On the new economy: part 1

Reflections on a New Economy of Generosity

Before the world fell to its knees in mid-March due to coronavirus, I had been contemplating a better way to work for a few years. In university I quit the only Economics class I took within a few weeks because I disagreed with a fundamental assumption that was taught to me as truth - "resources are scarce and people are selfish." In my heart I could not understand this central tenet and could not bear to exist in a room that took that perspective as unquestionable fact and refused to think bigger or more creatively.

I started to really find my groove lately bringing wellness into corporate environments and working as an intuitive healer. As I grow in my learning of indigenous cultures and connecting to my own ancestors, I still believe we exist in an abundant universe, it is just about how we relate to those eco-systems and interconnections that determine our wealth. Relationships are at the heart of my life - I cannot imagine a life without deep and meaningful personal relationships.

My job is immensely fulfilling and I did (and still do) feel incredibly blessed to be doing wellness work that feels very aligned to my soul.

While it was never really consciously part of my 'plan' to work in corporate environments as a youth, I found myself working a soul crushing job after graduation from university. I would answer phone calls, emails and live chats all day helping to defuse conflict, solve customer service problems and make some very entitled people more happy in a call center.

Ironically, during those 8 hour shifts working for a wellness company sitting in front of the computer, sometimes dealing with some difficult emotions, I started to become ill. It was hard to get out of bed in the mornings. My body would give unexplained severe symptoms of colds, flus, stomach issues, acne - basically any message it could to get me to change.

I couldn't figure out why working for a wellness company was making me sick. I quit after just a few months of making barely above minimum wage, feeling very disillusioned. Moreover, I felt deeply sad that a company I believed so deeply in (the products were very healing for myself and so many people) did not truly practice what they preached.

The executives lived lives that felt so removed from the reality of most of their staff. The Christmas parties for the head office were unnecessarily and excessively lavish and extravagant, with aerial silks dancers in expensive venues and champagne poured on the floor bottle by bottle - without even really being shared or enjoyed. Other friends at the company felt burnt out and underappreciated. Especially at the retail store level where people were so passionate about healing, yet paid so little and not afforded any of the ridiculous luxuries of the head office Christmas parties.

I started to see a heartbreaking disconnect... The leaders of the company were not living their values. They were using lip service and broad scale beautiful marketing to share a vision that many of their employees felt was not really embodied or practiced. I started to see how the executives didn't really care about the 'lower level workers.'

There seemed to be a disconnect between departments, between retail stores and head office, almost like as employees we were only valuable for our labour and we were disposable if we were not productive enough. This lack of appreciation resulted in extremely high turn over. Everyone I knew when I joined the company excited and passionately at their store level, eventually quit like I did. No one really stayed longer than a year or two. No one really addressed the glaring hierarchical elephant in the room.

At the Christmas party of my first ever corporate job, I came face to face with the couple that ran that international wellness company. The woman was nice enough. The man was clearly a misogynist. My friend was with me and didn't want to be hugged by the male executive, she made that clear with her words and body language before he approached. He hugged her awkwardly and invaded her physical boundaries anyways. He turned to me and asked which department I worked in, I told him I worked in customer experience. I'll never forget the way he looked at me with hardly a shred of interest, replied with these very curt yet cutting words ' Oh. You work on the floor below us.' After this strange response he immediately turned away from me before hearing my response and talked to someone else he deemed more important, more interesting, more worth his time.

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Corporate environments do not have to be destructively hierarchical in my opinion. There is a way to lead a successful business that values each employees contributions. A circular approach to leadership, one guided my a set of shared values and visions can be so powerful.

My dad is a beautiful example of a grounded, humble and soft spoken CEO that quietly makes sure that his employees have the best resources, perks and pay that he can offer. When Covid-19 hit, my parents decided to go without their own salary to keep their business afloat and keep as many people as they can still employed. Because that's the right thing to do.

At the Christmas parties of my parent's company I saw year after year, stunning and kind quiet expressions of generosity. Everyone gets a gift and a bonus. Everyone gets a beautiful meal at a nice restaurant and can bring a spouse or a friend.

My parents grew up in poverty. They were immigrants from India to England, growing up in an intensely racist Birmingham. My dad had one pair of pants as a teenager and lived with his older brother while his parents and the rest of his large rural farming family lived in India or abroad. My mom was 9 months old when she moved to England with my grandmother to meet my grandfather who had come to England with hardly any money. No one would hire my grandad in the 1960s even though he had a university degree from India - he worked at a post office and taking tickets on the bus, probably facing unfathomable racism.

My grandfather decided to get his British teaching certificate and completed his training. He taught high school math for many years, even taking on family counselling and multicultural advocacy roles in his community. My grandmother found an amazing job working in the court system, teaching English to inmates in prisons. She later spent years teaching herself healing modalities such as reflexology, ayurveda, nutrition and herbs and compiling ancestral wisdom that has been passed down from generation to generation. I come from a family of resourceful, determined, creative and intelligent immigrants who found their way to success by positively contributing to society in any way they could, because they had to in order to survive.

Even now, racial inequality is evident in business and economic spheres. When my dad goes to a meeting, out for a work related meal or to networking event, people frequently mistake another manager at the company who is with him, as the CEO of the company. He gets overlooked as being the CEO because he doesn't reflect the image that we are conditioned to believe a boss is. He doesn't dress or look or act like the typical CEO. The only real difference between the outward appearance of my dad and this particular manager at his company that other people repeatedly mistake as the CEO of the company, is the colour of their skin. My mom only recently started correcting others when they mistake other white men as the CEO of my dad's company instead of acknowledging the leadership role he actually occupies and has occupied for the past 20 years.

This is an example of subconscious bias, how deep ingrained conditioning leads to incorrect assumptions.

Who do you imagine when you think of a CEO? Be honest. Who do you think actually has the best chance to become a CEO? The stereotype reflects a large portion of our reality. Look at a list of the world's wealthiest CEOs to see how homogenous the demographic still is. These people hold an enormous amount of economic power. That's all changing now. The patriarchy is crumbling.

So I have been contemplating how corporate environments can be healthier for a long time. Teaching yoga and meditation since 2012 was always my side gig. After teaching violence prevention, consent and empowerment in high schools for the past three years I took the leap a while back to start my own corporate wellness business. It has been the best journey of my working career to be my own boss.

I am the CEO of me and even during the time when I didn't have enough money in the bank to even pay for a coffee, it has been worth it.

Building a better world by introducing non hierarchical leadership and wellness education, sharing my ancestral practices of embodiment and spirituality, teaching transformational lunch and learns with other amazing facilitators and sometimes being able to hire other yoga teachers to pay them twice their normal rate in a studio - these are ever days I am endlessly grateful for. I am thankful for the sacrifices of my ancestors so that I can share our collective gifts and be of service. I can do what I do because I decided to alchemize my own pain and draw upon my strengths, but it wouldn't have been possible without the deep sacrifices and intergenerational trauma of my family.