Beauty Unveiled: The Power of Beauty to Thrive in Business, People, and Life - Featuring Prof. Peter Hawkins
Description
Our guest is Prof. Peter Hawkins, a well-known figure recognized for his work in systemic coaching and developing coaching cultures in organizations.
Professor Hawkins presents beauty as a transformative force, urging individuals and organizations to align with their core values for a sustainable and harmonious future.
Beauty is found in authentic, vulnerable moments and genuine connections between people, emerging through acts of kindness, compassion, and service.
Advocating for a move away from transactional leadership, Professor Hawkins calls for a model that recognizes each person's inherent beauty, fostering belonging and mutual respect.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Podbean, or your favorite podcast platform.
Managerial & Leadership Development
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: You are such a prolific author, how did you end up writing so many books?
Prof. Peter Hawkins: I started off by writing chapters for books where people said that, well, I write a chapter on this one, the other. And then since then, each of the books that, that I've written is because a real need for a new approach.
So my first book, which was around supervision, was because, you know, I'd become a supervisor and discovered there was no real guidance for supervisors and that every supervisor did something different. Thought, well, you know, we need something that kind of puts this together.
And then, you know, when I got on to writing about, uh, coaching and systemic team coaching and leadership, it's always because I got to the edge and can't find what I want to learn next. So end up writing it, and by writing I discover what I know, but also I discover what I don't yet know. Writing is a just a lovely practice, as always, discovering. And, and I suppose I've always been an integrationist, wanted to work across disciplines. And so by writing I'm, I'm able to kind of integrate stuff that has come from very different traditions.
Stephen Matini: And it's interesting because you are such a big, big, big name in coaching, but your books are infused with, um, so many different ingredients. So they're not just your typical coaching book. And then, um, I remember last time when we talked about your latest book, which I think is, is still has to come out, right? The beauty in leadership and coaching, the way you explain it to me, it seems to be the last discovery in your journey and somehow it puts together all the ingredients that you have found along the way.
Prof. Peter Hawkins: Well, it kind of tries to set coaching, leadership, organizational development in, in a larger context, where in that larger context is both on the one hand about evolution and about epistemology, and it's another level about spirituality and ecology.
Basically, in that book, I am very much looking at the great challenges that we face as a civilization and saying at root, they are all interconnected and at root, they are all symptoms of the fact that we haven't been able to evolve human consciousness at the speed of which we have changed the earth. So beauty, I am using as energetic force as a guide to help us on the return journey from how we've shrunken our, our consciousness, our way of engaging with the world, from participatory consciousness to collective consciousness.
And then the white European world, we, we, in American world, we've, we treated further into from the embodied consciousness to brain consciousness. And then we've retreated even further into left hemisphere. And I'm seeing beauty as a force that awakens us to that which is beyond us, that which comes knocking our door and takes us by surprise. And so the notion of following beauty is awakening, if you like the taking us out of our left hemisphere into our whole brain and add our brain into our, our hearts and our guts and our embodied knowing and back into relationship.
Stephen Matini: One thing that I often see particularly business people doing, they tend to focus on business. You know, they're just business. And instead of most of my motivation, most of my creativity, I get it from stepping out the whole realm of, uh, business. And my background is in humanities. So for me, humanities, literature, theater, music, steel, is a huge, huge source of inspiration. And I believe that you and I share some people that are really dear to our hearts. You talked to me about William Blake, you talked about Dante, uh, Rumi. Why are these people so important to you?
Prof. Peter Hawkins: First of all, I'm fascinated by you saying about business or busyness. What is business? I'm just interested, what what do we mean by business or what do we mean by organizations? An organization exists because there is a purpose or something that needs doing that requires collaboration. And that collaboration requires organizing. Actually we could say that business is a mode of responding to what's needed and necessary, but it's become an end in itself.
So the purpose of the organization is to feed the organization so it can feed the organization so it can feed the shareholders so it can, so there's something wrong with business. We've all got business to do, but the business should never be an end in itself, which is why I also in my books around teams say we shouldn't talk about high performing teams. The goal is not to be a, a successful organization or a high performing team.
Prof. Peter Hawkins: Those are a means to an end. And the end is to create beneficial value for all the people your work serves. So trying to get us away from means to purpose is important. And we don't create our purpose. We discover it. And I think that people, you mentioned Dante Mena Ian, Rumi ha real, William Blake Ridge, Shakespeare, <inaudible>, let's bring in some of the great, uh, w Wang Wei, the Great Tang Chinese per they go to Essence, they go to the heart of purpose, and they go beyond the restrictive separating individualism of the modernist western world. They reconnect us. Nna Jin Rumi says, why in the plenitude of God's universe have you chosen to fall asleep in such a small dark prison? And beauty is, if you like, what are the keys to unlock the prison?
Stephen Matini: Do you find it hard, easy possible when you work with um, clients, let them enter beauty.
Prof. Peter Hawkins: I put it the way around that my job isn't to let them into beauty. My job is to discover the beauty and what they are in them and what they're doing to uncover the beauty. This is there rather than believe that I know where I need to take them.
Stephen Matini: It is true when the organization tap into the purpose, the soul, the beauty, that's when magic happens. But in my personal experience, it's not always possible, you know, to unveil it with clients. So when you experience that resistance to change, whichever you want to call it, what do you do?
Prof. Peter Hawkins: If a client says to me, uh, but what matters is the bottom line, I would say, so Steven, what is the bottom line? Tell me about the bottom line. If they say, well, it's the, the amount of profit we make at the bottom of the page, I'd say, and, and what is the purpose of that profit? So we can reinvest and what's the purpose of re well so we can make more? They've stopped. At a full bottom, my job is just to Dr. Open the windows to what is beneath that bottom
Stephen Matini: With this latest book, what do you hope that readers will take away?
Prof. Peter Hawkins: I just received an amazing email this morning from a beautiful black woman in, in in America who just talked about how just reading the first chapter, 'cause I'd used it as a handout on the program, had let her whole body shaking and just brought up so much for her and inspired her to write a poem that she sent me. And honestly, it, it brought me to tears. I just thought if more people have that reaction, it just opened up so much for her in terms of what was buried within her that needed to
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