EP24: Seeking an Injection of God In Your Regenerative Business
What if the missing piece in your work isn’t more strategy, effort, or even rest—but something deeper? Something that wakes you up, reminds you of who you are, and reconnects you to what matters?
In this episode, I share a simple but powerful shift that has transformed my mornings—and, unexpectedly, my approach to business. It started with a pre-dawn walk, just me, my cocker spaniel, and the dark sky, and became what my sibling called an Injection of God.
I’ll explore what that means, how it relates to regenerative work, and how we can cultivate more thrill, discomfort, adventure, and connection in our careers. Because a regenerative business isn’t just about sustainability—it should make you feel alive.
You’ll hear:
Why stepping into the unknown (literally) shifted my energy and focus
How we’re conditioned into comfort and distraction—and how to resist it
Ways to bring this sense of aliveness into your business without burnout
The importance of balancing stretch with restoration so you can sustain your purpose-driven work.
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Full Transcript
Alisa: My friends, I have to tell you that I think I may have found the answer to all things. Or at least the answer to starting my day in a really, really good way. Quick background, and then I'll get into what it is that I've been doing. So, you may have heard on the podcast that I have been kind of off-and-on, unwell, since October.
And so one night I was going to bed feeling really frustrated at the thought of not being able to sleep very well with coughing and then waking up and just feeling kind of full of mucus, and I thought, you know what? Resting in bed until, sort of, as late as I can, which is, you know, 7 o'clock when my kids come in and poke me and announce that the daytime has begun, that isn't helping me.
I'm not getting better. So I'm gonna try something different and I decided the next morning I was gonna wake up early and I was gonna go straight out of the house. So sure enough I woke up between 5.30 and 6. And I put on my dry robe and my hat and my gloves, my scarf, you know, I'm in the UK and it's, February has just begun, so it's pretty chilly out there in the morning.
And Flint, my working cocker, and I stepped out into the morning, at which point it was pitch dark still, and we could see the stars above us. And as soon as I stepped out, I felt Just, I don't know, welcome, or home, or comfortable. I was expecting to feel a bit nervous about the dark, um, or kind of longing to get back into bed, and I didn't at all, I just felt like, this is exactly where I want to be.
And we walked down our street, through the town, and then there's a kind of open fields in the middle of the town where the playground and the football pitches are, and there were no lights on that part. We walked through it and decided not to use our torch, walked through the dark, and most of the town was still very much asleep by this point.
We walked all the way down to the river, out past the sailing club, and then the landscape kind of opens up and there's a seawall that runs all the way along the side of the river with grassy areas, um, either side. And by this point the sun wasn't coming up but it was getting lighter in the sky and I could make out the path and I could sort of see the, the grass and the bushes either side and then the red and green lights on the river that guide the boats.
And it was just us. Just me and Flint. No one else. And we were listening to the sounds of the wading birds and geese flying overhead, and we even caught an owl, we didn't catch an owl, we caught the sound of an owl, we did not catch an owl, I promise you. And the whole thing was quite magical, and also thrilling, and I felt really alive in a way that I haven't done since winter started to draw in and I have retreated a bit more into my home.
And when I got home it was about quarter past seven and the kids were up, my husband was up having breakfast and I noticed immediately I was just that much more excited to see them. I was happily going about making breakfast, getting them dressed, getting myself changed. I think everyone could feel the difference in my energy.
And the next morning, I didn't have to talk myself into doing it again. I didn't really have to sort of push myself in a way that I might if I were going out for a run, for example. I was just really excited to get back out there. And so, more often than not, I have been going out in the early morning, and I shared this experience with my sibling, and my sibling said something that really struck a chord.
They said, yeah, you're going out and getting an Injection of God first thing in the morning. Now, in the past I've had a bit of a difficult relationship with the word God, I'm not a, in fact, I've been very clearly not a religious person since I was about seven or eight. But recently I've come to understand that term very differently.
I love the phrase that Liz Gilbert uses of the God of my understanding. So God to me is nature, is the universe, is the spirit world. And yes, absolutely. Walking out in the dark along the river, surrounded by the calls of the wading birds. That is an Injection of God. And I felt that in my body and in my spirit coming back into my home and taking it through my day, the rest of my day carrying on as normal, but something feeling different from that early morning experience.
And there's so much around us that has a very soporific effect. Sorry, you might hear Flint, who is featured in this story, who's having a snooze behind me.
Yeah, there's so much in the world around us that wants us to be asleep, that wants us to be desensitised, that wants us to be kind of uber safe and comfortable and tells us that the way to get to that is to consume as much as possible and kind of switch our brains off and plug into constant entertainment and distractions.
And this feels like a really wonderful counterpoint. But this term, Injection of God, is one that I feel I am moving into a deeper relationship with and I've been thinking about what specifically that means in the context of my morning walk and how that might translate into my business.
An Injection of God, when I imagine myself standing out by the river, there's an element of thrill to it. That's the first thing that comes to mind. There is something about the fact that I set out in pitch darkness and I get to see things slowly becoming clearer around me, but it's still very much in the shadow world.
And when you hear the call of a bird, there's always that kind of moment of thrill. What was that? What's out there? You can't make things out clearly. There's an imaginative element to it, there's a, not fearful, I don't feel fearful, but there is an element of my pulse quickening, my senses being very much on alert, really listening with my whole body, sensing with my whole body.
