Spirit in Action

Our Highest Work - Healthy Money & Joyful Livelihood

Through the OurHighestWork.com community, George Kao helps folks work toward doing the best work they can, in tune with their ethics and leadings, and effectively. Having made his own transition from a "more, more, more" ethic to a "better, better, better" purpose, he coaches people, especially solopreneurs, in selecting their work and doing it wisely.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 04 Oct 2015
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - As you know as regular listener to Spirit in Action, we have great folks doing great things here with us weekly. People doing wonderful healing work of all sorts for the world. Though I try to do my own share of direct work to heal the planet, it is also crucial, tremendously needed work to help leverage the work that others are doing. We do that through Northern Spirit Radio programming by increasing their visibility or at least audibility through our podcast radio shows. Today for Spirit in Action, we have another also crucial supporter of those doing good work, George Cow. That's K-A-O Cow. And he has established an online community and website called our highest work. Between his video podcasts and blog and the interactive online community interactions, George helps folks live effectively and wholly into their greatest calling, their highest work. George Cow joins us by a somewhat iffy Skype connection over in San Francisco, California to tell us more. George, I'm absolutely delighted to have you here today for Spirit in Action. - Thanks, Mark. I am honored to be here because I am a listener of this show and just admire the amazing work of so many of your guests. So it's just an honor to be here. - I tell you, it's been an honor to do this now for more than 10 years. There's so many incredible people doing such wonderful things for the world. And you're one of them that I've gotten to know along the way. Could you tell our listeners what our highest work is all about? - So it's a podcast that I started with the intention of creating a community around the podcast where we are exploring and aiming for the most ethical way of creating livelihood, particularly in business and in marketing. Most of my audience members, when I first started this, most of them were people who were creating their own sort of solo pre-neurotype of business. They might be some kind of a consultant or coach or counselor or a healer of some kind. But a lot of those people were falling for the more unethical ways of doing business and marketing that they thought they had to follow in order to make enough money to do what they loved. And so I came along and really had this intention to shift that, to say, no, no, you have a good heart. You're trying to do good in the world with your business. You don't have to follow the traditional marketing and business methods that are combative and really feed on the potential customers fear and greed and fear missing out and things like that. So our highest work was intended to explore sort of more how can we bring spirituality and the deeper values into business and marketing, particularly for the solopreneur. - You know, I'm sure that there are a lot of people doing business in a way that I probably would consider to be unethical, the rape and pillage type of business, the kind that we don't have to look at, the consequences of our actions, who probably consider themselves very religious. So you're clearly drawing a line between people just seeing religious and ethical or spiritual. - Absolutely. Well, you know, what's interesting is those people who are running those kinds of businesses that are maybe bad for the environment, bad for society, from our perspective, they might themselves, in their own private lives, really be quite ethical, quite generous. But they have this, somehow this distinction in their mind between sort of that kind of behavior versus their values in business, it doesn't go with them to the workplace. I have some friends, they're living here in the United States now, but they were telling me how this is very much true, at least in India, maybe other places as well, where India is a very religious, very spiritual country and spirituality is a very, it's even more a part of their lives than a lot of Americans who, of course, different religions here. But even though they're really spiritual, they don't bring those kinds of values of compassion, humility, honesty into business, into their work and their work, their cutthroat, they try to get all the advantage they can for themselves without regard to other people and to the ripple effects that are caused. And then they go back home and they're very spiritual. So it's interesting that this is not just one culture, it's not just North America, but this seems to be the case, at least in India and probably elsewhere in the world as well. - Well, let's talk about your background because I'm totally in alignment with your vision. And I wonder about the path that got you to see this so clearly, and you grew up in Taiwan. I think you're in California right now, although this wire could be connecting me to any place in the world, I guess. But how did you come to have this vision about business? - I grew up with a businessman father and he ran an international business and he was very financially successful. I grew up a sort of upper middle class, but I always noticed, well, one thing was he traveled so much so I didn't see as much of him as I would have liked. And I always kind of felt like the business was stressful. People who were in the business didn't seem to love what they were doing. And so I really started questioning the whole thing about business from the perspective of as a child, how come you guys aren't having as much fun as we are, as kids, you know? And of course, going to school, that's not necessarily fun either. And then as I got into high school and college, I started to get into politics a little bit for university, I went to Berkeley. A lot of politics there. What's interesting was in high school and growing up, we immigrated from Taiwan to Orange County, California, so Southern California. So that was my first exposure to America. And it was, you know, during Reagan and I'm sure I am living in Orange County, which is known to be very conservative, both religiously and politically. And so I really grew up in that time as an evangelical Christian, or what we call ourselves evangelical Christians, and really we were a fundamentalist. And then we were also Republican, but when I went to Berkeley, I had this experience of trying to convert one of my professors to evangelical Christianity and instead over a two, three year period, I was the one who had my mind changed. - You got saved, did you, by your professor? - Yeah, you could say that. Yeah, I got saved from a very narrow worldview where the only way to heaven is through Jesus and the Bible is the inerrant word of God. And, you know, the Republicans are the only ones who know how to run this country and what should be done. And so the way that happened, and this is all going to type back into business, but the way all that happened is, as I tried to convert him through going to office hours and writing papers, he would always be very respectful in his comments back in my papers and during office hours. The thing that got to me most was he always kept on asking or suggesting to me to say, "George, you know, you use very sort of black and white language, like it is this way, it is that way." And he was an English professor. So he was saying, "Well, you know, "George, you might want to try using the language of, "it seems to me that et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." Or from my perspective, this is what I'm seeing. And so he started training me in several years using that kind of language. Also, at one point when we had this conversation about spirituality and I was telling him what I believed and what about him, what does he believe? And he just said, "George, I know you are someone "who really is compassionate to, you know, "compassion is part of your spiritual heritage, George. "You know, you believe that everybody has infinite worth. "And therefore, it seems that you also believe "that everyone's life experience is valuable. "You care about listening. "And so if you truly want to listen to somebody else "and understand even to some small degree, "their life experience, "you have to be willing to be uncertain, "even just for a moment." And that was the complete opposite of what I was being trained in my spiritual group. I was part of campus crusade for Christ back then. We were all about certainty. I mean, I think fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist really, anything, seems to be all about certainty. I know what is true with capital T and no one is gonna talk me out of it. I have to defend myself against anyone who might try to crack this concrete structure of truth that I have. It's a battle, right? It's a war with the devil, you know, in the case that I was believing. And so he suggested, well, if you always are certain about what is true, what you believe, how can you ever truly learn? Because to learn means that you need to suspend the certainty for a moment to contemplate ways of thinking and experiences of life that you haven't had. Because if you believe that you know everything, then all the variety of life experience that's on this planet, you will never truly understand because you haven't truly listened. So that was the first major crack in my unshakeable faith. - And is this a crack in both your religious point of view and your view about business? - Yeah, so around the same time, I was starting to become swayed by sort of the Berkeley culture away from republicanism and toward more environmental and social values. It's amazing how much the people who surround us influence our thought form and our values, right? So at the same time that I was starting to question my certainty in faith, I was starting to also start to embrace more environmental and social justice values, which at that time was very anti-corporate, anti-business too. Eventually, as I went on and graduated, I swung more towards the middle where I thought, isn't there a way, and there is a way to bring the love for society and the care for Mother Earth to bring that into what we do in business. I mean, why not? Both and instead of either or, it was really what I was being trained in through this time at Berkeley. So just to complete the piece about my thread, my spiritual background, I started to question and talk to my pastors, my friends, 95% of my friends, probably higher than that actually, were also evangelical Christians, 'cause we all lived in the same, in this kind of evangelical Christian house, went to all the activities that were, several Bible studies a week in worship sessions, and we would go out and try to convert other people when we weren't in class. And so I started talking to them, and then I even started back then, one of the first sort of online discussion groups about this stuff. I called it the Forum Community. The idea was, here we can ask hard questions. And what was interesting was that I couldn't get a good answer for my pastors and church leaders about this very point, which is, if you believe that the Bible is the inherent word of God, and the Bible is the only spiritually true book, how can you say that if you haven't read every other book on earth? Because if you say that Bible is the only spiritual, that means you've already judged all the other books, and how can you have judged all the other books? If you haven't read them all, that doesn't make sense. It just logically didn't make sense to me. And the same thing, if you say Christianity is the only true religion, how can you say that unless you've studied all the other religions? It doesn't make logical sense. And they couldn't give me a good answer. - I think you're maybe presuming there that logic would be important. I think some people specifically say, the ways of God are unknowable. It's a miracle, logic. We just have to see it with faith. I assume that's an answer you heard in many cases. - You're absolutely right. But what's interesting was, because we were in a university setting and we were trying to convert other people, we were trained to use logic in our conversion process. What's called apologetics. And so we had our own logic. And so given the emphasis on rationality, that God is rational, believing in this worldview, makes