Being Before Doing: Inner Development in Business

Earlier this week, my collaborator Nadine and I arrived in Arcos de Valdevez in Northern Portugal. We came to spend several days on the regenerative farm of Maria do Céu Bastos—a member of our Inner Development community—to help paint walls, cook meals together, and talk about how inner work connects with the land.

We arrived with our laptops and tidy agendas, ready to talk about sustainability and resilience as thoughtful concepts.

Then the wildfires started.

Flames broke out in the dry eucalyptus and pine hills just northeast of the farm. Within hours, thick smoke rolled into the valley, turning the midday sky a sullen orange. Canadair water planes and firefighting helicopters roared low over the roof, dipping down to the river to scoop water. By evening, a local telecommunications mast burned down, and our phones and internet went completely dark.

With emergency go-bags packed by the front door and cats in carriers, resilience stopped being a neat slide deck. It landed right in the body.

When Resilience Stops Being a Concept

Most business advice treats resilience like an operational checklist: backup servers, diverse income streams, automated sales funnels, and emergency cash reserves. Those things have their place, but they are external tools. They belong entirely to the realm of doing.

When the sky fills with smoke and the signals die, you realize very quickly that tools cannot steady a dysregulated nervous system. An algorithm cannot hold your fear, and an online audience cannot walk over with a hot pot of soup.

This is where inner development in business moves from an interesting personal interest into the very foundation of how we work and live. In the Inner Development Goals (IDG) framework, the first and most fundamental dimension is Being—relationship to self. Before you make a decision, draft an offer, or respond to a crisis, the state of your inner soil dictates how you show up.

1. The Being Dimension: Inner Grounding When the Signals Go Dark

When the cell tower burned and communication cut off, something fascinating happened. Inside the house, Maria calmly set her phone aside to tend to the animals, check the wind direction, and close the shutters against the ash.

Miles away, family members who could not reach us began to worry. Modern communication tools have trained our nervous systems into chronic urgency. If someone fails to reply within thirty minutes, our minds immediately invent catastrophe. We traded the quiet wisdom of “no news is good news” for continuous, low-grade adrenaline.

Inner development in business asks us to build a different kind of nervous system. It calls for the capacity to sit with silence, hold uncertainty, and find an internal anchor when external inputs vanish. In my book Business Like We’re Human, I describe this as waking up from the industrial machine. Industrial conditioning teaches us that stillness is laziness and reaction is productivity. Conscious business asks us to root down first, so our actions come from calm presence rather than fear.

2. The Thinking Dimension: Complexity Over Knee-Jerk Fixes

Wildfires in Southern Europe are not simple occurrences. They are entangled with climate change, rural abandonment, the planting of commercial eucalyptus monocultures, and decades of extractive forestry policies. You cannot look at the smoke and point to one isolated villain.

The IDG dimension of Thinking encompasses critical thinking, complexity awareness, and perspective-taking. In business, we often reach for shallow, linear solutions. Sales are down? Buy ads. Feeling exhausted? Download a productivity app. Overwhelmed? Hire a virtual assistant to run the machine faster.

Linear thinking treats symptoms while feeding the underlying fire. Complexity awareness gives values-led entrepreneurs the patience to look at root causes. It invites us to examine how our business architecture, our pricing models, and our definition of success either feed extraction or restore life.

3. The Relating Dimension: The Ubuntu Mindset and Social Soil

For decades, conventional culture celebrated hyper-independence: build your empire alone, rely on nobody, scale to seven figures from your laptop on a beach. You see the extreme end of this mindset in billionaires purchasing private islands and underground bunkers.

Out on the farm, surrounded by smoke, the illusion of hyper-independence evaporated. A million social media followers cannot carry a water hose. A digital dashboard cannot watch your perimeter while you sleep.

What protected Maria’s farm was her local social soil. Years ago, Maria began dropping into the municipal library, donating books, having tea with the librarian, and chatting with neighbors over garden fences. When the fires neared, those relationships stepped forward. Neighbors phoned every half hour. Someone arrived at the door with a hot pot of dinner. People offered spare rooms in safer hamlets down the valley.

This is the Ubuntu Mindset I write about in Chapter 6 of Business Like We’re Human: “I am because we are.” We are woven into each other and into the living Earth. You cannot build a resilient, conscious business without deep relational roots. Relational marketing and collaborative partnerships are not clever customer-acquisition tactics; they are your actual community safety net.

That relationship extends to the more-than-human world. Waking up at 3:00 AM to pitch-black smoke and hearing an owl call out from the trees brings a sudden, visceral grief. The fire burns through the homes of foxes, nesting birds, and mountain cows who cannot pack a bag. Recognizing our kinship with nature changes how we price, how we consume, and how we run our businesses.

4. Collaborating & Acting: Showing Up in the Present Moment

Even with the sky full of smoke and go-bags resting by the door, the rhythm of the farm did not freeze into panic. We walked out to the arbor and picked sweet, sun-warmed grapes straight from the vines. We stood in the kitchen chopping fresh garden tomatoes, beans, and eggplant for lunch. We gathered quince for jam.

This touches the final two IDG dimensions: Collaborating and Acting. When crisis or market uncertainty hits, the unexamined reflex is either frenzied hustle or frozen resignation. Grounded action looks different. It focuses on the concrete task directly in front of you—tending the soil beneath your feet, sharing a meal around the table, and caring for the people within reach.

In business, acting from Being means we stop reacting to every industry panic or algorithmic change. We make offers based on genuine human service. We price with fairness and transparency. We choose unhurried pace over manufactured speed.

Tending Your Inner Soil: Three Inquiries for Conscious Founders

If you want to bring inner development into your daily business operations, start with these three grounded questions:

1. Where are you acting from hyper-independence? Where in your business are you carrying all the weight alone out of habit, and who could you invite in for honest partnership and co-creation?
2. How steady is your nervous system when the digital noise stops? When you step away from screens and incoming notifications, can you rest in your own presence without reaching for distraction?
3. What social soil are you feeding? Are you spending your energy chasing fleeting vanity metrics, or are you building genuine relationships with peers, clients, and neighbors who would show up if the power went out?

Frequently Asked Questions

“`