Tami Simon: Welcome to this special solo podcast episode of Insights at the Edge. Welcome, friends. Thanks for being with me. I’m going to talk about being a spiritual entrepreneur, and I’m going to offer seven orienting principles that are alive for me right now about spiritual entrepreneurship. I haven’t done very many of these solo episodes. I don’t think I’ve done one for about 200 or so episodes back on Insights at the Edge, so this is a special opportunity for me to connect with you right from my heart.
I’m recording this from a studio in British Columbia on an island—Cortes Island. And one of the things I’m very aware of is how, as a human being, we are a connecting point between the inspiration of the sky, with our feet very grounded on the earth, and how the energy of that groundedness comes up into our bodies, and the inspiration from above comes down through the top of our head, and it all meets—you guessed it—in our very human heart. And then our heart has the opportunity to give voice to what we care the most about and to flow out into action through our hands, through what we make in the world, and for those who we reach out to and touch.
So I’m speaking to you from my heart about spiritual entrepreneurship. Why this topic? A few months ago, an article came out [in which] I was referred to as a spiritual entrepreneur, and I thought, “That’s really curious. I’m not sure how I feel about that. And in fact, I’m not sure I like it.” My first reaction was that it sounded a little something like oily. And then I thought, “Is it oily to be a spiritual entrepreneur? Am I oily?” And my conclusion is that, in fact, that is an archetype that I’m inhabiting. And no, I don’t think I’m oily, I’m happy to say.
I will say that I believe in not keeping our light under a bushel, so to speak—taking the bushel off and shining it brightly through our hearts. And that means claiming and taking up the space that we stand in. And for those of us today who want to make an impact in our world because we care, we need to be right where we are in the field of endeavor that we’re in, and change it, upgrade it, evolve it. And that’s a big part of what I’m interested in doing for the world of business. Business has an “oily” name to it often when people hear it. And it doesn’t have to be that way. And that’s what I feel very committed to changing through spiritual entrepreneurship.
So what do I mean by this word “spiritual”? It means a lot of different things to different people. Some people are turned off by it. They think it has something to do with religion. Let me tell you what it means to me. It means the innermost—the most subtle—dimension of knowing; the deep inner contact that I believe is available to all of us; a sense of something that goes beyond our incarnate individuality, where we’re connected to everything in a type of timeless way; a light that knows no end, that has the ability to shine through us, a pure goodness that’s available to us.
And this exploration of the spiritual inside has really been a lifeline for me. My whole adult life, it’s what’s inspired me. It’s what’s given me a sense of, “I can be here” during really hard times, dark times—difficult times within my own life and within the world—this sense of touching that kind of inner pure field of light and goodness. So yes, here I stand claiming being a certain kind of person in business, a spiritual person in business.
And then, what about entrepreneurship? I love entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship to me is a form of utter creativity. It’s finding a way to solve a problem, a need that people have, an unmet need—being tremendously creative and innovative about it; being willing to explore, try, fail, stand up, try again, persevere, keep going, have the grit.
So we can bring spirituality and entrepreneurship together. We can fill our business activities with that inner light and heart of service. So that’s the core of what it means to me to be a spiritual entrepreneur.
Now, back when I was a younger person—we’re going way back now; back into the 1980s, mid-1980s and 1990s—when I looked around, I was looking for mentors. Was there anyone who could help me? I didn’t have the language I’m using now for what I was trying to do, but I did have the pure intent and motivation. And it was hard to find mentors. In fact, what I found in the business world was people who would say to me, “Tami, this is all great. It’s a very aspirational view. But at the end of the day, business is business.” Which is kind of code language for, “Money runs by its own rules. If you bring this type of benevolent heart to it, you will fail.” And I thought, “Well, that’s not going to work for me and that person can’t be my mentor.”
And then, within the world of spiritual wisdom traditions, where I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying and looking at the inside of many spiritual organizations, I found some terrific meditation teachers who were terrible at organizational life and organizational development—knew nothing about it, cared nothing about it. There was no sense of a 360-degree review and feedback process, no sense of the wisdom of organizational training and development being brought to these organizations. And I was like, “Well, that’s not going to really help me either when it comes to spiritual entrepreneurship.”
