Can a house be a conscious leader?
Jul 24, 2008
So, can a house be a conscious leader? A strange question maybe but this story highlights something about ‘congruence’ – an essential aspect of conscious leadership.
My recent choices highlight this after recently choosing to “rent” out my house in the South Island whilst I am spending more time closer to Auckland.
We just spent 10 days at the house completing a lot of tasks that have been on the pending list for a long time! A bit of the builders house never being finished syndrome! We placed an advert for rental and had 5 people come and look the place over.
What quickly became apparent was the unsuitability of this house to the traditional rental market. Being an “off-the-grid” home, solely reliant on Solar Power, Water Turbine and having a composting Worm Farm for sewage, was way too daunting for the average renter.
It didn’t feel right allowing the house to be used for this purpose… so I chose to accelerate the plan for creating an “eco-stay”. This has always been part of my vision of creating a retreat centre on the hill at a later stage, and now this house is showing me that I can start the process now!
So the plan has swung into action now for making the house and land into an experience for off-grid living. So people can come and stay, receive some education on the systems involved with the house and hopefully gain more awareness of their impact on the world by simple actions such as turning appliances on and off!
The congruence? To let out the house to a market that might see the renewables as challenging or irritating, seemed to be out of integrity with the ethos of why it was built in the first place and my values about sustainability. How easy it would have been to let out the house to the first taker rather than aligning my actions with my values – leading by example I think!
What else is possible?
1 Comment(s)
By Caitriona Reed on Sep 10, 2008 | Reply
- I have come to know the handmade straw and adobe dwellings on our land as … leaders? personalities? – both in the sense of leading the way towards sustainability (dreadful word!) – and as, yes, personalities in their own right. Not build by formula, having few straight edges, the demands they made in constructing them produced the kind of relationship one might expect to have with the sort of human being who has a very clear sense of their own core identity. Is that an aspect of leadership perhaps?