Instead of Competition
“Life, rather than money, is the appropriate standard for evaluating economic choices and performance.”
David Korten (www.davidkorten.org)
As a parent, a small business owner and a coach, the theme of competition features regularly as an antagonism. When my children compare themselves unfavourably to others, I want to remind them of their strengths and beautiful uniqueness. When other coaches, who see themselves as being in competition with me, avoid engaging in conversation, I want to ask them about their contribution and the choices we can jointly offer our clients. When my clients decline themselves permission to do their life’s work because they fear someone else might already have done it, I want to encourage them to go ahead and do what makes their hearts sing.
This unwilling urge to compare ourselves to others, favourably or otherwise, to compete head on, to battle it out regardless, to compete, is what can actually get in the way of our businesses thriving.
What’s Wrong with Competition?
We are taught to compete from an early age, often at school, but sometimes even before that. Competition is sometimes presented as being “healthy” as a way to encourage us (or more often encourage our parents) to sanction it. So, it becomes written into our conditioning as something that’s ok. Later in life, as business owners, our competitive experiences colour our behaviour in “the marketplace”, which now replaces the sports fields or the academic streaming systems of our youth.
As a result of this, many of us find ourselves unconsciously acting from a place of desperation, neediness, in our business dealings. We believe that we must win at all costs in order to survive in business and this often results in us giving of our worst with manipulative, aggressive or fearful behaviour.
What Else is There?
With sustainable business we can do things differently. We can give ourselves permission to re-write the rules on competition and to realign ourselves with the three Ps – people, planet, profit.
What do other living systems do when faced with “doing business” together? Our scientific understanding of how the natural world works has changed. According to David Korten in “The Great Turning”, we used to think (Newtonian physics) that only matter is real but we now know (quantum physics) that relationships are real and matter is an illusion. We used to think (old biology) that there is individualistic competition for survival and that life is a series of battles. We now know (new biology) that life exists only in cooperative relationship to other life and that the species that survive and thrive are those that find their place of service to others.
Life is therefore about community and cooperation rather than about battles. We used to think (ancient psychology) that our happiness depends on the quality of our relationships, not the quantity of our possessions. We now know (modern psychology) that this is still true today, except that we keep forgetting about it!
How does that translate to how we do business?
Instead of “identifying a gap in the market”, we can “identify our unique offering to the world”. How can I best be of service to humanity and the planet? What makes my heart sing?
Instead of seeking to “outperform the competition”, we can simply “give of our best”.
Instead of asking “What’s wanted?” we can ask “What problems exist and which of them do I excel in solving?”
Instead of “avoiding the competition”, we can “collectively offer choice.”
Instead of fearing our competitors, we can welcome them as fellow problem solvers and sources of choice.
In life and in business, there is space for each of us to find our place in the service of others, mindful that our happiness and success depends not on the quantity of our possessions or the number of battles won, but on the quality of our relationships and on our cooperative relationship to others.
September 9, 2010
Posted in: Ethical Shopping
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