#96: Ben Gioia: Wake-Up Calls And Transformation

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I'm so happy to be here with you today. As always, there's so many things to be grateful for in this moment. I'm grateful for my wife of almost 29 years. I just got a hit of love for her. I was away on a business trip recently speaking. The blessing of being a public speaker is that you get to be in front of so many people, have the opportunity to impact lives, to give expression to your voice. So I feel incredibly blessed that I get to express my message to so many people, and to be paid really well to do that is a wonderful thing. But the other side of it is that it keeps me on the road at times, and I miss my beloved, I miss my family. I miss friends. I miss routines, just the daily things that sometimes we take for granted. So in this moment, I would love it if you would all join me in finding something to be grateful for. Maybe it's something that you don't express your gratitude for regularly. Maybe it's something really simple, like at the moment, at a desk that was gifted to me for my last birthday. It's one of these autonomous desks, so it goes up and goes down. And I love it because part of the day I'll sit When I'm in consultation or I'm reviewing speaker reels and things like that. And when I'm podcasting, sometimes I sit and sometimes I stand. So today I'm standing and I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for this opportunity to just take good care of my body. Standing in this position is good for my back. And so that is something I'm giving— I'm in appreciation for in the moment. So what's something right now as you're listening to this or maybe even watching, what's something that you are grateful for? What's something that you're ready to put your attention to. So the things we appreciate actually appreciate in value. They appreciate in our awareness and the attention that we give anything is so powerful. So the value that we place on it when we give it greater attention is really, really special. So I am appreciating right now this opportunity to be here with all of you. And I'm appreciating the fact that I've got incredible guests to share with you. A gentleman that I'm going to read a little bit from his bio in just a moment, and then we're going to dig right in. But this guy is— He's special and you're going to enjoy our conversation. I think you're going to learn a lot and it's going to be a great experience for all of us. So, Ben Gioia is my guest today. He is a 2-time bestselling author and an international speaker who's positioned million-dollar thought leaders. He's created a mindfulness video game and he inspires leadership. I love this part. He inspires leadership to serve humanity. Ben is the president of influencewithahart.com. And his teachings are used by more than 20,000 people, leaders worldwide. Ben shifted a culture at a Fortune 100 company and launched one of the biggest magazines on earth. He trains global business leaders at Stanford as well. Ben, it is a pleasure. Our paths have intersected over the last few years, both in the training space and more recently in the airport. So, it is an absolute blast to have you on the show today. Welcome. Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Thank you so much, Adam. It's a pleasure to be here. And I do want to say for a moment, when I got into this world of doing this on my own, you were You're the first person I saw on stage and I said, wow, I want to be like that guy. So delighted and honored to be here and complete the circle in this kind of way and then open up the next circle.

Brother, I'm inspired to just— I got to have at it with you now. You were inspired to be like me, so I want you to just take that hat that you're wearing. So those of you that are listening, you're going to have to check out on YouTube. Now go ahead and put it back on. Awesome. I am so happy to see that inspiration was carried forward, man. Well done all around. Look, your bio is impressive. There's a lot that you've done in the world, and we'll dig into some of the details relative to your pivot, your personal pivots and business pivots. But before we do that, what's something that's not in the bio that you would love for people to know about you?

I'm just happy to be alive. There's the happy to be alive because my breath keeps coming, which is a brilliant thing, and that can stop at any point. And then I had some pretty dicey experiences at different points in my life. It was questionable if I was going to live through them. And I'm happy to say that I survived all of those. I'm here today.

Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah. They can never be grateful enough, I think. And if there's a well of gratitude, I certainly don't— in my own experience, I haven't even seen a glimpse of the bottom of that well. It really is sort of infinite how much gratitude that we can be aware of. in ourselves and in the world. And it pays such incredibly wonderful dividends to sit in a space, hold a space of gratitude. It's a prayer. I mean, I'm a very spiritual person. I don't typically talk all that much about prayer on this show, but gratitude is— I feel like prayer, like gratitude is a form of prayer.

I do as well. And I make a big use of it. I had this funny experience of going through these, almost dying a few times in a row while I was in India. Not having really enough insight at that point to really understand the gift of life in the way I understand it today, not to understand just this absolute blessing that we have. And it took years for me to really process that whole experience and go, holy cannolis, like, I made it through that. And what you're saying about the well of gratitude, like, I had just basically dipped in like the thimble at that point when I survived that. And then, you know, this is now 12 years later. Maybe I'm on like the half-size bucket, it feels like, and I'm looking for the bigger vessel.

Yes. In looking at that analogy, the amount that we can carry with us— so assuming that gratitude is— and to go to the ocean of gratitude with a thimble is what you can take away with you. And if you go with the bigger vessel, as you said, and you can carry away that much more of it, which is magnificent. Ben, share with us a little bit about your background because you've pivoted several times, both personally and professionally. We love— our community loves to hear those stories of how it is people have lived very interesting lives. And by that, I mean, you know, lives had great highs, great lows. That variance between the two is a magnificent landscape to trek. And I know trekking in the mountains are part of your story. So please lead us on that journey for just a little bit here.

Yeah. Thank you so much. Yes, I'm from New York originally, around the city, and after college found my way into the magazine world. Loved being a part of that because it was creative. And then probably my latter 20s, I traveled overseas for the first time to South Africa and realized firsthand how much help the world needs, or many, many people in the world need, and came back to the States with this very, very powerful fire inside to help and to make a positive impact. So I moved out to California and got myself into the nonprofit world. And I loved that. It was very enriching. It was the ALS Association, Lou Gehrig's disease, which is a quite a ride to say the least.

Yes.

And came out of that experience and just realized that I wasn't crazy about the for-profit world as I had experienced it because of many of the challenges that capitalism and for-profit companies bring into the world and bring into people's lives. And I was also a little bit disillusioned with nonprofits because many have a great mission but don't have the leverage to be able to do to make that big impact that they want to make. I wanted to strike out on my own in a big way. But before I did any of that, I went to India for a while, and that was what led me to the Himalayas. Yeah.

Well, say more about that. So yeah, I'll say this. I've never been to the Himalayas. I don't know how many folks have been. I'm fair— I would think a fair amount, but my guess is there's a lot of people who that's part of their bucket list as well, to see that mountain range or Or to trek into those mountains?

Yeah, I highly recommend both regardless of the story that I'm about to tell.

So this story is gonna come with a warning label, which is like a do not— don't try this at home kind of thing.

Don't try this at home, yeah. I found my way into the mountains of southern India. Basically within the space of 72 hours, I almost died 4 times. It was astounding. And this was before I had any kind of gratitude practice, awareness practice, spiritual practice. Like I was still kind of in the land of atheism and agnosticism. Yeah, one or the other. This thing after thing of first going up a mountain in a bus and the bus almost going off the cliff. The next day, walking with my guide and all of a sudden, we hear screaming and shouting over here in the trees and he— I can't understand because it's not in English and he turns to me and he says, run. And I said, run? And he says, run, and he runs down the path, right? I'm from New York, so I'm thinking that it's either police or bad people who are chasing us, right? I have no idea. And it turns out it was a forest fire and it hadn't rained in 4 months in this part of India. So things were just going up in smoke, no pun intended. So I got through all of that. Next day we're hiking, the guide stops me all of a sudden on the path and he points down, he says, snake. And there's this little tiny green snake there, which is apparently incredibly deadly. I mean, I guess there's no real scale of deadly. It's deadly.

Right. Incredibly deadly.

Very deadly.

Very deadly. As opposed to just ordinarily deadly. Yeah, okay, a little green snake. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the last part of it, we're walking along and he's in front of me and we hear noise in the brush, in the bush over here, and I see him turn to the side and lift up his walking stick as if he's gonna clob or something. So I go running toward him because he's the guy with the stick and look over and there's a mountain lion right there. And fortunately, because I guess there are 2 of us and one of us looks very tall with the stick, the mountain lion takes off. But man, I had nothing left at that point. I didn't even have adrenaline. It was just like, okay, there's the next thing. Really amazing.

Was that a catalyst for you in some way to come sort of face to face with your mortality in a place that's foreign? I mean, look, I'm a New Yorker, native New Yorker. Walking down the streets in New York is dangerous on a good day, at least back in my day. That could be life-harrowing as an experience too, but different. These are things that you're more accustomed to, and you're in India for the first time, you're in the mountains, and here there are 4 ways you could have gotten taken out,

right?

