Love Summit in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA: Bringing love into the Business World: Oct 2017

Imagine bringing love into business in a way that heightens the workplace atmosphere and creates definable results from the people care aspect that is necessary in businesses.  Business is what shapes this world, supply and demands shapes our environment, and culture is now conceived of many of the products and services of business.  Thus we need to bring love into these workplaces and that is exactly what the love summit was all about. 

It was thankfully hosted in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH, USA and initiated and run by the amazing woman that is Samantha Thomas through dreamchange.org.  I met Samantha at Maharishi University of Management in 2009 in the PDC I was teaching to her and others and we have remained in contact ever since.  I will forever be in gratitude for inviting me to participate in this summit on a scholarship.  It’s exactly what I needed in the moment, a good healthy dose of a check-in personally, being inspired by others stories and work, and networking to get to know some of these people individually. 

The Summit was two days of Jam packed presentations and some other formats for learning including a 9 room breakout where each participant could attend a workshop in that space.  The speakers were from all over the world, there was a diversity present, and very dynamic speakers all in there own way.  Some were more theatric and humorous, some more technical, but all shared an element of personal story.  Because that is love, it means something else to everyone but it is indeed a energy generating force. 

Personal Stories of Transcendence

A common theme indeed was the sharing of peoples journey of their approach of how they were touched by something that allowed them to have this epiphany of bringing more love into there careers.  A common them for that was death or sickness from people around them or within themselves.  It was gut wrenching often and my headache during the experience was probably from fighting back tears speaker after speaker rather than letting them flow.  But these stories all showed how transcendence was possible, which was one of the themes.  We must create a new story around what business values and love needs to be integrated into that.  When we redefine business its easier to create thriving workplace relationships through bringing love in.  Also its easier to not just focus on profits and bring more social and environmental focus and not necessarily decrease profits. 

Purpose

A lot of focus was also on the self care side which is not my strength necessarily.  One main crisis that happens within is the lack of purpose.  I have long known my love for teaching and caring for the earths resources but lately I have been searching for a bit more inside myself.  Hence my intention to stick put more in the states and evolve TreeYo Permaculture, the brand.  I guess my confidence has been waining

in my ability to do it here back in my hometown region, on family land that is not mine, and without the familiarities of how I navigate in Europe.  So when motivational speaker Nick Jackson of Cincinnati asked me what is your next mountain to climb it was a good exploration.  The conclusions became an increase in team work that is for sure.  Running TreeYo virtually alone these days goes against the brands intention and I need to put a focus on that to increase reach.  With a bit of capital to finally play with in my pocket, i can invest in many things but the workshop reinforced investing in people. I bought a book from powerhouse speaker Judy Wicks, one of the farm to table pioneers, that I can highly recommend, which reinforced all these points.  It was an emotional journey reading her book, seeing how one person could evolve and create so much awareness through business.  I highly recommend it for anybody reading this!

So in the end the research was there to show love in business makes perfect sense and its a trend for sure.  Its people care, we spend so much time at work that we need healthy and thriving relationships for sure.  We need to be thankful and gracious and speak gratitude as often as possible.  We need a human element brought back into the mechanical beast that is capitalism.  It’s a model that is dying because of this and and we need to rewrite the stories about it to form something new.  The love summit indeed does that; bring brilliant thinkers across the board together to bask in love and integrate love into the workplace. Thanks to Sam and all the others who put on this wonderful event, I do feel inspired.  And remember invest in yourself and the others around you. And spread this message in all parts of your life and don’t be afraid to explore that edge in business!± And see you in Chicago next year, i am hooked!