Seinoza Walks Ed. 2 — Principles, eh?
In Ed. 1 of Seinoza Walks, I wrote about a particular principle of ours — leave space for magic — and how it’s proving its worth on our pilot walk on the Ise-ji pilgrimage in Japan.
For this second edition, Kalia and I thought it might be worthwhile diving into how we think about principles, how we developed ours, and how we’ve put them to use.
We’ve all seen a corporate vision and principles. Usually they’re some trite statements, supported by three or four words, printed out and plastered seemingly over every available surface including, my favourite, the back of the toilet door. Created by committee and then wordsmithed and windtunneled into meaninglessness, after a big-bang introduction they quickly fade into corporate memory. That is until a new CEO comes along, or a scandal suggests a fresh take might be appropriate.
What. A freaking. Waste.
At their best, principles are one of the most insanely powerful decision-making tools we’ve discovered, but before we put them to the test in Seinoza, we experimented on ourselves.
Back in January of this year, Kalia and I took something called the Great Decisions Course, run by an organisation called Art of Accomplishment. When you see the words great decisions, you might imagine frameworks and trees that are designed with cold rationality at their core, with the objective to strip any mamby pamby emotion from life’s decisions, big and small.
By contrast, Joe Hudson, AoA’s founder, shows us that emotions are an absolutely fundamental part of decision-making. In people who’ve suffered damage to the emotional centre of the brain, a decision that might take a twentieth of a second for an undamaged brain, might take twenty minutes or more — the intellect is still online but without any emotion to guide how it will feel about the outcome, it has no idea what to do.
So we’re making emotion-based decisions all the time, but our intellect has a very cunning trick up its sleeve: it will often do anything within its power to avoid making decisions that might lead to an outcome that it considers to be emotionally disadvantageous.
Which, funnily enough, is a kind of principle. It’s just one that operates below the level of consciousness in most folk. Just like profit is more important than our people, taking care of others is more important than taking care of myself, or spiritual purity is more important than making a living.
If you have an ounce of empathy, a strong sense of boundaries, and want to run a profitable business, all of these unconscious principles sound insane. But we see them show up in people’s lives all the time, and for one very good reason: they help us avoid an unpleasant emotion — fear. Fear of scarcity. Fear of rejection. And, most heartbreakingly, fear of abundance.
A set of conscious principles in and of itself won’t make the fear go away. Indeed, you’ll have to learn to welcome the fear in order not to be completely paralysed by it.
However when fear sneaks in and threatens to start running the show, principles can ground us in how we want to live, or how we want to run our business, and make the next step obvious.
When Kalia and I started the process of creating the principles for Seinoza, we started with how we, individually and collectively, want to be in the world. So far, so normal.
But far beyond some free word association exercise, we looked for something extra as we created them: the somatic signal that let us know both that we’d hit on the right principle, and would make it obvious which direction to take when fear threatened to take hold. We wanted them to not just sound right, but to feel right in our bodies. We wanted principles that hit us in the gut, sent shivers up our spine, or brought a deep sense of sensory satisfaction. That way, we’d always know when we’re acting in accordance with them. Which is how we arrived at the following:
Connection, connection, connection:
When I worked as a service designer, one of the most overlooked elements of any service was the exit: how did we want people to feel when it came to an end or something went wrong. The importance of endings is backed up by something known as the peak-end rule. It posits that people will judge an experience by how they felt at its peak, and at the end — it’s why customer satisfaction is far higher for all-inclusive holidays paid for up front, rather than those that hit you with the bill at check-out. So it was important for us to be able to come back to a principle that helped us consider the entire experience our clients have with us, from the excitement of that first engagement, through the meat of a walk, to the valuable-but-sometimes gnarly experience of integration after a transformative experience comes to an end.
This principle also has a second job: in reminding us about what it is that we want to connect to because our best experiences of personal development work have gone far beyond the strictly individual. Through AoA, for example, our work has helped us build an incredible community of friends and supporters. And without wanting to get too woo on y’all, the sense of connection to something larger than ourselves has changed the way we relate to ourselves and our communities, so reflecting the importance of these three levels of connection in our work felt pretty important, too.Everything is an iteration:
Both Kalia and I have a tendency to aim for perfection, which is really just a way of saying that we share a fear of failure and the rejection that might come with it. Knowing explicitly that everything is an iteration creates the safety to experiment without having it all figured out, and without having the spectre of shame hanging over our heads. This is one of those principles that often shows up in corporate environments — DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL! 🤪 — but what is so often lacking is the environment of safety that makes failure both possible, and an opportunity from which to learn.Open the drawer
This is a reference to the drawer we all have in the kitchen, you know, the one in which we throw random things that we’re not sure how to deal with. Over time, the cruft piles up and some long, spiky thing you can’t see wedges it shut. You can’t stand to look at the drawer, much less try and open it to find the thing you know is hidden away inside, simply because the psychic cost is way too high.
For Kalia and me, opening the drawer means clearing out the crap often, upright and early. If something feels wrong with how we’re interacting, or how the business is running, we open the damn drawer.What feels essential
Feeling into what’s essential, rather than thinking through it, has been life-changing — we both have our own felt sense of when something just a bit too much, or doesn’t quite fit. For Kalia it shows up as a buzz. For me, a knot just above my stomach. When faced with everything we could do as a business, being aware of these feelings keeps us focussed on what matters most.Leave space for magic:
Our favourite principle, and probably our most vulnerable. It’s about setting things up with space so that serendipity can have its way, and then surrendering the control we’re so used to trying to exert on the world (we wrote about how it shows up in Ed. 1).
We’ve both built principles that guide how we want to live our lives outside of Seinoza, too, and what we’ve found is that over time is that they become so embedded and so somatically self-evident that we don’t even refer to the words any more. Any time a decision comes up, we just feel into the outcome that we want, and the decision goes away. And if we ever find ourselves really in a bind, the path to a resolution is as simple as asking what do your principles tell you?
It’s a pretty satisfying way to run a business, and a life.