What Seeks to Emerge from Within?
It’s a prompt that leads us on a new journey, diverging from cultural conditioning and embarking on a courageous journey of self-discovery
“What seeks to emerge from within me?” is a question I find myself asking more often. Merely asking the question is freeing — that some form of spaciousness opens within, enabling a shift from thinking in terms of shoulds and shouldn’ts to feeling into “What if?” and “What else is possible?”
It’s not that thinking is bad, but rather to seek a balance of thinking and feeling. And I would say that as we ask, “What seeks to emerge from within?” we’re not just feeling but allowing. It’s an invitation to allow what comes to come, and what is pushing to the surface to surface. All of it. The comforting, the reassuring, the loving and accepting, as well as the painful, uncomfortable, and scary.
We can also ask ourselves what seeks to emerge in an organization, a community, a religion, a local government, and so on. We can ask in a family, in a relationship. We can ask in relation to a career direction, how we treat our body, how we eat, pray, meditate, recreate, and so on.
We can ask our loved ones what seeks to emerge from within them and see what they say. They may look at you a little oddly as they try to figure out what you’re really asking. But you can encourage them to ask the question of themselves without the need to share the answer. The value is in asking and then observing. Asking and allowing, asking and clearing the mind for the unexpected to arise.
In traditional marketing and MBA schooling we’re taught to find an unmet need in the “marketplace” and then fulfill it. Finding a new unmet need is considered the holy grail for launching a new business. It’s the way (as the narrative goes) to be competitive, to grow a business, to make money, and succeed.
Even though there are numerous celebrated examples of businesses that launch products and services that are not new or necessarily innovative, but rather they’re different in the way they bring their products and services to market.
In 1991 David Neeleman founded JetBlue with two leased Airbus A320 planes and a single route from Buffalo to Fort Lauderdale. The airline business was not new at the time, not even discount carriers such as JetBlue. But JetBlue was celebrated for its innovation.
What was the unmet need they fulfilled?
Simple— treating their customers with respect. Which, by the way, was also not new, as Southwest Airlines had been doing it for decades. But JetBlue succeeded because there was (and is) a strong demand for all kinds of businesses that truly value their customers.
What is perhaps new or different about treating customers with respect is that so few large companies actually do. If you don’t believe me, just call up your electrical provider or cable TV or cell phone carrier with a question about your account and notice the experience. Most likely it will take you a while to reach a real person, and when you do you’ll likely be transferred around. When you finally reach a real person and ask them a question they don’t know the answer to, they’ll repeat your question as though they truly understand it, put you on “a brief hold,” after which they’ll read from a script. I’ve experienced several occasions of reps hanging up on me when they didn’t know the answer to my question.
This isn’t respect. And yet we all expect it when we pay for a service and even yearn for it as a basic human need.
The most enduring, legendary brands are companies that truly value their customers, such as Apple, Zappos, Starbucks, Tesla, Southwest Airlines, Disney, Ritz-Carlton, and others. These companies endure in crowded markets because they’re different in the way they value their customers, and I would argue that this mere fact alone invalidates the age-old maxim of finding an unmet need and fulfilling it.
I’m not saying there aren’t unmet needs — there are. I’m merely saying they’re rare and hard to find. And yet, marketing experts and academics continue to preach the mantra of unmet needs merely because it’s logical and they can point to examples of it working in some instances.
But in reality, finding them in the modern world is extremely challenging, and when we do find one there are ten other companies already zeroing in on the same unmet need. Which means that within a short time it will no longer be an unmet need. This is the dog chasing its tail.
But there’s a different way.
It’s not dreaming up the next invention or service no one is providing in a particular geographic market, or a new app no one has thought of. It’s not buying a franchise to service an unsaturated market. It’s not a new twist on hotdogs or dim sum. It’s subtle and powerful, and yet it’s not new.
It’s soooo simple that when we think of it we tend to dismiss it as over simplistic, or we tell ourselves it’s too cliché.
Are you ready for it?
It’s merely doing what we love to do and doing it with kindness and generosity.
It’s looking within and asking, “What seeks to emerge?” and then observing what comes up.
But all too often such an approach is sidetracked by what we’re told about how the world works. We want to do something different, and our social conditioning tells us to look at how others are doing it and emulate them. This approach is stiff and formulaic. It’s not looking within and finding what seeks to emerge. It’s not authentic. It’s not generous. It’s merely following the crowd.
I’m not saying this approach is wrong. It’s just not authentic.
Organizations with strong cultures know who they are and what they stand for. Translation: they have well-defined brands. With a well-defined brand the values of the organization are clear and clearly communicated. Thus employees, vendors, customers, investors, and the community have something meaningful to align around.
This is what engenders a strong culture. But not if it’s inauthentic. Enron’s website said they valued, “respect, integrity, communication and excellence,” when clearly they didn’t.
How do we develop authentic brands? By asking, “What seeks to emerge?” and paying attention to what comes up and how it feels.
This is a revolutionary concept, by the way.
Traditional organizational thinking is about following the crowd. The problem with following the crowd is that it’s based on a premise of success defined as financial prosperity.
Asking, “What seeks to emerge?” is based on a different premise. It’s about something that lives within us on a deeper level than mere financial performance. It’s about living and working in integrity with the truth of who we are. Which translates to an offering, an approach, a product or service, a relationship, a church, or local government that is generous and kind.
It also implies (and requires) that we trust that doing what feels right is also the best path to success in the way we define it (which includes financial but doesn’t rest solely on the money).
If we look within, discover what seeks to emerge, then bring that to the world, and then we fall flat, it’s not that the method failed but that there is a deeper level within us that is seeking to emerge that we haven’t yet fully tapped into.
How do we access that deeper level? By asking again and again. By being still so we may hear the voice of our intuition speaking to us through the silence.
It also means (and this is the scary part) that we listen to the voice that calls us to a grander version of ourselves. Because when we dismiss the voice calling us to a grander version of ourselves, we’ll be forced to go down a path that is not fully authentic, which will lead to spotty and inconsistent success. The closer we are to living our truth the higher the likelihood that we’ll embody all the measures of success as we define it.
“Grander” doesn’t have to mean fame and fortune or driving a yellow Corvette at age 50. In this context, grander simply means we’re bringing our true gifts to the world more fully, whatever those gifts may be. It could mean opening a sandwich shop on 5th Avenue and bringing joy to busy workers through the food and service you provide. It could mean adopting five children and giving them the best life they could possibly have. It could mean writing code for a revolutionary new app (in this case an unmet need). It could mean meditating for four hours a day and praying for peace in the world. It could mean any number of things, so long as it’s your truth.
Asking, “What seeks to emerge from within?” is the prompt that leads us on a new journey, diverging from cultural conditioning and embarking on a courageous journey of self-discovery.
And to note, I didn’t invent this question, it comes from the book Life Visioning: A Transformative Process for Activating Your Unique Gifts and Highest Potential by Michael Beckwith. If you find the words of this post stirring I highly recommend reading this book.
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