So I set out on my own training path. And quite honestly, I’ve been on that training path for a long time. And over the past decade or so, I feel so fortunate to have found some terrific mentors in the form of visionary CEOs, business trainers, and wisdom teachers. And at Sounds True, we’ve put together these mentors into a world-class faculty for a program that we call the Inner MBA. It’s now run three years. We’re about to enter our fourth year, and more than 3,000 people have graduated from the Inner MBA. It’s a partnership with both LinkedIn and Wisdom 2.0. It’s a nine-month online immersion, and you can learn more at innermbaprogram.com.
And with this talk, I’m going to be sharing some of the insights that I’ve learned through the Inner MBA. And I’d love to warmly invite you to join this community—the Inner MBA community—if you’re interested, if you’re looking for fellow journeyers who are bringing together their deep interest and commitment and hearts landing in the world of spirituality and the desire to make a difference for good through business. You can learn more, as I mentioned, at innermbaprogram.com. And also, for listeners of Insights at the Edge, if you use the code INSIGHTS, you can get a $500 tuition discount for the program that begins in mid-September.
All right. Let’s get to these seven orienting principles for being a spiritual entrepreneur. The first orienting principle is leading with presence. Now, I’m using this word “orienting” because these are principles that are important to me to return to again and again and again. They’re ways of orienting attention. They’re not so much like these are chiseled laws of every moment of life. It’s more like, “Oh, this is what I care about. This is what I value. This is what I want to return to again and again.” It’s what’s alive for me right now when I think of holding up spiritual entrepreneurship as a way of being a genuine, benevolent force in the world. Leading with presence—number one orienting principle for me—to return again and again to this state called presence.
What do I mean, “state called presence”? We can feel it in ourselves and we can feel it in other people. I’ll start by describing what it feels to me when I’m with someone else, and I can tell that they are someone who’s really embodying presence. There’s an openness, a spaciousness, a “welcome anything” quality about them. They feel both grounded and big at the same time—“big” as in receptive. Anything could be said and shared; there’s that much welcoming space about them. There’s a feeling of care. Their hearts are present. A certain type of immediate generosity. They’re not distracted, they’re not sketchy, they’re not trying to convince me of something. And also, it’s attractive. It’s a quality I want to be around. It’s a quality that soothes me and brings out my best. I feel connected.
Now, here’s the incredible news. We can be these people who embody presence for other people—for the people that we work with. And when we do, we bring out the best in other people. And here’s the great news: at least in my experience, being in presence, acting from presence, creating from presence is tremendously rewarding. We experience ourselves as undivided. We’re in the moment. We’re fully engaged. Those are things that are inherently rewarding. They feel good. Presence feels good. It feels substantial. We feel our own gravitas as human beings, our own sense of ourselves.
One of the core faculty members of the Inner MBA teaches at the Peter F. Drucker School of Management. He’s a remarkable person. His name is Jeremy Hunter. And one of the quotes that he brings forward from Peter F. Drucker—great management teacher—is that, “You can really only effectively manage other people when you learn how to manage yourself.” And I think the key—from my view—of learning to manage ourselves has to do with this orienting idea of knowing how to return to presence again and again and again; knowing when we’re distracted, knowing when we’re freaked out, knowing when we’ve been hijacked, knowing when we’re flattened, or when we’re all hot and agitated.
Knowing how to work with our body is key in my experience to return to presence, because our body is always in present time. It’s not in the future. It couldn’t be. And it’s not in the past. It couldn’t be. It’s right here. So we can orient by coming back to our body. And we can do this at work—we can do this in a meeting. We can do this at any time and check in with our breathing. You can do this right now. I can do this right now. Are we right here in a state of embodied immediacy right now? Can we feel our breathing? Can we make it soft and smooth, silky? When we do, do we feel more here, more open and receptive? Are we more able to lead with presence and therefore manage ourselves?
And what I mean by “manage ourselves” is we know at work when it’s time to say, “Let me think about that. Let me get back to you on that.” When it’s time to sleep on something, when it’s time not to make a difficult matter worse by taking action, which could be the wrong action. This is what the practice of mindfulness—the training in mindfulness—develops in us. This is why we’ve included a training in Mindfulness Daily at Work from Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach as part of the Inner MBA and why we practice mindfulness as an Inner MBA community. It’s a huge development as human beings when we become really good at no longer identifying with all of our passing thoughts and passing feelings. But instead, we take the time to develop a bird’s eye view—a witnessing eye’s view—of what’s happening inside of us, and we carefully choose how to act skillfully. Once we’re informed by all of our passing thoughts and feelings, we become what Eckhart Tolle calls “an everyday teacher of presence.”
That’s the invitation at work: no matter what role we have in an organization, to impact other people by being an everyday teacher of presence. And there are innumerable opportunities to practice every single time we’re triggered. I notice that when I’m triggered, often what happens—the first thing I feel in my body is that my toes clench up and my hands start to clench a little bit, and I become a little bit like one of those creatures that hangs from a tree by its feet and by its hands, like a sloth hanging—like that. I’m all tense in my feet and my hands, and I can simply use this orienting principle of returning to presence by breathing into my hands and feet, opening them, relaxing them, letting my breath return to silkiness. This is a way of managing ourselves, and it allows us to live into the heart commitment that I believe we all have, which is to bring benefit to other people—to not be part of the mess.
Which brings me to the second orienting principle for me of spiritual entrepreneurship, which is putting relationships first. I mentioned to you at the very beginning of this, that as a person, I’ve found myself having one foot in a spiritual world and one foot in a business world, but actually I have three feet. OK. And my third foot lives in the realm of healthy and thriving and glorious, reciprocal, nourishing relationships. And why is that? For me, it’s because I found it was one of my deepest longings as a person—one of my deepest longings—to genuinely connect with other people.
So often in the world of work, it seems that people treat other people as if they’re somehow some means to some other end. You’re some instrument in my grand scheme, you’re the cog in my big business wheel, something like that. It’s a transactional thing. You’re going to get this done. And to me, we miss the incredible opportunity—the opportunity of our lives—which is very simply to love each other, to give and receive love. And we have so many opportunities.
In fact, every single time we come into contact with someone, anyone at any point in our life, we have that opportunity. And we have that opportunity so much at work. One of the CEOs that’s part of the Inner MBA, who has been a huge inspiration to me, is Steve Macadam. He led a company called Enpro for many years, which is a public company north of a billion dollars in sales with 6,000 people who work on the manufacturing floor. And Enpro has a commitment to what they call their “dual bottom line.” Yes, as a public company, they’re committed to their financial performance, but they’re also equally committed to their second bottom line, which they describe as human flourishing. And Steve talked to me about what it means to treat a human being—the growth and flourishing of a human being; their learning, their personal evolution in their life—as an end in itself.
Even if it doesn’t have an instrumental purpose for the organization to care about people’s families, to care about their interests outside of work, to support them when they want to have training of some kind that doesn’t directly relate to their job at work, to actually care about people because—not because they’re going to be better at their job, not because they’re going to be loyal, not because it’s going to increase the value of the company—but to care about people because we care about people. Just that. And that people can always smell it. They can sniff it out. If you’re doing a tit-for-tat kind of thing—“I’m doing this for you. I’m caring about you so that you’ll be X, Y, Z for me,”—people can always feel that. I can always feel that. That’s not really caring about someone. And the fact is, this isn’t something we have to instill in us. I believe this is natural to us.
This is what lives in that deepest dimension—subtle dimension—of our heart. That’s what the—as I mentioned—this unborn light gives birth to. It’s this love we have for each other, and we get to live that at work. And we live it at work simply by removing the barriers to it. That’s it. Because as human beings, this is how we are. And what I mean by removing the barriers is giving people the space to speak to each other, real human to real human. It’s been one of the most remarkable things that I’ve seen at Sounds True—is that you don’t have to create a top-down culture change movement. What you have to do is get out of the way and let people care about each other. Let them have the meal trains when there’s a loss in the family or somebody’s going through a hard time. Simply create the room for it to happen and the acknowledgement that we are a caring, loving community. We put our relationships first. When we have that kind of attitude, so much changes and our natural human love at work pours into the culture.
And that brings me to principle three: creating a culture of care, engagement, and well-being. We know how important that is, particularly today in the times that we’re in. Sometimes when I talk to people who are part of business groups, I feel like before I can even get into any of the inspiring and important things I want to share, I have to practically resuscitate people. And what I mean by that is so many of us are so tired, we’re so burnt out. We’re so flattened by everything that’s happening in our world—by the pressures that are on us from environmental destruction and climate change, from the losses in our families, from the mental health challenges that we find close to us—close to those we love. Losses of all kinds. Could our organizations possibly, instead of being one more stressor pushing me to the edge of my limit, instead be these cultures of care? [Could] they bring forth our engagement and we feel that our well-being is enhanced through our work?
I think it’s possible. I think we have to orient towards that if we’re going to really take spiritual entrepreneurship seriously. One of the new conscious business trainers that’s in the Inner MBA is a gentleman named Tony Schwartz, who’s the founder of The Energy Project. And he talks about how we can think about energy in terms of the quality of energy and quantity of energy. You could put this, if you will, on a graph with quantity being the vertical axis and quality being the horizontal axis. And if we go to the upper right quadrant, we’ll find that we have a lot of energy and it’s of a high quality, and that’s the high performance zone. And I believe that’s where we all want to be. We all want to be like a mindful or great athlete where we give our best—our high performance best—at work.
I know that’s what I want. I really want that. I want to bring my A game. I know—and this is me, and I think it’s inherent in us—this drive as human beings for excellence. As Steve Macadam, the EnPro CEO, says, “Who wants to come home at the end of the day and say, ‘Yeah, one more mediocre day,’ when they’re sitting at the dining room table sharing about their day?” No, that’s not what we want as human beings. We want to live and work in that high performance zone.
Now, we could also have a high quantity of energy, but it could be of low quality. That’s the upper left quadrant, and that’s what’s called “the grind.” And I think many of us live in that grind zone at work. We’re just grinding it out. Grind, grind, grind, grind. Now, if you go to the bottom right where you don’t have that much energy, but it still has a high quality to it—that’s the zone of rest.
And the goal when we’re creating these cultures of care, engagement, and well-being is that we alternate between high performance and rest, high performance and rest. We always keep the quality of our energy refined—beautiful quality, high performance, rest. Any good athlete knows you have to have those days where you restore, where you build yourself back up, where you have good sleep and nutrition, and then you can come back out and perform. That’s where I think we want to live, and we want to build the cultures that support that. High performance, good rest.
Instead, if we go down now to the lower left where we don’t have a lot of energy of a good quantity or a good quality, that’s the burnout zone. And if we spend too much time grinding it out, we end up being in the burnout zone. And I think that’s where many of us find ourselves today, and this is the kind of shift that’s needed.
Conscious businesses need to help make this shift so that we create cultures where people experience high performance and are given permission—not just permission; it’s reinforced that we want you to take really good care of yourselves. Not only do we put relationships first and take good care of each other—and when we do that, take good care of our customers—but we value self-care in our culture. It’s a value of ours because we know it leads to high performance.
When I started the Inner MBA program—as I mentioned, we’ve now run three cohorts, so this was three years ago when we first ran the first Inner MBA—I realized I had a false perception—a false dichotomy—in my mind. I thought if you really put self-care and well-being right front and center of your organization, it was going to cost so much money to support that, that it would impact productivity.
That was the false notion that I had. I was like, “Wow, this is such a tension. How do you make sure that people have the time that they need to take care of themselves and their families and still control your budget the way you had to?” That was a question that I brought into the Inner MBA, and I was schooled. And I’m so glad I was. And the way that I was schooled both by the participants—the members of the community—and the faculty, was to see that the more you’re able to invest in people’s well-being, the more they actually have to give, the more innovative they are, the more creative they are. That’s the engagement part, and that it’s actually a false dichotomy to think that it’s so costly. One of the CEOs that I interviewed as part of the Inner MBA program is Rose Marcario, the former CEO of Patagonia, and she talked about the tremendous policies that they have, including … Are you ready for this? They’ll send a nanny on a trip with an employee who’s recently had a baby, who needs infant care so that person can attend meetings if they need to travel for work for some reason.
And then I remember saying to Rose, “Look, a lot of companies aren’t profitable enough. We can’t send a nanny along with a new parent.” And she said, “Tami, have you actually done the math? Have you seen how much it would really cost to do that? Have you looked at it? Have you really seen what the costs are of these programs that you flat out say you don’t think you can afford?” And I realized she was right—that I was making certain assumptions.
Another one of the CEOs who’s a beloved presenter in the Inner MBA, JeVon McCormick, he’s the author of a book called Modern Leader, and he’s the CEO of Scribe Media, which has been ranked as the top company culture in the United States. JeVon, his motto is people first and he’s come up with so many innovative policies that support his staff. You ready for this one? They have a pool of money that’s set aside that an employee can access if they have a personal emergency of some kind. If I remember correctly, I think it was $1,500. If your car breaks down, if you have some kind of dental emergency for one of your kids and you just need help, the company is there for you and they’re able to loan you the money right there from this employee assistance fund that they’ve created.
These are just sample ideas. The main thing is an expression of a commitment that says, “We want people to know that we care about them. You know why? Because we care about them.”
And now we move on to orienting principle number four: embrace challenges. Another way to say this is “do the hard things.” I think sometimes when people think about spirituality, they think, “Oh, that means that everything’s going to come easily. It’s all in the flow. This is like sitting on a cloud with angels singing. That’s what my life’s going to be like because I’m a spiritual person.” Well, that certainly hasn’t been my experience at all. In fact, I feel uncomfortable every day. Uncomfortable things are happening, curve balls are happening, unexpected things are happening, and this notion of embracing challenges—actually opening my arms and saying, “OK, bring it on. I embrace you,”—that is the nature of growth. That’s the nature of being that high performing person—is that there are lots of challenges that are coming and they’re being embraced. They’re being worked through.
When we think of an athlete, think of the number of challenges. They actually train by challenging themselves. Could it be an orienting principle that when a challenge comes, we see it as a welcome part of our growth and development? Not like something that shouldn’t be happening because we’re a spiritual person and everything should be love, light, flow, and cloud banks. No, we’re human, people. Bridging—as I mentioned—heaven and earth right here with our heart that feels so much, that takes in those challenges and turns out beautiful creative work. And in order to do that, I believe we have to welcome the journey of not just waking up to our deep light, but—as Ken Wilber says—then continuing to grow up, to not be stuck in any kind of childhood fantasy that other people are going to take care of this, right? I don’t need to worry about it. I don’t need to grow up. Someone else is going to handle that. It’s not really mine to do.
No, actually it’s ours to do. If we’re going to have any kind of entrepreneurial impact, then we have to actually grow up and claim our agency.
Then there’s cleaning up. Cleaning up has to do with the willingness to look at our own unworked material, what could be lurking in that semi-conscious place that other people can see. It’s hard for us to see often—that’s holding us back. One of the core trainers that’s part of the Inner MBA is a Harvard professor named Lisa Lahey. She’s the co-author of the book Immunity to Change, and she brings the immunity to change process into the Inner MBA.
With the immunity to change process, we look at how one part of us might have our foot on the accelerator—the dream; how we want to grow, evolve, and contribute more at work—but yet there’s another part of us that seems to always have a foot on the brake. What is that? What’s that foot on the brake? What are we doing? What is the idea that perhaps has never been tested, that we think we have to hold fast to in order to keep ourself safe?
That’s really what we’re doing by putting our foot on the brake. It’s too scary to take our foot off. There’s too much risk involved. Can we do the cleanup work of examining that, of bringing it to consciousness, of starting to test those assumptions so that we wake up, we grow up, we clean up, and then we show up?
And that’s what I think is really needed. And being asked for—dare I say—at this time, for us to be people of conscience who show up; who take our space, speak our voice, say what we care about, and create organizations that are coherent and congruent with our deepest hearts’ values. That’s what I think is being asked for—that kind of showing up. And it’s amazing to me how many people in the Inner MBA have reported that one of the greatest gifts they got from the program is they started speaking up at work more. They started having hard conversations. What I like to call “brave truth telling.” Yes, I’m going to stand in a place, I’m going to be skillful. I’m going to say it in the way that I think other people in this organization can receive it. I’m going to work with all the tools that I’ve cultivated for working with other people, and I will be a brave truth teller, embracing the challenges of this situation.
Now, there’s another aspect of embracing challenge that I want to talk about because I think it’s alive for many of us at this time, which is the sense that there are things we’re being called to let go of so that what is new can come through a time of transition—embracing the challenge that comes with transition. And I think for many people, the pandemic ushered in a sense of the very grid of our lives changing, whether that’s where we live; whether that’s where we work, how we work; whether that’s some type of grid change in our relationships—a sense that as part of the evolution of our time, there are things we need to have the courage to let go of so that we can inhabit what’s wanted next.
And often in that process of doing the hard thing—letting go of the known so that we can step through the unknown to something that we can sense, but we don’t really know exactly what the new form will be, but we know we have to do it—that is a true embrace of challenge and it requires all of our capacities to do it. And yet if we don’t do it, we secretly know that we’ll rot. We’ll actually rot. And yet we have this terrible choice. Do I rot or do I enter the huge unknown and take a risk? And I do think that an orienting principle “do the hard thing” means that we choose to let die what needs to die so that what can be born can be born. I’ve just gone through this in a very, very, very, very, very, very big underlined way in my own professional life—of passing the CEO baton to a brilliant, innovative woman that I’ve worked with for seven years, Sybil Chavis—at Sounds True.
My intention is to remain intensely involved with content creation at Sounds True—to always be the founder and now to function as the board chair. And in this change, there was a certain type of letting go of ego confirmation and acclaim the CEO title so that I could step into what’s truly being animated for me, which is the next creative expression of my life as I move now—I’m in my sixties—and move into the next few decades of my life where I can feel a different type of creative energy is asking to come through me than the management of the day-to-day flow of the work of Sounds True. What a big deal to actually follow that. What a risk to take, and yet what a greater risk not to. So one of the core orienting principles: do the hard thing, embrace challenges, embrace the unknown, follow the true call inside.
And now onto orienting principle number five: spiritual entrepreneurs orient around solving real social problems. I hope it’s obvious that when I’m talking about spiritual entrepreneurship, I don’t have any idea that people will necessarily bring their entrepreneurial powers to something like spiritual education in the way that Sounds True does. You can take these orienting principles and apply them to any business. My hope, though, would be that our entrepreneurship—our problem-solving ability—would actually address the real needs we’re facing right now.
Melissa Bernstein is an entrepreneur-in-residence for the Inner MBA, and she is a powerfully creative and intuitive person who senses what’s needed now—what are people’s unmet needs and how can we use our creative powers to address them? Along with her husband, she founded Melissa and Doug, the toy company that dedicated themselves to helping elicit imagination in children—stimulating a child’s play. And now in the past few years, she’s created a new company called Lifelines, and they’re creating materials that stimulate our senses in order to help us feel more grounded and relieve stress and balance our nervous system.
It’s almost like she has a sixth sense of what will work—what will work in terms of her own animation, passion, and skillset, and how to address a real need at the same time. She taught an innovation workshop for the Inner MBA and offered, right at the beginning, this quote from Nietzsche, “If you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.” And I think that’s so true. We can embrace challenges as I described previously because we have our why. We know why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s clear to us. All of us [are] invested in it. All of ourselves are lit up by it. That’s what gives us the perseverance, the ability to keep doing the hard thing again and again and again. If we’re solving a real social problem and we have a sense of destiny around it—our own destiny; “This is what I’m here to do. I feel it. I feel that sense of inner call.” If we know our why, we can bear the how.
And dare I say, I think right now we need many, many, many spiritually focused entrepreneurs who know their why and are addressing the greatest problems we face. I think entrepreneurship is a huge part of what’s going to enable us to move out of the current time of destruction and divisiveness that we’re in and move into a different world. Business is operating differently and we’re remaking our world through conscious entrepreneurship. That’s what the invitation is for us to participate in.
And that brings us to orienting principle number six: trust the unfolding process. It’s hard to trust a lot of times, especially when things aren’t going the way we wish they were going, whether that’s in our personal lives, our family lives, our organization’s lives, or in the life of our world. It’s hard to trust the unfolding process. And yet information coming in—crises coming in—leads to creative action. It leads to the next unfolding. I heard this phrase, “trust the unfolding process,” from a meditation teacher. And it was very important to me at that time in my life because it was a time in my life when I had a lot of doubt, especially about other people. And was it safe actually to really relax and trust?
And from this meditation teacher—believe it or not, I received the Bodhisattva name, which is a name that you get—a special dharma name, spiritual name—when you commit yourself to working for the benefit of other people. And the name I got was “All-Trusting Heart.” And I was like, “No way. How could I have a name like that?” Obviously it was an aspirational name, and I asked this teacher, “Why did you give me a name like that? Especially when X, Y, Z has happened to me and this other thing has happened to me?” And basically I’ve had the experience of being stabbed in the back. And he’s like, “Well, that’s the point. You even trust that you needed to be stabbed in the back for this next unfolding to happen, for the unfolding process to happen.”
So when I think now about how as a spiritual entrepreneur we can lean into this idea of trusting the unfolding process, two key ideas occur to me. And they relate to this notion of being a human being that is between—as I mentioned to the beginning—the heaven principle, the open sky, and the earth.
At the earth level, with our feet on the ground, I’ve found I can lean into trust when I release tension—physical tension—in the body. The physical tension correlates with mental tension and worry and repetitive discursive thinking. It’s a way that I’m pulling back and pulling out of the intensity of the moment, the heartbreak of the moment, the outrage of the moment. That tension is a kind of pulling back and not actually being aligned with the full, burning intensity of what’s happening in the moment.
So trusting the unfolding process has a lot for me to do with this notion of finding physical tension. Feet on the ground. Where are they flat? Where are they not flat? Tension all the way up through the shoulders. Can I release it? And when I do, do I become more in touch with the power and the open potential of this very moment?
Now, the other thing that helps me trust the unfolding process is to remember that bigger purpose—why I am doing what I’m doing in organizational life. And that there’s a whole lot of support for that. I’m not alone in that. The vision, the inspiration, what is underneath that purpose has so many other people also who are aligned with it. And so many forces—huge heart forces, huge visionary forces that are in support and in collaboration of this purpose being realized. So that’s also what helps lean in for me to trusting the unfolding process.
And this brings us to orienting principle number seven: lift each other up. Isn’t that really what we could be doing with our businesses? Isn’t that really what I think any very inspired, quote unquote, “spiritual” entrepreneur wants to do?
We want to lift up, yes, each other—the people we work with. We want to lift up our investors if we have investors. We want to lift up our vendors, the people that we do business with, our customers. I’ll take it even further. We want to lift up future generations. We want to help lift up the state of the environment that we’re in, the earth that we occupy.
In the world of Sounds True, I even want to help lift up the ideas—the nobility, integrity, and purity of the ideas we publish almost like platonic ideals that we can lift up in beautiful ways. I think it’s possible for business to be this force of lifting us up instead of—as we often think about business—as something extractive that benefits the few, it becomes something that’s regenerative—that lifts up the many.
At Sounds True, we started a Sounds True Foundation so our for-profit company could also have a nonprofit arm making the programs that we create widely accessible. We call it “equitable access to spiritual education.” There are so many different creative models that businesses can use that reflect this knowing of our interdependence.
One of the plenary speakers at the Inner MBA graduation was Lynne Twist, and she talked about how she first met Buckminster Fuller 50 years ago and how he said, “Every part of our world, including our businesses, will have to be remade 50 years from now with this recognition of our interdependence at the very core of the design embedded in everything that we do.” And that time is now. Some people call this “the stakeholder model.” All of the stakeholders rise up. We’re all lifted up together. Now, from a very personal way, we also have the chance to simply—and it sounds simple and it’s profound in my experience—lift each other up.
You ready for this? In all of our interactions, we can actually do it. We can do it in really simple ways, and this is something that I’ve been experimenting with for the past decade. And I’m so excited to get to share this with you because it’s simple, but yet I found really profound. It’s a certain turning, if you will, where you actually say out loud what you are appreciating about someone in the moment. This is what I’ve found for a long time—what I said out loud were things that I was critical of or things I wanted people to do at work, or things that I thought could be better or stretch goals. And then I shifted it.
I still say all of those things, but I added in—every single time somebody does something, and it’s not just the people I work with, it could also be people that I just meet and interact with in the world, where I have this inner rising of a sense of appreciation. Like, “Wow, that was so lovely. What a great smile. What a beautiful sound in your voice. It sounds like you have a radio voice.” It could be as simple as, “I love your shirt.” It could be like, “Oh my God, you stayed late and did this thing.” Or, “What a great job you did.” Every single time I think it, I’ve made this inner commitment to say it out loud to the person or write them an email or text. And what I’ve noticed is it connects us heart to heart when I do that. It’s a simple way that we can lift each other up.
When it comes to lifting each other up in many ways, that’s what the Inner MBA—the nine-month conscious business online immersion that we’ve created at Sounds True—that’s what it’s really about. We’re not going to do this as isolated individuals. We’re not going to remake the world of business with a deep heart-based, mission-based business unless we have each other. Unless we have each other we can ask for help. We can receive help, we can give mentorship. We can receive mentorship.
And that’s what we’ve created within the Inner MBA community. We’ve gathered conscious CEOs—people who are committed to a different kind of leadership, changing the world of business so that it truly is this force of lifting each other up. These are people like Eileen Fisher, Bill Ford—the list goes on and on. People with deep commitments to changing how business is done in the future. Conscious business trainers like Otto Scharmer from MIT and Ed Hess, professor emeritus at the Darden School of Business. And wisdom teachers Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Tara Brach, Rhonda Magee—all joining together to create a world-class faculty embedded in a deep community. The program also features a series of Conscious Business Accelerator workshops, including a special workshop on Conscious Marketing on how to be a trauma-informed leader, the inner dimensions of mastering money, and more.
And again, I warmly—arms wide open—welcome you to join us for the Inner MBA. It starts in the middle of September of each year. We only run the program once a year. About 3,000 people have graduated. You’ll be joining them as part of the Inner MBA community.
You can use the code INSIGHTS. If you’re interested in applying and receive a $500 tuition discount, just come and visit us at soundstrue@innermbaprogram.com. That’s innermbaprogram.com.
And here at the end of this set of reflections on being a spiritual entrepreneur, I just want to take a moment to thank you. If you’ve listened this far, clearly there’s a conversation happening between us of some kind—some sense of alliance at this time of poly-crisis, as it’s called in our world—where we’re rolling up our sleeves, spreading our heart wide, connecting the visions that we receive coming from above with a deep sense of groundedness [and] having that energy flow through us. Yep, we’re doing this. I appreciate you. Thanks for being part of—dare I say—this movement with me.
Sounds True: waking up the world.