But you didn't,

right? Yeah, it did. But it was interesting too because it did begin to open my eyes. I did not have a lot of experience of death in my family growing up. Like, a lot of people didn't die for a really, really long time. And the ones that did were very distant. So this was probably my first real face-to-face experience with death in a profound, direct way for me. And what was so interesting was, although there was this amazing lesson times 4, I took a lot of the lesson, but there was a lot that I didn't take. And then for lack of awareness, basically lack of love for myself, lack of understanding that there's a lot more out there than me, I went back home and kind of fell back into my routine of work and party on the weekends. Right? Just kind of fell back into the old stuff. And it took about 2 years and going back to India for me to finally go, oh, okay. Had to find my way to another hole and then find my way to the door that led in the light to finally go, okay. And that door was meditation for me.

Hmm. I've just come up with a title for your new book. You ready?

Yes, please.

It's for Near-death experiences. 4 times that you came face to face with death.

Yeah.

It's interesting. I'm just kind of playing with the thought here that in a way that there are 4 wake-up calls, really. That would be the title. Just playing with it, but 4 wake-up calls. And when you were saying that to me, I thought to myself, you had 4 near-death experiences, which are not— it's not like you got bitten by the snake and somebody sucked the venom out and you ended up in the hospital. You know, for 6 months as some people do, and you somehow miraculously survived. I really think this is kind of profound as it's coming out, not what I'm saying, but just your experience was profound because in a short period of time, you had 4 looks at what death could have been like. The bus could have gone off the side of the mountain. The mountain lion could have eaten you. They happened so quickly and disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived. You could almost call them these little wake-up calls. It's just like 4 glimpses of what— maybe that's the title, 4 Glimpses of Death.

Oh my God, 4 Glimpses of Death.

Yeah, these wake-up calls are pretty interesting because they were a catalyst for you. 2 years or so later, it led you into a different path. Is that a spiritual path? Is it a path that you wouldn't necessarily associate with spirit? Because meditation— I think this is one of the interesting things, and this is the I'm going to get to the question for you, Ben, which is meditation has, for some people, a direct link to spirituality. And I think that's why some people resist it or feel as though maybe somehow in meditation, there's some element of religion or some indoctrination that occurs, some sort of place where you lose control of your own free will perhaps, or something like that. And I've found that for me, I'm not a great meditator. When I think of it as meditation, I'm not terrific at it. I just think of it as stillness practice. But regardless of what you call it, please lead us to those 4 glimpses of death that you, several years later, sort of began a reinvention of your own and a pivot into the space of meditation.

Yeah. Thank you so much. So at the end of those 2 years post-4 glimpses, I was in a really, really low place in my life, instructive place in my life, job, relationship, the whole deal. Everything was just ugly. I remember on my birthday, I kind of looked up in the sky and raised my hands up in the air and I said, I just want to be free. Like, I just want to get out of this and I don't know what that is. You know, what can I do? And a couple days later, I realized I could go back to India.

Hmm.

So I went back to India and I went, did a volunteer project again in the Himalayas, found my way to another area where there are a bunch of travelers and a bunch of meditators. And I didn't know that at the time they were meditators, but I would see these people walking around and I would see the looks in their eyes and they just this beautiful clarity and this depth and this love. And it wasn't like, you know, not cult look in the eye, but it was just this profundity. And I kept seeing it and I was like, wow, I want that. So I asked somebody, you know, how did you get that? How'd you do that? Yeah. And they talked about this particular style of meditation called Vipassana, which is a very non-sectarian, just basically awareness of the body sensations and breath. That's the whole practice, like completely stripped down. And I said, okay, that's interesting. And then I would meet the next person. How'd you get that? You know, why do you look like that? And they would say, Vipassana. And then I asked somebody, what does that mean? And in this particular tradition, you start out with a 10-day meditation in silence, 10 hours a day of meditation. I mean, it's like meditation boot camp to the nth degree.

Wow.

Yeah. So somebody said that to me and I said, I'm not doing that. Are you kidding me? And then I saw the next person.

That would be my 5th glimpse of death.

Exactly. Well, actually, Interesting that you say that. You know, met more people, they all kept saying Vipassana. So I was like, all right, fine, I'll go. I'm a recovering Catholic, as I think many people are, or can at least kind of get the gist of that. I think Jesus is amazing. I think the teachings in their core are amazing. And I think like many things, they've been misused over time. This idea of this non-sectarian meditation approach is really, really resonant for me. So I went and I showed up and I sat down.

There's no religion in it?

No religion. There's no iconography. It's the teachings of the Buddha. They specifically don't call it Buddhism. I mean, which is so, so beautiful. So I show up and I'm sitting on the cushion every day, and it is the single hardest thing that I have ever done. I am miserable. And it turned out to be the single best thing that I had ever done and the single biggest pivot of anything ever for me.

Wow. And so when kind of joking about a 5th glimpse of death, what was that like?

So there's this past life experiences. So I had heard of them, I certainly was familiar with the concept, they were not on my radar in any way. And somewhere around day 5 or day 6 of the meditation, I'm sitting there and all of a sudden I have this image in my head and clearly it's an image from a past life of mine. Like, I just know that's what it is, there's no doubt in my mind, you know, there was no like, oh, could this be this? It was just like boom! And I went, oh my God, just say something very important here for people who don't know so much about meditation. The practice of meditation is not with the goal of creating experiences. People have all sorts of experiences, you know, spiritual, psychedelic, psychological, transformative healing, all these kinds of things. But the goal is not the experience. The goal is the transformation over time that means the practice that you're doing. But that made me go, there's so much more to this universe than I had even given acknowledgement to. I understood the universe from a scientific perspective— understood is a strong word— an understanding of the universe from a scientific perspective. I knew there was a lot going on, but this just opened the door to so much more than we can see at any single moment, 100% of the time.

Yeah. So what did you do with that? I mean, I think a lot of people listening to this now may say, I'd love to make 10 days out of my hectic— and I will use the dirty word around here anyway, we don't love the word busy, don't use it very often— but do you think people say it a lot because they feel it? And that hectic busyness of life, to make 10 days to be silent, to be still, to be in meditation, would be something I think a lot of people would be open to and yet still might say, geez, yeah. When I'm retired. So I don't know when, but someday soon. So you did this incredible— and it was painful, it sounds like, in many ways. And at the same time, you opened up this new awareness that didn't exist beforehand. So you were different. There was something new that didn't exist previous to this. And that's, to me, the definition of transformation. I don't use that word lightly. Transformation is not mere change. When something has changed, the essence of it is the same. It's Really not something new and different, but it sounds like you underwent something that made you or created something new and different in your experience, and that was a catalyst for what you started to do afterwards. So lead us from that point forward to a little bit of what that road was like afterward. Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do is take it. All you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

You know, the beautiful thing about that whole experience in the practice was that it gave me tools to use You know, the actual meditation, something that I could make a part of my everyday. And, you know, just with this basic kind of goal of how do you be present with your experience without getting hooked on the pleasant or trying to push away the unpleasant, right? Just being there as life is unfolding. So that was incredibly powerful. Went back to the ALS Association after that experience, serendipitously, And helped them through a big transformation organizationally that they were going through. And at the end of that whole experience, the husband of my boss, he said, hey, I'm taking my business online. He had already written his book and had been doing some speaking. He was a very successful consultant and vice president of the Bank of America at some point. And he said, hey, I'd like you to be my director of marketing and sales. And I said, oh my God, George, I would love that. Thank you. Is it okay that I have background in neither marketing nor sales?

I love the way you teed that up, buddy. Nice, nicely done.

Yeah,

that's a good one. So George says what?

George says, that's okay, figure it out.

Yeah, nice.

Yeah, so that really, that got me on the path, started paying attention online to all this whole new world of internet marketing and marketing and all these things and Really found my way— very preface that slightly. Before I started, I said, wherever this road takes me, I'm only gonna work with people who I resonate with, who are doing good in the world, whose values match mine in a profound way. So put that right first and foremost, and that worked really well for me. Found my way to Eben Pagan, first of all, who was very, very helpful. And then Eben's coach, or the person who did his weekly coaching, was someone named Lou Dallo. Lou Dallo. I don't know if you've ever come across Lou D'Alessio. He's very under the radar, but he was the first embodiment of basically what I ended up creating as my first brand, marketing with a heart.

Hmm.

Like, Lou embodied that, taught me how to think as an entrepreneur, as a business person, engage the things that I had to learn, how to discern among them. I really called in my teacher at that time. I was very blessed to have that experience.

Yeah. Then people are familiar with that phrase, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And I love the way you put that because you can look at it as a calling in. When we're ready for growth, we call in a teacher. When we're ready for a mentor, we call in a mentor. My dad wrote a book called Doctor of Preparation years and years ago. That's one of these things that's so important that we are preparing ourselves the same way as if we were planting in a field. We prepare the soil, you know, we're going to plant a garden, we prepare the soil, we prepare the place where we're going to plant something. So preparing the soil for our own growth is really important. When that preparation has been tended to, there are new things that show up. There's new growth, there's new things that sprout out of the ground almost miraculously, except it's just part of the universe's laws of nature, right? So it shouldn't surprise anybody that when we do those things, something happens. So preparing ourselves, preparing our mind, preparing our bodies, our physical emotional, spiritual bodies even for growth is something I don't know that everybody's sort of consciously doing. But it sounds like this was a period of cultivation for you.

Big time. Yeah, and it was interesting too because leading me to the next pivot, about 5 years into Marketing with a Heart, I woke up one day and I looked at it and I was like, I love this thing because I've created it and it's my baby and I don't feel passion for it because I realized it doesn't tell the whole story. It's not who I want to be. It's not how I want to impact the world. What I did was I received some coaching. I mean, did a lot of reflection and writing on my own, but I received some coaching. And the pivotal piece of the coaching for me was to connect to my purpose in a big way. So I always knew that I wanted to help people, but I was able to articulate my purpose then in a way that inspired and excited the heck out of me just by saying it, and was also a fabulous filter for how I wanted to articulate my business, current brand, which is Influence with a Heart.

Yeah, exactly. So you pivoted. In essence, you'd kind of gotten the juice out of what you'd been learning to that point. It's almost like being in a car and used up your tank of gas, and now it's time for a refill so you can go that much further. It's not like the tank of gas that took you as far as it took you was wasted, because I think a lot of people who are In there, are more consciously aware of their evolutionary process, which we call the pivot, that are conscious of that, think that maybe they've wasted time and they've— things they've done, experiences that they've had, time they spent in a job they didn't maybe end up loving as much as they thought they would, for example, that somehow that's waste. And it's not. It really is the alchemy of life that everything goes— is used. Nothing goes to waste. There's nothing that doesn't have the capacity to move us forward. So to fill up the tank and use what we've taken from where we've left off to fill the tank up and then move further is the process. So it's wonderful that you were able to not so much say, hey, look, there's a new thing I want to do that has nothing to do with the old thing. It was a changing. It was a sort of reinvention of that thing. It's the next generation of it, which is influence.

Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, I knew when we met more recently, became reacquainted on— I was on a trip going out to speak and we ran into each other in the San Diego airport. And I knew there was a good reason for our meeting because I never think there's ever anything that's so random. And our company is called More Love Media. Right. And our speaker program or the suite of speaker programs that we have are under the umbrella of the Heart of Enrollment. So I knew when you were sharing with me where your brand had evolved into that there was that lovely Venn diagram of Commonality. So that's— your pivot has obviously continued. You're an author, you've written books, you write on the process of influence and from a heart-centered place. But rather than me share what's the essence of your message, I'd love for you to share that because in the marketing and space of marketing and sales, we do have a lot of people that are still playing on an old paradigm. You know, this paradigm of how to effectively communicate your message through your marketing and through your sales process, really relevant today, that people have awareness of new ways of doing it, which we would call a new paradigm. But share with us, well, what's your paradigm for marketing and sales these days?

Yeah, thank you. So I start with this idea of inspiring people to say yes. So it's good for them, it's good for you, and it's good for everybody you're going to impact, right? So, so setting that intention first and foremost, and then also understanding that yes is not a singular action, but it's actually a series of actions or outcomes. So I like the analogy of cascading waterfall, right? It doesn't just— the water just doesn't go from the top to the bottom. Like, it falls here, it pools over here, this comes out here, you know. So there's this beautiful, natural, gentle, very often progression, you know, maybe a couple of little bumpy parts, but there's a more, you know, more or less gentle progression from top to bottom. And I like that process of enrollment and getting people to say yes, and again, in a way that's good for them and good for you. So that's my meta process. In terms of individual components, I talk a lot about empathy, story, thought leadership, and mindfulness as my big 4. Hmm. Empathy for the connection, you know, literally the— it's not just, hey, I understand who you are because I read your bio, but I get who you are because we can connect and resonate human to human, either because of a shared direct experience or the fact that we're just humans and we're sharing this reality with each other. One of the most beautiful things about that is the trust factor that comes with empathy, the connection that comes. And then in practical terms, you know, you ask people questions about them, they share with you, you have marketing language. Very, very simple, straightforward, and massively powerful. And then the story part, oldest form of communication. Again, you can cultivate empathy very quickly by asking people to share their stories with you. Sharing your story with them, showing them that even though you're this potentially— you're the person on the stage who's the thought leader talking about the stuff, that you are an absolutely accessible person still, right? That they know that you're on the ground with them. That was one of the biggest things that stood out when I saw you 7 years ago on stage. You may not remember this, but you did laser coaching with me at the end because you were laser coaching like 500 people that day. You know, and everybody's waving their hand going, ooh, ooh, ooh, I saw you saw me. And the first thing you said was, you looked at me, you said, I got you. And then a little bit later you came to me again and just you— there was— when you were talking to me, there was nobody else in the room and it was as if we were sitting down talking to each other, you know. And to be able to bring that presence and that connection into an environment like that is, I think, the way to go, is one of the most powerful tools. And it's actually not that hard. If you put the intention behind it and really practice doing it, drill it into your bones. Thought leadership? Yeah. People still very much appreciate, resonate with the people who are those authorities that they know what they're talking about. Not only know what they're talking about, but they really embody the transformation that they're offering, right? Because it's legit. Like, they get that it's not, you're selling me something, right? It's, I'm offering you an experience of transformation. Very similar to the experience of transformation that got me to this point, onto this stage, or whatever the case may be. And the thing I said before about doing it in a way that shows that you're accessible, you're a real person, even if you are the quote-unquote expert in the mix.

Hmm. Yes, empathy, story, exchange is what I put down. This exchange of stories.

Exchange is good.

And beautiful that embedded in that is this idea of both being accessible And being a presence, a part of when we train speakers in this style, in the process that you just described, that being a presence, that representing presence versus pretense is a big piece of that. The veil that's often between us and other people is a veil that we don't even see in many ways. It's sort of invisible, but it's this separation. And, you know, that's one of the most powerful things that we can do in our own lives is to Remove the veil,

to

be conscious that the veil exists, and then simply to do things to close the gap between ourselves and other people. Get rid of the veil and close the gap.

And then you said thought leadership, which you also use the term embodiment, that there's this embodying of what it is that you're sharing so that it doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. I really want people to hear this. Thought leadership is not about being perfect. It's not being a freaking guru. It's not about being flawless that you don't make mistakes or something. It's quite the opposite. In fact, it's really just about being congruent, that there's this congruence between who you are when you're in your teaching space, for example, and when you're in your living space.

I mean, it's when there's a separation between those 2 things, or at least there's not an alignment between those 2 things, I think people, they're not as purpose-driven or as able to accelerate their purpose as they could be. They have something they clearly want to share with the world. I mean, there's a lot of people who have messages they want to share. I don't think people get into that space of either being an author or being a speaker or a coach or a trainer or any of those things somehow pull something over on people. There's other ways to sell product, and it's far easier products to sell than that product if their goal is to be a fraud. I know that that's not the goal, but where they struggle often is the fact that there are deep sense of purpose does not match this embodiment principle that you brought up. So they get up there and they talk about stuff and they pretend— again, the pretense— that somehow they're further along than they are. Or even if they've achieved certain things, that they don't also still have the humility or the memory of their more humble moments in life, the times they've really screwed up, even in that present moment where it is that they're not hitting the mark in every area that they'd like to. Yeah, I mean, with embodiment, I guess the parenthetical for me in that Would be humility. So that's 3, the empathy, story, and thought leadership. And the 4th one?

The 4th one is mindfulness. And it's really the foundation of it all, right? You will be more empathetic the more mindful you are. If you're paying attention to your thoughts and words and actions, you're going to do better with them. There's some talk about when you are mindful of your body, like paying attention to physical sensations or your breath, you're actually working the part of the brain, the insula I believe it's called, that supports empathy as well. So literally by being more mindful, you're creating more empathy inside of the brain. That's an amazing thing. And then for those of us who can't quite get to the 10 days of meditation yet, mindfulness is a great way to bring that embodied presence into every moment of every day, or at least as many moments as possible throughout the day. I want to just drop in a definition here too, because people hear mindfulness and Google's doing mindfulness and mindfulness is such a buzzword. I like to just tell people it's just being present with what's happening in the moment without judging it, right? Whether it's your thoughts, what you're saying, the feeling in your body, you know, the thing that you're seeing happen in front of you. And it doesn't mean to sit there and passively accept what's happening, right? You say, okay, this is the moment and now I'm going to make the choice with what to do

Beautiful. Love the fact that you dropped in that definition, Ben, as well. What a perfect segue into placing the show where I ask our guests about their rituals. I'd love to know what is it you do on a regular— and ritual, again, not religious connotation, not dogma, but something that you do consciously as opposed to habits, which often we do unconsciously. So what are these things that you do consciously to create mindfulness for yourself? Because people might be thinking right now, I'd love to be more mindful, What does Ben do to be more mindful or more present in the moment during the day?

Yeah, thank you. So kind of a range of things. Try to be thankful for a couple of things before I go to bed and be thankful for a couple of things when I wake up, you know, like set the tone. I personally, my meditation practice in the morning and in the evening, that's really, really helpful for me. It's like pivotally, if I can use that word, helpful in my experience every day. And then the kind of throughout the day stuff, 2 things that I find really, really helpful. One is just reminding myself that, hey, my feet are touching the ground. What's that feeling? And just connecting to that feeling. That's an amazing way to be mindful anytime, like standing there, being at the desk, like whatever's happening, you can connect to your feet. Or another one that I really like is something called a 3-breaths meditation. You know, anytime you become aware that you're actually in the present moment, like I'm doing the dishes, I'm here, you actually just take 3 breaths and be with that experience. And that also works for things like, hey, I'm really freaking pissed off right now and broiling on the inside, hey, I'm just gonna take 3 breaths with that and just be with that experience, right? Not push it away, not pull it closer, just look at it and let it be.

Yeah, I took 3 breaths just now. So I hope as you're listening to this, folks, that you are taking those 3 breaths. What a beautiful moment to be present with each other. And I really appreciate your presence today on the show, Ben. Thank you.

Likewise. This has been a blast and beyond.

Way cool. Our community loves this and I'm sure they're going to get great value, have already gotten great value. I want to remind everybody too, as we're closing out this episode, just today was a blessing. Maybe you're listening to this and it's been a great day already, and maybe it hasn't been. There's a chance that some of you have dealt with some crap, was in email form or some other form, but we all have our stuff and I'm no different. We all have our things. And yet today was a blessing. And I know it was a blessing because we all woke up today. That is something that is a shared experience. And as Ben said earlier on, there is no guarantee of that. We weren't guaranteed that we would wake up today. So my question to all of you listening, and maybe some of you even watching at the moment, is, are you willing to wake up again tomorrow? Is that your intention to wake up? And my guess is that everybody is going, yes, absolutely, I want to wake up. And it's metaphoric as well as rooted in the reality that We want to live another day. We also want to live a little better tomorrow than today. And to me, that's about consciousness. That's not about how much money we might make tomorrow or what great opportunities might present themselves or whether we get our way or we don't get our way. It's really just a question of how much more aware can we be, how much more conscious and awake we can be. So I do wish and pray, in fact, that we all get to wake up tomorrow And I hope that that is going to be made true for you. That's the first part.

And the second part of the waking ritual for tomorrow is that in that moment where you realize, holy smokes, I got another day, right? It's happened.

I'm actually waking up again, that you can be grateful right then. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. For that moment, for that breath, and lastly, this waking Very simple waking ritual. If you feel like it from the bed or when your feet hit the floor, I sometimes do it from the bed and sometimes it's as I'm putting my feet on the floor, but I say 3 times, I say these words, I say, I love my life. I love my life. And I hope and pray that you all do in fact love your life and whether you do or you don't at the moment, that you are on that path to loving life and to being a lover of life in fact. What a blessing this has been. Invite you all to leave a review on iTunes. Of course, we appreciate that feedback very much. We also love the comments that you leave on the website. So you can go to adamarkel.com/podcast and leave a comment. Of course, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, feel free to do so. We've got some incredible interviews already in the canon, amazing ones that are being revealed on a weekly basis. And our Facebook page has just become— well, it's a Facebook group, and that group has become spectacularly rich, just rich with people like yourselves who are reinventing Some aspect of the business, their personal life, in many ways are vulnerable, are sharing great resources, are in support of one another. It's fan-flippin'-tastic. So you can go to Start My Pivot Community on Facebook, or you can go to Pivot FB to get there. That's the shortcut. So it has been a blessing, as I said, and I wish you all an incredible rest of your day or your evening. I'll just say ciao for now. And Ben, thanks again for joining us.

Thanks, Adam. Really a pleasure and an honor.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.