Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Jeremy Hunter. Jeremy is a global authority on mindfulness and leadership as well as the great-grandson of a sumo wrestler. He serves as the founding director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute, as well as the Associate Professor of Practice at the Peter F. Drucker School of Management. Jeremy’s work is informed by the experience of living day-to-day for almost two decades now with a potentially terminal illness, and we’ll be talking about that. For eight times, he’s been awarded the Teacher of the Year award by his students, and when faced with the need for life-saving surgery, more than a dozen former students came forward as organ donors. Jeremy’s also part of the core faculty of the Inner MBA®, which is a nine-month online immersion training program that Sounds True has created in partnership with LinkedIn and Wisdom 2.0. Each year, we take one cohort through the Inner MBA and it starts in September. You can learn more at InnerMBAProgram.com. Jeremy, welcome.
Jeremy Hunter: Hi, Tami, how are you?
TS: Doing well, how are you doing?
JH: Yes, good.
TS: All right. Right here at the beginning, something I don’t know about you. It’s interesting, we’ve had lots of conversations, but I don’t know, how did your life path become focused on being this bridge between—this is how I see it—the deep spiritual journey, and leadership, and organizational transformation. How did that become your focus?
JH: Yes, that’s a great question. In the late 1990s, I was studying at the University of Chicago with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who I think everybody knows is the founder of flow. And we were doing a series of research projects under the umbrella of Good Work. And the Fetzer Institute and the Nathan Cummings Foundation gave us a grant to study “successful professionals who are also long-term mindfulness practitioners.”
So this is the late 1990s, which is a completely different, I think, psychological world. And so even at that time, to have somebody publicly admit they were a meditator was not easy, frankly. And through the good graces of Mirabai Bush and the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society, we found really remarkable people. Robert Shapiro, the former chairman of Monsanto, being one of them, and world-famous movie producers, world-renowned architects as well as journalists, therapists, people who were making a living using their mind, basically. And I would go interview them.
And we would ask a question, something that would be impossible to answer, like, “What do you think your life would be like if you didn’t have this practice?” And again, this is the late 1990s, so a very different world, no mobile technology, none of the craziness we live with right now. They would say something like, “I’m being pulled in so many directions at once that if I didn’t have this practice to keep me grounded, centered, and sane, I think I’d be dead.” And a third of the people we talked to said, “I’d be dead.”
And I realized that everybody needed this kind of practice. And of course, I would’ve been dead too. You know, you mentioned I had this—when I was 20 I was diagnosed with this autoimmune disease, and I turned it into basically a spiritual adventure. And I’m sitting there listening to these people taking notes and thinking, “Oh yeah, you’d be dead too, Jeremy.”
And so then at the end of the nineties, we moved from Chicago to the Drucker School in Claremont. And of course, I think people know Peter Drucker’s considered to be the founding father of the discipline of management, and truly one of the great intellects of his time, maybe of all time. He’s quite an amazing human being. And he wrote extensively about so many things. But one of them which caught my eye was the notion that we have over trained in analysis and we have under trained in perception. We train people to think, but we don’t teach them to see.
And when I found that, that kind of blew my mind. Now, he was a prodigious collector of Japanese painting, Japanese ink brush painting, and he said that Japanese art taught him how to see the world. And so this notion of developing perception, if you were a meditator, that would make sense. But I think if you were just a normal person, that would make no sense at all. What the heck does that mean? Develop perception.
And then the final thing was a colleague of mine, Jean Lipman-Blumen, also a legend in her own right, said to me offhandedly in the hallway—it was like one of those moments that you don’t see coming, but they totally change your life. And she says, “Jeremy, we train managers to manage everything but themselves.” And then in that moment everything came together. I thought, wow, you have these people who are living fairly intense lives saying, if ‘I didn’t have this practice, I’d be dead.’ You had me thinking, “Oh yeah, you’d be dead too.” You have Drucker talking about developing perception to see a world that’s there, not the world that you assume is there so you can adapt to it.
He was thinking about this in terms of ,how do you adapt to change, how do you actually deal with the world? And then my colleague saying, “Oh yeah, we don’t teach managers to manage themselves.” And so it all came together and I realized, oh, everybody needs this kind of thing. And as we’ve talked about before, the balance of Western education is so biased towards thinking and cognition, to the exclusion of somatic sensing or emotion or perception and all the other human faculties that we can develop. And I think also being half Japanese really underscored something for me, because I think anybody who’s been to Japan knows Japan is fundamentally a society of perception, and that it’s a perceptual society, which means that attention—stability and attention is a highly prized cultural aspect.
Even with my own team, their quality of attention is just so much more. I have a business in Japan, and we meet on Zoom regularly every week. And their quality of attention in those meetings is so incredible. I mean, it’s better than mine, frankly, but people are there. Presence is valued as a cultural quality.
