Empowering Leadership through Inner Health and Healing with Amy Elizabeth Fox

We can be kind to even people who are behaving in ways that are less than attuned and less than healthy. We have a much better chance of being the then the walking invitation that they might look at what's happening. If we go in with judgment or we go in with assessment, or we go in with condemnation, then we can't be the field in which they might be willing to actually look at what's happening. I think getting rid of our assessments or our habit of judgment is a sort of second big step.

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 a 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. 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 their inner happiness and flourishing. How powerful is this spark? It can light a fire that starts a journey that doesn't only lead to a change, but to a transformation. I'm excited to introduce you to someone who lit that very spark in Ashish and played a big role in why we are here today. Meet Amy Fox, Co Founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, a premier transformational leadership firm offering immersive executive development services including experiential leadership sessions, coaching and retreats. Amy has been guiding week long programs for senior leaders in the private and public sector for over 20 years, including CEOs and board chairs of FTSE 100 companies and a top team members of the Fortune 500. She is a pioneer in introducing trauma literacy into vertical leadership development. Prepare yourself for a touching and incredibly special episode for us. You will learn more about the role Amy is playing in the lives of top leaders to help them uncover and heal trauma that has impeded their true leadership potential that has masked that light that needs to shine. This includes our very own Ashish's past and what has unlocked his future with us. Join Amy, Ashish and I as we do our part to bring clarity and increased literacy behind this trauma. More is being asked from leaders than ever to be innovative, bold, inclusive, but they've been deflated and downgraded because of life experience. What is needed is a leadership of recovery. Stay through till the end as Amy shares her takeaways and resources that may spark your journey and unlock your inner light. So let's get started. Please join Ashish and I as we welcome Amy to the Happiness Squad and Hardwire for Happiness together. Hi, Ashish. Hi, Amy. It's a pleasure to meet you. How are you?

I'm wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Anil, it's a pleasure to have you with us.

I'm doing amazing, too, my dear friend.

Oh, sorry.

No, I'm doing amazing too, obviously too great to be with you, but I'm literally, you know, being in the presence of the greatest teacher, the person who is fundamentally who put me on the path that we are on now together. I am more giddy being with Amy than probably if I was in the presence of the Dalai Lama. And I'll state it, I am more giddy right now because of the impact that Amy's had on my life. Truly, truly changed it. So, Amy, I am so excited to share your beauty, your wisdom, and just your energy with our listeners, because I know at the end of this conversation, they will be transformed. They will take something away from it that will, you know, put them on that path that you put me on almost eight years now.

It's very, very generous and beautiful to hear you and I. What it brings up for me is she. Because I also feel very delighted to be with both of you, is there's a very special kind of happiness that comes from connecting with people with whom you have some kind of a soul journey and where your lives have been entwined in a way that really mattered, as ours have been. And I very much hope this conversation is a gift for whoever's listening, but it's just a joy to be with you in every case.

Thank you.

I'm going to say for. For our listeners. Ashish said it as we were prepping for the chat. He's like, this is the individual that lit my spark. And that spark is now ablaze, and we are excited to see where it takes us. So, Amy, I actually kind of want to roll back. And one of our favorite questions to ask our guests when we first start is, you know, what is happiness to you? And how would you say your definition has changed from. For you since your younger years?

Oh, it's a wonderful question. I think in my younger years, happiness was probably very tied to certain external realities coming True in my life like that I would have worthy work or I would have good friends, or maybe it was tied to a hope for less pain inside. Like maybe I would be less lonely or less sad because I was very lonely and sad as a child. And I think over time, what I've come to understand is that the relief of that sadness or that loneliness is a deep, long healing journey. And that for every aspect of my inner life that has healed or transformed or been relieved or had a moment of restoration that leaves open room in your heart for happiness. And in fact, happiness is the natural state of the heart. So it's not so much something you aspire to or you achieve either by changing your emotional state nor accomplishing anything external. It's like a returning home to the nature of the true heart, is how I would describe it now.

I love that. Amy. And so in sync, right? I think one of the core pieces of what we talk about is like, listen, if we can be at our best by being more. I think you're talking about equality. We are taught all through our life that happiness is an end that we pursue through whatever means of working hard, getting promoted, falling in love, buying the next big house, the next big car, the next relationship. But if we look at all the research, if we look at our own wisdom, happiness is. If we make happiness be the means, I think we can put that towards whatever end we want. I love that articulation from you. And of course, how else would it be coming from someone like you who's been on this journey?

I was recently with a beautiful non dual teacher named Shai Tubali. And Shai described the three layers of the heart chakra, or the heart chamber. He said the first outermost layer is the part of our emotional state that's responding to the immediate circumstances of our lives emotionally or sort of pragmatically. And the middle heart is the one that reverberates from early life and unhealed early incidents at that repeat infringement from the external world. So when the outer heart gets pinged, it reverberates inside us. It's the reason why certain things might upset you and not upset me or vice versa. It depends on if it has that reverberation or look alike. He said, but the innermost heart, which in Sufi scripture they call the heart cave, the innermost heart, is the part of us that is abiding in eternal peace and sort of, I really loved that because that is my experience that with deep meditation and deep immersive experiences of grace, one can return from the external heart and the middle heart and find oneself in that equanimity and expansion of the innermost state of the heart.

