exposing. He is always safely “clean” from talking about personal mistakes and learnt from them lessons because he never went that far.

Balance with vulnerability

Now, when we’ve met openly our hardly recognized pride let see what is behind it. Yes, even though we call ourselves business people we are as much vulnerable as everyone else, not involved in “making money” or “securing better future”. We tend to hide it because of so many inherited fears, conditionings and prejudices. And yes, accepting vulnerability will change our perceptions about work and the ways we connect in business. The need for this transformation is more and more obvious because the pressure from being frozen escalates with unbelievable speed, because we are exhausted from holding this or that acceptable business image, because we either suffer from “not enough” or we are still not satisfied from “having everything”.

Allowing vulnerability in business will bring effective progress and natural balance from within in our work. Communicating without the fear to be seen in moments of difficulties will expand our inner human resources. Accepting vulnerability charges you with potent energy to face reality when struggling without being blindfolded with illusion fed solutions, habitual activities and harmful patterns. This is how deeper growth is happening. Shared vulnerability is the most important material we need to build effortlessly pure connection with others. Then many self-repressions will simply disappear and the balance will naturally follow.

Independent business communication

How weak becomes strong

When the purpose of communication is to hide something you become dependent from whatever you want to hide. In business we have quite clear ideas what to reveal or what not to. There are business techniques, which teach us what and how to communicate in order to get money, power, prestige or respectability. We have accepted as normal that the main reasons to connect in business is to make money, become powerful (influential), have prestigious image and we will be respected. The outcome should be happiness and satisfaction. Both those who achieved that and those who are on their way to reach it feel that connections based on this type of superficial values is not that nurturing as it seems. We lack open human communication in business but the only thing we do about it is building “trusted relationship” with beautiful and clever words, which purpose is to hide our addiction to “successful business” manifested trough money, power, prestige and respectability. Admitting an addiction is quite exposing and brings unexpected transformations and often pain. Taking away “hiding” techniques to communicate will make us very vulnerable, weak. Allowing vulnerability in business will enable us to participate in life unconditionally with our work. It will allow us to experience trust rather create it artificially trough intellectual techniques.

This is how I see ordinary manifestations of vulnerability in business. It is to you to decide how impossible or how possible is that in your everyday business life:

Vulnerability is ability to:

• Say “I don’t know”
• Admit honestly what is exactly your responsibility for the difficulties you are in
• Be flexible about the ways you participate in your work and have the courage to actually do something different
• Approach people without hiding the true intention of the conversation
• Approach people for support in moments of difficulties
• Communicate openly with people even when you feel weak
• Talk about individual present struggles honestly without judging yourself for being weak
• Reveal the real magnitude you give to your problem
• Refuse giving support which will harm you in any way
• Communicate with others from one level perspective (no one is bigger or smaller than you because of social, financial or achievement labelling)
• Participate honestly in business processes rather manipulating them

Working at home

Vulnerability as a possible way to naturally grow in business and experience your work as a contribution journey rather accumulation activity. Vulnerability will not be that painful and unacceptable if we recognize our definitions about it as prejudices:

• Vulnerability means weak therefore unprofessional
• Vulnerability is lack of appropriate skills
• Vulnerability seen as weakness is contagious therefore we should avoid any contact with it

Hiding with pride our vulnerability is exhausting with its demands. It blocks natural progress. Vulnerability is charging with its lessons. It has the strength of a seed in a fertile soil.

Imagine how tensed you would be if there is no home to get to at the end of the day. Communication trough pride is communication as homeless. Communication trough vulnerability is allowing the warmth and resources of a true home. Feeling at home in your work is much more enriching than aiming for or being on the top of a popular game.

The sequence thought-word-action is more than understandable for most of us. What is not so obvious is that our words actually reflect the real states behind thoughts. We rarely pay attention to that connection and use language as a deceptive (misleading) mechanism both to others and ourselves. Every time when we are not clear what behind our words is, we spread darkness. Every time we have clarity but do not express it with words we spread darkness again. Read more

Today’s business civilization is backed up with few prejudices (“business is a tough game”, “only the strong survive”, “competent means trustworthy”, “successful business is financially profitable business”,“persistency and ambition bring money and trust”). It depends on individual level of consciousness how you look at them – as a support to have successful business or as an obstacle to express yourself authentically trough your work. Many see those prejudices as rules and therefore no actions are taken to get out of their vicious circle. Today’s mainstream business is based on the collaboration between rules and prejudices. Read more

Stuck with assets or free for business

Behind respected straightforward professional language we often hide the suffering from frustrating prejudices in business. We don’t like to admit how much tension they bring into our lives because the need to release them will be more obvious. It will trigger actions, which might change totally our perception of assets we accept as valuable (money, power, prestige and respectability).

To understand a prejudice as such we need to see how does it function in everyday life and how does it harm our connection with others.  Prejudices are obstacle for our natural vitality because they damage directly human ability to response intelligently to difficulties. There is no need to convince anyone that slaving to prejudices is moving into a vicious circle. Every time we communicate accordingly to certain bigotry we make it stronger, no matter whether inside us we approve its existence or not. Words are as harmful as actions. In fact words become actions sooner or later.

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