Peter is not only an expert on money, he coaches you to align your personal cash flow with your life and work direction, which changes the way you look at money.
He is the founder and creator of peterkoenigsystem®, a body of work described as “money work” and “sourcework”, a system for accelerating the realization of life and work goals. Titled “Source and Money”, this chat will be hosted by Johannes Ecker and will focus on how “Climate Change” is now more recently on the agenda amongst leaders, considering how the business community has started to embrace Purpose and Transformation processes.
Transcript
Living Room Conversations: Source and Money
Johannes = Johannes Ecker (Host)
Peter = Peter Koenig (Guest)
JOHANNES: Welcome everybody to the 13th episode of our Living Room Conversations brought to you by the LIVEforward Institute! I’m Johannes, I’m a catalyst at LIVEsciences which is our brand. And I’m the host of today’s Living Room Conversation and I’m very excited to have a conversation with Peter Koenig and you guys out there so yeah, let’s bring our guest Peter Koenig onto the screen. Welcome Peter!
PETER: Hello everybody! I’m in Paris, I got a picture of the Eiffel Tower behind me on its side so that you can just see where I am and very happy to be with you wherever you are.
JOHANNES: Hi Peter, welcome! It’s great to have you especially you bring a little bit of
caffeine flavor into this Living Room Conversations. That’s exactly what we want to have. We really believe in the catalytic power of conversations and therefore I’m really looking forward
where the topic: Source and Money will lead us and yeah happy to have you here! And of course we have our audience here. Welcome everybody on Youtube, Facebook and LinkedIn! We’re looking forward to involve your questions into our conversations and we’ll pick them up and looking forward to what you bring onto the table.
Peter, we had a little pre-conversation and I didn’t ask him any questions because I really wanted to be curious myself like what showed up in this conversation, but before we dive into it; a quick check-in. How are you arriving in this conversation? Where are you tuned in?
PETER: Well I’m just in as I said, in Paris. I’m actually sitting in a hotel lounge right now and it’s a quiet one and I hope it’s going to remain quiet and I’ve just seen with our connection it was very good up to now but with Stream Yard it may be taking – I may go off sometimes so I’m a bit nervous about that. But otherwise I’m feeling ripe and ready for this conversation and looking forward to have it with you, Johannes.
JOHANNES: That’s great, that’s great I’ll do some solo if that happens and let’s see how it goes if the energy flows. I’m very happy to have the honor to host the show because when I first came across the your source work and your money work and I just read and heard about it instantly catch me and so I’m very curious to elaborate and investigate on that with you. Maybe because I was in preparation I was listening to some great podcasts you already did on those topics with Lisa Gill on Leader Morphosis and with Francesca Pick on greater than. And let’s see if I have a balance on like diving into but also taking it a little bit further.
Maybe just to start off is starting with, why would you say these topics, these tools and systems, how you call it, Source and Money work; like why are they relevant for people, for organizations nowadays?
PETER: What I’ve been doing and what I call research which is empirical research, it’s not academic research coming from a theory or from my head or from sitting in an office, but it’s what’s called actually technically it’s called Action Research, which means to listen to people who are active in their particular fields, whether it’s money or whether it’s running companies, entrepreneurs. Trying to describe exactly what they do to realize their projects and their relationships. And then offering a description of that and what I have done sort of without really much intention is… But maybe this is my deepest thing is somehow to illustrate illusions. So my money book is called 30 Lies About Money, where I actually show up many different illusions that people have in their relationship to money. And this, what I call my source work; is actually describing what happens in the informal part of our initiatives rather than the formality in an organogram. So who has the power, who has the responsibility, who’s got the authority and what do they do in order to realize their projects and initiatives and very often the what I’m calling the illusion is that one thinks that the CEO for example has the power and the authority and the responsibility but it might actually – if you look at it with my what I call my source principles, you may discover it’s somebody else.
What I’ve been doing really is showing up I think many kinds of illusions to be able to discern much quicker and much easier what’s really going on in order to realize one’s own source, one’s own let’s say, path, life path and and get things done easier and quicker. So that’s a quick summary.
JOHANNES: So, am I hearing you right that you say you’re discerning illusions? And you’re like making the informal, formal? Like you make invisible stuff visible?
PETER: That’s right.
