Step One – Viewing yourself and your organization as organisms within an ecosystem:
- 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
Step Two – Learning to Believe, Look, See, Feel, and Act:
- Believe – We have often heard and sometimes repeated the old adage, “Seeing is believing.” I have begun to reject such notion. Instead, I am now embracing, “Believing is seeing.” Looking reveals nothing unless we believe what we seek could be there. Without belief, I conclude, I will look only half-heartedly; seldom will we see what we do not believe; and such uninspired vision will rarely evoke feeling nor implore action.
- Look – Nature teaches that true awareness of our living and operating environments is essential to organizational survival and success. Are you among those who are blind to the world around you? Are you slave to electronic devices and the continuous flow of content (drivel) whose immediacy masquerades as urgent and important? I will open your eyes if you are willing to jettison the comfort of your blindness.
- See – Seeing is more than a superficial glance and acknowledgment. Essential Seeing peels away the layers of debris and extraneous matter. Seeing requires a deep examination, appreciation, understanding, and assessment. Unless you LOOK and SEE, you and/or your organization risks never truly knowing its place in the world around us.
- Feel – Steve recognizes that Looking and Seeing are necessary for your success and fulfillment, but not sufficient. Unless you see deeply enough to stir empathy, prompt emotion, and generate sentiment and stimulation, then chances are that nothing will happen to alter your trajectory. Nature instructs that we FEEL deeply enough to motivate movement. Great Blue Heron will show you how feeling comes naturally when we seek it. Individuals and organizations perform best when purpose-driven, passion-fueled, and results-oriented.
- Act – Deep Feeling inspires Action. Great Blue Heron propels and enables you to ACT with purpose, passion, and a fierce determination. You will learn to adopt a results-oriented philosophy, a relentless compulsion to make the most of your personal and professional ecosystem. You will act on behalf of yourself and your organization, as well as the larger ecosystem in which you operate.
Step Three – Establish a Vision. Steve implores that every client needs a vision, an aspiration, a future desired condition at a point certain in time. He’ll help you imagine and design Your Mighty Oak DREAM.
Why the Mighty Oak? The oak tree, which is the national tree of many countries, primarily symbolizes strength, longevity, perseverance, beauty, and bounty. Most would agree that The Mighty Oak is emblematic of success and stability. It is massive, stationary, and long-lived. The oak tree, the oak enterprise, seeks to flourish, to reproduce, to provide for future generations. The enterprise seeks to be The Mighty Oak. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed that the purpose of a tree is to grow a little new wood each year. And so it is with the oak. As it is with you and/or your organization.
Using the oak as model, Steve (Great Blue Heron) will guide you in imagining, defining, and achieving your Mighty Oak DREAM. The oak teaches many lessons. He’ll share them with you.