Have you ever thought about how you approach life? Your mentality – one of abundance or scarcity – shows up in your work and business exchanges.

Canadian pricing innovator Tara Joyce exemplifies how your work can be a platform for creating a more abundant world. In May 2008, at the age of 26, she left her corporate career in marketing and digital media in search of a career that would represent what she truly wanted from business and life.

Later in 2009, Tara Joyce decided to try something exciting in her business. Desiring a business framework that was centered on abundance instead of scarcity, she decided to stop setting prices and experiment with a pricing innovation that she calls “Pay What It’s Worth”, a concept she discusses in her book titled by the same name.

Through this pricing strategy, Tara aimed to explore her relationships with money by allowing clients to set prices. In the five years that followed she was able to sustain her business while empowering customers to determine the value of her offerings.

Conscious and Sustainable Business

Tara is an example of a growing niche of entrepreneurs who seek to change the rules of business and redesign business exchanges. Innerpreneurs are seeking more conscious, sustainable and meaningful exchanges.

How can you redesign the systems around you to make them more value-driven like Tara has done? The following points can guide your thinking on redesigning the frameworks within which you find yourself.

1. Pay attention.

   Pay close attention to the problem and the underlying opportunity. Look for ways to redesign the system that created the problem. Innovators like Tara look not only to stop the gap but to eliminate it. They desire to go beyond filling a need; and hasten to redesign the system that creates the need.

   In Tara’s case, she was not satisfied with the language and logic of fear and scarcity that tends to surround business transactions. She wanted to re-frame her work to make way for a more abundance-centered paradigm.

   Innovators take responsibility for the systems they find themselves in; knowing it is not enough to complain, cheat the system or to be passive. “You have the power to choose the type of world, and economy, you want to live in and create,” she says.

2. View people differently.

   See people not as a means to an end, but rather as your foundation. In Tara’s words, “Treat your relationships with care. They are your foundations.” Innovators are intrinsically motivated to uphold their values and to serve people. Valuing people is not a tactic to grow their business but the only condition in which they are fulfilled in business.

   As such they build frameworks for their business that are grounded in the cultivation of free flows of information. They have an ethical expectation of norms in each business relationship. Most importantly, they communicate need for accountability on their part and that of their customers.

   Take time to think about how you are setting and communicating the norms of your business, think about the level of disclosure you create with each exchange and think about the level of accountability you give and receive in your business.