And I think living in between these worlds and seeing how one society—the United States is a kind of attention deficit society. And then you have another society which is almost totally the opposite. And how much attention is paid to even the most minute detail, and then oftentimes in the service of making that detail beautiful, has been, I think, kind of an interesting way of going through life.
But that’s the long answer to your question of, how did all these dots connect? And then the challenge was, how do you talk to business people, or managers? We’re not a school of business, we’re a school of management. How do you talk to decision makers and managers, who may not be interested in a spiritual journey, about this kind of thing in a way that they would find relevant? Not just relevant in their life, but an absolute necessity. And that was the next challenge. But that’s the answer to the question.
TS: I’m curious to know more about the quality of perception that Peter F. Drucker was pointing to, and how even right now in this moment, could I do a perceptual exercise to start to connect with the quality of perception that he was pointing to?
JH: Yes, I can give you one that’s actually documented on the internet, of somebody who came to visit him and he brought this topic up. Can you see the world that’s in actually in front of you? Because most of the time we are projecting that through the filters in our head and then distorting what’s actually happening. And she said, “OK.” And he sat her in front of one of the ink brush paintings in his office and he said, “How many colors are there?” And she says, “Two. Black and white.” And he says, “Really?” And she looks at it and she looks at it and she looks at it and she goes, “Oh, I realized there were a thousand shades of gray.” And he said living with these paintings day in and day out, and having a relationship with them, is really what honed his quality of perception.
TS: And then make the bridge to me to organizational life, to being effective as a business human once we cultivate this type of subtle perception of what’s real, what’s actually in front of us.
JH: Yes, wonderful. So that’s easy. So you have a meeting with your most difficult client. What are the assumptions, emotional reactions, expectations, judgments you walk in with, even before that meeting has started? And how do all of those filters distort your capacity to be present and clear in that engagement? And oftentimes it’s so automatic and so invisible and so fast we don’t see any of those things, and you’re already headlong into a reaction, and it’s distorting the outcome.
One of my favorite stories about this process, I was working with a group of financial advisors, and they were the top financial advisors in the country. And one of their rewards was [LAUGHTER] to spend time with me. What a dubious reward. But anyway, I asked them to think about their most difficult client. And a fellow in the back of the room, his name was George, throws up his hands and says, “Oh God, Joan.” And Joan was his most difficult client.
And I said, “OK, what’s the story in your head about Joan?” And he says, “Oh, that’s easy. Joan wakes up to ruin my day.” And every time they had a phone conversation, it would end with frustration on both sides. And I said, “OK, so your homework is to see if you can transform this relationship by letting go of the stuff you’re bringing to it.” Because he was quite good at his job, and I think he wanted to be better. We met three months later and I said, “So what happened?” And he said, “Well, I didn’t wait for Joan to call me. I got back to the office on Monday and I called her. And the phone is ringing, someone picks up the phone and I hear a frail old lady’s voice say hello.” And he said, “In that moment I saw how my assumption that here’s a woman who wakes up to ruin my day was completely wrong.”
And then it occurred to him that her husband was the client, his client. He died. He was the one who managed all the money. She didn’t have any kind of financial acumen whatsoever. And so whenever she’s calling him, she’s calling him from a place of real anxiety about her future. And he said, “I took personally this anxiety she’s projecting on me. And I realized this is someone’s grandma who’s just worried about her future. And what a jerk am I to have all these reactions around her—and worse than that, allow them to affect the outcome.” And the moment he heard the frailty in her voice, he said, “My heart broke open to her, and I talked to her as if she was my grandmother.” And it completely changed their relationship.
And so, if we talk about something more management-like, like productivity, we tend to think of productivity as a linear phenomenon. I’ll be more productive if I just work harder. But if you think about the productivity in that relationship, in that conversation, the productivity gain, if we want to talk about it that way, was instantaneous, simply because he changed his mind. And so they didn’t have to work on the relationship. They didn’t have to keep talking and hash things out. He simply changed his mind, and the world changed and their relationship changed.
And so we don’t think about these things as being impactful on something like productivity, but it’s there. It’s clear. And I think that is such a huge, gigantic, untapped potential we all have, to transform how we work. Simply, at some level, by changing the mind we bring to it. And nobody’s ever taught us how to do that.
And so what I try to do is help people see how it is they’re constructing their experience. How are they constructing their reality? What are the stories they bring to something? What are the unhealed traumas that they’re projecting on a situation that distort it and distort the outcome? How do their emotional reactions damage a relationship?
