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🦠173: Beautiful Questions for Challenging Times with Steve Morris

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“There’s nothing more powerful than a united group of souls ignited in a common cause with love at the core.” – Steven Morris

Steve Morris is on a mission to help organizations and their leaders rise to their potential to live and work wholeheartedly, while making a positive impact on the world. In this conversation we talk about beautiful questions that reorient one’s life trajectory, moments of truth, and the practice of pivoting, or evolving.

We me after he sent me a handwritten thank you note, then two years later we got to meet in person when I took his 2018 workshop on how to cultivate a life of curiosity. 

Steve’s emphasis on curiosity, conscious business, and wholeheartedness are an inspiration to me, and I know you’ll love his take on how to cultivate habits and a path of choosing curiosity over fear. Be sure to also check out his free Care Package for COVID-19.

What’s on your mind? Submit follow-up questions at http://pivotmethod.com/ask

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://pivotmethod.com/173

Background on the Pivoting Around a Pandemic Podcast Series

Background from our kick-off to this Pivoting Around A Pandemic series, episode 159: With so much happening daily in the world and global economy around coronavirus, we’re all dealing with massive amounts of uncertainty, pivots at work, and for many—fear and anxiety that comes with not only the health concerns, but questions around how to maintain our livelihoods moving forward.

When Momentum member and pandemic expert Dr. Michael J. Consuelos reached out to offer himself as a resource to the JBE team and the MoMo community, I jumped at the chance to record a conversation for all of you as well, which has now turned into a full-blown series:

More about Steven Morris

StevenMorris.jpg

Steve Morris is a brand and culture advisor, author, and speaker. He partners with business leaders to mine, articulate, and activate their unique belief system to create organizational integrity, connected cultures, and evolved brands.

Steve’s book will launch in late 2020, The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Evolve Your Business, Brand & Culture, published by Conscious Capitalism Press.

Over his 25 years in business, Steve has worked with more than 3,000 business leaders at 250+ global and regional companies, helping them build trusted and vital brands, so they spend less time chasing customers and more time earning the trust of the people that matter most.

Steven lives in San Diego with his wife, two boys, and Aussie Shepard mix Cocoa, and is a surfer, yogi, and trail runner. 

Topics Covered

  • Poetry as meditative practice

  • Sweet Darkness poem

  • Darkness as a powerful realm for imagination

  • Heart and courage

  • John O’Donaghue’s workshop on beauty and questions

  • David Whyte’s take on beautiful questions: a question that can’t be answered with the strategic mind; a lived question, a question we experience, one that can re-orient our trajectory or our horizon. Take us from one set of attention or perception into a re-oriented possibility question

  • Form beautiful, heart-based questions that inspire and invigorate you. 

  • What if we saw this time of crisis as a time of awakening? An invitation to instigate and foster our own version of lived artistry?

  • What promises can I make to myself here and now as I experience this crisis that will change me on the other side? 

  • How can I serve? How am I being called to rise? 

  • How can I be more true to myself during this time, and even afterward? 

  • Increased simplicity and self-care in our lives — how will this change us? What if we don’t want to go back to the way things were?

  • What are some potent questions that I can be asking myself to reorient my life trajectory? (aka Pivot)

  • What does team- or self-leadership look like now that I’m quarantined?

  • What does my self-identity look like when my the world as I knew it is changing?

  • The practice of pivoting, evolving

  • What if you were the main character in a movie? What is your moment of truth? 

  • Unseen world of possibility that didn’t exist before

  • The beauty of evolution

  • Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart”

  • What is a leader within a flat organization? 

  • “There’s nothing more powerful than a united group of souls ignited in a common cause with love at the core.”

  • The Beautiful Business: What brands can do. Care for your customers, care for your team; be of service, be unique, what’s in it for them?

  • There are two things brands shouldn’t be doing right now: selling or going silent.

  • "Just like any of us, customers want leadership from brands, which means casting a vision and providing hope. Be there for them, not to sell to them, but to care for them. Ask them what they need, or better yet, anticipate their needs by providing something they haven’t asked for."

  • From Steve: A brand is about character. And character reveals itself during times of crisis. Crisis also reshapes our identity and call parts to us forward that “normal” times don’t.

  • "Flattening the curve" as a metaphor from the business owner perspective: what is the right thing to do now? Survival, 

  • We look with uncertainty (poem)

  • What are the promises you can make to yourself here and now? 

Resources Mentioned

Check out other episodes of the Pivot Podcast here. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen, and if you enjoy the show I would be very grateful for a rating and/or review! Sign-up for my weekly(ish) #PivotList newsletter to receive curated round-ups of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and new tools I’m geeking out on.