How Nature Can Help You Start to Evolve as a Business

“What is your most favourite memory of a time and place in nature and why?”

It’s a question I ask guests on Sustainable: The Podcast. 

Every person who is actively involved in changing the way business works has a connection to nature.

This connection to nature gets lost in conversations as we focus on profit margins, competitive advantage, sustainability and other key business terms.

As I spoke with leaders from some of Europe’s coolest, most innovative and nature connected companies such as MUD Jeans, Vivobarefoot, Opaline, Land of Ed, Elvis & Kresse, Chateau Mauris, and Bio-bean, they shared how their desire to make a greater impact in the world is fuelled by their connection to nature.

The time they spend in nature not only invigorates and refreshes them but it also helps them to gain a deeper sense of who they are and why they want to do business differently. 

Nature helps you evolve as a leader and team

Spending time in nature can help you do this in three key ways.

1.      It improves your health and well-being

2.      You start to experience a relationship with nature and see yourself as part of nature

3.      You receive insights in nature that can help you more meaning and purpose in your life and business

Spending time in nature, in a place where you feel safe, triggers your parasympathetic nervous system.

This is the part of the nervous system that helps you relax and experience less stress – essential for any risk-taking business leader!

Your brain also changes when you spend time in nature. After 90 minutes of walking in natural setting the part of your brain that is responsible for thinking and worrying switches off.

This helps change your brainwave state into a more relaxed wave known as the theta brain wave state. 

Your mind becomes so still that you experience moments of insight, intuition and clarity that you wouldn’t normally be able to access when stressed and worried.

In the theta brainwave state, you are able to not only experience moments of stillness in the mind but you can also lose track of time and feel fully connected to the world around you.

Abraham Maslow, a North American psychologist who studied high achievers, called these experiences ‘peak experiences’. Not only are they essential to help us reach our full potential but most peak experiences happen when people are out in nature!

The one thing you can do with nature to evolve yourself

Creating peak experiences in nature starts through engaging your senses. We’ve been taught that we only have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. However, science is starting to show that we many more than five.

Some recognised additional senses are Thermoception (sense of temperature), nociception (sense of pain), equilibrioception (sense of balance), mechanoreception (sense of vibration) and proprioception (sense of movement).

The premise of my work in connecting people to nature is that we have multiple senses, which are different ways in which we can access sensory information from the environment around us.

Our brain stores the sensory information we receive from the natural world around us and then filters it for meaning, discarding any information that isn’t considered relevant.

In our modern busy world, we’ve trained our brain to switch off to much of our sensory stimulation. To tap into the benefits of nature, we have to re-train ourselves to become present to the natural world around us – even in cities – so that we can access the benefits of spending time in nature no matter where we are.

The more we can do this, the easier it is to access peak experiences, connect to nature’s wisdom and gain insight and understanding that creates more meaning and purpose in our lives – and our businesses.

Practically apply this to your life

Commit to spending a minimum of at least five minutes a day engaging your senses around nature.

You can do this at home with a plant, with a memory of a time spent in nature, sitting in your back yard or a city park as well as in forests, beaches, mountains or any other wilderness area.

Pay attention to size, shape, color, distance, movement, texture, sound, etc of whatever part of nature you are looking at. Activating some of your senses helps engage the others.

It’s not important that you know the names of all fifty-four senses. This is nothing more than an intellectual exercise.

What’s important is that you explore the senses for yourself and see how many you are able to experience.

By focusing on the natural world, you start tapping into more than sixty-seven scientifically researched benefits of spending time in nature that help you decrease stress, anxiety and negative thoughts, improve your mental clarity and focus so you can start to learn from the natural world about how it works.

The more you do this, the easier it becomes until you develop a habit of looking for nature and tapping into its support no matter where you are.

Evolve yourself with nature, evolve your enterprise

 “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

~Albert Einstein

If we wish to create a business that makes a greater impact on the world, then nature is the most obvious place to look for inspiration. The more you engage on a sensory level, the more you notice that can be applied to your business model.

Velcro? was developed in the 1950’s after its inventor, George de Mestral, was outside walking his dog and noticed cockle-burs attached to both himself and his dog. Curious about how they attached themselves, George looked at the burs under a microscope and got his friends in the weaving industry to help mimic the hooking mechanism. 

Today, the company behind Velcro is a public traded company with multi-million-dollar annual revenues that continues to look for nature for insight and inspiration with over 450 patents to its name.

As an entrepreneur, you’re probably familiar with the Pareto Principle, known more commonly as the 80/20 rule. The rule states that 80 percent of your results are going to come from 20 percent of your effort.

In the 1920’s Italian economist Alfred Pareto looked for a way to explain land ownership. While in his garden picking peas, Alfred noticed that 80 percent of the peas came from just 20 percent of the pods. When he applied the same principle to land ownership he found it was roughly the same.

Today, the 80/20 rule is used in multiple industries all around the world.

These are only two examples of many businesses that are inspired by nature!

Get the competitive advantage

In the report, ‘Better Business, Better World’, published by the Business and Sustainable Development Commission earlier this year, sustainable business, or business that makes a greater impact, is an emerging $12 trillion-dollar market and could create up to 380 million jobs by 2030.

This emerging trillion-dollar market puts the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), 17 global goals that focus on creating a sustainable world, at the core of this emerging market. An additional $8 trillion dollars could be generated by existing enterprises putting the SDG’s at the core of their business model.

The only way to tap into this market is to put impact at the core of what you do. More and more consumers are making choices with every purchase they make. When you show your customers that you care about the world, you gain brand loyalty and customers for life who will champion your cause.

Many of the companies leading the transition to sustainable business are putting social and environmental impact first with great results.

B Corp is a growing movement of people using business as a force for good. With 2,221 business from over 50 countries and 130 industries, many of these organisations are driven by people who have a connection to nature and a desire to bring business back into harmony with the Earth and its resources.

Out of the seven companies I mentioned at the start of this post, five are B Corps. They are learning from nature how to create products with no waste, mimic natural processes and how to create new ways of working that benefit all life on Earth.

Nature is an entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur, especially an evolved entrepreneur, the way you think and act is already far more aligned with nature than you’re probably consciously aware of.

You’re also in the unique position of being able to take greater risks and pioneer the success of business models that are truly aligned with nature far quicker than corporate organisations.

Nature possesses six key principles that enable it to function in a way that supports life on Earth; resilient, optimising, adaptive, systems-based, values-based and life supporting.

As an entrepreneur, you have to be resilient. You see change and disturbance as opportunities for growth and are able to bounce quickly back after unpredictable events happen in your business.

You are continually exploring how your business can become better and look at how you can make the most effective use (optimisation) of a situation, product or resource.

You look at how to adapt your business when resources and opportunities emerge. If you’re an online business then you’re continually adapting your marketing depending on the data you receive from your clients and customers.

Instead of understanding your business as a separate entity, you consider how it functions as part of a complex system that includes market trends, your clients and customers, business legislation, etc. You can only understand how your business functions if you consider it as part of a bigger system.

You take time to consider what’s important to you and the communities in which you serve through your business. You allow your values to drive your business growth and measure what’s important to you, which includes, as an evolved entrepreneur, the positive impact your business has on the world.

Lastly, you consider whether the service and product you offer supports life by looking at how to incorporate water-based, renewable, bio-based and biodegradable processes into its production and explore how you can leverage information and innovation in improving your services and products.

This last principle – life-supporting - for me, is what distinguishes a true evolved entrepreneur from one who is only interested in growth and profit margins.

Action to align your business with nature

Here’s five action steps that you can take today to help you evolve your enterprise with nature (and get the competitive advantage):

1.      Ensure nature is a key part of your personal and business well-being program

A simple pot plant on your office desk can boost productivity by 38% and creativity by 45% while nature views from the workplace reduce absenteeism and presenteeism. Increased productivity means increased profits.

2.      Take the B Impact Assessment

This free assessment helps you identify the social and environmental impact your business makes and gives clear suggestions on what you need to do to improve it.

3.      Identify which Sustainable Development Goals your business supports

Look at this list of the SDG’s. Once you know how you are helping the world to achieve these Global Goals communicate it through your marketing and communications.

4.      Get clear on the ways in which your organisation creates waste and figure out how to reduce it

Bio-bean, is the world’s first company to create bio-fuel from coffee waste. They identified a waste resource from other organisations and found a way to create something valuable from it. Take a couple of hours to go over your business model and identify any ways that you are missing an opportunity to turn waste into value.

5.      Develop your own sustainability strategy

A growing number of governmental organisations, non-profits and corporates are making decisions on who supplies their products and services based upon their commitment to sustainability. Ensure you are ahead of the competition by creating your own basic sustainability strategy.

Which ones are you going to implement in your business today?

If you'd like to know more about how you can enhance your relationship with nature and become capable of creating the systemic transformational change needed to help create a sustainable world, I'd love to hear from you!