And then you always tie that back to the outcome. What’s the result? Is that result the one you wanted, or did it go in a place you didn’t want it to go? And by making it tangible like that, then you take these topics, which can all too easily be filed away in the woo-woo box, to something that is incredibly practical and I think an absolute necessity for this ever more challenging and interesting world we live in. How do you transform your mind, and how do you do it in real time? I don’t know. Does that answer your question?
TS: It does. And you’re also pointing, I think very interestingly, to answering something that you brought up, which is the challenge that you found yourself in at the Peter F. Drucker School, how do I bring these deep, inner transformational tools and insights to business people? And what you just said was connecting it to the results that people want. And I wonder if you can say a bit more about that.
JH: Yes, I think that’s absolutely a necessity, because executives are action people, and they’re driven to achieve things. And I think where oftentimes the “mindfulness at work” phenomena fails is by not connecting it to a result. We’re going to teach you how to meditate and then you’ll lower your blood pressure, or maybe you see some of your kind of mental constructions and learn how to manage them better.
But the rigorous connection to result, I think, is what makes it tangible for people who aren’t naturally predisposed to doing this kind of thing. And frankly, to me, it’s more interesting. So a lot of the practices I work with are embedded in daily life. So I don’t start with meditation, for the reason that for most people, they don’t like it. It’s usually unpleasant in the beginning, and there’s a huge barrier to entry.
But if you can start with their daily life, even just start with their children, for that matter, and show that, OK, by doing these things you can change the outcome in these situations, then that builds huge motivation to keep doing more of this. And I think that’s one thing.
I think the other thing is that I had to learn how to be generous to people whose lives were really different than my own. And to be totally open-hearted to the variety of human experience that was in the classroom. And I mean, I don’t know, maybe just a more direct and honest way to say it is that I had to learn how to love unconditionally, quite frankly. And approaching the work from that way, of being able to accept whatever the student was bringing, I think, helped a lot.
TS: Jeremy, you have a podcast called Untaught Essentials. And for our conversation, I want to dig in a bit to Untaught Essentials for business humans. And one of them you already pointed to, which is somatic intelligence. This is not something that’s in most MBA training programs. It is a focus of the Inner MBA. And I also have heard you say that in your own life, early in your life, you would’ve said that you lived in a long-distance relationship with your body. So I’m curious how you have developed more and more somatic intelligence, and how you introduce this to business humans.
JH: Yes, that’s great. Yes, I was really kind of a disaster in that department of being highly achievement-oriented. And in that achievement orientation, being totally disconnected from my body, to the point where it was killing me, quite frankly. And learning how to sense into, what was I actually feeling, even just to know what did tired feel like, because I didn’t know what tired felt like until I was collapsing in bed from some illness.
So I think simply learning how to direct attention to what is happening in your body is the start. And I studied all kinds of things like Focusing, which was developed by Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago. Not the best name, quite frankly, but it’s having a dialogue with the felt sense of your body, which he found was what actually made therapy effective, was that he found that it wasn’t talking about the story to the therapist, it was that the patients who got better had a dialogue with their own body, and that that dialogue would resolve whatever conflict they were holding. And I think he started to formalize that process.
The practice of Focusing, I think, was a huge thing for me. And then the body aspects of a mindfulness meditation that I learned through Shinzen Young, who was my first great teacher. Ann Weiser Cornell, I think is the person who I learned Focusing from. And then from there on, Marcela Widrig, who I just interviewed for my podcast, is a fantastic guide into somatic intelligence, to the point where, I mean… This might be a little too esoteric, but living with illness for an extended period of time, with an autoimmune disease, which causes… I mean, for me it was like, “OK, when is my body going to betray
me?” basically, is the kind of constant thought one holds. And learning how to trust the body, but also sense into it was really, I think, really essential.
But then, working with the body for so long, it starts to make me realize the body’s not simply a mechanical thing there to carry around your brain. And I’d be curious to know, actually, how you think about this, because I really start to see the body’s kind of a collection of energy, which that’s like the most woo-woo, Southern California sentence ever if you aren’t predisposed to this kind of thing. But the body is, at some level, a kind of energetic field that you have a relationship with. And of course, if you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, and that sounds so totally weird—as a native Midwesterner, I’m totally with you. But in 30 years of doing this, I mean, that’s kind of the conclusion I’ve come to, is that it’s not just a mechanical object, which is I think, the kind of default mainstream view of what the body is. But it’s a field of information that you can have a conversation with at some point.
TS: I’m with you, Jeremy. And I won’t go into detail, but briefly, the worst business deal I ever made, after I met the people, I did feel like I was going to vomit for about an hour, and I went ahead anyway, even though I had that. This was 25 years ago, and learned, “Oh, my body is communicating to me in its intuition all the time.” Now here’s my question to you, though. You work with some pretty conventional corporations, and you’re going in and you’re teaching people the value and the importance of connecting with this field of intelligent energy as a place to receive our intuition, guidance, knowing. How do you do it? How do you talk about it in those situations?
