Why Conscious Hosts Will Help Their Guests Fall in Love

The most popular post in this young Conscious Travel web site is the one titled: Tourism What’s the Point?  Its popularity reflects the fact that:

• travel and hospitality enterprises need to attract and engage a diverse and intelligent workforce;
• there’s widespread recognition that money is no longer a sufficient motivator.  As companies describing themselves as “Conscious Capitalists” have discovered,  it pays to put a sense of higher purpose first, if you wish to increase profitability;
• there’s a growing need to align the members of a company around a common set of values and principles that can shape and guide behaviour on a day-to-day basis. A company’s culture (the sum total of its mission and values)  – even though it may be invisible and hard to measure or articulate – is often its key point of advantage or disadvantage as it most directly affects the level of engagement, productivity and creativity.

In that post we started to explore three deeper motivators:

Picture from Hubble Space Telescope

1. Tourism as a healing agent that rejuvenates guests ‘ well-beiing,  regenerates despoiled landscapes and resuscitates indigenous/local cultures;
2. Tourism as a connecting agent that helps guests encounter people from different culture and settings to both widen and deepen their mindsets and cause them to face the unexamined assumptions that underpin their behaviour;  and
3. Tourism as a “wonder and awe making” agent that helps guests not only appreciate the beauty of our Planet but also find deeper levels of meaning, purpose and contentment from their experience.

While clearly these motivators offer a greater sense of purpose than the act of “making money,” they still sound a little dry.  Perhaps our language should be more inspiring, colorful and clear so may I suggest this:

The purpose of travel is help people fall in love with a place, with each other
and with the miracle we call Life. 

This concept came to me after watching Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg  summarize 40 years of work studying flowers and the critters that pollinate them. This is what Louie had to say at his TED talk:

To watch them move is a dance that I’m never going to tire of.  It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart. Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature’s tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth. It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we’re not separate from it……

The concept that “Nothing lasts forever. Everything in the universe wears out “ blew my mind. Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. It’s the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again.

So in this context, the purpose of a conscious host is to help their guests become mindful, awake, alert and aware of the beauty, magic and mystery of life on this planet — in short to fall in love with it.

For when you are in love you are utterly present and when you are in love you will do whatever you can to protect the object of your love.

When you are in love, you slow down, you have no desire to rush away and seek another object for your affection.

When you are in love, you are most attentive and observant and take pleasure in the smallness of things.

When you are in love, you also experience peak health and vitality.

When you are in love, you are most awake, aware and alert – in short most conscious. You don’t need to be told how or  why to behave in a way that respects and reveres. It comes naturally because that’s your  real uncensored nature.

And there’s a reason it’s called falling in love and not climbing into love. It’s because it involves a spontaneous shift in consciousness – an “aha” moment when you “see” differently.

When you fall in love you are changed – albeit sometime temporarily and you experience a sense of infinite possibility. Isn’t that what latent or actual Conscious Travellers are seeking?

And when you are in love, all you want to talk about is your beloved. Isn’t that the source of the infectious spark that makes us share?

So dear Conscious Host, by helping your guests fall in love you will be playing a conscious role in the evolution of life itself – and surely that’s a good reason to come into work on Monday?

 

First Conscious Travel Event in Canada

AWAKENING THE DREAMER SYMPOSIUM – Nov. 22^nd - 4:00 – 8:00 p.m. 

 (Capilano University Library 322 — 2055 Purcell Way, N. Vancouver)
For information, please contact: Joe Kelly by email:  jkelly@capilanou.ca

Conscious Travel is  a movement and an e-learning community designed to help travel suppliers become Conscious Hosts so that they can can attract, engage and support Conscious Travelers and develop a viable alternative to mass industrialized tourism. The end goal is to create and enact a vision for a tourism economy that doesn’t cost the earth.

Who better then to inspire and recruit but the next generation of leaders – those energetic, connected and free-thinking members of Gen Y and Gen Z who will be responsible for stewarding tourism towards a more prosperous and stable future?

To raise awareness of the issues affecting humanity and to encourage future hosts to become active change agents in their community, the founder of Conscious Travel, Anna Pollock, is teaming up with Capilano University’s Project Change initiative, LinkBC and the  Be The Change Earth Alliance to host the symposium known as Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream. The symposium is a transformative educational experience that empowers participants to respond to humanity’s current situation with action and informed, grounded optimism about our future.

Through dynamic group interactions, leading edge information, and inspiring multimedia, participants in this half-day event are inspired to reconnect with their deep concern for our world, and are empowered to make a difference.

The Symposium was developed by The Pachamama Allliance.  Designed with the collaboration of some of the finest scientific, indigenous and activist minds in the world, the Symposium explores the current state of our planet from a new perspective, and connects participants with a powerful global movement to reclaim our future.

It is an exploration of four questions:

• Where Are We?
An examination of the state of environmental, social and personal well-being
• How did We Get Here?
Tracing the root causes that lead to our current imbalance
• What’s Possible for the Future?
Discovering new ways of relating with each other, with the Earth and looking at the emerging Movement for change
• Where Do We Go from Here?
Considering the stand we want to be in the world and our personal and collective impact

What to Expect – here’s the trailer:

Awakening the Dreamer Symposium Trailer from Pachamama Alliance on Vimeo.

