Embracing an Agile Mindset with Johanne Lavoie

When stakes feels high and when we feel uncertainty, our brain goes into alert mode and will trigger our survival based response. So we go into default mode which is our habits and that's why in those moments we de skill we don't have range anymore because we're in our habits and that's why it's so important to cultivate practices.

Hey there friends. Welcome to Happiness Squad. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential by mastering the art and science of happiness. We bring on the best leading experts on these topics to help you unlock your true potential and live with more joy, health, love and meaning in your life. Your host is no other than the star combo of Ashish Kothari and Anil Ramjiani who are both on a mission to provide you with an unfair advantage to be the masters of your experience and leaders in your industry. We get ready to be moved, challenged and enlightened on this podcast. It may change your life. Thanks for being here and joining the Squad.

Hey Happiness Squad. It's great to have you with Ashish and I as we host guests who are industry leaders helping individuals and organizations unlock inner happiness and flourishing. Do you believe your worthiness comes from what you do? Get ready for our next guest who shares how this is a false polarity. Meet Joanne Lavoy, a partner at McKinsey where she's earned the distinction of Master Expert in Leadership, the firm's highest partner level expertise recognition. She's also the dean of McKinsey's signature multi client Program, Leading with Inner Agility, which helps senior executives lead with greater purpose and impact in times of increasing complexity. As an author and frequent lecturer, Joanne actively engages in broader conversations at the nexus of leadership, mindfulness and business. Joe has played a key role in the transformation in so many lives, including that of Ashish's. I'll be honest, for this whole episode I was in absolute awe as Joe and Ashish shared through their own stories. Insights that opened my eyes across how practices and habits are are truly powerful to ensure we live healthier, meaningful and fuller lives. I truly hope that the tips and practices that we share support you to build the apparatus that you seek to unlock impact all around you. And this all starts with expanding the vessel within you. Wait till the end. I assure you you will be filled with ideas and inspiration and so much more. Join Ash and I as we welcome Joe to the Happiness Squad podc. Joanne Ashish, it's such a pleasure to be with the two of you today. I hope you're keeping well Joe. We're just going to dive straight into it, if you're okay with that. The first question I have for you is I don't know you as well as Ashish does. Neither do our listeners. Could you just start by telling us a bit about your background and how an engineer, left brain consultant, became McKinsey's leading expert on leadership resilience and master to coach so many CEOs.

Well, do you want the short story or the long story?

I want the long one. Joe.

We'Re biased.