JH: I find that—OK, that’s a great question. Sometimes just simply asking, “Well, what’s your body think about this?” Or when you ask the question, “What does your body feel about it?” And some people can go there. And I find that the more disconnected you are from that flow of information, the more vulnerable you are to making emotionally-driven decisions without—to be more emotionally volatile, I would say, is one, the more disconnected you are from that.
The other is that the more disconnected you are from your body, that you tend to make decisions that kind of intellectually sound good, and on paper they might sound good, but as you said, there’s a whole other field of information that’s saying, “No, no, no, don’t do this.” So that it distorts the action.
So I think at some level everybody gets it, and they want to know it’s OK to listen to what their gut says. And I think really super-successful business people actually do this quite well. And to know that at some level your body is a more honest arbiter of reality, I think, than your brain—given you that you’ve healed your trauma. That can be a distorting factor. But I think that helping people tap into that sense—
OK, let me back up. One of the things that I have found over and over and over again is that the groundedness of the leader becomes the groundedness of the group and vice versa. And the opposite, I would say. That when a leader is ungrounded, or that they are emotionally volatile, or that they don’t have a sense of inner calm, that chaos or that distortion becomes the group’s distortion. I have seen it over and over and over again. And then when the leader is grounded, the group becomes calmer. They feel safe. And when the leader is volatile, no one feels safe.
And then the follow-along effects on the relationships they have with one another, their capacity to communicate clearly and honestly, down to the result we eventually get is either positively or negatively impacted by that. It just seems like such an obvious thing. And I’ll bet there are a handful, maybe three business schools in the world that teach you how to be grounded as a human being. And yet it’s the thing that drives everything else. And I’ve seen it over and over and over again, and why that isn’t plainly obvious to everybody is a huge mystery to me.
TS: How do you help business leaders become grounded? What do you teach them?
JH: Question number one, are your feet and your head in the same room? And oftentimes they’re not. So then when we establish, look, your feet and your head need to be in the same room, and then it all works with what I—fundamentally, the core of my practice starts with your nervous system. You have to learn how to manage. Managing yourself first means managing your nervous system. And can you bring your nervous system back into a state of groundedness? And that when you do that, people feel it right away. You feel it right away. You’re like, “Oh, OK, I kind of like this.” And then other people around you notice that. I think that’s the starting place. And then from there, it builds. And I’d say the core of my teaching and coaching is really about helping people develop that capacity. And when they do, really truly amazing things happen.
TS: One of the modules you teach as part of the Inner MBA has to do with learning how to manage your nervous system. And I wonder here if you could give people an introduction to how you frame the conversation, because it’s so clever, Jeremy, the way you work with these three different color zones. So tell us a little bit about that, the framework you’ve developed to bring the nervous system to business people.
JH: Sure. Human beings respond to challenge or threat in one of three ways. We either go into protection or defense, we shut down, or we engage. And so I found an easy shorthand for that is you go into the red zone, I mean, the protection or defense or escape. The black zone, I shut down or freeze, or the green zone where I can engage or I can adapt or I can inquire, which is where, ideally, we want to be. We’re not going to be there all the time. But I find the red zone, green zone, black zone shorthand to be incredibly useful because it’s not therapeutic language. People identify with it right away. We’re not talking about stress, interestingly. I found that successful people do not want to talk about stress or managing stress. But if we can talk about, “How do I help me and my team be in their green zone more?” That kind of framing changes the game, and they can start to see where in your organization is a chronic red zone? Or is that because the job is designed to put people in the red zone over and over again? Or is there a leadership deficiency that’s causing the team to be in a red zone?
And let me step back. A long time ago, I moved away from the whole language about managing stress, partially—
TS: Tell me about that, because when you said successful people don’t want to talk about that, I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know that.”
JH: No successful executive will ever admit to being stressed, because they don’t want to be seen as the weak link in the chain. And then also the frame. I think we all know, the frame you put on a situation affects the outcome. So if you talk about managing stress, then basically you’ve put a frame on it of, how do I get from negative 10 to negative one? And what was it Freud said? “The best that psychotherapy can do is return a person to a more normal level of misery,” or something like that?
So the stress-management conversation is about getting to a more tolerable level of misery. Where I find red zone, green zone, black zone is actually more useful. It’s like how do I be in the green zone more rather than, how do I be in the red zone less? And then if I am in the green zone more, and how do I make my green zone wider so that I don’t even have defensive or protective reactions? Then life changes. Then you’re moving from minus 10 to positive 25.
And that’s something I think we have also not done a very good job at as a society. But what I found over and over and over again is that when a leader prioritizes putting themselves in their green zone, which means a place of vitality and resilience and aliveness, things change in the most amazing, fascinating ways.
So they become more alive. And as they become more alive, as we talked about earlier, the people around them become more alive. Because they’re setting the emotional and consciousness tone of their group. And as that happens, as we’ve talked about before—one of my students who is just one of my personal heroes for what she’s done with her life, she says, “I see myself as a leader. I see myself as an island of calm and connection, and I am trying to make this island bigger, starting with my own team and then our stakeholders and their stakeholders, and I’m trying to grow this.”
And her results, what happens when everybody’s in their green zone, is that you have amazing off the charts levels of collaboration, a willingness to take risks and trust one another. And that dynamic creates outcomes that at the beginning are completely unforeseeable, which in the case of my student is absolutely true.
And, you get to feel better, right? I mean, it’s like, OK, the ulcer goes away, the depression goes away. You’re living in vitality. And so thinking about, how do I make my green zone bigger? Prioritizing that as the core strategic aim of your work or of your life. I get better sleep, I eat better, my energy is better. Changes everything, and it’s totally the opposite of the dominant narrative we have around working, which is really, at some level, destructive. Not at some level. It is destructive. I’ll just say it that plainly. Why do I need to stress myself out into extreme states of catatonia in order to be successful at work? And that’s the model we have, and I think that’s the model that people are rebelling against post-pandemic. I don’t want to do that.
TS: Yes, I mean as you’re talking, you’re describing this large green zone at work. Many people in the green zone working together. I’m imagining listeners going, “What is Jeremy talking about? What businesses are like this? What I keep hearing about are all the mental health challenges in the workplace, the large number of people who are depressed and supremely anxious, and what does it actually take, more than one single green zone leader to create a large group of people working in that zone? Really, Jeremy? Are you seeing this happen?”
JH: So to just make it more concrete, my student is named Heather Dyer. She’s the head of a water district in Southern California, so it’s a government agency, so I don’t know, but they’re not generally tended to be known as nimble organizations. After her own personal transformation, she became CEO of this organization and decided to transform the culture, and she shifted the structure, basically. She said, “I made the culture around personal and professional development and growth, which meant that I trusted my people that if you needed to take a day off, you could take a day off. All we cared about was, did you get the work done? And we put structures in place that gave them more autonomy around their work. And then we did a lot of group development exercises,” this is her talking, “About, how do we improve the quality of relationships we have with one another? And how do we deal with conflict better?”
All the things about being human together. And she helped people get degrees and to grow. She’s also a biologist, so she sees the world through the lens of biology, which I think is really a powerful asset. Life is interconnected. Her own words. “As a biologist, I know that life is interconnected, and yet my leadership didn’t reflect that. And now it does.”
And so we think about what are the needs that the people have, how do we help them meet those needs, and that when they know I care about what their needs are and they feel safe, then the collaborative superpower turns on. And you can look at her LinkedIn feed. Her results are absolutely amazing. She and her team have developed completely new ways of financing 21st-century water infrastructure. I mean, these fundamental things for the health of society at the leading edge of climate change that she is looking at and that she is making progress on.
And so it sounds pie in the sky, but gee whiz, when you take care of people, help them feel safe, empower them to take action and use their talent and intelligence, amazing things can happen. And I think that we have somehow totally forgotten as a society. And the dominant management models are profoundly destructive. The whole GE thing of, “We’re going to take away 10% of the non-performing team members every year,” that just creates profound fear and anxiety. And I think history has borne out that that’s not a sustainable model.
So we need to figure out a different model. And there are different models, and it starts with the human nervous system and that putting people in chronic states of stress and fear is not a way to create sustained performance. Now you can point to, OK, well what about this place, this place and this place would show up in the news regularly for not being pleasant places to work, and yet their stock market valuations are off the charts? It’s like, “OK, that’s great, and how sustainable is that? How sustainable? Are people flourishing and thriving in those environments?” And my guess is probably not. It doesn’t have to be that way.
TS: I don’t say this very often on Insights at the Edge. In fact, I think I’ve never said it before, but I’m going to say it right now. You ready? Amen to what you just said. OK, here’s something I really want to talk to you about, Jeremy, which is how we each work with our own fear. And I’m bringing this up because I’ll just say it, I’ve been pretty anxious the majority of my life, and I think that even though I’ve operated in what people might think often looks like the green zone, underneath there’s been this sort of subtle anxious feeling that I’ve always been like, “Stay at it, Tami, be vigilant. Look everywhere. You’re a little paranoid. That might be a good thing. You’re running an organization, you have a lot of people who you’re responsible to. Get back at it.”
This kind of base-level anxiety kind of running the show. And I’ve really been looking at the transformation of that anxiety and how it can free up, to use the language that I often hear you use, quoting Joseph Campbell, about how vital people vitalize. How the more I resolve this anxiety, the more vitality, actually, really genuine joyous vitality, is on tap. So help me and all of the other anxious business people that are listening with this challenge.
JH: Well, I’m right there with you. I think that for any number of reasons—one of living with autoimmune disease for two decades, doesn’t make it an easy road to walk down, quite frankly. But I think you put your finger on where I think the huge leverage point is, which is the transformation of fear. And for any number of reasons.
One is, I’m really curious to know, and this goes back to the vitality part, what happens in life when you are not experiencing it through the lens of potential threat constantly? And just speaking from my own life, and I’ll be quite frank, there were times where I really have seriously thought—not recently, but there were times, especially early on in that experience, where I thought, “Why should I bother living? And where’s a nice tall bridge I can find?” Or something like that.
Or there were times it just profound darkness and hopelessness. And so, I don’t come at this from any kind of Pollyanna-ish sort of way. Grinding misery I think I have, in some small way at least, known in my own life as well.
So the transformation of fear, I think, is the place where the action is, actually, and that we have lived with the same basic neural infrastructure for tens of thousands of years. And how do we begin to change that, I think is what I’ve kind of explored in the last 15 years or so of my life. Well, first of all, not to run from. Step number one is acknowledge, OK, that you are actually experiencing this. Then step number two is to not see it as an enemy, and that all of those anxious, fear-oriented thoughts are really there, at some level, to protect you, and it can go off the rails. So when you learn how to have a relationship with fear in a way that isn’t trying to banish it from your experience, I think that what I’ve experienced is that it changes and it turns into—how do I talk about this without sounding totally nuts?
TS: Feel free to say it plain.
JH: OK. Learn, how does this show up in your body? And then, let’s say it’s a sensation in your body. Let’s just pretend it’s a clenching.
TS: Sure.
JH: A clenching in your chest or something like that. Then that clenching in your chest becomes the object to work with. And by approaching that object in a way that doesn’t see it as an enemy—in fact, I oftentimes encourage people to hold that sensation as if it were a puppy dog or a small child you like or something, and that you hold that with that quality. More often than not, it will begin to break up and shift. And as it breaks up and shifts, something opens up inside. And what opens up is usually more space or more peace or even just happiness. I think you become more available to experience joy and happiness in your life.
Now, we have also talked about the disease which I made up many years ago, called FDS, Frivolity Deficiency Syndrome. It’s a serious disease, and I’ll say that I had a pretty bad case of it. The hallmark is that you can find the downside of any situation [LAUGHTER] really well, and I think that you, with what I call gentle relentlessness, step into these places of fear-based contraction, hold them with a quality of care and allow them to untie, that over time things shift inside. You don’t see the world through this Eeyore-ish sort of lens, and that your perception changes. Going back to Drucker, your perception of the world changes, and that you see—I’ve now come to think about it as you become more possibility-oriented, or you become more oriented around—what’s the word I want? Opportunity. That’s actually what I want to say. You become more opportunity-oriented, you see where the opportunities are as opposed to where the threats are. And that’s certainly true for me. I mean, I think if you would’ve met me like 25 years ago, you probably wouldn’t have liked me. I was very negative and cynical and angry, and I don’t think I’m that way anymore.
TS: You’re fun to be around, Jeremy.
JH: Oh, thank you. So are you. We have fun.
TS: Oh my God. Two people who suffered from FDS, Frivolity Deficiency Syndrome, who are officially in recovery here. Look at us.
JH: Yes, we’re actually having fun.
TS: I remember you told me one of your secrets was taking your pleasures seriously, and I think about that a lot when I make a favorite cup of tea or something like that. I think of you, Jeremy, saying that to me, and I think, “I’m going to take this pleasure very seriously.”
JH: That came from the designer, Charles Eames, and it was one of their rules that they definitely took their pleasure seriously. And I think that we don’t do that enough. That sounds so frivolous, but the systematic intentional experience of enjoyment is, I think, a really essential quality to cultivate in your life. How do you really enjoy something?
For me, it’s eating. So, unfortunately, my sumo wrestler great-grandfather’s body is kind of manifesting in my own, but don’t push those things away. Those are the things that make life worth living at some level. And that’s where the fun is, right? Yes. Anyway, we could go on about taking pleasure seriously, but it should be, I think, a calendared event on your schedule. It’s like, where is there pleasure in your calendar? Because that’s what keeps you vital, actually.
TS: I want to make sure we’re addressing that person who’s listening who says, “OK, I have a lot of fear. It relates to my work life. You’ve pointed out how important the transformation of fear is, and you’ve told me to go ahead, get into my sensations, welcome them, stay with them. That’s going to release a certain amount of vital energy. Do you have anything more for me? Because I’m still afraid.”
JH: Yes. I would say before you did any of that, it goes back to the taking pleasure seriously, which is to— as a kind of systematic practice—pay attention to what is beautiful in your world. What are the good things in your life? As the word’s coming out of my mouth, there’s also part of me that’s like kind of retching, but to look at who or what has supported you in your life, and even just write them down, from your first grade teacher to, there was a day where everything fell apart and your buddy came to you on the playground and said, “Everything’s going to be OK.”
Where are those things? Be vigilantly conscious of when you have been helped? When you have been supported? What enlivens you? What do you look out the window and see as beautiful? What art animates you? And to do that regularly. I do it every day. And that’s where I think I feel very enormously appreciative for Japanese culture, because beauty is so baked into everyday life at some level. By doing that, you start to shift the mind’s automatic tendency towards survival and looking at negativity. And it sounds so frivolous.
And then the Calvinist in us kind of says, “Pleasure, beauty, all that stuff, yeah, whatever.” But I think that by doing that—one of the things I make my students do is, first of all, I make a distinction between gratitude and appreciation. To be honest, I kind of hate gratitude. Why? Partially because in a reciprocity-based society, to think of all the things that you’ve been grateful for, that you’ve received, creates a lot of guilt for people. I found that with my East Asian students. I’d give them this exercise and they’d come back and they’d feel miserable and they’d say, “If I looked at all the things I appreciate or that I’ve received, the good things I’ve received, I feel like A: I either don’t deserve it or B: now I got to pay somebody back.” So in a reciprocity-based society, gratitude can create misery.
And I found that it’s actually much more helpful to start with appreciation, which sounds like, “That’s just semantic differences, Jeremy.” But actually, it’s a very different phenomena. Appreciation is about recognizing the value of things, the value in things. And they may not have anything to do with you. It may not be something you have received, you personally, but I can see the spiderweb over there, or the way the sun is kind of coming through the trees right now if I look out the window, and I can appreciate that.
And so what I ask my students to do is make a list of 10 things they appreciate about their life every day for 21 days. And they can’t repeat anything. With the assumption that at around day five, you’re going to get through your kind of automatic list of things you appreciate. And then you have to start to look. And you have to look and look and look and see what is valuable, what is beautiful, what are the things that move you?
And by building in that habit, you create a counter habit to the mind’s natural tendency to see the negative, the broken, the weak, all of that. And if you can do that, that is a good way to start. And then you can take that and use it as a meditation practice. Pick something good in your life and then contemplate it. Hold it in your mind, and then see what happens in your body. It’s almost always pleasurable. And then as you hold that state in your body, you can feel your neurochemistry change, you can feel your somatic quality change. And if you do that over and over again, then things can really shift, I think. And I’ve found it also, both in myself and the people I work with. Does that answer your question?
TS: Beautifully. And I have just one final thing I want to talk to you about, Jeremy, which is, I think when we look around, especially in business, people have this sense of accelerated uncertainty, change, accelerated sense of, “Where are businesses going? What’s going on? Are we going to be OK?” And at the same time, someone like you is coming in and saying, “I’m going to help you more and more be in the green zone, yourself and with your company.” And I wonder if you can make this connection, how you see this time we’re in, and, if you will, the opportunity for people to bring their full conscious humanity to work. What is this moment, this opportunity for business people right now?
JH: Yes. That’s a deep question. OK, so let’s see. There’s so many different ways that you could approach this. One is absolutely, people feel—so we’re coming off three years of this COVID adventure, which keeps continuing, keeps having sequels. I think we’ve all been thrown off at some level. Now, enter AI in the last few months, and that adds a—and then you’ve got climate change, and then you’ve got political instability and all of that sort of stuff.
So there’s a lot to feel anxious about. And so, underscore more than ever all the things that we talk about in the Inner MBA, that your capacity to manage yourself becomes more important than ever. And even if it is simply—the other thing, which I hadn’t talked about yet, but learning how to ground yourself, or what I call solidity practice. In the swirling world where everything seems to be changing, how do you find a place of solidity that you can ground your nervous system in?
And I think that’s probably one of the easiest practices to take up, is just start to have a relationship with solidity. OK, what does that mean? Sometimes it means just taking your palms and putting them on the tabletop and feeling the solid quality of the tabletop, and that allows your hyperactive red zone nervous system to come back into the green. And I find that, the people I work with, find that extremely useful. Just put your hands on the tabletop. Feel the tabletop. Or feel the feet under your floor or feel the support from the chair. OK. So that creates a base of stability.
Now, from there, where do we go? It’s clear we’re at one of those moments in history where everything can change, and that, for many people, is threatening. Why all of this nervous system stuff is so important is that it shifts you out of the fear of what’s going to happen to me to, as I talked about earlier, look for the opportunities. What’s the opportunity here? We’re going to have to be able to do this over and over and over and over again, because we need to reinvent an entire civilization.
So at one point, there are things that seem like they are crumbling, because they are crumbling, but it’s not a finality. I think that’s the other thing I learned from what I call the great kidney adventure. If I can digress just a minute. After I had the surgery, I was more alive than I’d ever been in my entire adult life. And at the nine-month mark, I fell into a huge depression. A huge “not interested in living any more” kind of depression. And it was strange. “What’s happening to me? I’ve never been healthier, and I’m now not interested in being alive.” And it was interesting to know that as I was leaving the hospital, the doctor pushed into my palm an antidepressant medication, which meant that they knew it was going to happen. It’s that regular.
So I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with me, but then it started me down the path of exploring transitions. And I think this is going to speak to what you’re asking about, that what I learned in that process is that when you undergo great changes, oftentimes your nervous system will react in a way to slow everything down. And we experience it as a depression. And what I think the intention is, is by slowing you down and forcing you to basically become somewhat immobilized, is that it forces you to look at, well, what are the thoughts or beliefs or assumptions that I am holding in my life right now that no longer are appropriate? For me, it was the assumption I wouldn’t live past 30. And now, suddenly, I had to think about a future. And that what we experience as a depression is a kind of opportunity to start to let go of what is not valid anymore. Well, there are a lot of things in our culture now that are not valid anymore that we took for granted, or that we thought were unchanging assumptions about how the world is.
And so, I think a lot of the chaos we experience is really something forcing us to say, “What is not valid?” I had to go through this process of basically cleaning out the attic, of “Let go of the beliefs or assumptions or behaviors that no longer fit.” And at the same time explore, “OK, who am I going to be? Who do I want to be? What’s important to me?” And what does that next—essentially, incarnation, look like? And nobody ever talks to you about that. Maybe Chip Conley is the only other person that talks about this, but that’s what happens in life.
And if you’re used to achievement and making things happen, and then suddenly you are in this depression that you can’t explain, you think the game is over. But what’s actually happening is the game is changing, and nobody ever tells you that. So I think what I had to learn, what I learned how to do, was to realize, “Oh, these transition processes are natural inflection points that almost inevitably happen in life.” Nobody ever tells you this. And they’re not asking, they’re demanding that you let go of what is not working. Animals shed shells that no longer fit them, right? Humans, this is the human equivalent of that, except because nobody ever tells you that, you think you’ve lost it. And what it really is, is you on the precipice of the next stage of your evolution, which I think is the larger story of what you and I care about. And what the Inner MBA, I think, is really all about, is what’s the next stage of human evolution?
And as part of that, tying this back into the earlier conversation, it means you almost always have to come face-to-face with something with your own fear, or with your own unhealed trauma, which of course is terrifying and it seems totally overwhelming. But it is—as my friend Marcela says—is the small temporary price of discomfort you pay in order to get to the next stage of your greatness.
And that’s what people have to know. And I think that’s where we are—not just as individuals, but as an entire civilization. As a carbon-based civilization, we need to transform, and we need to have a transition. And that’s not going to be pretty. And there’s no choice but to go forward. And by navigating that transition, you also don’t do it alone.
I didn’t navigate my transitions alone. I had a lot of help, from people like Marcella, and from my meditation teachers, and going on retreat, and taking care of my inner self to foster that next stage of my life. And I’ll tell you, my life now is radically, radically different than my pre-kidney transplant life. I mean, not just because of the physical health, but who I think I am.
But I think that to me is the larger picture, larger and more important picture of human evolution. And it goes back to the transformation of fear, and that these transitions put you face-to-face with your fear so that you can overcome them and they can stop limiting you. How about that? [LAUGHTER]
TS: I’ve been speaking with Jeremy Hunter, a terrific collaborator on the journey of personal awakening and organizations awakening to their possibility, and how we can develop the inner capacities to do this. He’s one of the core faculty members of the Inner MBA. He mentioned Chip Conley, who’s one of the many CEOs who are participating in the Inner MBA, bringing their insights and stories. It’s a learning community. The program runs once each year, it begins in the middle of September. We’d love to have you join us. You can learn more at InnerMBAProgram.com. Jeremy Hunter, I love talking with you. Thank you so very much.
JH: Thank you, Tami Simon.
TS: Sounds True, waking up the world. Thanks for being with us. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q-and-A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
