How to become a Permaculture Business Coach
I’d like to share how I came to be here, talking about how permaculture works in small business.
I had been running a tidy little bookkeeping business. I started it in 2005 when my second son was born, so that I could work from home, and my former employer became my first client. I was contributing my little bit to the family income, and it was doing fine just ticking along, I was really good at it. Then I got this idea around 2013 that I could do something more. So I’m pursuing the options available to me, and I’m trying and failing and trying and failing at lots of different things like an online course on business financials when you’re not a numbers person, and a research study into being organised and productive, and nothing was working, nothing seemed to fit.
Then in 2019, my husband of 25 years just……. left. Out of the blue, with no warning at all, and almost overnight, I was destroyed. Abandoned. Betrayed. Broken. But his departure, as it turned out, was a blessing in disguise.
As I’m putting myself back together, the quest to make a living is now a lot more profound. And it was then that I discovered coaching. Signing up to learn how to be a coach was the single most emotional business decision I’d ever made. I knew I just had to do this. I took action, and used my mortgage money to pay the deposit on the training, and instantly burst into tears. I was as terrified as I was inspired and motivated.
The process to learn how to be a coach means that you go through the whole coaching process yourself, and for me, that process was one of healing, self-discovery, identity, forgiveness, growth, love and vision. It was infinitely exactly what I needed right at that time. I healed so much that I remarried in December 2020.
The coaching and healing process put me back in touch with my 6-year old self, who was at that time, completely in love with the earth and all of nature. I had always been a hippy at heart, but this process really brought it front and centre.
So I’m now working as a coach, and given my background in small business support, it made sense to focus on being a business coach. Only, I had this passion for living in harmony with the earth, and it felt like my profession was rather at odds with my passion.
In my journey to rediscover my nature-loving self, I learned about permaculture. I signed up to complete a permaculture design certificate without really knowing what it was, I just knew I had to do it, to be true to my authentic self. Turns out, every moment of every module of that training reinforced to me that this is what I’d been wanting to do my whole life – I just never knew what it was called! Permaculture is a design framework that harnesses the power of nature to benefit human life. It uses the wisdom of ancient cultures to work with nature, not against it, and strives to live in harmony with the earth and maintain the natural order of things.
Permaculture starts with growing your own food, but the concepts, principles, and ethics apply to every aspect of life and society, including livelihood and running a business. As I grappled with the dis-connect between my profession and my passion, I began to see the business wisdom that can be found in the permaculture principles, and I developed this understanding to help small business owners just like you to run your business the way mother nature would want you to.
As I continued to develop this understanding, one thing that became abundantly clear was how the small business sector was still flying under the radar when it came to making the change to sustainability. Governments have made this commitment to take action towards preserving the environment, as well as a few corporates and big businesses, and consumers are becoming more discerning in the choices they make. There are a few small businesses that are specifically focused on offering sustainable solutions, but we don’t need a few businesses doing 100% sustainability, we need hundreds of thousands of small businesses all over the country doing their 1% better.
So I have now dedicated my career to promoting the movement towards sustainability in the small business sector, through permaculture business coaching, developing permaculture business plans, and conducting sustainability assessments, to help one little business at a time, create one little change at a time.