Oh, gosh. Yeah. So I always say I have a fascination for complex systems and there's nothing more complex than human systems. So my fascination is for how do we work with the inner lives of leaders and organizations and use that as a pathway to create change in the world. Now, my background is as a little. I grew up in Montreal, hence the accent, as a little tomboy who became an electrical engineer. And I'll give you the a little bit of the sense for my operating system as a young tomboy is tell me a girl can't do it and tell me it's tough. And that's the thing I'm going to do. I became an electrical engineer because it was the toughest thing I could do. There was no girls and my dad was an electrical engineer. And then, you know, I worked as a system engineer with the police force because there was no girls and it was kind of cool. And then I decided to go to Harvard because it was like the toughest thing I could think about doing. And my dad had gone to mit, so I needed to one up him. And then I was at Harvard and there was this thing called McKinsey that was the number one employer on campus. So yeah, I need to do that. So I get into McKinsey because it was the toughest thing I could think of doing. And then I'm working in basic material, which is mining, pulp and paper and energy sector, doing operations work. And I go in emerging markets because I wanted an, you know, it was just the opening of emerging markets. I moved to South America in that time and I was, you know, late, my late 20s and I was just on fire traveling from Canada to South America and loving every piece of that. And then, and then we came back to Canada with my husband and it was the time that I wanted to check the box and start a family. And that's when I hit a wall and I couldn't have children. My entire hormonal system was just shut down. And my sister's a specialist doctor. So I went to see A bunch of doctors and they couldn't explain to me why I couldn't have children. I couldn't even do fertility like there was. I was flat as a pancake in my hormonal system. And that started a long journey for me. And I took some time off, a summer off, and I came back and the fertility doctor says, we don't know what you did, but looks like you could maybe try some boosters. Anyway, I'll spare you the detail, but I did 18 cycles of boosters and I had lots of data that was coming from these experiments. And that data started to show me that the harder I worked, because that was my operating system. It's like work hard. If you don't work hard and you don't suffer along the way, you're not working hard enough. And you can solve everything with your logic. But the harder I worked, the less it worked. It was really self defeating. And I remember a doctor telling me at one point, you know, Jo, the animals in times of drought, shut down their own reproduction system out of a survival mechanism. And another doctor said to my sister, I don't know if your sister realized that there's no space in our life for a child. And there was kind of these little nudging along the way and I ended up taking some time off, ending up having a first pregnancy, our son. And I was still approaching the pregnancy in my kind of high performance mode. And we lost our son at birth. And that was, you know, a teacher told me years later, I think life found a way to bring you down to your knees. And I thought that was the perfect expression of just this moment where I felt so defeated and such kind of the game, just nothing makes sense anymore. And I'll spare you some of the detail, but it really created a crack. And there was a social worker at that time who gave me a book that was about mind body connection, which was something I would have never allowed myself to read because it was not true in applied sciences. But I read the book and thankfully it started with quantum physics. So I got really intrigued into it and I was quite desperate. I read the book and it started just thinking for me that maybe I was at least in part causing my own challenge. And that the way I was approaching challenge in my life was the challenge. And that started me, you know, and as life does it in these days, all forms of teacher appeared for me in different form. Whether it was like the wife of a colleague who taught me body scan and thankfully she didn't use the term meditation. I wouldn't have done it. So. But there was all kinds of teacher that just appeared. And I started, without knowing it, to do my own work and my own work towards, you know, my relationship to reintegrating, my relationship to the feminine. My. I didn't have those language, that language in that time, but I started doing my own work and through this ended up, I have a 25 year old and a 22 year old today where I built, born naturally. So I'm skipping a lot of details here, but that journey for me was what cracked it. And I became really fascinated about how do we learn and grow as human being, how do we bridge the conscious, the unconscious, how do we become more conscious of the stories and the paradigms we live into? And I was still at McKinsey and I would come back to McKinsey and kind of shove all my learning into a drawer and moved back in my performance mode. And then it happened to be, I think I was 30, I'm going to age myself. But I was, you know, 33 at that time when I met another partner at McKinsey who, out of his own journey with terminal cancer, had cured himself from terminal cancer. That was Michael Rennie, combining both traditional medicine and his own spiritual journey. And I'd started to come back to the firm and bring some of these bodies of work to work with his clients. It felt very cultist at that time, you know, put yourself way back in time when these movements were starting. But it was very powerful. And I attended some of these sessions as a participant. And as a participant, I started saying, wow, I know this work, but it feels really like a random walk. And it doesn't have to be a random walk. And I remember doing a one on one with this spiritual teacher, Gita Bellen, who he had brought. And she did a process with me and she asked me at the end, she says, shalon, why do you want to be a partner at McKinsey? And I said to her, to prove it to all the men around me. And when I said that, it's just like my whole inner system became object and became like it just popped. And I realized my own kind of motivation system. And I said, wow, you know, that. That's where I decided I can't continue to do this work this way. And I ended up, long story short, quitting McKinsey. But I never quit and starting to train myself in this body of work. And I ended up staying, but dedicating my professional focus to how do we actually work with the inner lives of leaders. And then I'll just finish my story by, you know, I did my own grieving process through more than 20 years with respect to my son. But in a way, you know, I feel he lives with me through me every day because I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if it was not of this soul that came into my life. So if you want the long story, that's the long story.