JOHANNES: Alright. So I assume that might get uncomfortable if you actually do it with people like whenever you make something visible right?
PETER: Right so I create a lot of conflict, actually. But also in creating the conflict, I’m actually resolving a lot of conflict. And you know, some of the people you mentioned like Francesca and Lisa, they’re very sort of harmonious and like harmony and they would love some of my language I use to change – to be changed. To make it less- more easy for people to sort of take in and that’s fair enough, I like what they try to do but I have- they haven’t persuaded me to change what I’m doing, yet. Because I feel, you know, I just express what I have to express and I believe it’s of value. Time to be shocked if it’s necessary to be shocked out of the illusions that they may be in. Which are very sometimes, very deep seated illusions. Like you know, like if you’re a fish swimming in water you
can’t see the water you’re in.
So, you know, it’s like some of the things that as you say, you take the fish out of the water and you say ‘Look!’ you know, ‘There you are, you’re swimming there and the water’s
there.’ and then suddenly they can see something and it may not be comfortable to look at what you’ve got there. But it is a step ahead if you want to see the water you’re swimming in.
JOHANNES: I like that very much. The theoretical camera and yeah I can now understand because I read that your tools, your systems like help to develop consciousness, like individual consciousness and it’s related to a lot of inner work and I can see now
how this might relate. But what I would like to do with you is look onto the three pillars purpose, self-organization and and wholeness from your Source and Money work but to do this, can you quickly explain what is money work? What do you understand by it? You’ve been the scores of it if i it’s private right and the money work and as I know, one or one principle of source work is order so maybe you probably will start with money work right?
PETER: I start wherever you’d like but if you’re- I will start with the first question you asked: what is money work? You know, I call it money work because it doesn’t- the center point of it is not really money. It’s identity. But I discovered the process I used for consciousness related to identity through the relationship to money. So for me you know, I’ve been working with this for 37 years and it started with the relationship to money it still continues because I consider the consciousness around one’s relationship to money so absolutely key that I like to still call it money work but the essence of it is to discover and in this case if it’s related to
money, through the relationship to money; what part of yourself, what part of your identity
have you disidentified from? And projected onto money? In other words saying you know, I need money because I won’t be secure unless I have money. I won’t have a choice unless I have money in my life. I won’t have- I wouldn’t have freedom unless I have money or else ultimately and these are all things in common language I won’t be able to exist unless I have money. So these are all things that that actually belong to us, our existence, our freedom,
our security, our happiness and so forth; all these all these parts which we project onto an external medium in terms of money and actually we lose ourselves, by projecting ourselves, by projecting these parts disidentifying from them.
So the money work is about let’s call it, diagnosing first of all, the parts of ourselves that we have disidentified from and using our relationship to money to help become conscious of that. And then there’s a process, an intervention in our own system which I have developed which is to help reclaim these parts and re-center themselves back into our identity so that we are not disidentified from them, we are whole then again. Because, Johannes, if you say for example; money is I need money to be secure, you’re defining yourself chronically as an insecure person who needs money and probably needs more money and more money and more money in the hope that you’ll have enough at some point to feel secure. But actually that doesn’t work. You need to actually start by reclaiming. You’re finding that part which is in you and has never left you but has just been disidentified from. That is always secure within you. And so that’s the essential description of this kind of work and you know, I’m giving it a very short snapshot. There’s more to it but that’s a very simple part of the way of describing it.
JOHANNES: I know you’ve been working on this for decades right? And it’s hard to
explain it just in a couple of sentences and I’m sure we’ll get it even deeper but may I ask you, because you said you still call it money work because sometimes we project
parts which we haven’t integrated fully, right, onto money. And would you say it’s only with money or it’s also with other things, topics and just money – why did you pick money?
Did it happen out of your biography, did you see the greatest potential in there because it’s a very juicy topic?
PETER: Yeah. Well it relates to my own biography. I was a strategy consultant in the 1980s when I was 33, 34 it’s now almost 40 years ago, I’m now 74. And I was working with I was actually doing work on values, purpose, vision, the sort of stuff that’s being done now. But I was one of the pioneers with my colleagues from the United States in these processes back in the 1980s. And we took top managers then already off, sites onto retreats, when retreats hardly existed actually at the time. But we took them away and we worked with them on their vision, on values, and their purpose and so forth and we got them all- everybody got wonderfully excited and very happy with everything that we were doing. It was really sort of very dynamic and pioneering work. And we thought we were changing the world with this. And then after two or three years I noticed that you know, we were dealing with the powerful so-called, powerful people in the world and I recognized they were not powerful enough to… [INTERNET INTERRUPTED]
JOHANNES: Oh Peter we have- Peter are you still there?