sense. That's what I used in my line of questioning. - And if I recall correctly, and again, we talked about this two and a half years ago, I think you were actually the leader of your campus crusade group, right? - Yeah, I was the worship leader and I was one of the Bible study leaders. And so I was, yes, I was one of the leaders, yeah. - I have this feeling that maybe you would have had a vast amount of community cut off from you very quickly, not only from those people who are part of the campus crusade for Christ folks that you were associated with, but maybe from your father, who's kind of on the other side of that aisle as well, did you end up losing a lot of roots all at once? - Actually, my parents were not Christians and they were basically tolerating what I was going through. At one point, because of the influences from my fellow fundamentalist Christians, I actually told my parents during that period that they were not my real parents. That God is my real parent. You can imagine that hurt them quite a bit, but they didn't disown me. They still accepted me. Thank goodness. So, yeah, I was very grateful that they were tolerant of me during that time. And yes, when I couldn't get the right answer from my church leaders and friends, I said, I'm right now I'm gonna give this evangelical thing a break. And I started going to the used bookstores and Berkeley and reading up on all this different types of spirituality and just blowing my mind. And yeah, yeah. - A real education. - Oh, shit, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's really self-motivated to say, well, what is the truth then? And I'll tell you, it was very, very difficult because yes, I lost 95 plus percent of my friends. Not like they were shunting me necessarily and some of them were because they didn't want to be, the whole thing is about defense, defending our faith. So they didn't want to be influenced by me, by my way of thinking, right? So they stayed clear to me. And I understood that. I, of course, I understand that because I was one of them. But even those who didn't try to shun me were we didn't really just didn't have much to talk about because our worldview in spirituality, Christianity, was so embedded in everything we talked about that it was hard to have a meaningful conversation other than sort of small talk. And so yeah, I lost most of my friends really. And for two and a half years, two to three years, I was really scared that I was going to hell. I mean, really, I was truly scared. I said, oh my God, that I'm not truly saved, you know? Then fast forward, after that time, I found Unitarian Universalism. And that was very comforting for me to know that, ah, here are people who are seekers, truly. They are open to learning from all faiths and cultures and they're not going to shut down others, but they're going to learn from them. So obviously you, we went to U services for a while. And in terms of my business side of things, I discovered the movement called Sustainable Business. Back then, it was called Triple Bottom Line, which is People Planet Profit. I'm really interested in it. I went and got a graduate degree, business degree, in one of the first schools in the world to offer an MBA, a business degree, and green sort of sustainable business. And so that's kind of where I dramatically shifted my perspective of what's possible in business. And even further, since then, I've gone into the question of, okay, it's not just enough for me to bring green and social justice values into business, but what about spiritual values? We a lot of the people in sustainable business, they don't say that they're bringing their spirituality, and some of them are atheists. They're really in it for sort of, it's very metrics driven, sort of tons of carbon emissions, you know? Sort of measuring community impact. It's a lot of measuring. And as we know, when it comes to spiritual things, it's beyond our current ability to measure. And so it's more about the heart. It's more about presence and values than it is about measuring carbon emissions saved and things like that. So that's where I am now, is how can we bring our values of deep honesty, deep caring, generosity, humility, service to others into our business and our marketing? - And I think doing it successfully, doing it in a way that is sustainable. - Yes, the key is to redefine the word success, because success has been taken over in mainstream media as being primarily financial. And so a billionaire is assumed to be successful, whereas someone working on minimum wage is assumed to be unsuccessful. But I wanna redefine that success to mean that each person in fact would do, well, to define the word success for themselves and say, what does that mean to me in my career? But also what does that mean to me every day? So I like to say redefine success every day. Every day I get up and say, I am successful today if I have stayed as true and aligned to my higher values as I can. And if I brought more beauty, truth, and goodness to everything I do today as much as I can, then that was a successful day. And I am in a successful career. - Well, I wanna get into some of the details of that, because you do business coaching. You help a lot of people move in the direction of their highest work. It's part of being part of that community. And folks, by the way, again, the website is ourhighestwork.com. There's a link on northernspiritradio.org. And through that website, you can get ahold of George Cow. As you were speaking earlier, I was also struck by, there's a quotation that's associated with George Fox, who's founder of Quakers. In full context, it starts out of a sentence. It tells us all to be patterns, examples, in all countries, all lands, everywhere. And it ends with this phrase. And you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in all. And of course, he's saying this back in the mid 1600s. It strikes me that that is part of how you do this highest work. You talk about having reverence for each individual, listening deeply for the truth that each individual has. Is that also your coaching method? - Absolutely. I don't push people to do what I did, or to use the strategy that I believe is the fastest way forward, or the easiest way forward. I listen for where their spirit