You know, Joe, and when I had the good fortune, you know, you said, when the timing is right, the teacher appears. And there were so many teachers who appeared in your life who helped you through that. You were that teacher for me together with Amy, who met back then a 44 year old who was very much about the doing and living that first mountain life of I want to be successful, you know, and I was running out there harder. The higher the goal, the harder you run. And, you know, it doesn't matter what the obstacle is, and you just go through that. And I had met you in that moment and you were much, so much further along in the journey because you were not in that moment. There was not an element of out there approval. You were living the life in purpose to help leaders, you know, really do their inner work. And you were that. And so it was amazing to me. But friends, as you listen to Jo, notice that I want to pull out two or three things that she highlighted, and we're going to cover that quite a bit in this podcast. The first is this notion of complexity. We think we know it, but 90% of the leaders actually don't know it, and they don't have the language for it. Things that are difficult are not necessarily complex. They can be complicated. But complex systems, there is a whole science behind it. And the complexity out there requires us to fundamentally increase our complexity in here and that from a different place. We use different tools out there, not the tools that we are taught. And the best place to practice that is through our own human systems, through our whole human lives, because we are complexity at our core. There's a second point of what Jo highlighted, which again, so many of us in our work together, when I worked with her, when I tutored with her, when I saw her magic, and I'm doing that now, is so many leaders, men and women, roam around dead or numb to what their bodies are feeling or what they're doing to their own inner lives and inner bodies and health, we're numb. Jo mentioned that, you know, her whole body system had shut down in terms of our fertility system because of all the work out there. And to heal, she Healed by really focusing, by really turning away that energy to truly heal and not by doing more of like more more more, but like really deeper work. So there is an important element of where are you right now? Where is your body, where is your mind, where is your emotion? Just tuning in a bit to recognize where are you and what is that state from which you're operating. Really, really important. And then also notion of finding your why. We can try and find the why out there of making a partner, as Joe said, to prove to others, or we can be guided by a deeper why and the importance of that. We'll cover so much of that here. But Joe, I want you to share a little bit about some of the underpinnings behind the work you and I did. And Amy, in that program that I had a chance to experience at Penalonga, that was so transformative, but it was so transformative also because it was five days of us together. And I've shared this story so many times on this podcast. I was having unbelievable bouts of stress and anxiety. And third day in that program, I woke up with no anxiety for the first time after so long. And that week helped me connect to my why, which led to the formation of Happiness Squad. So talk a little bit about some of the elements, the magical elements that you weaved in to that program that thousands have benefited from through that gift of yours to us.

Thank you, Ashish. And one thing I would say is that the walk, we always keep walking, the walk's never finished. So I do have my moments of recess in my moment of fear and scared and my body tells me big time and it still happens to a. I think the key is to be more mindful of it and to have practices that we cultivate, to be able to use our own life as our own teacher. Right. I'll come back to that. I think for me, because I felt very blessed to have had this teaching enter my life. And you know, I've been 30 years at McKinsey, so I didn't change job, but I changed how I approach my job fundamentally and I changed my path fundamentally. And I was a big believer that the gift that I had received to be able to, to do my more of my depth work, my inner work, working on my own operating system. I was seeing some of my colleagues and I really felt like if there's something I can give back is ways to normalize in a place where we recruit and we're surrounded by so many brilliant and high achieving people to normalize and to make it okay for Us to do our depth work in relationship in the context of our work. Because when you do this work, like all of us can go to retreats outside of work and do our part, personal work, there's something really precious when you can do that in the context of your working relationship because you're rewiring the relational tissue and the way that we're entering in relationship with each other. And you create, you know, a safer attachment fabric where you can feel that you belong for who you are, not for what you do and carry that in your work to really magnify and amplify what we can do together. And I work in a profession that is a service profession where essentially we're in of service and we're working with human beings. And if we can not work with the inner system, but just the outer system, we're leaving on the table such potential. So I felt very strongly about bringing that into possibility. And then out of these programs, what was also interesting is I had no interest in teaching frameworks or, you know, modules to people, and more interest in teaching practices that we could incorporate. And then out of this program, everybody could bring their own voices to how this manifests in their work, just like you did Ashish, and now created something that is your own unique expression and your own manifestation of bringing this work into the world. And to me, that's really exciting.

Yeah, it was just magical to me how you and Amy created that vessel, that safe vessel. You know, we talk all the world about psychological safety, trust, vulnerability, but there was a way you weaved in and created that vessel, Joe, where strangers shared stories that had never been shared even with their most inner loved ones and could feel held. And, you know, it was that moment, Joe, that I. I mean, it was so transformative. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, some of those learnings that you weaved in there in creating that environment that as leaders, people can implement. Because there is so much suffering and it is so much private suffering, and there isn't space. There's a way to create a space where we can witness it and we can actually support each other.

Yeah. There's a couple of things you said, right, that I want to pick on first is the suffering. And you talked about complexity. Right. And Bob Keegan has this beautiful quote. Bob and Lisa, like, he talks about the complexity of the world is not the challenge. Right. The world is becoming more complex. The problem is not the complexity of the world is the mismatch between the complexity of the world in our own. In that moment. So if I'm approaching greater and we have two choice, right? I can choose to reduce the complexity in which I'm operating, I can take an easier job, I can move to the suburb, I can simplify my life or that's one way. So reduce the what I take in. Or I can learn to grow my vessel, right. My capacity to host the complexity. And what that means in simple terms would be we all come to the world with our own conditioning, with our belief, with our habits and etc. And there's a certain rigidity to this. And if we approach a complex environment with our habits and our ways, just like me approaching our fertility with my tried and true way of approaching other challenge in my professional life, I was approaching a new level of complexity with a very narrow range. And that was the suffering, right. And I needed to be able to learn, to actually let go, to create space, to slow down, to go faster. Like all of these things that felt completely against my own wiring. Right. So I needed to grow my complexity and become more adaptable to entering relationship with that new challenge. So that's one point and that's the suffering comes from the mismatch.

Yeah. And Joe, and that is something that is present in spades today in our world because the world is more complex than ever before, is more volatile and there is very little in the form of development that is helping. We teach people skills out there, but we don't teach practices to grow our own complexity.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the key. So couple of things right there you're saying you're right, the world is becoming more complex so we need more adaptability.

Yes.

And there's a paradox, Right. I wrote an article about the adaptability paradox is that it's when we most need to adapt, when the stakes feels high, when things are changing, when we most need to adapt, it's when it's most difficult to do so because we're wired for survival. Right. So when the stakes feels high and when we feel uncertainty, our brain goes into alert mode and will trigger our survival based response. So we go into default mode, which is our habits. And that's why in those moment we deskill we don't have range anymore because we're in our habits. And that's why it's so important to cultivate practices. And, and that's why for example, this simple practice of learning to breathe, to excel, to downregulate our nervous system in the moment. Simple practice, right. That simple practice is so common sense, it's so part of our human being. Human learning to breathe, like being able to breathe. Yet we live in a world today where we need Apple watches to remind us when it's time to breathe. We need phones with hundred, two hundred, three hundred different apps for meditation to teach us to pause in the moment and just down regulate our nervous system. We know how to do this. If I'm a mother or father and there's a crying baby and all of a sudden there's chaos in the house, I know that I need to downregulate my nervous system so that I can co regulate with that child and just everything will restore. But yet in the business world we think we could just run, run, run, run, run. And we go to the bathroom with our phones so that we fill every single white space with bits of information. So we need a watch to remind us did you breathe? But so practices that we teach are nothing new. They're practice of being human, right? So the practice of how do I downregulate myself? How do I get back into the present moment? How do I attune to another human being when I'm in a difficult conversation? And by the way, there's no such thing as a difficult conversation. There's a conversation that I experience as difficult that's very different. These are practices that we can actually remember and reintegrate into our daily life and all of a sudden we create more space and we can actually accomplish more, right? And I want to bring back to one thing you said about the polarity of doing and being. Most of us as leaders in this world, especially when we run fast paced, our worthiness comes from our doing. I am because of what I do, I belong because of what I do. I am loved and achieved because of what I do, not who I am. And that's a false polarity, right? So I gave up as a child, I know for myself as a highly driven little tomboy, I wired in my system that I am, I belong in the world. Not for my being, but for my doing. So I gave up as a child my right to be too early and I started doing in order to be. And that gets carried. I mean the gift of that is that I accomplish a heck of a lot. Like many people in our life, it's our drive, but it's a drive that's driven on anxiety, on a doing note, right? And then we're very senior executive in the face of complexity and we have a scared person in front of us and we're trying to logic them because all we know what to do is to do instead of just slowing down and in that moment addressing the fear underneath. Right, I'll give you a story. I was in a chateaufam in Paris years ago, a few years ago, and I was with a bunch of senior executives like C Suite executive that were on their path to CEOs of nationalized oil and gas company. Don't ask me why I was there, but it was quite something. And so there was people from Iraq and Iran and Egypt and all of these different places. And I had the chance to facilitate this fireside chat with Peter Vassar, who was the ex CEO and chairman of Shell, a man who is phenomenal. And we were sitting in that circle at night and somebody asked him a question and he was just beside me and he has the question and then he goes like this and then he answers the questions. 30 seconds of silence. Now, when he answered the question, he didn't answer the question. He answered the fear underneath the question. And I was so taken aback at that time, so blown away that I actually stopped the whole thing. I'm like, what just happened, Peter? Where did you go when you heard that question? And he just looked at me and he said, I digested the question. And then he answered the fear underneath the question. In that moment, there was a being space. He actually received the person. He attuned to his own nervous system and he picked up the fear to address it, which was actually, which is most of the time what makes our challenge a challenge. It's not the technical side of the challenge, but it's the fear, the need, the emotions, the identity stuff underneath that we are not attending to. Yeah, right. So I think that these skills, their practices that if we learn to cultivate, we restore our ability to just be human at work and be much more effective.

