Philosophical Tenets

  • To benefit from Nature, you must be in Harmony with it. Steve (Great Blue Heron) will open this path for you, and show you how to move forward – crawl; walk; run!
  • I take an Ecosystem Approach to living and operating, which entails:
    • Know and understand your immediate surroundings — social, economic, and environmental
    • Recognize your essential factors of life, work, and recreation
    • Consider factors that might be viewed as either competing with or contributing toward your satisfaction and fulfillment
    • Identify your niche… and exploit it
  • Five Essential Verbs: Believe, Look, See, Feel, and Act.
    • I find Nature’s Lessons because I know they lie hidden within view — belief enables me to look and see
    • Really look, with eyes open to your surroundings, external to electronic devices and the distractions of meaningless noise and data
    • Be alert to see deeply, beyond the superficial
    • See clearly, with comprehension, to find meaning and evoke feelings
    • Feel emphatically enough to spur action
  • Every lesson for Living, Learning, Serving, and Leading is written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature
  • Discerning Your Mighty Oak aspiration
  • Emphasize the Purpose; Find the Passion; Fuel The DREAM
  • Insistence on Action
  • Seek and Celebrate results
  • Nothing is more important than Inspiration and Humility

Core Values

Steve (Great Blue Heron) assists individuals and organizations anchor themselves in personal integrity and professional ethics. Steve will help you understand and embrace environmental stewardship and selfless service if those two essential values are not already front and center for you.

  • Responsible Earth Stewardship – you and your organization are citizens of Planet Earth. Steve works with clients who accept and embrace, or are willing to open eyes to this fundamental value.
  • Intelligent Tinkering – a value that is ecosystem based. We must recognize that all things are interconnected and interdependent; know the consequences and implications of all actions.
  • Doing Good by Doing Well – a value that recognizes our obligation to the greater good now and into the deep future. It involves performing well enough give back and pay forward. Great Blue Heron works only with individuals and organizations willing to accept such an obligation for doing good.
  • Sustainability – leaving a world that can provide a future undiminished from the one we occupy. This value recognizes that we have an obligation to future generations.

Steve helps clients understand the environmental and societal implications of life and living.

Steve espouses four levels of fitness essential to life and living, as well as recognizes five life-portals:

  • Four levels of fitness – Steve helps individuals and organizations recognize the critical nature of their own four-dimensional fitness, even as they understand that capacity, performance, fulfillment, and enjoyment correlate with health and well-being. Great Blue Heron will help you understand that maintaining fitness across all four fronts enhances your ability to perform and draw satisfaction and fulfillment:
    1. Mental – acuity and sharpness
    2. Physical – health and vitality
    3. Emotional – friends, families, colleagues
    4. Spiritual – embrace of a presence larger than self
  • Employing all five portals: mind, heart, body, soul, and spirit. A GBH client appreciates the need to operate and thrive along the wholeness of human experience, through mind, body, heart, soul, and spirit. I absorb and appreciate Nature via all five portals.

Nature-Inspired Life; encouraging and seeking a better tomorrow through Nature-Inspired Living!

“Four levels of fitness:
Mental – Physical – Emotional – Spiritual”

Great Blue Heron, LLC

Stephen B. Jones, PhD
(Applied Ecology)

CEO Great Blue Heron, LLC
Nature Inspired Learning and Leading

Nature Based Leadership Institute Founder

Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading Author

Former CEO Fairmont State University; Antioch University New England; Urbana University; University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Former University of the Arctic Board Chair

213 Legendwood Drive NW
Madison, AL 35757
(603) 903-9575