Earth Is Speaking Through Its People

You can hear a variety of voices that speak through people. Our Find Your Voice seminars provide opportunities to witness and learn more about this. The exciting part is when people begin to find their own voice. Every once in a while a discernable pattern shows up. When it does, it can be powerful and exhilarating to recognize it.

That is what happened in our seminar last week in Villa Rossa, a beautiful resort an hour away from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Participants explored and practiced a framework for effective communication – a template to Find Your Voice. The practice culminates with each creating a message they want to deliver. In most seminars about half the managers choose to focus their messages on their company, their team or on business issues. The other 50% of messages usually cover a range of topics including work-life balance, education, the environment and more personal messages too.

This week in Villa Rossa something quite unusual happened. The large majority of participants chose to focus their message on protecting planet Earth, preserving water, maintaining the environment and other related messages. At first, I thought it was just a coincidence. As the aggregated weight of these messages continued to build, it occurred to me that something else was going on. Earth was speaking through its people.

Brazil and its Amazon forests can be seen as the lungs of our struggling planet, and through the seminar, the Brazilians that I met are its guardians. In “Greendex 2008” – a recent National Geographic Society and GlobeScan survey, Brazil scored highest for overall consumer choices that are environmentally sustainable. Earth has a way of communicating through its keepers.

The exquisite power of the exercise was that as people began to find their own voice, the Earth’s voice found them and spoke through them.

© Aviv Shahar