Hi friends. We hope you're enjoying the tips discussed in this episode. If you're on the career treadmill, seeking the next promotion, experiencing stress and anxiety, or reached the top of your career and wondering if the sacrifices to get there were worth it. Ashish and I have been there and we're ready to support you. The Happiness Squad rewire program is designed to integrate the nine hardwired for happiness practices into your day. Within five minutes form proven habits to experience more success, resilience, satisfaction and creativity. You won't be alone in your journey. Check out the rewire link in the show notes. Make happiness your competitive edge to achieve your goals. Now back to the episode.

And you know, we do so much of this and I've integrated so much of what I've learned from you, Joe, into the work we are doing now. Right. And that's how we achieve more, by being more rather than just doing more and pushing hard. Friends, on one of our podcasts, we talked about this notion of an iceberg that I learned from Joe and from all the work. Right. Most of the time we are trying to act really towards the top of the iceberg. Behaviors, maybe a little bit. You know, we talk about thoughts and beliefs and we go down there, but we all do it from our own triggered state. We don't create space similar to what just Joe described right now to. From a regulated place, sense into what are the needs, what are the deep fears that are driving the question, the conversation, the conflict, the disagreement, the reason why we have two different perspectives. We don't create the space, by the way, many of us don't even have the apparatus to go there. We need to first build that so we can sense into our own, so we can sense into the other. But that's why these practices that I learned from her and from the work that she's been teaching so many are so powerful. The power of the pause, the power of downregulating, the power of sensing the real challenge, the real fear, the real part of what we are experiencing and difficult, and then from that, taking whatever action we need to take.

And, you know, the beauty of this too, is that they're fundamentally very human practice. I always say I teach nothing new.

Yes, right.

We just remind ourselves to be human with each other. And I think there's a whole trend right now in leadership. We're in the face of. Of complexity. We need more human centric leadership and these practices. You know, I want to pick up on something you said before. The power of stories. Right? So the use of stories. Yesterday I was meeting a new. A new client. Phenomenal woman. First time we meet and we went. That colleague of mine invited us. We're in this little cafe at night and we're having a few bites of sushi. And she comes in late and she sits down. And she's of Indian descent, and she sits down. And the first question I asked her, like, we literally, I said, how are you? And I asked her the question, where are you from? Where were you? And she said to me, I'm in Indian descent. And I said, were you born here? And within four minutes, she stops. After four minutes, she's like, oh, my gosh. In four minutes she says, you know more about me than any one of the people that I work with. And I feel connected to you. And it was literally, my colleague was sitting there and it's like, what happened? I just got interested in the person. I wasn't trying. I was like, it was not manipulative. There's a human being who just sits beside me. And in that moment, I take four minutes to get interested in who she is. We had a brilliant. Like, we spent two hours after together. But this thing about training ourselves, the practice of, am I curious about somebody else's story? And when people start to get to know each other's story a little bit more, who are you as a human being? Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Like, just a few things that tells me all of a sudden, the person in front of me, it's almost like they become. They go from 2D to 3 dimensional and then even 4 dimensional, where there's a connection. Because part of her story is my story. She's a woman. She's like one of my favorite. I do a lot of senior teamwork. And one of my favorite exercise that we do. We may be working on business challenge or whatever, but I always insist that we have a dinner at night. That is origin stories, where my question to them is always, how has my life apprenticed me to become who I am today? Simple question. And people just go on and share stories. It's the fastest ways to build trust in a team. It's the fastest way to build acceptance so that then the next day we can turn on the heat and really engage in tough business challenge and have more compassion towards each other, more curiosity, more generosity. And that is not at the cost of performance. To the contrary, it's not at the cost. It allows us to turn on the heat and to be much more agile in not take things personally and stay curious versus quick judgment about intent. Right? So these practices are just human practice.

They're human practices that get lost in the busyness of life in the quote unquote harshness, right? And this protective armors that we start to put around ourselves. But you're absolutely right. And that was one of the big elements of that one week we spent together. Friends for the first time. Many of you know my story by now, right? Growing up, always from a very young age, trying to do more. Nothing but number one mattered. You had to have perfect scores. Iit and the whole rush towards that. And then Booth and consulting. It was at that retreat, Honestly, it was at that retreat where for the first time I stopped. We didn't have devices, we didn't have our laptops. And we could first Time just be to connect with each other as human beings without titles, to really talk about things that we don't talk about because that bonded us. We had so much similar journeys and to really have space, space for introspection, our minds clear, unnumbed by drinks. We love drinking in many retreats, right? Like you know, we go out, we do a two day leadership thing but we're going to have filled with booze. Our minds were clear, we were in nature, we were in company of each other and we were having really deep conversations. We were being human and the magic that came from it. So we all know it, we don't do it and that's the invitation.

And you know Ashish, I think you're, I do believe you're raising the importance of creating retreat times in our life. And I do, I'm a big fan of inserting some retreat time in our fast paced life and that can be for some of us it's time in nature. For some of us it's, you know, for me backcountry skiing, going into the big mountains where I live is a deep retreat time and for some of us it may be going into a spiritual retreat for some of us into meditation retreat for some of us it's, you know, it will be different things that create real space where we can become more aware, practice intensely and then we go back to our work. What I feel or, and what I feel is important is are we staying in practice, using our everyday work as the playground for practice, right? So the reason why I choose personally to stay in a fast paced work environment and work with business leaders and work in business environment versus versus working on the side and switching off of the corporate world is that for me it's a perfect playground to practice. Right? Our toughest leadership challenges are practice ground. And if I can ask the questions, different question of what for is this happening? What do we want to solve for versus fix? What other perspective? How might I be wrong? What's the direction not to destination? We're going like there's a whole bunch of practice that I can use in my everyday work. Using my work like that's the way I see my work. My work is my life. It's a practice ground, it's a playground. My marriage is a playground and a tough one.

Every one of them is. And it is so in line, right? It is so in line with all the, even in Hinduism, in all of the eastern traditions there is a big push towards practice in life rather than retreat to a monastery. There is this notion of one of the highest things. Karma is about staying in action but using our day to day life to practice and live with some of the spiritual teachings and principles. I have a different take on retreat because retreat in today's world also sometimes people say I don't have the space because retreat means I'm retreating, I'm retreating from something. Who wants to retreat? We want to forward, we want to move forward. Always move forward. We don't want to retreat. What if you actually treated retreat as an opportunity to retreat yourself, treat yourself, fill your cup and you can retreat, retreat yourself in your work every day. Small breaks, you don't have to escape away. There is power in that. And some of the deepest learnings and kind of breakthroughs in my life have come when I have taken a week off or taken three days off and disconnected. But I think Joe, what you're highlighting is a real power of really, you know, being in practice, building in breaks, quote unquote, retreating ourselves. To live into these principles and apply them in every day at work versus the need to just escape.

Yeah, the metaphor. We not the first one using this metaphor, right? But if you think of a high performing, high achieving, high end athlete, you do not have to convince an athlete to inject and strategically integrate recovery into their day, into their race, into their recovery is the doorway to performance. And you do not have to convince an athlete to eat, to sleep, to visualize their race, to take a moment to breathe, to be able to fill their life with positive emotions. You don't need to convince them because they know that that's the doorway to performance. When the tennis player misses their shot, what do they do? They reground, they recenter and they go back in, right? Lean into the difficulty. Yet we're corporate athletes and we think we can defy the law, the, you know, the principles of nature and just keep on running. And then our mind will make an excuse that, well, if I don't do this, it's lazy, I need to self sacrifice and et cetera. We'll make all kinds of excuse. And why do we do this is because we don't make these excuses. If we don't have these, oh yeah, but I'm not rewarded for it, it's lazy, et cetera, et cetera. Then I have to experience this suffering so my mind will make these excuses so I don't have to experience suffering that I'm actually violating myself. And it comes from a deep rooted lack of, you know, just accepting our humanity. So we just kind of bypass it and keep on running. And I did that to an extreme. It cost me a lot. Until life just stopped me.

The beauty of having two ears and one mouth and sitting in this conversation with the two of you is absolutely incredible. So I just. I'm listening here with respect, reverence, and reflection of what each of you are saying. And the reason why I'm just silent is because everything each of you have said has resonated with me on every single level. Just working slightly backwards, the number of times I speak to colleagues who come back from holiday. And the question is, how long is that holiday glow going to last? Are you diving straight in? Yep. Lasted few days. How do we find those ways of integrating? I love how you said it, Ashish. A retreat. Treat yourself as you should every day, if not every hour, if not every minute, every breath you take, Joe. That simple act of breathing that we shouldn't need to rely on a hand device to tell us when and for how long to do it. But such a simple thing that we do, don't do different things, just do that differently. The other piece around vessel and how you can grow your vessel. I was thinking of Einstein as you both were talking, right? You can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it. You need clarity. And each of the things you both have said is finding that adaptability, finding that space, creating that space to be takes work. It doesn't come easy. And I'm someone who, working with Ashish, working with others, know that when push comes to shove, you default back to your old coding. So it takes time to actually give yourself the opportunity to rewire, whether it's those relationship tissues, those mental tissues, those spiritual tissues, those physical tissues. And I love how you said it. I mean, working for a company that deals with athletes, you're absolutely right. You know, recovery is truly the doorway to performance. But the only way we're going to feel comfortable, as you said, to lean into difficulty, is if we first recognize. Hang on a second. Is what I'm doing working for me? Am I someone? And I bolded this in my notes here. Does your worthiness come from what you do? I raise my hand to that, Joe. Hand over heart. I honestly, there are times I will write an email, I will create a slide, I will create an Excel purely out of proving that I am worthy to be at that table. And every single time I've been coached, it's, hey, you are at the table. You don't have to prove your worthiness. So this is my reflection just to say to our listeners, you know, as you listen to Ashish and Joe, just step back. What resonated for you from this and just take one practice that they suggested and integrate it into your day. Give it a few days, but really, truly invest in it. Give it the space. I was telling Ashish earlier, Joe had a conversation with my sister about meditation. She's like 30 minutes, no less. Even if you're sitting there in silence, just it has to be 30, you can't compromise. And I'll tell you whenever I speak to my friends about changes they want to make in their life. Yeah, some things can be progressive, but some things you truly need to integrate it. So that's just my way of just saying expanding the vessel, finding simplicity in the complexity, giving ourselves space to retreat, to treat ourselves and just reflecting how we create space around others and just how we can truly live this. It's only going to come from us. It's not going to be anyone else who does this for us. We have to do the work ourselves. And if we don't want to do the work, okay, you can continue as you are, but like you both have said, you'll crash and burn. But if you truly want to rise and climb that second, third and fourth mountain and shift from success to significance and truly make a difference in the lives of yourself and others, man, I'm going to re listen to this as soon as it's released. I'm just saying that not to listen to me, but just to re listen to what each of you have said. So I just want to say thank you, Joe, from the bottom of my heart for how you've shared this with Ashish. Ashish, how you shared this with me and to our listeners how we're sharing this with you. There's just so much we can take away from this. I'll pause there and pass the mic back to each of you.

I just want to say something anil of and thank you for reflecting back on this meditation. Right. And the 30 minute admire your sister. The one thing that I took from I was listening to Atomic Habits, you know, great book recently and there's something that I took from it about creating being habits. So if you create a habit, you can say I want to meditate every day. And then you'll shame yourself for not doing it when you're doing it and it becomes one more doing habit. But if you actually say I, who do who am I becoming? I am somebody who deeply listens. I am somebody who's intuitive. I am somebody who is spacious. I am somebody who my kids Come and turn to I am somebody. It's quality of being. Then your practices become to cultivate that quality of being every day and you'll find yourself am I every day practicing that quality of being? And it's actually one of my favorite practices to wake up in the morning and instead of doing, turning to my to do list like many of us, turn to your to be list. What's on my to be list? What's the quality of being that I want to practice? And then just keep that at the forefront of your attention and practice it in every meeting, in every and a practice will emerge from it. And then all of a sudden you look back a few months later and you're more of that being. You're more of who you are fully because you're going towards who you want to be more fully at your best.