A youth version of the Symposium – Generation Waking Up - is currently being developed.  We hope one outcome would be for tourism students in British Columbia to take this version back into their communities. The individuals behind this project, Valerie Love and Esteban Duarte,  recently raised over $20,000 in crowdsourced funding to complete the development of materials that will make this symposium partucularly appealing and relevant to the younger generation. You can see their appeal on Kickstarter here. With commitment and creativity like this, humanity is  in good hands. Breakthrough rather than breakdown might just be possible.

Is Conscious Business “Capitalism 3.0″?

Jean Houston

Dr. Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher and researcher in human capacities, and one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time and principal founders of the Human Potential Movement sent me a summary of the major mindset shifts taking place at this point in history. What an amazing time to be alive!.

If you are interested in and committed to envisioning and co-creating a fresh new vision for the travel and hospitality community, now’s the time to find fellow kindred spirits and get started. Many brave souls have prepared a path before us. All the  great work in sustainable tourism, ecotourism, geotourism, and responsible travel is building towards the same end – ensuring our travel activities don’t cost the earth. Conscious.Travel is not designed or intended to duplicate or fragment but to integrate and support. Our focus is on people not product; on helping nourish and grow leaders with courage and imagination. It was Victor Frankl who said,

When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.

Here are Dr. Houston’s five shifts with my comments in italics..

1. We are changing our understanding of who and what we are and what we need to become in order to be able to deal with the complexity of our time. It was Theihard de Chardin who coined the phrase – “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience”. That being the case, there are no limits to what we can achieve. In the same way that we can acquire superhuman strength when in a dire emergency and loved ones are trapped, so can we find the power in ourselves to cope when the stakes get really high – and they are increasing every day. 

2. Human societies are in the process of re-patterning. Social constructs are dissolving and whole new stories are trying to emerge, such as the rise of women to a full partnership with men across the globe, and many others. Women are a vital and significantly important part of the travel community and are driving the movement towards conscious consumption. Time we stepped forth in our own communities. It’s not about seeking to climb to the top of decaying institutions but being a change agent at the grassroots level

3. How we conduct business and commerce is shifting. This is perhaps the most important social event of the last five thousand years, because commerce impacts almost everything in our lives. Capitalism as practiced in the past is seriously flawed. Even Alan Greenspan had to admit it contained flaws he hadn’t acknowledged. Now is not the time to discard the only means of sustaining ourselves but to re-think, re-set- re-create a better version. Simply put, Conscious Business is Capitalism 3.0

4. The rise and fusion of different cultures–we are swiftly moving towards a planetary civilization that accentuates the uniqueness of each culture while blending them together. Think of the great fusions of food and of music and of beliefs. Now if travel & tourism had a higher purpose, then this is it. But we won’t make our contribution to building a planetary civilisation so long as we continue to displace vulnerable cultures in our attempts to secure the few remaining unspoiled, remote spots of beauty left where indigenous cultures have existed for thousands of years. To be involved in travel means to care about the disappearance of a language every two weeks and to speak out where the actions of the travel community have created injustice.

5. Whole new orders of spirituality are emerging that are not about religion. The new cosmologies are giving us a view of ourselves that we never had before. For the first time ever, we find that we don’t live in the universe, but that the universe lives in us. In other words, for the first time in human history we’re consciously aware that our own evolution as a species is in our hands and not left to random chance. That’s both wildly exciting and terrifying. Isn’t that enough to jump out of bed with passion and enthusiasm?

Time to wake up folks. Fresh, organic coffee lovingly grown by a cooperative is brewing!

To quote our friends at Interaction Associates:

ROI = Return on Involvement

It doesn’t matter whether you get involved in Responsible Travel, Sustainable Tourism, Green Travel, Geotourism etc. what matters is that you participate and take a stand for what you believe in.

All Business Is Social

Many travel companies and destinations view Social Media as the “next big thing”, “the next must have” or the “next budget item” and fail to undertand that the shift is so much deeper.

The current state of “social media” for many businesses looks more like an episode of MacGyver than Apple’s design process. Duct tape and bubble gum hold together fragile tactics such as Twitter accounts run by the summer college intern (nothing against college interns) or agency-generated Facebook fan pages that have few actual fans.

This is not how any design process begins. It’s not a purposeful or intentional act of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component. It’s a reactive fragmented approach that may achieve short-term results for marketing but usually ends up living in isolation (a social media department). Source: David Armano Blog

Truth is we are moving (some might argue, we have moved) from a product to a human centric view of the universe recognising that business is first and foremost about relationships that may lead to transactions and not the other way round.

All business and all marketing is social and a failure to design your entire business around this fact will generate partial results and render you less competitive.

Take 5 minutes to watch this video from Danish firm Leader Lab. Fortunately,  their choice of music won’t blast your eardrums either!

Leader Lab Video