Fulfilling life out of rat race

By ALICE SHOPLAND

Eight years ago, change management consultant Anne Ackerman bought a backpack and went on a "character-building" holiday in Nepal.

Little did she know that it would lead to far more dramatic change than the sort in which she would engage clients.

Just hours after a chance meeting in Nepal with a Polish doctor who had worked with Mother Teresa, Ackerman abandoned her trekking plans in favour of travelling to Calcutta.

She extended her trip and spent her first Christmas away from her children and her family, working as a volunteer at Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying.

"I learned some real-life lessons from Mother T herself," Ackerman says, "and that began my change process and my search for meaningful work - or work with meaning."

Back in Auckland, she trained to be a hospice volunteer and took one morning a week off from her consulting work to do that. But rather than satisfying her new-found need for meaning, it "fuelled the thirst".

A friend introduced her to the Hearing House. Ackerman was astounded by the passion and commitment of patron Sir Patrick Moore, and his absolute conviction that an impossible dream was going to happen just through pure heart and passion. The impossible dream is that children who were born deaf and who now have high-tech hearing aids or cochlear implants could learn to listen.

A cochlear implant, which costs the Government about $26,000, allows a child to hear. But because they have missed out on the usual early stages of listening in the womb and the world, they don't know how to make sense of the information they hear.

It can be overwhelming for both child and parent, and without tuition in accelerated listening they may simply give up.

With no Government funding and completely reliant on private donations and sponsorship from organisations like the ASB Trust, the Hearing House, in Greenlane, sees about 35 families once or twice a week for up to three years, at no charge to the parents.

"It's hard enough for families coping with a deaf child, without any extra financial worries," says Ackerman.

Initially she spent one day a week working at the Hearing House, then three days a week, still on a voluntary basis. Three years ago, she became the full-time executive director.

"Right from the start, I just loved being here. All my corporate clients seemed really boring in comparison with the excitement and determination of this place."

She says many of her corporate clients found the transition hard to believe, and kept trying to tempt her back: "I kept turning them down and they got the message."

Her friends and family, though, had seen the changes made by the trip to Nepal and India, and for them the new direction made complete sense, she says.

When Ackerman became executive director, she negotiated a salary from The Hearing House of about half of what she earned as a change management consultant. And out of that, initially, she also employed an assistant.

"I've got absolutely no regrets about the change I made or about the drop in pay," she says. "The rewards and satisfaction of this project outweigh anything else I've done. And I'm still able to go to India each year to travel and do a retreat.

"Because of the enormity of our task, we're completely reliant on magic, and that makes each day here magical. It's like an orchestra - far, far more than the sum of its parts.

"And really, it's no wonder that the corporate sector I used to work with started to look so cold and jaded."

Martin Hill, now 56, is another high-flyer who's made a radical change of direction. Ten years ago, Hill, now 56, was using his skills as a designer of strategic communications for big corporates. Today he uses them to benefit the environment - and clients who share his vision.

"I had always felt there was something wrong with the way our industrial society worked if it had to destroy the natural world to be successful. I loved solving strategic design problems but I never got to work on the fundamental problem, that the system is based on a faulty design.

"We take from the earth, make stuff and then throw it in a hole, or in the sky or the sea. I was distanced from the things I love, like mountains and nature and ecology."

The turning point for Hill came after a heart-felt discussion with a friend who suggested he imagine being at his own funeral. What would he like people to say about his achievements?

He realised that he wanted to help to create a sustainable future, and that "building an empire and making lots of money" was never going to satisfy him unless his work made a difference.

"Once I saw the world from an ecological perspective, I couldn't continue to aid its destruction without trying to do something about it," he says.

The difficult part was not deciding to make change in his life, but "taking a step back from everything I'd done so far and everything people expected me to do, and developing my own vision".

He says friends and family found his decision unsettling. Although he knew he was doing the right thing, "the uncertainty was terrifying at first".

But the business world is still very much part of his vision: "I'm deeply interested in business because it's not only the cause of environmental destruction, it can potentially restore it.

"It's by business integrating the laws of natural systems into its activities that sustainability will be achieved.

"The key to this is sustainable design, and the end of the unspoken cultural myth that everything is here for us to exploit at the expense of living systems."

Hill and his partner, Philippa Jones, make environmental sculptures - works of snow, leaves and other natural materials, which disperse naturally.

The only remaining evidence is photographs, which Hill publishes as cards, prints, books and calendars which sell around the world.

As well as earning, these products subtly carry Hill's message about learning from nature to operate cyclically.

Some of the sculptures have been created as part of the Fine Line Project on which he and Jones work together.

When the project is complete, in several years' time, they will have made a dozen sculptures from natural materials on a dozen high points around the world, connected by an imaginary line encircling the earth.

"The line refers to the interconnectedness and interdependence of natural systems," says Hill, "and the fine line we tread between sustainable development and extinction."

The couple are en route to the Bugaboo Mountains in British Columbia and the Isle of Skye in Scotland. They have also made sculptures on Mt Ngauruhoe, Karambony in Madagascar and Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.

Hill's income now is a far cry from what it used to be, but it's enough, he says.

"If you are doing what you are meant to, nature provides. When things get tight financially, I don't go looking for another corporate design assignment. I go out to a wild place and make another sculpture. It works - usually just in time."

When Hill began to change his life's direction, he tried unsuccessfully to find New Zealand business clients who would work with him "to redesign the nature of business".

Last year, he was impressed by concrete evidence of change: he was asked to collaborate with a team working with the Waste Management Institute of New Zealand and all stakeholders "to communicate a new vision and framework for change in the waste industry and society, based on ... waste elimination".

He is heartened by how closely this brief matches the one he has set for himself.