When You’re Numb and You Know It
Authors Amy Elizabeth Fox and Nikki Trott on why your business may not survive you
By Marc Cinanni
The biggest threat to your business isn’t the market, it isn’t your competition. It isn’t even AI. It’s you.
The saddest thing I ever saw (and the most instructive) was a retirement party at a large intergovernmental organization. A director of IT, thirty years of service, twelve of us standing between library shelves eating cake off paper plates. Nobody wanted to be there. He probably didn’t either. It felt like a funeral for a ghost, someone who’d shown up every day for three decades and disappeared during the process.
I know that disappearing feeling.
Early in my career I was introduced to the Canadian ambassador at a function hosted by the same kind of organization. We stood in a circle while he made the rounds, shaking hands. He shook mine and looked straight through me like I was transparent. I remember thinking:
Is that what this place does to you? Or is that what you have to become to survive it?
That’s what prolonged numbness looks like, at the beginning of the road and at the end of it. Most of us are somewhere in between, reaching for tools that were never designed for this kind of problem.
Two voices speaking at the upcoming World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens have each been working, in their own way, to name what that human problem is. Nikki Trott, author of Sacred Business, has built a philosophy, and a practice, around the idea that business was never supposed to be separated from life. Amy Elizabeth Fox, author (with Nicholas Janni) of Leading in Chaos, has spent decades helping leaders navigate the growing gap between how we have been taught to lead and what the moment we are living actually demands.
They arrived at these ideas from different angles. But what emerges from my conversations with both of them is uncomfortably coherent: we severed the connection between how we work and who we are. And got rewarded for it.
Below is a weaving of my conversations with both authors, conducted separately ahead of their appearances at this year's World Beautiful Business Forum next week in Athens.
Conference room full of five-year-olds
This is Nikki’s favorite question: “If your business didn’t exist, would people on the planet be better or worse off?” Sit with that.
She traces our disconnection to something foundational. “Business came from humans coming together in communities,” she says, “serving each other and solving problems, sharing their gifts.”
And then we stopped. “That relationship was severed and broken. It became about extraction for short-term gain for the individual, instead of long-term flourishing for the collective.”
And we feel it. There’s a pressure on us that we’ve grown to ignore. An unspoken agreement to hang our personalities at the door whenever we walk into a place of work. I remember my first office experiences as a twentysomething intern. Doors closed, shades drawn, cubicles arranged in a maze that seemed designed to disorient us. To make us forget who we are and why we were there.
“It has been understood as normal, or even required, to leave your morality, your values, your deepest innermost passions aside, to put on a uniform and go into a workplace and perform a role which may not be fulfilling or aligned for you.”
And disoriented people are easy to direct. Looking back, the maze wasn’t some design flaw. It was the design.
Most of us have inherited a definition of success that was never ours to begin with. “Otherwise,” Nikki says, “you could just run on a hamster wheel for decades, working to someone else’s idea of success.” She pauses. “I’ve done that for ten years, by the way.”
She has. The full story comes later. For now: she left.
For Amy, the disconnection shows up most visibly under pressure:
“Most businesses have put a huge primacy on intellectual capacity, and they cultivate leaders who are cut off from the neck up, operate from the neck up, perceive from the neck up, and decide from the neck up.”
This works, more or less, until the world stops cooperating. Now it’s sped up, multiplied the stimuli that surround us, and somewhere along the way demands stopped arriving one at a time. There’s a certain nostalgia in thinking about generations that knew what order felt like.
“The picture of the world that we have day to day is starting to move like a kaleidoscope, with such fast, furious adaptive demand that we are all in a state of heartbreak and overwhelm. Our frontal cortex—our problem-solving, even our imaginative function—shuts down, we move into a fearful and regressive state and our view gets myopic, rigid and self-protective. We are making decisions with a conference room full of five-year-olds.”
Anesthetic or aesthetic?
For Nikki, the blind spot is institutional:
“I think we’ve relied so heavily on the thinking in the brain that we’ve forgotten to listen to the cues of our body and intuition.”
She’s watched this in boardrooms, where intuition is tragically suppressed. But then it’s used anyway, where we dress it up as data. She calls this “root engineering,” or building a rational case around a feeling we had anyway. To put this into practice, three years ago she set herself the challenge of making every business decision through her body first.
