Why and how I work
Building civil society has always been tough. With today’s upheavals and disruptions it’s tougher than ever.
With my 70th birthday celebrations behind me, the conviction I felt in my teenage years is still with me but is now finding a new form of expression. My vocation continues. Although retiring, which means I am not proactively seeking engagements, I am positively open to hearing from you if you are working for a decent world and need my help.
Although I am just one person, I know my thoughts and actions influence a world – that bit of the whole world I am in contact with.
So I live as well as I can today and part of that is helping you to do the same. Notice the past but do not be limited by it. We can be in touch with our best selves and lean into the future to sense what is emerging for us and the good of all.
Every day, I do my best to enjoy my practice of making my influence a creative, life-sustaining one which invites profound systemic change at all levels, from personal to everything I touch. Living well and serving civil society is part of that practice.
Cultivating this practice in thought, speech and action is the best way I know of protecting myself and living well. It is also a way of responding to the tendency towards hatred, anger, prejudice and fear and other destructive behaviour, in me and in others.
Money, status... generosity, gratitude
My primary motivation is to help you and to help myself to fulfil our common intention to grow civil society in the UK and worldwide. I offer my service in both the market economy, in which the currencies are money and status and the gift economy, in which the currencies are generosity and gratitude. One is transactional, the other transformational and both can work well. I invite you to tell me whichever better suits your current circumstances.
If we agree to work together in the market economy, I will tell you my scale of fees for coaching through crisis and for Get2thepoint facilitation and will then ask you how much money you would like to pay me.
If we agree to work together in the gift economy, we will agree the time parameters of the service I’m giving on the understanding that in due course you will express your gratitude by making a similar gift of time to an individual, team or organisation. With our generosity we will help to co-create a more decent and sustainable world. Read more about where we have got to with our generosity and gratitude prototype.
‘Hello, this is Martin...’