is calling to them, and I support them in pursuing that faithfully and efficiently where they can be more efficient. This actually brings me to something I wanna take a moment to talk about, which is the issue of money. And throughout all this, where they're pursuing wealth and then God, or the more spiritual people who oftentimes ask you money to say money is the root of all evil, which actually I was studying this stuff, and the original wording was supposed to be money is the root of all kinds of evil, not the root of all evil, but the root of all kinds of evil. And so as spiritual people, we're supposed to have nothing to do with money, never talk about money. And I think that's taking it too far, in my opinion, because what I see right now is that we are put on this earth in this time that part of our calling, part of our spiritual calling, is to figure out how to deal with money wisely, compassionately, justly. It's not to ignore money, somehow become a victim of that ignorance and that avoidance. There are too many of us who have good hearts and who could channel resources toward the good, toward a more environmentally sustainable, socially just future, who don't have the financial means to sometimes support ourselves or to create that kind of impact. Now, I'm not saying that all the money should be made by us, good people, but I am saying that we need to make sure we are wise about stewarding our resources so that we don't suffer the consequences of not having enough, because when we don't have enough ourselves, it becomes very stressful. It's sort of like when you're hungry, it's hard to serve someone else, but when you are adequately fed, your brain is in a better state, your energy is adequate to be able to then serve others. And so part of our highest work, I talk about healthy money, not make lots of money or get rich, but what is enough for you? And we all have different lifestyles, but what is enough for you? And how is your business plan or career plan creating enough? And how do you work on a day-to-day level where you don't have to be worrying about money all the time? - We're gonna find out a lot more about that in just a moment, but first I wanna remind you, you're listening to Spirit in Action. This is a Northern Spirit radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org, where you can listen to more than 10 years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll also find a place to post comments, and we love two-way communication. So when you visit, please do post a comment. There's also a place to make donations, and that is how we sustain this full-time year-round work. So click to donate, but even more important than supporting us is to remember to support your local community radio station. They provide a slice of news and of music, that you get nowhere else, and we need that kind of openness and information to grow and to see clearly in the world. So please, before anything else, support your local community radio station. Again, I'm with George Cow. His website is our highest work, and you can find the link from northernspiritradio.org. I think of what has been going a year, two years now. You hadn't got it started two and a half years ago, and I recall watching basically over the last year. Is that about right? - Yeah, it's getting close to two years now. We started the first episodes in early 2014. So yes, it's a year and a half, almost two years. - And via his coaching and via the group work, I mean, it's a group learning process. It's a community as well as podcasts and blogs that George provides for us. It helps us learn how to do ethical work, and how to be successful with our higher work. Again, that isn't necessarily to end up like the Koch brothers, but I'm just wondering if your father was one of the people who contacted you for coaching. Would that be a good place to start? I mean, assuming that he was coming to you, his younger self was approaching you. How would that go? How would that work? Or maybe he wouldn't have made the contact. There may be some preconditions that exist already if someone is contacting you. - Yeah, I don't think someone would contact me if they had that sort of ordering of priorities that my dad has, which has got to make all the money first, and then we'll take care of the spirituality and our higher pursuits later. People are interested to work with me because they don't want to leave their higher aspirations aside. They want to do good in the world primarily and have enough and to be able to give back as they can. And I should mention, by the way, that I myself have had a dramatic transformation over 70 years of doing this work. I've been doing this business coaching full-time for 70 years now. In the beginning, okay, in the first couple of years, I was still very much influenced, I think, partly by my upbringing, my father's voice and my head, but also by the surrounding teachings in business and in marketing, which is some of you listeners, may have heard, you know, get six-figure income. Now it's seven-figure income is what they're everyone's pursuing and how to get millions of followers on your social media overnight with no work, just pay us a thousand dollars. There is so much hype and deception in the marketing. When people want to start to say, "Well, I want to work from home, you know, "I want to work for myself," and they start putting that into Google, they're entering shark-infested waters. Literally, I hope everyone will pay attention to this because literally just about 100% of what you will find online when you Google, work at home, work from home, start your own business, I should say 100%. There's, you know, some government-funded resources that are legit. There's some others who are caring and compassionate, but most of what you're gonna find, especially things that sound really, really good, that, oh, I can actually create a financially successful business with as little work if I follow this formula, or if I buy into the system, if anything sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is, and I would say 99% of the time, because I, myself, have bought into many of those systems, and in the first few years of my business, I sold some of those things myself because I was influenced by all that thinking. I