4 May 2014 - QA 3

How can spirituality help me to be a better business person? Is spirituality different from business?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Is business different from you? You are the link.
If you are well and you are happy, if you are intelligent and intuitive, then you can do good business.

Tell me, what do you need for business? You need intuition, you need innovation, and you need inspiration.
How would you move forward if there is no competition? Competition inspires you.
So, intuition, innovation and inspiration, all three things come from spirituality.

Spirituality means what? Calming yourself down, centering yourself, and seeing life from a bigger perspective. This is what brings a pleasant environment around you. With spirituality, your quality of communication also improves. Don’t you want better communication with people? Communication, compassion, good character, consistency – all these are gifts of spirituality.
So, not directly, but indirectly these aspects enrich your life. When your life is enriched, you’d be a better communicator, better negotiator (good communication is necessary for negotiation), your intuition works better, you become more innovative and you’ll be an inspiration to others. So in these ways spirituality helps you with business.

Another thing is ethics. Spirituality also brings in ethics in business.
Nobody wants others to be unethical towards them. Do you want your customer to be unethical towards you? No!
Not doing something which you don’t want other to do to you is ethics. And it is spirituality that gives sustenance to ethics in business.

Business always goes up and down. When there is a down trend in business, it is spirituality which gives you immense strength to hold on and to move forward.