PETER: I’m still here, hold on. Am I back?
JOHANNES: Yeah!
PETER: So I realized they weren’t okay. Something was missing from them being able to realize their projects and I observed, what I observed in our processes, that while we worked on the nice things like vision and values everything was hunky-dory. But when immediately we talked about money and the budget and realizing the implementation plan with money it was like the atmosphere changed completely in the room. And it was like you know, I use this term it was like you know, money came through the door and the vision and
values seemed to fly out of the window. And that is sort of the biography, that was the start of my research I was asking myself well how is that possible? Because my values are the deepest things I care about. You know, what would be an invention called money, a human invention? How can that upset me and push me off my life path like this for my deepest intention? and that was where the money worked what I call the money work started. And yeah.
JOHANNES: Thank you. Now I can really like see why it is, for relevance like in an organizational context because I was just reminded I can totally resonate with you and
I make the same experiences like as soon as money, budget onto the topic the climate, the
communication culture shifts a little bit. So, okay how can you, like if I’m not referring to wholeness you already said like we’re dissociating, like splitting parts from us and project it onto topics, persons or whatever in this case, money. And so how if people are striving for wholeness right? In the sense Frederic Laloux defined it to like, to fully accept that your light and shadow yeah that there’s inside, outside, professional, private, weaknesses, strength. So how can your money work in your source work help to become more whole? Or to like, re-become whole others would say, like we are already whole right? We just have to rediscover it.
PETER: That’s right. You know, we are already whole, we have all these parts of everything inside ourselves but we have been disidentified in our education from the time we were born, we’ve just identified many parts for very good reasons; for survival usually but for very good reasons. And the process of personal growth and development and be able to be increasingly competent to deal with the world we’re dealing with, is to reclaim each of these parts one by one. It’s a step-by-step developmental process. So the money work is really what I call it’s really to name it properly it’s identity work. It’s reclaiming pieces of identity and how do we do that? Well the very simplest explanation of what I discovered how to
do this which I’m happy to share here is that if you say money is security I’ll go back to that example; you just replace whatever you see money is you replace it by the word ‘I’ this is the
very simplest practical way of doing this is to say I am secure, and I am secure with money, but I’m also secure without money. Now what will happen is that your mind if you’re so convinced that you need money for security your mind will see this is a lie to start off with.
But it is a good lie and actually it touches a much deeper truth. So I am secure with and without money and the work we do in my money work or my identity work is actually not a
mental game. It’s physical bodywork that needs to happen. So in other words, we need what’s happened is that we’ve been conditioned into this belief that we need money for our security and with the body work we do we’re actually doing cellular body work with language. It’s very simple but it works with the resonance of these words, we can deprogram and decondition.
So the phrase I am secure with them well without money. When it’s allowed to enter and you feel what’s happening with your body you know, it’s going, your mind may have an objection to this, it’s a lie but it’s a very good lie. If you don’t tell yourself a lie, you never change anything. You keep telling yourself your existing truth, nothing changes. So if you really want to change something you have to tell yourself a lie. That’s why my book is called also 30 Lies About Money. So you tell yourself this lie: I’m secure with and without money. Until you notice something actually starts moving. Something starts changing. Until it starts to this the car starts to become really a truth, because it’s a much deeper truth. If you’re not secure with or without money, you’re worse off than your dog, your cat, and a cow. Because they’re secure. They’re secure, they’re living happily and secure with and without money you know, it’s just you that’s not. But that’s- if I could just continue, and I’ll let you- this is only half of the work. Because you referred before, very briefly to the question of poverty light and dark. So if you only get to the point of saying: I’m secure now, I’m happy, I feel secure with and without money, you haven’t quite done it the work they’ve finished yet because you need to go into the other side as well which means; and this is what you’ve been avoiding really. You need to say: I’m insecure.
Now when you say I’m you know, money is my security what you’re really saying is: I don’t want to experience my insecurity. That’s really what’s going on. You’re not really aiming for security, you’re aiming not to feel insecure. So we need to deal with that as well. And what you do then is you say: I’m insecure and I give myself permission to feel insecure. That’s the starting point. And then you and then we turn the heat up a bit. You allow the body to work with that because the body has maybe not said you know: ‘I don’t allow you to feel insecure, this is really bad. This is- you need to feel secure. You need to get a good job, you need to have a good career, a good education, you need to get 12 degrees and then you’ll be really secure and then you need to have all the money that will come from that as well and then you’ll be secure. And then after you’ve got your money you need to get a Porsche so that you will be popular you know, with the women in our cases, men. And once you’ve got your Porsche and and you’ve got a nice house and maybe it’s a little castle, then you need to get a yacht then you’ll feel ultimately insecure and if it’s not done then, by the time you retire
you know you’ll get a good pension then you’ll feel secure.’
So you know you’ve got a whole life yeah planned out and actually what you need to get, to get to a better point a deep point you just say: I’m insecure right now and it’s really great. I’m insecure, you allow yourself to open to your feelings of insecurity, and you’ll notice if you do ,and you allow it that something will start to flow there like like a lust for adventure. You know if you’re trying to be so secure all the time, there’s no life in there. There’s no adventure. In life anymore. You know, you allow yourself to take a risk. To feel insecure, take a risk. And when you’ve got both sides nicely handled you’ve done it. You get the question of security.
JOHANNES: That’s great. I can totally relate to that and it reminded me of Tony Robbins like Six Human Basic Needs. Like if you live your life from security it would look totally different than from insecurity, or love or whatever. Is it, Peter what I understood is that first, you really
like do a holistic approach like, you do like embodiment work like you combine it with changing beliefs right? What I also learned is that I would answer the question yes like
doing your money work would definitely help to become more whole in this sense right? Because you’re looking at those parts and you’re trying to reintegrate them by facing them and really accepting it and changing them. And obviously you’re doing a great job because Andy in the chat says ‘We love you Peter!’ so you must be doing very good work. Is it-
what I know that you’re familiar with Spiral Dynamics and in the other podcast you say you’re not an expert on it, but I think you quite are. What I was wondering is would you say organization companies can really be successful by without like having done this work, or like if i put it other way around, would you say like very successful companies, they have mastered this work which you’re talking about so that they become so successful?
PETER: We’ve got two words in your question, which need further refinement from my point of view.
JOHANNES: Great, great!
PETER: I come to the word ‘success’ first. So how are you going to define success? So let me give you my view on it. So my view on success in an initiative, let’s say, an enterprise is that success is when everybody loves what they’re doing. Okay now that’s not the conventional definition of success in terms of how companies are usually looked if you read the financial times, you will not find anybody writing ‘this is a really successful company everybody loves what they’re doing’ with or without money or being heavily in debt. Okay?
So that’s why I think the question of success needs definition first. The second word that needs looking at very carefully is ‘organization’ you’re talking about organizations. Organizations as a noun and you know I said at the start I show up illusions and I believe the noun organization is a trap because what is an organization?
Now, as an alternative I like the word ‘enterprise’, I like the word ‘initiative’ I like the word ‘project’ because those things are all founded by human beings. An organization or a company tends to be like an ethereal concept. And actually a company, a limited company was created as a legal ethereal concept with a very specific purpose that the people that would be founders would have their responsibility limited. So we have limited companies right? We’re limiting the responsibility of the people for the actions and the decisions they take and we do that consciously and at the time limited companies were created there was a very intentional purpose behind it which was good. But what we’re not seeing is that what’s happened is that these companies and these organizations that you’re talking about have been, are being treated as if they are living beings now. Now that’s an enormous step to create- to treat an ethereal idea as a living being. Well I believed it in myself for several years, actually in the 1980s and 90s and experimented with this; ‘Are we, as a collective, a living being as an organization’? And if it would work well I’d be very happy to continue believing it. But what I discovered was that what happens is if you say an organization has a purpose, an organization, an ethereal idea like this has a purpose. What I discovered happens and you can look at it in Unilever and other companies who have common purposes; you see that the people, the individuals are relinquishing their sovereignty, their sovereign purpose, their sovereign source to this ethereal life– [Internet Interruption]
JOHANNES: And there is gone, Peter Koenig on the most exciting part of his elaboration, I hope he’s coming back- oh no you’re still there Peter in the background!
PETER: I’m still here.
JOHANNES: That’s good, that’s good! Continue.
PETER: Yes, so this is the trap that I see as I say I’m showing illusions here. So the illusion is that that this ethereal thing has a common purpose and then people are subordinating their own individuality, their own individual source, their own individual purposes to decide this notion which is like I call it a ‘phantom’ and that is not serving them individually and ironically, they think they’re serving a collective, but actually they’re doing precisely doing the reverse. Because the way a collective emerges into being, is when everybody in the initiative is living fully their individual source, their individual purpose simultaneously then something magic starts to occur and we get to the ‘we’ that Frederic Laloux talks about in TEAL and so forth.
But you’ve got to understand how you get there. You get there through people living individually and simultaneously in collaboration with each other. It doesn’t just come from anywhere, it doesn’t come from having certainly, doesn’t come from having this notion of an organization with a common purpose as a starting point. That’s the illusion.
JOHANNES: Ah, thank you Peter. First we really like being really specific on how we use terms and language, I like that very much. And I see a question from Marianna! Marianna I hope you don’t mind if I put another question because it smoothly would follow up and then I’ll ask your question. Peter, is it because you just said that you don’t believe there are organizations, like you use the concept like you would put it you call it differently?
PETER: And I would say- can I just interject?
JOHANNES: Yeah!
PETER: I’d say that as a noun, it does I’d say, let’s say it doesn’t exist, but as a verb it exists. In other words we do need to organize ourselves, we do need to get organized. Absolutely important.
JOHANNES: Yeah. So I assume you would not agree somebody uses the word ‘self-organization’ like we want to switch to self-organization you would probably rather say self-management, self-direction so I have directed teams kind of this okay and you said because it really touches the now the next topic which would be like purpose like moving from hopeless to purpose, you said you don’t think it’s helpful, or it’s even like correct to say like there’s one big purpose like superior purpose and everybody is supporting themselves but everybody should be the source of him or herself follow his own purpose and bring it together. So would you say- do you recommend companies to say ‘Peter Koenig, we want to find our purpose, we want to listen to it, we want to hear the calling.’ like Frederic Laloux would say? Would you say that’s possible or would you say no, rather, look into your individual purpose and bring it together?
PETER: So again I’m talking about practical reality. I talk about purpose and the
vision. The purpose and the vision of let’s say a whole enterprise and I will use that word again is the purpose and vision of the person I call the source of it or the founder. And that’s just the reality. And one of the tricky things for any founder is that nobody else is going to understand that. They may have ideas and purposes and visions which are relatively close and be attracted to the founder’s purpose, but you know your vision, Johannes and mine are such intimate things. They are so fine and so finely discerned and defined that if we say I’ve got the same purpose as you or the same vision and we start working together at some point down the line, we’re going to discover there are really differences here. And that’s what happens when we start, when there’s a pre presupposition that we’re all working with the same vision or the same purpose. Now I make a very important distinction here you know this all comes out of my research. Things like purpose and things like vision, and it is a question of definition but they are usually not limited in time and shouldn’t in my definition shouldn’t be limited in time.
So you know I have a like a purpose which has been running for 30 years to create love in business. Now what I mean by that and you might like the phrase too but what I mean like that if we just leave it, it will be different to what you might mean like that and it should be. It’s fine, it’s no problem. But it’s unlimited in time. Now, when we actually work together we need to be able to define things in another way so the things that are common and are shared are like what I call, what what most people call objectives or goals or missions to do things, to complete something practical and for those to be well defined, they need to be limited in time and space. So are you still with me? [Internet interruption]
JOHANNES: Yeah.
PETER: Hold on, I’m going to come back if I’m not with you right now.
JOHANNES: No, we hear you.
PETER: Are you hearing me?
JOHANNES: Yes, yes I do.
PETER: Are you hearing me?
JOHANNES: Yup I hear, yes.
PETER: I’m not seeing you right now.
JOHANNES: That’s all good. Peter has to come back in a second. The bandwidth internet reception in the French Cafe hotel lobby seems to be not that good which will give me the time to look at questions and say yeah– Peter, good to have you back! I just took the time to talk to the audience and say yeah bring your question in! I have Marianna’s question on my mind and we’ll put it as soon as Peter has finished. You wanna finish your answer first and then we go to Marianna?