had this radical transformation just a few years ago where I would say I came back to my spiritual truth, and I shut down that part of my business that was selling a lot of programs that people loved buying from me, but I didn't feel what was a truth service to them, so I could have kept making a lot of money, but I shut that down. Today, I'm making two and a half times what I used to be making. I'm still making enough, I live in San Francisco, I'm still making enough, but I purposely cut my income dramatically because my conscience no longer was allowing it, and what's interesting was I lost most of my friends, because most of my friends were other fellow business people and marketers who were doing that kind of thing, praying on the public, praying on the hopes and dreams of people who want to call their own shots. Now, what I'm doing is instead of, I used to be selling a lot of my information and programs and content. I made a decision two years ago to give it all away for free. So all of the content you're gonna find on my website, I no longer sell any content, it's all free, and I only make a living doing one-to-one coaching for those who can't afford it, and for those who can't, I provide as much community as possible for free, and I provide free for business tips every single day, Monday through Friday, on my social media. - Well, let's talk a bit about the kind of tips that you give, and you've got a wealth of them, and as you said, every day, there's something new, some aspects, some way of looking at it, and a lot of this is stuff that, I mean, you learned it by living it, but it's also filtered, I'm pretty sure. There's a lot of things that you learned that you choose not to pass on, because not every diseased week contract do we wanna give to someone else. So, give an example of what kind of thing is, so what was this morning? - Well, this morning was unique because I just made my 100th video four months ago, I started making a daily business tip or personal development tip, like switch between the two, video about four minutes long, and I read a short blog post along with it, and this is information that is better than I'm giving away than a stuff I used to sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars. I started doing that in mid-May, and now I'm just at video 100, actually, and I recorded my 100 first video today, and today's video was about what I've learned about self-control. (laughs) I really try to cover everything from authentic business to honest selling to what I call joyful productivity, to personal renewal, and healthy money as well. And also, how do we improve our services to our clients and customers, so that really, I like to say, the best marketing you can ever have is when you don't do any of the marketing. It's when your client or customer has been so helped, so served, and so delighted by your service, that they just naturally want to spread the word. That's what truly the highest and most honest marketing is, when you do good work, and people talk about it, because they get benefit. So, I talk about all these different things on my sort of money through Friday videos, and I was giving a lot even before, then I started two years ago with giving information, but one thing I learned about information was that if I can make it more consumable, make it more concise for people, they're much more likely to consume it and benefit from that. So, that's why I started this project a few months ago of doing these short blog post, short videos. And what I've noticed ever since I started, and so this is a business framework for everyone, and interestingly, I've argued in somewhat following this for a while, I decided to give, give, give, my content, my expertise. I figured if something can be copied online without costing me anything, which is all information online, then I'm gonna give it away. If it can be recorded and passed on, if I'm recording at once, but it can be consumed by 10 people or 10 million people, and it doesn't cost me another dime, 'cause it's on YouTube, it's on Facebook, then I'm going to give it away. And so, that's what I decided to do, and ever since I started doing that, I have grown a more loyal and truly kindred spirit tribe than before when I was trying to only give away teasers and selling the real stuff. So I have started to see, when I pursue first, the kingdom of God, of the kingdom of generosity and true service and compassion, that all the rest now I'm seeing has been given to me. It's starting to be, because right now I have a waiting list, I can't take on any more clients for at least three months, and what I wish to be is to be a living example of business that can be authentic and honest and aligned with the higher values that we all care about. - And just to be clear, folks, George must be very successful at his work, because somehow he's making enough money to live in San Francisco area. That is not the same rent structure that you'll experience here in Eau Claire. I have a house on a couple acres of land in the country with a creek behind me, and just a beautiful, beautiful place. It's a 15-minute drive to the center of town from my home. And this house is appraised at about $100,000. And I have a feeling it'd probably go for a couple million there. - Yeah, definitely. - So this truly means that success is working. And since you're so generous as to share your expertise with people, let's talk about just a couple of specific kinds of things you might talk about. - The most important thing for the day, people come in, they operate from, I think you encourage them, if it's the point that they're at, to work from a list of things they wanna do. And the most important thing is one of them. Tell us what that means to you. - So what I've seen and experienced myself, of course, is that human beings are easily overwhelmed, especially in our day when there is social media and there are so many requests and demands on our time from our phones ringing and notifications popping up to emails and things like that. That it is more important than ever to become clear about what is the most important thing for each day. If you simply took each morning, five minutes, 10 minutes to clarify for yourself a couple of things, what is your purpose, what are your values, how will you approach the day? Not just what I'm not gonna get done today, but how will you approach the day? What is success to you mean in that way? And then you say, well, what would be the greatest contribution I can make today for my business and for the world? How can I make the greatest contribution through my business to the world today? What is the project to work on? What is the task to accomplish? 