Innovation can be many things. Many seem to believe innovation has something to do with high-tech laboratories, crazy engineers, or NASA.
Most of the innovations we integrate into our daily lives actually have nothing to do with any of that.
Most innovations are not technological.
We can have social innovation, financial innovation, cultural innovation, political innovation, psychological innovation, and so on. I think you get the point—you can literally put any word next to "innovation," and it will likely work and mean something.
Innovation is wild and limitless.
I have a personal preference for systemic, business, and network innovations. Each of them can mean many different things, and they are also highly interconnected.
Today, I am inspired to talk about something very unique yet omnipresent, highly unspoken but very important. Something that evokes shame, guilt, deep discomfort, or even complete ignorance in most spheres of our professional lives.
I want to talk about some serious bloody business that has a huge impact on all of us. But we continue to act as if it doesn't exist or doesn't have value for us.
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We usually live during the day and sleep during the night. Most of the time, this makes sense for a conventional human physical body to function in the most optimal way. So, I guess it makes perfect sense that most of our "work hours" are during the daytime. The 9-to-5 world makes sense, I guess.
To respect how the Sun helps us in different ways to be more productive at work, we even created some wild and weird cultural innovations, like daylight saving time!
Most places in the world change time twice a year. It makes literally zero sense to your physical body. In fact, this practice is deeply harmful to the overall coherence of your biological system. But no one cares.
During the times when we invented workplace practices and procedures like that, we were actually in a world war. So, back then, it made sense. We needed to save electricity and make sure factory workers could do their jobs for as long as possible while the sun was still out.
We know how to use the Sun to our advantage to make us more productive, save resources, and maximize the economic benefits of working hours.
We usually understand daily (and annual) cycles very well in our businesses. We know how to get the most for our money by coherently collaborating with the Sun and its natural cycle.
We don't have control or authority over the Sun, but we learned how to dance with it and how to honor it to make us and our businesses more successful.
The Sun is actually very stable and very predictable. (At least on a very simple and small human scale, it is like that; ultimately, the Sun too is wild.)
But for normal humans, the Sun comes back every morning no matter what and goes down every night. The mathematics, statistics, and probabilities of this cycle are not really questionable.
We know the exact times of sunrise and sunset for centuries ahead. The Sun's cycle is highly predictable; we could even say: almost certain.
We have also been deeply studying and even praying or making sacrifices to the Sun probably since we became humans.
The Sun is powerful. It makes sense to work in collaboration with the Sun if we want to build successful businesses or even something as simple as a happy and healthy life.
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There is the Sun, and there is the Moon.
Both have cycles, patterns, and uniqueness to them, and both have a tremendous influence on all living things and beings on this Earth.
So, what about the Moon? How exactly do you use the power and unique qualities of the Moon to help you become more productive and successful at work?
How do you co-create and collaborate with the Moon in your business affairs?
The Sun clearly and deeply impacts your strategy and business vision. You do many things around the Sun. The hourly rates you pay people are usually not the same during the day and night for the same job. Your overhead cost is also not the same.
The Sun actually has a tremendous impact on your financial sheets and your daily operations.
But what about the Moon?
The fact that we are completely unaware of the real impact the Moon has on our bodies, emotions, and even thoughts doesn't make them useless for our businesses.
You potentially don't even suspect how much money you are actually losing because of your deep ignorance about how to use the Moon to your advantage in the same way you do with the Sun.
If we talk about real hard strategic decisions and choices, creativity and innovation, communication and team productivity, management and leadership, all of them are deeply interconnected with the cycles of the Moon and your understanding of how it truly impacts your business.
No, I will not talk here about astrological charts of some sort or your rising moon sign.
What I actually want to talk about here is science, human biology, and deep social psychology and the very unfortunate conditioning of patriarchy in our business affairs.
The Moon actually impacts the very intimate and personal hormonal cycle of half of the population living on this Earth!
The menstrual cycle of a woman is directly interconnected with the Moon, its phases, and its 'energies.'
The hormonal cocktail of a woman is under the mercy of the Moon whether she likes it or not. She also has no control over it. If she is a healthy adult woman, she bleeds every month.
When she bleeds, her inner system, including her nerves, hormones, and the overall homeostasis of her body, is completely different from when she is ovulating.
Biologically speaking, she cannot have the same productivity, efficiency, creativity, or even self-confidence levels every week.
It is simply not how it naturally works for a woman. She will not perform the same tasks with the same amount of energy.
To be truly efficient and productive in business, she needs to adapt her work schedule in coherence with her body schedule and her natural biological processes.
If a woman learns how to truly collaborate and co-create with her hormones while she works, she can perform magic.
She can become everything she wants and generate any amount of money she desires.
If a professional life of a woman deeply honors and respects her biological cycles, her own body, emotions, and mind will support her in generating a bigger contribution and impact in the marketplace.
If you fully honor how her body naturally works and you learn how to coherently co-create with her cycles, she will generate more money and more value for you and your business!
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Why don't we already do this everywhere if it is so powerful and magical, you might silently wonder.
Let's give all the freedom and whatever women want to be happy, healthy, and productive at work. Why wouldn't we do it?
If it represented a real economic value to take proper care of their 'hormones,' for sure we would already use it and even abuse it, no?
Hmm. The logic is there, but it's not that simple.
The problem is most women are actually completely self-ignorant and unaware of how deeply their menstruation impacts their personal health and their careers.
Most women in super serious 'businesses' have no idea what I am talking about here. They have no clue how to be coherent with their own bodies and their natural cycles at work. They don't know themselves anymore, their bodies, or how to optimize the optimal health and performance of their own personal systems.
And this is a real tragedy.
