By Esther Blázquez Blanco

In the run-up to The Great Wave, we’ve asked speakers, hub hosts, and friends to don their advice-giving hat and tell us: What’s one thing you would recommend someone do to live a more beautiful life, to have a better and more beautiful business?

Here Esther, our high priestess of Deep Feedback, offers some thoughts on how intuition, presence, and longterm thinking merge into one.

Listen deeply to your instructions. I can’t give you an instruction, nor do I want to, but I know there’s space within you where you know. You know what to do. During my deep feedback sessions, there’s a moment where I ask participants to pair up, and they sit on the floor, facing each other, not speaking. That’s all they can do, and all they’re asked to do: just to look into each other’s eyes. Be present to each other.

The fact is that your presence is the best gift you can give to someone, because what happens in these moments is that by deciding to be present to someone, we become more alive ourselves, and more alive than we are used to being. And this is not about — it’s completely independent from — what else we might bring to the moment; whether we’re sad, happy, whether we’re good or not.

That’s when you hear your questions: How do I want to live this?

By listening deeply, you will hear your own instructions. Please, once you hear, choose the right one. The answer might be that there’s no answer.

If you don’t know which one to choose, pick the one that brings the smell of the great wave.

And by the way, may those instructions not be for me, you, or even for us. May all this presence and deep listening be for a future someone who won’t even know who we were, please.

P.S. Why a dog? A dog takes care of you, is there for you, celebrates your contentment, lets you shine humbly and doesn’t care about your job title, but only about you, h-u-m-a-n-b-e-i-n-g.

For more than ten years, Esther has been dedicated to choreographing honest encounters that have lasting impact. From designing and creating a Burning Man retreat on the Mediterranean Coast, to organizing Hackathons and Brand events, she worked at Typeform to create an authentic and inclusive company culture. Later she joined Gsma to lead the content of the 4YFN Tech Conference for 20,000 people in Barcelona.

Today she is the founder of Deep Business Connection. You can find her at @BLAZQUEZ_ESTHER.