'Cause most of us haven't have a to-do list. And I always recommend that clients also create what I call a slim list, which is that you've got this long running to-do list, maybe of dozens or hundreds of items that you could be doing. But then each day you pull out a separate piece of paper, I don't even use paper anymore, so I just open a separate document online and say, all right, if I were to only get one thing done today, what would be the most useful thing? And sometimes I might consult the to-do list, but the problem with the to-do list is the visual overwhelm actually slows us down and confuses us more than we might realize. So it's important to have white space around your most important thing of the day. And then you say, well, if I got that done, what would be the second most important thing that I could get done today? Okay, but write that down. Well, if I got that done, what would the third most important thing of the day be? And write that down. So just have these three items. And if you approach your day to say, I'm gonna do the first item. And if you really can, if it's really difficult, then you say, well, fine, I'm gonna go to my second most important item or my third. But you can only do these three items until you accomplish them before you do the items that are less important. And if each of us did that, our businesses would be running better, our careers would be more successful. And we would feel less hurried and less overwhelmed, less anxious. And I really believe that if we're less anxious and more fulfilled in our work, we bring that kind of compassion and generosity to everything else that we do. All the other people we touch in our lives. You know, I suspect that a vast amount of the work that you do is helping people sort out what their priorities, what, even as you were just talking, I was aware I do write myself up a to-do list, not always, but I do write myself up a to-do list. And that's actually a relief for me because otherwise I follow the bouncing ball that's right in front of me and it leads to something else and I get all distracted. But there's also deep within me, something that says I want to be completely present. So when my friend Crispin calls up and he says I need something to talk to right now, that becomes number one on my list. But I am an immediate person in that point of view. So I'm imagining your coaching has to really ask the questions to help the person see themselves more clearly. So good guess, I hope. - Absolutely, because each of us is called to follow our unique highest path. And when we try to copy someone else's, we can emulate in some ways that if some part of their path calls to us then find that's part of our path too. But it's never exactly the same as anybody else's. And so in your example, when you're present with a friend who calls, it wasn't part of your scheduled day, but your spirit is calling you to be present to that person in that moment, then absolutely. The love that we give and share is far more important than checking off anything on our to-do list. So ultimately that's it. - Can you give me an example of people you've worked with kind of before and after pictures? I understand that there may be some confidentiality and if that's it, change whatever you need. But so people come to you with this array of abilities, aspirations, problems, resources, and they end your coaching period or continue on into it looking like this. Can you give me an example so I can see the kind of transformation that can happen? - Yeah, so I'll give you two examples. There's one person who perhaps they've been working in another job, maybe in the corporate America scene and they have delayed their own higher work for many years to take care of their family. So I start working with them. We clarify and they have to have some ideas. But we further clarify, ah, this is the work I really want to pursue. This is my life experience is valuable and I want to share that with the world or maybe they have some skill that they've been developing that they haven't made a career out of. And so we do that work to clarify what that message is to crystallize it and also to clarify what then is the business model around that work so that they can actually launch and make a living doing that. And I've done this with dozens of clients over the years. And so some people end up, they end up writing a book while we work together. Some people end up launching some kind of a consulting service. And in some cases they might have been using some of those skills on their job, but in other cases it was a hobby before. Maybe they were passionate about holistic healing and now they want to share that expertise with the world and earn a living doing that. Another sort of type of client already has been running a business that's supporting them, but they're feeling like they're running ragged. And so now they want to systematize things. They want to create more freedom in their day and have a feeling that ah, this business can support me when I'm no longer able to work, this business can support me. So I kind of do some of that as well, structuring the business in a way that's smart. And oftentimes these are more sort of, they have some kind of transformational message that they want to share with the world. So there's some kind of coach or some kind of healer, some kind of consultant, some kind of counselor, some kind of author. And that's really what I love doing is working on bringing truly service oriented, helpful messages to the world in a way that people can make a living doing that. So yeah, so there's just a couple of examples. - So if I can make an overview about that, I think the first type of example you're talking about is people maybe who don't know their work. Part of your coaching is to help them identify their highest work. And the second type, I think you're saying that maybe you're trying to help people do their highest work in a way that's going to be spiritually, physically, economically sustainable. - Yes, exactly. - I find that I seem to have better luck with the second type of person and the reason is because my coaching, especially going forward, my coaching is going to be in sort of three month increments. And so during that time, when someone is trying to find, I'll just give them advice. For those of you who are trying to find what is your message, what is your highest work, the keyword is experimentation. You've got to be willing and open to experiment because you don't know because you have actually, it may surprise you what your highest work is. It has threads with what you currently love and even some of what you're currently doing. But the way it's going to show up may surprise you completely. So I really welcome people who are feeling exploratory phase. I prefer them to come into my free community and to really take the time to explore. I've got a couple of videos specifically about exploring and trying to figure that out. And then when they're ready to kind of invest and say, "All right, I'm going to build a business around this." Of course, we still do some clarifying of the message and structuring the service offering or something. But when you're ready to say, "All right, I'm going to commit to this particular thread "for a while." That's where I really love to help people. - And folks, don't forget the website is ourhighestwork.com. There's a link on nordenspiritradio.org. What you said earlier, George, though, is that if people come to you now, they have to wait three months. So do I understand that if someone's hearing this right now, what they maybe want to do is join the our highest work community by your website, look at videos, start learning it. And maybe they can make an appointment that's for three months down the road. Is that how it works? - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, I open my coaching services three times a year. I take enrollment, sort of like a school does. And I can only sort of limit a number. And it's interesting, you know, Mark, you and I are having this conversation during a working day, but I'm quite leisurely. And the reason is because I could literally, in my schedule, take on more clients, but I purposely limit the commercialization of my time. I limit the hours during the week. And this is such so different from what I used to do. And what I used to teach, and you can imagine business teachers, business consultants would say, you've got to have an ROI, got to have an return on investment for every working minute. You know, you got to be making money all the time. And I used to think that too, right, let's do that. But now I say, no, you've got to set up your career and your business in a way where you are making enough. You've got to be clear about what's enough for you. You've got to make enough. And then as the rest of time, you give, give, give. Because, and the give, give, give is, of course, wonderful for the people you're giving to, the audience that you're serving. But it's also wonderful for your own heart. I am more fulfilled and happy and carefree now than I was when I was making three times as much money. And I'm also making more impact now, thanks to social media. Now I put something out there and all of us can do this. Those of you who are listening right now, you are being called to share your life experience and life lessons with the world in whatever way energizes you. Some of you, it's through Facebook, for some of you, it's through making a video, for some of you, it's blogging. For some of you, just sharing generously your life advice with your friends and family, right? And for some of you, it's through podcasting, you're through a podcast, right? So I purposely limit my commercialized time so I have time to serve in the free community of our highest work. I not only share content, but I also answer questions and other people are also answering your questions. But, and I also facilitate a free group coaching call every month so you can come to that with your questions and I coach you in real time for free. And I'm starting to do what's called co-working sessions. So sometimes we have projects we wanna complete in our business that we're procrastinating on. We struggle with because it's a difficult project. And so these co-working sessions which are free in our highest work that I do them occasionally, is where you come to that and each of us, I do an initial, a few minutes of inspirational pep talk, and then each of us would work on our own project. With the energetic support of everyone else to stay on that call, we work on that for a while and then we celebrate at the end. And we also take a break and mail to check in on progress. But I really hope, in my perspective, Mark, is that most of the people, the vast majority of those who are hearing this, are never going to be my clients for one reason or other. They can't afford my services or, you know, there's not in a room or there's not the perfect type of person I can help. But they can certainly benefit from what I share. And that's what I hope. And that's why I'm always speaking to the maybe 90% who I just want to serve. So I hope that more businesses can take on this perspective because truly it is going to create success for them. It's going to create a better world and they will feel so much better in their business. - You know, you said at the end of those who work alongside each other's sessions that you celebrate at the end. And I was just trying to picture how you do that because I don't think you can share pizza through the phone. How do you do that? - That's so funny you say that. Because that's what my wife was just mentioning. Oh, you guys celebrated, would you guys bring pizza? Well, you could use emoticons these days with pizza emoticons. No, what we do, we celebrate at the end by going around and just taking 30 seconds for each person to say what they got done, that session. And we all kind of give props through the chat, you know, things like that. - So, you know, there's a very key element. We talked about it way back at the beginning, George. It's about this individualism versus community thing. And I'm identifying that more and more as a central issue, particularly in this country. I don't know how true it is for every other country, but this idea of myself and what I do for myself, this is one thing and what I do to the community or with the community energy I give and receive from the community is another thing. How do you think about that? And I see them when we learn how the individual and the community work together as being absolutely key to a better future for our planet. - Yeah, what's interesting is that I recently was hearing about the work of, I think his name is David Sloan Wilson, who wrote a book called Does altruism exist? And through his research, and I'm sure other scientists have discovered this, that in communities, within communities, the individual who is selfish tends to win, at least in the short term. They are the ones who take advantage of other people, they gain power, they gain wealth, we've all seen that. But what's interesting is that communities that are more selfless, that are less selfish, if the community as a whole is more selfless, they tend to win over communities where there's just a bunch of individual selfish people. So nations that are more generous, win over other nations that are more selfish, the companies that are more selfless, win over companies that are more selfish. And so we have to remember, and this really comes down, in my opinion, to our life, a philosophy, our worldview, our spiritual take on things, is that we have to somehow see ourselves as being an integral member of a community. And that we have to think about, how can we be a planet that can succeed together? Because if we're all selfish, as the research has shown, the community loses. We might ourselves win in the short term, but the community loses. But if we want the world to be sustainable and to succeed, we need to say, gosh, I need to live as if the community itself is a whole. If your right hand says, I don't care about the rest of you, Mark, I'm gonna do what's good for me. You're going to be in a world of trouble. But if your right hand says, oh, I'm part of this whole, and if I help the whole thing succeed, I can succeed as well, then the whole being becomes healthy and can serve truly. So I see myself as being part of the business community that if I can be selfless and model good behavior within the business community, the business community can truly serve the customer community, which then has rebel effects beyond that. - There's a lot of wisdom in what you're saying. It's very clear that you're living it. I think you must have encountered one time or another about trying to encourage people to find that they're working the world. The way I've seen it phrased is, you look for the place where your greatest joy meets the world's deepest need. - Yes, absolutely, that was, it's interesting. That quote was popularized in modern times by Frederick Buchner, who was the Christian minister. And what's interesting is that if you trace that quote back, it goes back to Aristotle who said something like that. But it isn't interesting that that idea has been around for thousands of years. It's like the golden rule. It's the idea that if we can pay attention to what the world is calling from us, from our strengths, and we serve that calling, everybody wins. And so I always like to say to my audience, my clients who are in business, interesting, well, how can I make my business financially sustainable? And I always say, listen, money comes from other people. Money doesn't just happen because you were saying affirmations in your closet, and you say, I imagine money and money. The money comes from other people. Other people say, ah, you've got something I want that I find so valuable, I'm gonna pay for it. And so we are forced, say by God or by the universe, through the market, we are forced to provide something that others are willing to pay for. And so we have to say, well, what are others willing to pay for? And that others are willing to pay for lots of things. But out of all those different things, what is my joy? What is my deep gladness? Ah, I will build a business doing that. - Well, you're clearly doing your greatest joy. You found your highest work, I believe. And it's such a gift that your highest work is helping others find their highest work. - I must say. - It's a good agency. - We love it, yeah. - You said you're lucky, but I think it's more than that. I think you're faithful in a very important way for us to learn to be faithful. And some people think faithful means following somebody else's lines. But I think you found what's written within you. And then, okay, I've got the book. Now I just have to live it out. And I can see that you're into the sixth edition already. And there's gonna be much demand for what you've written within your heart and are publishing for the world. So it's really beautiful work that you do. Now again, folks, we've been speaking with George Cowell. His website is ourhighestwork.com. There's a link, as always, on Nordenspiritradio.org. You can join in for free. Be part of the community, the podcast, the video series. And every once in a while, he opens it up and you might wanna have some personal coaching from him. You'll find about that on the website as well. George, beautiful work, beautiful inspiration. I love your spirit and the way it's shining in the world. Thanks for joining me for spirit and action. - Thank you so much, Mark, for your work. I just wanna take a moment to honor you because I was a fan of this podcast before we made contact. And so I wanna thank you for your faithfulness in continuing to bring us people who are really changing the world in generous, sustainable, humble ways. And so I'm just an honor for me to be part of this class of speakers you brought out to this podcast. Thank you. - Again, that was George Cowell, ourhighestwork.com. And folks, because this interview went long, I couldn't broadcast the whole thing. So there are some glittering gems of bonus excerpts on the NortonSpiritRadio.org website that I couldn't include in the broadcast. Crucial Production Help for this program was provided by Andrew Jansen. And we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of NorthernSpiritRadio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC]