My Spiritual journey as an Independent Consultant

An evolving e-book by Jean Roberts
Director, Roberts Management Concepts Pty Ltd
PO Box 51 Toorak 3142 Victoria, Australia
Ph: 61 3 9827 7997 Fax: 61 3 9827 7571
email: jean@jeanroberts.com.au

What is an e-book?
This book will develop slowly through 2008 and 2009 – inviting comment or queries from any reader or website visitor.

Why this topic?
In moving further into my senior years, I continue to share my spiritual journey with women and men of all ages. And, interestingly, many women and men – again of all ages – are similarly sharing their own spiritual journeys with me. This confirms my understanding of an increasing interest in spiritual conversations and understanding.

By spiritual, I do not mean conversations connected with or grounded upon established or new religions or dogmas.

I adopted these three principles around the time that I turned forty:

Why now?
Having completed and recently published my first e-book on the topic ‘Riding the Waves of Community Development in Australia – since the 1970s’, it seems appropriate to now share my personal journey through the same period, in particular, my journey as an independent consultant working with and within the nonprofit sector in Australia and beyond.

As a self-employed and independent consultant since 1985, I have been responsible for all aspects of my business – ranging from the innovative through to the mundane. Setting priorities, deciding which services to offer and how to offer them, keeping up to date with trends and opportunities, enjoying the good times, and most importantly, supporting myself through the rough and tough times which can be quite a challenge.

It has been necessary to build a strong bond with my ‘inner-self’ – as my confidante, to challenge my assumptions, to check my values and to determine my direction. And often, these have all been necessary at the same time!

During these years, I have kept a personal journal – not so much about my activities, but of my thoughts, feelings, questions and answers – as a means of knowing, understanding and appreciating myself and others. It is in fact a spiritual journal – a record of my spiritual journey.

Introduction to this e-book

There have been many highlights in my journey, and one of these is reflected in this extract from my conference paper titled "Women Entrepreneurs – a Case Study", presented at the 2nd International Conference on Entrepreneurship: Building the Future, in Rennes – St Malo, France, in October of 1999.

Entrepreneurial women begin their apprenticeship as innovators through a process of trial and error, gradually finding their way through the maze of ideas and opportunities, options and alternatives, implications and possibilities, fact and opinion, evidence and intuition, risk and reward, cost and investment, outcomes and consequence, regret and celebration. For some, this apprenticeship becomes a recognized and acknowledged mastery early in life, perhaps through a series of innovative accomplishments either as an individual, as a member of a team or through a group of people who are called 'an organisation'. For others, this apprenticeship lasts a lifetime and it is only in the glowing years called 'the age of wisdom' that they look back and see the until-now hidden evidence of mastery.

But I must begin by stating that I have only recently acknowledged within myself that I have completed my apprenticeship. This enlightenment began with receipt of the blue brochure advertising this Conference and inviting papers on the theme of 'women entrepreneurs'. This blue brochure was the external catalyst that started my mind thinking actively about what being an entrepreneur (and a woman entrepreneur at that!) is all about. This blue brochure stimulated a sequence of retrospection in my mind, culminating in my decision to respond to the invitation for papers.

My paper introduced something I had been practicing for many years, and I gave this practice the title of Retrospective Planning -

All planning is useful: but retrospective planning is a particularly useful tool, especially for entrepreneurs.

Retrospective planning is the ability to direct your attention back over a series of actions taken over a period of time after the impact of those actions has become tangible and real in order to recognise and appreciate:
1. Purpose,
2. Form,
3. Structure,
4. Rhyme,
5. Rhythm, and
6. Reasons.

Retrospective planning also allows objective observation, where the emotional component can be suspended during silent and unaccompanied reflection. For myself as a long-term small business owner/manager, this has enabled my acknowledgment of the fact of my survival as such. At least I can recognize that I've come through my years of self-employment, surviving and withstanding the substantial factors and reasons for small business failure in years 1, 2, 5 and 10 of operation that are the subject of continual and extensive research, study and publication throughout the world.

The process of retrospective planning requires a cluster of return journeys, a sequence of mind-travel to look over previous activity and non-activity. And the act and benefit of 'looking' is always advanced if we are using the relevant magnifying lens.

How did my spiritual journey as an independent consultant begin?

For me, being self-employed has been the means of my steep learning curve in spiritual growth.

My paternal great grandfather travelled from Montenegro by sailing ship in the 1850s at the age of 18, and was of the Catholic faith. He settled in Colac, Victoria, where he married Elizabeth who had arrived here from England. My grandfather was one of their seven children, and he may have had some influence of my father’s decision as a young man to become closely involved with the Methodist Church. My father continued this close involvement until his death in 1976.

Consequently, I was born into an active Methodist family, and remained an active Methodist until marriage, building our own house, having no car and only a week-day bus service, and with two very small sons meant we could no longer attend the Methodist church in which we had married. However, we were able to walk to a small local congregation which we found to be a Full Gospel or charismatic congregation.

In this congregation, I was faced with an understanding of God that was new to me. I had always thought of God as sitting on a throne, in Heaven and therefore not personally accessible to me as a young wife and mother, facing the reality of what was to become known as ‘suburban isolation’. There were many housing estates taking shape in what were then the outer suburbs – ours was just 12 miles from the centre of the City of Melbourne. This was in 1958.

However, back in 1952, this estate had been shaped with street names on unmade streets, with no sewerage and no electricity or gas connections to the blocks. We bought ‘Lot 51’ in 1952 and at the beginning of 1954, paid for four light poles to bring electricity to our block from Burwood Road, the nearest electricity supply. We were the first to start building in our short street, and as other houses were built over the next three or four years, the owners of these houses purchased access to these light poles from us.

When our second son was 4 years old, in 1962, our road and footpaths were made, and we had the telephone connected. Sewerage was available years later.

As you can glean from this short description that my life was a busy one and the paradigm shift of an accessible God – after a life-time of a seemingly inaccessible God – had to be managed within the busyness of daily existence. Through the next twenty five years, my spiritual belief gradually and slowly moved to a ready acceptance of a personal god – in fact I was by then thinking of this personal god as a ‘god-ness’, and most importantly, a god-ness within which I lived, moved and had my being.

Grappling with God!

A strong memory is an actual moment that I refer to as ‘grappling with God’. It came as a result of many attempts to establish direct conversation with Him. I wanted to do his will, but couldn’t be sure of what his will was for me. So, in a specific moment of time when I felt confused, abandoned, overwhelmed by circumstances and almost totally without faith in any future that would be God-centred, I spoke loudly and directly to him.

In my mind’s eye, I saw myself as taking God by the throat and shaking him vigorously to get his attention – demanding that he talk directly to me. I wanted desperately to be ‘one with him’ and to be aware of his presence and strength every step of my journey through this life. Life in total felt like a huge burden that I didn’t have the strength to carry alone.

I felt weighed down with everyday things – which seemed to fill my thoughts and feelings. After my desperate talk with him, which was an actual time and place, I expected my ‘load’ to be miraculously lifted and my feet to be planted on a different path. However, as the days and weeks passed by, I became slowly aware that ‘the everyday’ and ‘the mundane’ were how God intended to continue to talk to me. He had truly been talking, but I hadn’t recognised his voice. ‘My how you’ve changed since I’ve changed’ is a favourite saying of mine since that time - because I changed to seeing everyday things as discourse with God. And of course this opened for me a 24 hour communication channel that had always existed. A patient God indeed!

So began the keeping of my spiritual journal in 1986. I had divorced in 1983, entered self-employment in 1985, and have been from that time solely responsible for the financing of myself and my personal and business responsibilities.

Here are a few thoughts from my spiritual journal, written in 1996 and 1998:

Heart-singing (1996)

You do things that make your heart sing. Your heart doesn’t sing because you are doing these things: you do them because your heart is singing.

The heart doesn’t sing because of what you do. The heart sings because you open your heart and are tuned into the Universe through your emotions. It is a combination of thought and emotion which creates. It is the singing of your heart which creates the things that you do. Your heart sings, therefore you do. Your heart sings, therefore you create.

It’s like the RKO signal. There are waves of energy, joy, healing, light and love emanating from you because your heart sings.

The now moment - Christ Consciousness (1998)

We are just beginning to see and understand the majesty and the power of the now moment.

It is the essence of creativity. Not so much the now moment - but the understanding, the grasping of the now moment.

If we understand the majesty and the power of the now moment, then we create the now moment. We harness the energy of the now moment and produce an outcome through the harnessing of that energy.

If we understand that we live in the now moment, that we live and move and have our being in the knowledge that everything we think and feel and say and do carries the majesty of eternity and infinity and the Universe with it. Here we have creative energy.

Listen, do you want to know a secret? (1998)

This is the most important secret that you can share and expand and fill in the detail with all the people that you mix and move with, that you work with, that you relate to.

People are what and where and who they know they are.

And that’s the secret. That’s what you have to find. That’s the secret even to people themselves – to know what they know about themselves.

They have a perception of themselves, and that perception leads to an understanding of themselves. It is that understanding which either limits or facilitates or motivates or inflates their sense of self. This is the knowledge base from which they make decisions.

It begins with the perception of themselves. There’s the literal perception, and there’s the interpretation of that literal perception.

Now, to bring people along, to give them the opportunity to expand, to grow, to blossom, to develop – you have to find what is their perception. If their perception of themselves is that they are power-less, that everybody is against them, that their benefactors are actually their enemy, that nobody loves them – then that is the understanding that they will operate from.

No matter what message you give them, the knowledge base they operate from is their perception of themselves. And that’s what you must find, that’s where you work from.

Your question is: ‘How do you see yourselves: how do you understand who you are and what you are?’

Their response is: ‘Listen to me - this is what I understand about myself, this is what I know.’

Together, you move from and with that understanding.

Peace (1998)

There is peace of mind, because the mind controls the body. How the mind thinks and feels determines how the body responds - whether it’s alert and alarmed, or whether it’s restful.

Peace of heart is the peace of the emotions. It’s being able to keep your emotions on a safe, even keel - not slipping into anxiety, not slipping into fretfulness or worry - but just flowing.

And there’s a peace of spirit. And the peace that passes all understanding - Christ Consciousness.

Overview of this e-book structure, and scheduled release of chapters: