Right Livelihood Circles

June 1, 2012

What if you could use your talents and skills to earn a living doing something that excites you and meets a real and relevant need in the world? Would you feel more connected and engaged? More focused? Happier, perhaps? In our first Right Livelihood Circle, we are following a process to align our working lives with our gifts – what we’re good at – and our passions – what we love to do – and ways to discover and satisfy unmet needs in these changing, challenging times. Our goal is to expand the network of earth-friendly businesses that support the activists/entrepreneurs involved and that help us transform our society to a culture that regenerates both people and the planet.

With this ambitious intention, we began with a Pact: a commitment to principles of self-honesty, growth and learning, fidelity to our highest values, collaboration, and willingness to persevere until success is reached. Connecting with others on similar paths makes sense for a lot of reasons, especially because enjoying the journey is an essential part of our success.

You may ask, “Is our work based on anything?” As it turns out, we are lucky to have Dave Pollard, a local resident who has written Finding the Sweet Spot, a book about creating what he calls Natural Enterprises. His book is basically a blueprint for exploiting the advantages that dedicated, conscientious, open-minded people can produce through a combination of self-knowledge, collaboration, effective research and relevant innovation. Difficult as this would be to do alone, we are finding it possible, sustainable and enjoyable to do as a group.

Our Circle as now stabilized into a fairly cohesive, committed dozen people, building skills and rapport as we explore this challenging material. We have been meeting since early April. You can follow our progress in the updates below.

There has also been interest in starting another group on Tuesday or Thursday nights, so if you want to be kept informed, please contact me at: cabot at telus dot net.

If you want to get a taste of this process we are using, you can look at this brief explanation and begin working through the material in these worksheets. I am always happy to share my experiences and offer whatever help I can. Please feel free to shoot me an email!

-cabot