Yeah Joe. I mean those practices that I've learned from you have been so transformative and as a gift reno frankly to the world who don't get to directly get them from Joe. You know, our Rewire program is built around habit formation. Practice 9.1 is intention. Who do you want to be right. Do you want to be mindful? Kind, grateful. There's a whole range, right that you can choose to be the practice of mindful breaks. So we use the science of habit formation combined with the science of happiness and flourishing. And the whole idea was let's make things small and habits that make are about being right. So for example, the practice of mindful breaks, this notion of five one minute breaks in the day, it's the power of breath, six breaths along the day. And you are through that practicing, being mindful of. You don't need to meditate. You know, meditation is a way to cultivate a quality of mind to be mindful to be in the present moment. And we know that we'll get there. And you know, I've done a 10 day Vipassana and I've done longer retreats. But we don't, if we start to go with that as a goal. There's a reason why 80% of the world knows meditation is good. 20% meditate. And even of that 20%, 80% when asked, say they're not mindful moment to moment, they meditate in that 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, that's the time when they're mindful. So this notion of habit formation that you talk about in atomic habits, we looked at tiny habits. In fact we had one of the persons who teaches tiny habits with Professor BJ Fogg who worked with us to design our scripts.

That's brilliant.

To make it easy. Because to your point, these are practices to be human. We are human, we are human beings, not human doings. But we forget because of our habits when in the face of adaptability we descale, we go to our old habits. So let's build new habits, let's build happier habits using exactly the same science over time so that we can be more adaptable, we can hold more complexity, we can be more human.

And that's what I love in the work that you do, Ashish, is that you have nicely, so nicely crafted practices so that it can be embedded in our way of life. And then maybe the 30 minutes is the equivalent of the retreat. Yes, but am I day to day in that between the meetings, in meetings, taking a minute. Right. So that's what I, I think it's brilliant what you have done this way in my, what I would say is that if we do more of that, it will help us redefine what we call normal. Because many people say it's not normal to do this, but we've created a world that we call normal that is like Gabor Mate would say, a normal response to an abnormal way of living. And it doesn't have to be, it doesn't.

That's why I go back to. For our listeners, just as we wrap up, you know, just take a moment and just reflect on your life, reflect on your moments, reflect on yourself at work, reflect on, reflect on yourself at home and just take, take stock in what we've just shared today. I think the opportunity is how can you create better habits? How can you create habits that step by step take you further to where you want to go and mindful that we don't have to continue to be the way we are, we have the option to transform. Not only change, but transform. And I think the way that Ashish, you and Joe have shared it with me with us today, I think it's just incredibly powerful. So hey folks, remember you can't solve a problem with the same habit, the same mind, the same body, the same spirit that you've created it with. We have the opportunity to shift, we have the opportunity to change. It's just a matter of taking that first step. So Joe Ashish, I just want to say thank you to both of you. This was an absolute pleasure and Joe, I know that we had much more to ask you. I hope that we have the opportunity to have you back and chat with you some more.

So thank you, thank you for your work in the world and bringing this to people.

Joe, you know I'm eternally grateful for your gifts to me and so many others and I know we will continue dancing together and I'll keep learning from you my whole life. Learning with me, learning with you as.

We do this together.

Take care my dear friend.

Thank you. Thank you both and thank you for what you're doing.

Thank you Joe. Appreciate you. We hope you enjoyed this episode on the Happiness Squad podcast. Make sure to hit subscribe on your chosen platform that you listen to us on. If you enjoyed the tips discussed looking to combat stress, burnout or seeking deeper fulfillment, or navigating life transitions, then our Rewire program is designed for you. Rewire is your key to unlock your full potential to experience more success. Success, resilience, satisfaction and creativity make happiness your competitive edge. Check out the show notes and learn more about how you can benefit by rewiring away from fear in between episodes. Follow along on Instagram at My Happiness Squad for tons of tips, insights and short videos designed just for you. Until next time.