PETER: Okay. So I get the question. Am I with you still?
JOHANNES: Yeah! Still good. It’s all good.
PETER: Okay.
JOHANNES: Okay bring in Marianna’s question. Peter let’s answer Marianna’s question to get started with it. So let’s go for that. Kind of a little bit of topic change but that’s totally fine.
She asked, Marianna asked: how do you teach a person who doesn’t have a lot of money and it’s probably correct–
PETER: Okay, I- are you hearing me? Are you hearing me?
JOHANNES: Yeah.
PETER: Oh yeah. I- I notice- I noticed we’re cutting out, in and out. Can I just complete what I said before and then I go on to Marianna’s question?
JOHANNES: Yeah.
PETER: Are you hearing me?
JOHANNES: Yes.
PETER: So just to complete, John F. Kennedy when he put a man on the moon said by the end of the decade, if you’ve got a mission or goal or an objective you need to give it a final date. Okay, so on to Marianna’s question, what do you do with people with not enough money or they see that they’ve got too little money or something like that? So yeah how do you deal with that?
JOHANNES: Yeah, how do you teach a person who doesn’t have a lot of money and is probably stressed to have a better relationship with money? That’s the question.
PETER: So is that- can I just ask, is Marianna talking about herself?
JOHANNES: Uh, I don’t know that. Uh Marianna?
PETER: Can you ask her? Could you put her on?
JOHANNES: That I cannot put her on but you can write in the chat if you want to. So it would make a difference– oh no she’s talking about somebody else who is very poor. Peter?
Peter is gone again. Sorry guys out there for this interruptions and interruption of the flow. Looks like the French Cafes are not too good but I’m sure Peter will come back as soon as
he’s able to. So yeah guys bring on your questions. I’m very curious to see that I have a lot of questions for Peter, but I’m happy to involve you. Your question as well Marianna you
have a question to me; Johannes I have a question for you in the meantime as a catalyst you’re relationship–
[PETER Reconnects]
PETER: I’m just, I’m just trying to move to see if there’s [speaking french] no? Okay, alright I’m moving to try and see if I can get a better place but it looks like they’re all the same. So yeah, I’m back with you right now. [Internet interruption] It’s cutting again. I’ll try here.
JOHANNES: It’s okay Peter.
PETER: I’ll try another place. So I tried another place. What needs to happen is that Marianna, if it’s her or whoever it is, needs to say to themselves ‘I’m stressed’ okay. The person, you know, taking the question literally is being stressed by having not enough,
being stressed. okay? So what they need to do is to accept the fact and enjoy the fact that they’re stressed. Stress plays a role in their lives. That’s on the one side. And then they need to look at the reverse of that. So what would be the opposite of stress for the person? Maybe to be relaxed. Okay, so they need to tell themselves ‘I’m relaxed’ with and without money so both those things can be challenges for that person like lies but I call them good lies. And if they can work on that, and have that work into their body, they will find you see, it’s not about getting more money to start off with, but it’s quite possible that their financial situation will change but it doesn’t actually have to change because if you’re happy with stress you know, you can deal with the same amount of money. There isn’t too little money. But actually the situation of disidentifying from these aspects is creating the circumstances which you are facing at the moment. So that’s how I would answer this question.
JOHANNES: So it’s basically what you just explained before that this process like, going like, uncovering it then reframing it or looking at it and reframing it. So, okay thank you. I hope Marianna, your question is answered. Peter is it, we were- like if I’m going back to the context of self-organization, so you kind of if I understood you right, you said that the only source, and you if I’m right you use the word as synonymously with a ‘founder’ but also as a role, and also as I forgot about that, there was something a third description about it. But you
said source, only the source can have the purpose–
PETER: Of the whole enterprise.
JOHANNES: Ah, okay. Alright, so if I would like, transfer it to our context; we have three co-founders, yeah. And so, and like if we would do like a purpose listening, or if we would work, there are people who believe you have to like, listen to a purpose like there is a purpose and you just have to hear it right? And feel it, and sense and receive it. Some believe you can create it and like put stuff together. But am I right that you say only the source, like can and should describe or put the purpose to life?
PETER: So let me be clear here because this creates a lot of unhappiness, in a sense or conflict.
JOHANNES: Which you like.