Another aspect of this Injection of God is that it's not comfortable in a conventional sense, the comfortable option would be for me to pull the duvet up over my head, you know, cosy down and stay there as long as possible. You know, I'm going out in, you know, zero, sub zero temperatures, I'm going out in the rain sometimes, I had very strong winds the other morning.
It's not comfortable in that sense, although strangely I do feel extremely comfortable. There is an element of the dark kind of wrapping itself around me, but there's a certain willingness to want to get outside of what I recognise as comfortable and experience something different. And there's an element of adventure to it.
I try to mix up the path that we go a little bit, always find just a different, slightly different way to come back. We never know what we're going to find, what other life forms are going to be out there sharing the morning with us, what sounds we're going to hear, who or what we might bump into. And then the fourth element of this Injection of God is connection.
And that's really what underlines it all. When you do something simple like that, walking out in nature, but in a slightly more amplified way than my usual walking after the kids are dropped at school, there's an even deeper connection to nature, to the water, to the river, to the sky, to the birds, and a real remembering of who I am at my core.
And these four elements, thrill, discomfort, adventure, and connection, are all things that I would like to offer you as being discoverable within your regenerative business.
So let me try to bring this down and ground this idea a little bit. I'll tell you about how I've been thinking about this. So I've been taking this concept, an Injection of God, and thinking... how can I find a similar experience that I have on that walk within the day to day work of my business? Something that wakes me up, reminds me of who I am, takes away the chatter and the noise and any distraction or comparison, and calls me and those that I work with to the best of who we are.
Here are some examples of what that might look like in very simple and small day to day elements of my work. It can come even into things like the choice of words that I use. I think words are very powerful, language is extremely powerful and potent, and even things like deciding to use the term Injection of God.
in the title of today's podcast, there was an element of thrill in that for me, an element of that being slightly outside of what felt comfortable to me, but it being necessary because of the connection that I felt to that term, and also how it might wake others up and invite them into a kind of different space when listening to the podcast.
So, this is just another example that Is something that I've been practicing for a while, is just my commitment to being vulnerable, um, here on the podcast and also particularly on LinkedIn, which is where I the only social channel, in fact, that that I'm on, um, you know, my willingness to tell personal stories, to make mistakes, to speak out about things that I feel very strongly about even when I know that there are others around me who don't see things the same way.
I also like to mix formats in my business and that's something that I am excited to explore further. So for me, that's maybe the element of adventure. So just last week I was asked to record an audio experience for a, um, actually a corporate, um, company that I, that I work with. I've done a lot of kind of, um, um, inner work and personal growth work with.
And in the recording, I was mixing meditation, visualisation, poetry, uh, kind of conceptual thought, and it was a very new way of me working. It was kind of right on the edge of where I felt really confident about what I was delivering, and where there was a certain nervousness to trying something new. And that, for me, is a real element of adventure, an example of an Injection of God.
And I think, really simply, and this would always be my starting point, is this walk that I've been sharing, or this practice of walking, it's not, it's not intended purely as a metaphor. That is part of my Worklife that helps me to open up to new thoughts and new ideas, to work on problems in my mind, to have new insights.
The very first thing that I would suggest to you that you do, if you're not already, is to develop some kind of daily nature practice, some way of somehow being in nature every day as part of your Worklife.
So, those are some examples of ways that I have been trying to welcome this concept of Injection of God into my business.
And this doesn't mean that I think that we need to constantly be stretching ourselves, we should be always pushing through boundaries or living on adrenaline, I really don't want this to be interpreted as some kind of you know, hustle culture disguised as regenerative thought. I've been there, I did that for years, that was my philosophy of kind of how to do business, was every day, challenge myself, push further, do more, you know, eek out, uh, every, or squeeze out every moment of potential in every second.
And I'm not saying it didn't work, but I don't believe that it was truly sustainable, and that's what we're looking for here, to build truly sustainable careers, truly sustainable businesses. So it's very important as you play with this idea to continue to find ways to come back to comfort. You know, I come back from these early morning cold walks and I make, you know, a warm herbal tea and I reach for my favorite woolly jumpers and I put the heating on and that helps me to go out and have those adventures because I know that I can come back to comfort and it's really important that as we experiment with this wildness, this idea of injecting God into our businesses, the God of our individual understandings, that we also look after ourselves, specifically that we look after our nervous systems.
And I have a lot of tools to do that work, and it's something that I really prioritise with my one to one clients because I don't believe that you can do something as challenging as step out of the corporate world of work and the lifetime of conditioning that comes with that and pursue something as mysterious and ever changing as regenerative work, if you don't really take care of your nervous system.
And if that's something that you would like to have more support with, then please do take a look at my Vision to Reality Career Transition Program. You can find that on my website regenerativeworklife.com. Thank you for listening today. I'm feeling a little bit of that element of stretch in speaking with you about a concept that really only fully came together in my mind this morning.
We were out on a particularly frosty walk this morning. So I hope that you've enjoyed finding your way into this idea with me and I know that you will find your own interpretation of this. And really my, my parting words are that your business, your work, should let you know that you are alive, very clearly.
When I go out on those walks, I know that I am alive, and I come back to my home and my family and to my clients and my coaching knowing that I'm alive. So seek out ways to know that you are alive through your work. Thank you for listening and I will see you next week.
