Hector Marcel will speak in Wollongong this month. Photo: Supplied.
A New York–based meditation teacher who has spent decades helping global brands unlock creativity and manage change is bringing his ideas home to Australia, with Wollongong set to host a one-off Inner StartUp event this month.
Hector Marcel, president of nonprofit Three Jewels and consultant to Fortune 500 companies and universities such as Harvard Business School, will share how mindfulness and mindset can become powerful tools for innovation, leadership and performance on 13 January at iAccelerate.
Having spent the past 17 years in New York, Marcel is returning to his native Australia for the global 30th anniversary celebration of his meditation and wellness centre, Three Jewels.
Marcel said the nonprofit’s milestone was being marked by 30 wellness pop-up events around the world, including lectures and yoga sessions.
He described The Inner StartUp event, co-hosted with long-time Wollongong friend Evan Shapiro from Mindful Kookaburra, as especially relevant to those looking for new ways to foster creativity and tackle today’s challenges by strengthening clarity, resilience and decision-making from the inside out.
Combining practical mindset tools with accessible meditation, the 90-minute experience will help participants transform the way they work, lead, and create.
“The Wollongong one, because my background is business, will be way more applicable to business leaders, innovators or creative teams that, in this day and age, are finding difficulty getting innovation to kick in in their minds and to come up with solutions,” he said.
“I’ll share some of my insights from 25 years as an organisational change consultant.
“I’ve consulted for many businesses – many of them Australian – like Nike, Intel, Hitachi and Tommy Hilfiger.
“I’ve helped them organise and manage change, innovation, and performance.
“So I’ll share some of those insights on how business leaders can create a culture where innovation is a function of that culture.”
Hector blends business and mindset. Photo: Supplied.
He said it was applicable to startups through to big business, having consulted with both in New York, often focusing on how perception shapes performance, why stress and self-doubt quietly sabotage outcomes, and how inner transformation becomes a powerful lever for innovation.
“The view that I came to with all these organisations is that no matter how small or how large, the scale doesn’t make a big difference to me, because I’m focused on the human element,” he said.
“If the human minds are engaged, active, supportive of each other, it doesn’t matter.
“It can be a small team and be greatly effective – they just have to solve different problems.
“The whole focus is to get humans to do their best with each other, and then they can achieve more together.”
He said the tools he would share didn’t only apply to business.
“The more we can take care of our own minds, which actually dictate our habits and our approaches, the more we can be responsive rather than reactive,” he said.
He said it didn’t matter whether it was in business or a family context, we were all at the whim of the human condition.
“Someone in our family will get sick or an emergency will happen and our minds will react unless we’ve trained it to respond differently – that response requires a gap between the event and us thinking about our strategy to solve it.
“That’s where innovation comes in your business.
“Mindfulness and really paying attention to how your mind engages with reality is the key to all of it.”
He said as he approached 60 this year, his work was drawn from life experience and more than 30 years of study and practice in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which allowed him to now bridge ancient Eastern wisdom with modern Western business practices.
Book tickets for the Inner StartUp at Building 239, iAccelerate Innovation Campus in Wollongong on 13 January from 4:30 to 6 pm.