PETER: Which I like because what I say is where you have co-founders, the chances are that you have confusion you know, and it’s very often the case. Now let me just be clear, if you don’t have confusion with co-founders, it’s because instinctively they’re following a natural order. And the natural order is what my source work describes, it says that at the start you have three people sitting around a coffee table with a similar idea. But to start something, to initiate something, it requires one of these people to say something like ‘I’m going to do this’ or ‘would you like or invite the others to come in and help?’ so the thing just doesn’t start with three people deciding instantaneously, all together ‘Oh we’ve all got the same idea!’ you know, suddenly we’ve started. It doesn’t work like that. If you diagnose it and go down into the real deep nitty-gritty detail of every single founding, you’ll find that it’s one person who’s actually taking a risk and gone ahead and puts themselves in a rather special position in that sense. And what we’re doing with what I call the source work is just acknowledging this process.
That this has happened so and why do we want to do that? Why do we want to diagnose that? Because it becomes absolutely key for the practice so it can be key for the practice later. As I say, if everybody is working from their guts, and their instincts and the relationship with another, they can be harmonious and actually they’re following what I call source principles instinctively. Why it’s become important in our society is that what we’re trained in, what we’ve been educated in from school right up to this moment you know, education and business school and university and so forth is another system – it’s a management system which doesn’t follow this instinctive, informal pattern. And the purpose of these source principles is to describe what we all do instinctively when we actually do realize our projects and it’s become important because people following managed- normal management principles tend to be diverted from this and pulled across, pulled overboard in a sense.
So I- give you I’d like to give a little anecdote to show how important this can be because I’ve got hundreds of anecdotes, but I like, I forget them all but- I except for the most recent ones. And this one is from two days ago, in Paris.
JOHANNES: Go ahead.
PETER: With an enterprise which is working has you know, I spent two days with them and they’re working with my source principles and they actually love them. And the person that I thought, and everybody believed was the founder and the source happens to be a very wealthy person and has formed this enterprise relatively recently and called me in to run this couple of days. And he employed a colleague as a CEO and when we did this process I noticed, and everybody noticed, this CEO had very different ideas to him. You know, up to a point it was fine but his source, you see everybody has a source. I need to point that out. It’s not that we’re one person has a source, the founder and nobody else has. Everybody has their source, we’re trying to get everybody to live their source and it was noticeable this guy was the CEO, had a very strong source and you know, I was asking myself if he really wants to realize his source, can he really can he really do it in this organization? Because he’s got different ideas. And when I met them two days ago because I met them to discuss, they invited me to another event here. They came up to me both beaming and why were they beaming? They explained to me that who I thought, everybody thought, was founder who is extremely wealthy, and has all the 100 percent the shares, or most I think it’s 100 of the shares, noticed himself that he’s not the source and that his CEO was the source, actually. And he went – can you imagine this? He went to his CEO and said ‘Hey I actually- I’m- what I’m really interested in is part of what you have sourced.’ So do you understand? I mean it’s an amazing thing you, see without this description of source, you wouldn’t, you couldn’t come to this kind of conclusion. So he said: ‘Actually, I’m part of your company, I’m part of your organizer, your enterprise and I’m really happy I’ve got- I’m realizing something within your enterprise and you’re doing it with my money. I’m happy to finance your enterprise!’ So do you understand what I mean? And the two of them are are fully in their source right now and totally flying with us.
JOHANNES: So can you um- and Peter, now we’re heading towards the end; it’s getting actually to the core where I wanted to get with you. I have to talk to you once again but can you really briefly in one, two sentences, like what is the benefit for sources to be identified and to really accept this role I would say? What will it change?
PETER: So on the individual level, we have people doing what they love. Contacting their inner source, and living their life path, or their life masterpiece this is where we’re heading. With a continual process of self-development, on an individual level. From an, let’s call it an organizational level, collective level, we have people collaborating fully with one another, understanding how to- how creative people collaborate together and respecting each other’s sources, respecting each other’s fields, and creating projects and in initiatives together to support every each person’s individual source and actually realizing a collective emergence together in the way that Fred Laloux has attempted to describe in reinventing organizations.
What would- what we’ve done with source and Fred Laloux recognizes this, we’ve with the source work, we’re describing the process of how you actually get to Teal. Including the individual transformation process that needs to take place from Green or Advanced Green to Yellow and Teal. There’s a transformation that needs to take place, it just doesn’t happen like that. It’s not an incremental step. So with the source work where, that’s what we’re really involved with. And the money work, because the money work does this transformation.
JOHANNES: I’m happy to continue exactly on this point with you Peter once again. We had just an incoming question from Rossana, can you answer it in twitter style; ‘What is the one lie about money you would teach a person who has a tendency to spend too much?’
PETER: So she doesn’t want– maybe she doesn’t want to be dirty. So it’s something negative that you don’t want to reclaim. So maybe you’d love to be a really dirty, sexy woman and you don’t trust yourself to be that or something like something you know, in French – I’m in France so many, many women don’t like be are frightened to be what they call here a [Speaking French]. So, I’m just speaking off the top of my head here, but it is something negative, which something negative you got associated with money which is getting you to push money away and believe me Rassana, you are by no means alone with us. At least 50 percent of the population have negative ideas around money which gets them to push money away from them.
JOHANNES: Alright. Thank you Rassana! And thanks for the question, and thanks Peter for the answer. I can probably relate to that like ‘pushing away’. So we’re coming to an end, I hope you enjoyed the conversation Peter, with me and also everybody out there. We have some other conversations coming up in the next weeks, in November so if you like that, join us on November 25th. It’s a Living Room Conversation with Sebastian Dupuis and Teal Safari on Resource Fluidity both on the same day. Grab your smartphones and scan the QR code or join us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube and or on our home pages. I’m happy to have you with us again. Thank you so much everybody! And Peter check out question for you.
PETER: Oh I’m frightened now.
JOHANNES: No, no. What’s your take away from this conversation? Did we touch any point
you haven’t touched in this way? I said what’s you- what’s your takeaway or something like how I phrased it where you think: ‘Okay maybe if he’s representative for some other people, we still need to do some work here and there.’ What’s your takeaway?
PETER: Oh, I don’t know. Thank you, thank you. I just feel it’s been fun being with you for the last hour, Johannes. I think that’s my takeaway. Being great fun, it’s like I would like to continue for another hour if we had one, I think I’d be happy to do so. You know, we’ve touched the surface of these subjects and you know, I hope with touching the surface, we are encouraging people to go further and deeper because this is really the intention, my intention. To defuse this work because we have some very, very, very big questions to answer now globally. And my belief, my deepest belief is you know, I’m old, I’m going to die soon I mean and if anybody believes in reincarnation and I’ve got a kind of belief in reincarnation I want to come back into a world which is really nice and working. So I can you know, with my white hair I can say that. So that’s my investment in this work. To live well, die well and come back again into a nice world. So that’s why I’m still doing this work and I love other people to have the same spirit.
JOHANNES: That’s great. I enjoyed it also very much and like for people who get interested in you, at latest by now because I really can recommend your work and I will dive into it myself. Where can people find you? What’s the next upcoming events or something what you’re up to like what’s your current topic?
PETER: I think the best thing to do is look at peterkoenigsystem.com and there’s a calendar there which is usually out of date but they can find me somehow there or actually what’s very good is Tom Nixon’s work with source.com. I just mentioned those two, I don’t have any specific events right now. My work is actually to diffuse my work through other people, through other people and their events more than my own moment so they can discover. They can go from there.
JOHANNES: Yeah there’s some good books out there right from Nixon worked with serge and chef merkelbach. The little red book about source, there is seminars and the podcast with Lisa Gill I promoted and Francesca.
PETER: Let me- let me mention one new thing too. Yes, okay I must mention this. Create Love In dot Business. It’s a new platform, actually which Elena De Haas is setting– has set up. He’s setting up and bringing out from Belgium which is actually my, if you say in a sense, my love in business platform.
JOHANNES: Yeah. Aright.
PETER: So Create Love In dot Business.
JOHANNES: That sounds great. Peter, thank you so much! It was a pleasure having you, talking to you. Next time we’re gonna meet in Zurich in presence and wishes. Best time in Paris, come back healthy and see you soon! Everybody out there, thanks for tuning in! Have a great day, evening or morning whatever you do and see you all soon thank you. And great thanks to our team in the background, our producer Rhea the source of this conversation, director Ken and all the creative teams. Thank you, guys!
PETER: Thank you! Thank you!
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