How can a woman be so disconnected from her own nature and biology is a very deep question.
It actually all might have started with science and our laziness about it.
When we started to seriously play with chemical molecules and realized that we could drastically change body processes if we introduced some kind of chemical compound, we were very excited about that. This is basically how we invented drugs.
This is a real medical and pharmaceutical revolution!
We can do magic with biology and we can heal the impossible with the help of chemistry.
This is actually truly exciting and very innovative in many different ways!
Theoretical science and experimentation are very fun. A bit dangerous and mostly very confusing, but very exciting and stimulating for the mind and heart.
A bit more boring part of the scientific process is actually the engineering part of it. A scientist believes he lives on a rainbow cloud where everything is possible with a magic wand.
An engineer deals with the limitations and boundaries of real life, where nothing is truly unlimited or easy.
The process from discovering a 'molecule' to the step of giving it to sick people is usually very long and very complex.
We need to do tests, and we need to do many of them to understand how it actually works. A human body is a very sophisticated and complicated system that we still know almost nothing about.
So, usually before giving pills to humans, we actually give them to animals first. Mostly to mice, because they are cheap and fast to produce. Their body processes are simple but comparable enough to humans. So, it makes sense.
When we first started to use mice for science, we had a preference for selecting only males for our experimentation and testing. Why, you might wonder? Because of hormones!
When we were doing it with female specimens, we had too many inconsistencies and distortions in the data we were collecting. Too many errors in readings and too many variations in results. The too-complex process of the female hormonal system was making all our testing inconclusive!
So, since most of the drugs we sell (in theory) have nothing to do with hormones, why would we complicate our lives and significantly increase the cost of analysis with unreliable testing subjects?
Economically and even 'scientifically,' it made sense to us back then to perform drug trials on male mice only.
But it does not make sense anymore scientifically speaking today. Because now we know that hormonal production in our bodies is directly interconnected with all the other life-supporting systems. Our mental processes, our digestive, immune, and nervous systems are all dependent on how coherently the flow of hormones happens in our bodies.
It's not the same hormones, processes, and cycles for both women and men. Biologically and systemically speaking, our bodies are not the same and they do not function in the same way.
The hormonal process in a woman's body is extremely complex and sophisticated. We do not yet understand how most of it works. But one thing is for sure: it is different from what happens in a man's body.
And since our 'serious science' historically deeply ignored this fact, most of the data we have today does not represent the true reality of a female's biological functioning. Since we made our scientific and medical choices based on drug experiments and tests performed exclusively on males.
The true systemic scientific tragedy here is that we still continue to ignore female hormones, especially in business settings. But there is another huge social problem: menstruation is a deeply taboo subject in most places around the world.
If a woman is not truly connected and in coherence with her hormonal cycles, she is deeply self-ignorant and non-optimized. And if a woman is unoptimized, her career and business are unoptimized. And your company is too.
There is a significant impact on your financial balance sheets due to the deep ignorance of your employees about their personal and collective well-being.
We do not use the power of the Moon in business to our advantage yet because we do not truly understand it. We did not yet deeply investigate it. We never performed collective experiments or tested it scientifically. We did not yet fully study its potential economic and financial impact.
And until we take this seriously, we will never be able to work on something so important.
Most women around you are not aware of their own hormonal cycles and natural body rhythms. They will never ask you for an "adapted schedule" because they don't even know they need it.
They simply suffer silently and in shame.
They deeply force themselves to be like men and to work and function like men.
They do not understand how much harm they do to themselves when they live against their nature and biology. This is a deep social and cultural problem that we created for women.
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Just like with the Sun, women do not have control over their biological cycles and the consequences of living with a reproductive system inside of them.
But just like with the Sun, we can deeply learn how to dance with the Moon.
When women and businesses understand the natural hormonal cycles of female bodies and work in collaboration with them, everyone will have a better experience at work, more productivity, and greater financial performance.
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Let's come back to the business culture and the corporate world.
Most workplaces in developed countries are in complete denial that women have menstruations and that their cycle impacts literally everything else in their bodies, work, and even lives.
We never talk about it. We never let a woman choose when she wants to have her 'job evaluation' based on when she feels the most confident about herself. We don't give her time off to rest when she has cramps; we give her three Advils and politely ask her to pretend like she is not suffering. We even ask her to smile and be nice.
We act as if a woman were a well-programmed robot with the same expected performance each day and every day. But a woman doesn't work this way.
She is always changing. Some moments she is more creative; some she is more bossy and confident. Sometimes she just wants to take care of you and make you a nice dinner. And sometimes she just wants to disappear and get lost in the woods for a couple of days.
All of that can be the same woman. Most of the time, this is exactly what every woman is. She is many women in one. She has many talents, and she has unlimited power if she understands and masters her biology with her conscious awareness and self-responsibility.
So, what could we do in the real concrete world about it now? How can we help women better honor their bodies and natural cycles while they are at work? How can the workplace and business affairs support women in reconnecting with their authentic powers and systemic well-being?
How do we create hormone-friendly workspaces for women? How do we build a corporate culture that is respectful of what a woman is and how her body operates naturally?
What would job contracts look like, or meetings policies and procedures? How would we plan for our 'creative' team moments, and how or when would we approach serious business negotiations?
If we used the power of the Moon and incorporated it into our economic formulas and business strategies with the same dedication and motivation we did for the Sun, we would probably not be talking about any social or natural crises right now.
If a woman had the authentic right to be herself and be coherent with her true nature in society and in her career fully, there is no way we would be destroying life or each other right now.
We would probably be co-creating a very exciting and very beautiful shared reality with a lot of fun and pleasure in the process!
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