Business leaders should focus less on doing and more on being

In recent years I have come to understand that I can achieve more by doing less, but I learned this the hard way.

Here’s a few tips…

The trouble is that much of our value comes from being busy, productive and feeling useful.  That’s certainly the way that Gen Xers like me have been taught; work hard and you will be rewarded.  And there is certainly some truth there.  Any founder not working their backside off at the start probably will not succeed, but as the business grows and moves from start-up to scale up and then to mature business, a leader doing too much will inhibit business growth rather than fuel it.

How do we do this and why does it work?  Spending more time in silence and solitude reflecting, thinking and listening to that small voice within us can often direct us and our business in the right way rather than frantic activity.  This can save huge amounts of mental energy as we engage our intuition in our decision-making and not just our cerebral cortex.

Leading a business seems to be more difficult than ever with all that is going on in the world.  It seems like there are yet more even more challenges to overcome in 2026, when many of us were hoping, for once, to have a slightly more stable year.  The attacks on Iran earlier in the year changed all that.  Perhaps it was naïve to even think that any level of stability was coming?  After all, each new year this decade has thrown up a different obstacle to try and navigate the business through.  And it can be absolutely exhausting!

Living in this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous) world, we need more than even to get away and spend time on our own and do nothing!  Tapping into our intuition is a much-under-utilised way of knowing, especially in business, and many of us would rather trust a spreadsheet rather than a gut instinct.  But it is essential, not just for us but our people too, to tap into our emotions and body-mind which will often give us a sense of which direction to go.  And we can’t do that if we are running around like a headless chicken the whole time.

The old ways of only operating purely from our cerebral cortex simply don’t work any longer, and I doubt that they ever did?  I say “old”, but I am only really talking about the last 250 years or so, since Descartes and Bacon managed to convince those in the global north that the only part of us that has any value at all is our thinking mind.  This was the epoch that we moved from making decisions with our heart, our intuition and our mind to only relying on our thinking brain.  It was from around the 17th century that we separated from ourselves, others and nature.  It was from then that we thought that our individualism was more important that the community.  And it was from around then that we morphed into maniacal ‘doing’ rather than connecting, reflecting and ‘being’.

The old ways of knowing are those still found in many pockets throughout the world where ancient wisdom is still nurtured and cherished.  As Celynn Morin said on my ‘4th Bottom Line’ podcast recently, “I try not to use artificial intelligence before I have used my own AI.  And when I say that I mean Ancient Intelligence.”

Celynn continued: “I am teaching people about the three ancient intelligence centres, which is the head, the heart and the gut.  So, we have got the brain, and if you’re constantly in high beta brain wave activity, you’re mental duping, catastrophizing, potentially narrow-focused, and if you slow your brain waves down to alpha Theta, that is where you do your best work.  That is where artists create art and musicians create music.”

We then went on to talk about the heart and the gut and other ways of knowing.  If only more business leaders learned to tap into these other ways of knowing, which only comes through slowing down, doing less and spending some time in solitude and silence.

Business and other organisations that have leaders doing this and teach their people more about the ancient wisdom of connection will be those that are future-fit for these increasingly difficult times.

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