“A few months in, I was like, ‘This is just so obvious. I can’t believe I ever thought that it would make sense to do things against what my body is telling me in business, but not in other areas of my life. Why would business be different?’”
What she found on the other side she describes as a kind of magnetic pull. “The more I allow myself to follow and surrender to what’s pulling me energetically from the universe, the more I go into the slipstream that I’m meant to be in.” The world pulls, you follow. That’s the whole strategy.
For Amy, the body isn’t just a source of information, it’s the terrain of relationship itself. “Real team coherence,” she says, means “bodies operating in flow with one another and with consideration to one another. Knowing when a colleague might be vulnerable, sensing when people have reached their limit, making room for a voice that needs space.”
Then Amy makes an observation that stops me:
“I don’t think it’s an accident that the anesthetic and aesthetic are opposite words.”
Business has been running on anesthetic for decades. It’s been numbing our instincts, our grief, our sense that something important is being lost. We systematically ignore our bodies, our intuitions, the poetics, beauty, as sources of knowing.
Amy spent a year of serious illness in her early twenties and returns to that period when she wants to explain what becomes available when the mind runs out. “As your body gets more and more exhausted and more toxified, there’s no way to find the will, the hope, or the meaning from your mind. All of that has to source from the deep well of your soul.”
The illness, she says, gave her “a portal to the numinous,” stripping away worldly ambition and the tendency to operate in separation and competition, and became the origin point of her life’s work “as a cultural activist, as a mystic, as a social alchemist.”
I ask a question that sounds like it has an obvious answer but doesn’t: Why does it sometimes take such a shock to wake us up?
“We are walking around with generations of untreated trauma in our consciousness, in our bodies, in our cells.” And from that numbed state, she says, “you can’t feel what’s ephemeral or eternal or beautiful or wondrous. You can only feel a dullness or boredom or enact the habit of numbing and rote repetition.”
What catches fire
“How can our work be a living prayer?” It’s the question Nikki asks herself and the leaders she works with. It sounds radical in a business context. But she’s lived it:
After a decade in London fashion, she realized, on long walks to work, that the story of success she’d been telling herself wasn’t hers. So she left, started over, and knew she needed to write a book. Five years passed. One WhatsApp message to a group of mothers and one reply: a childhood friend who happened to be a literary agent. Living in the same city. In the same neighborhood. On the same street. The book got a deal with a top publisher.
“It’s by following the calling,” she says, “that the magic happens.”
Most will never do that. Most will never ask what their efforts are actually for. Amy has seen what happens instead:
“Many organizations are moving faster,” she says. “They’re getting more transactional, letting go of climates of inclusion, not thinking any longer about serving the common good.” But on the other side: leaders who are “in humility and foresight, understanding that what got them there won’t get them to where we’re going.”
Those people are turning inward, doing the work. “And to watch somebody catch fire with the chance to contribute to the generations of life yet unborn,” she says, “that is a very beautiful and very holy moment.”
Most of us will read that and feel something. Fewer will do anything about it.
That’s the split, and it’s why most businesses won’t make it through the times ahead. Not because the market will kill them, but because nobody inside them was willing to do what Amy and Nikki are describing. Not the comfortable kind of work. The kind that requires you to look at what you’ve traded away and decide whether the trade was worth it.
Amy describes, using the Kabbalistic idea, the leaders who make this shift as moving from “the will to receive, to the will to bestow.” Nikki found her own version of that shift when she realized the life she’d built wasn’t hers. What she found on the other side: “To awaken yourself and help others awaken. That’s it.”
So the question isn’t really about business at all: it’s about you. What have you numbed? Who have you been performing for? And how much longer are you willing to keep going like this?
***
Marc Cinanni is the writer and editor at the House of Beautiful Business. He lives off-grid in the mountains outside Barcelona.
WE ARE SOLD OUT!
And could not be more excited to meet 1,000 of you in Athens, Greece next week for the World Beautiful Business Forum, our ten-year-anniversary festival and the most human gathering for the more-than-human world. Four days, five acts, 150+ speakers and performers, 150+ sessions, eight amazing venues in the heart of Athens, and a wild program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. See you there! And if you can’t make it, follow the event here. We will make sure to report.
Great questioning