Wow, it is so beautiful. So beautifully put, Amy. And this is, you know, at the heart of the amazing work you all do at Mobius, right, in developing leaders for the future. There are tons of leadership advisory firms out there that do work on teaching leaders how to, you know, what are the things leaders do. So do this, do that. But your work is all about fundamentally shaping a quality of a leader from within, right. Helping them really pierce through all those armors and connect to their authentic self. And I'm one of those, Amy, who's really, really benefited from that work. Thank you for that and the amount of work you were sharing with me. Just this amazing group that you just took through this journey, even recently. What do you think, Amy, as you've kind of seen this space evolve over the last 20 years and you evolved, what do you think actually are the real qualities we need leaders more than ever now? And what are the real key skills and qualities you believe we need in leaders of today? And how are you working to help them develop into those?

Yes, wonderful. I think I would answer that, Ashish, in two ways. One is we can see, I mean even just to use sort of the state of the art of the literature, leadership conversation, right now leaders are being asked to be more inclusive, to be able to create psychological safety, to be more collaborative, to be more build a sense of belonging, to be more innovative, more bold. All of those things are actually intrinsic and natural leadership qualities we all have, except they've been injured and downregulated or sort of deflated, my sister might call it, because of life experience. So in one way I feel like the leadership that's needed is a leadership of recovery or a leadership of well being. And that that journey of being able to express the natural, holistic, wholesome qualities of relatedness, attunement and love. The journey isn't a journey of learning new skills. It's a journey of unwinding the hurt and the self protectiveness and the disconnection or dissociation so many leaders walk with because they're, they haven't yet healed from early childhood incidents. And we know now the enormous pervasiveness of trauma that people are living through in their childhoods. And it's a huge variety from families that struggle with addiction and alcoholism, families that have an illness, families that have lost a parent or God forbid, lost a child, forced migration, immigration experiences, being born into poverty, dealing with racism, Going too early to boarding school, domestic violence, corporal punishment in the workplace, many, many on and on and on, misunderstood cognitive challenges. And because so many people, almost all of us, have lived through something that impinges on one's sense of safety and openness and feeling really cherished and seen, because we aren't being raised with that kind of attunement and intrinsic kindness, we put up a shield and a self protective set of behaviors that are very skillful and very brilliant for dealing with that overwhelming early childhood context. But by the time we get to be an adult, they don't serve us. The one I see the most often is that many, many kids that become leaders and executives later in life are too early or precociously placed in the role of parent in their childhood. It's called a parentified child, meaning they move too swiftly to take on the role of a missing parent or a dysfunctional parent. They become the one that's caring for the siblings or caring for the house, or making sure all those sort of trains run on time inside the family. And that skill of being hyper responsible and hyper competent becomes the sort of methodology of life that has them take on more and more mantles of leadership. But it's from a compulsive place and it leaves behind the joy, the creativity, the vitality, the spontaneity of childhood as qualities they haven't cultivated. And very. It's very hard for those adults to come at their teams, come at their colleagues, come at their, even their families, their children, their communities with a generous heart. Not because they aren't generous or loving people, and not at all, but because their heart is behind a protective wall that they don't know yet it's safe to let down. So I see one giant vector in unlocking the leadership that we need as a healing tributary into corporate life. That more and more people feel they can tell their stories, that they have the strength and the support and the holding to look backwards into their life narrative and heal and address whatever were those early hurts. And to do it not in isolation or in the privacy of a therapy room, but to do it right in the center of corporate leadership development so that the corporation itself, any organization could be nonprofit for that matter, becomes the alchemy of love in which all of us can restore ourselves. And that's what I think it really means. It takes a village. We actually, we are obligated to support one another's repair in that way. It's one of the most noble things we can be part of. And my experience Is that any group that I invite into that kind of communion and custodianship of one another's vulnerability and hurt rises to that occasion. We long to be that way with each other. We long to reveal ourselves and to be authentic. But equally, we long to be the loving force of someone else's restoration.

You know, Amy, it is so profound, what you shared. It is so, so powerful. And I couldn't be more in sync with it. And that's the magic I experience. So, friends, I'm going to translate what Amy just said in the. In the context of my own experience so it becomes very real for you. I was, you know, I have always lived life. I was always an overachiever. I was always a doer. Nothing was good enough. It was a drive for perfection. It accelerated my career throughout. Throughout my journey. No matter which organization I was at, I was really effective at getting stuff done. Does that sound like you always rising to the top, working hard. And not just working hard, but holding a high bar. Right. If you feel, why don't others meet my bar? And if you reflect with that statement, if that's you, that was me. And that doing more as a way to get loved was also. While I was very successful at one point when I was leading multiple teams, I met my match. I was burning people out. I was completely polarizing people. One third of the people who were like me loved me. One third of the people were kind of like, yeah, it depends what I get. And the one third were hated me. I think I was the worst person on earth. That basically plateaus you as a leader. So I had a chance to actually do some of the more classic coaching where I actually. They helped me. You know, the coaches I worked with helped me realize the suffering I was causing, and that helped me change the way I interacted with people. All of a sudden, I realized that my drive for perfection was actually making them feel really, really not enough and causing so much trauma out there. Okay. So that was my first stage of evolution. I learned how to kind of modulate. So it wasn't that. All of a sudden, if I'm talking to somebody, if I'm seeing their work, I don't feel that what they're doing is not enough. But I'm not actually going. I'm actually going to more regulate my emotions to not put my frustrations out there, but figure out how can I actually help that person to get more done. Okay, so that was very effective. And that was the next stage of development. But guess what? I was living a lie within Myself, I was not really being true because I wasn't actually saying what I was really feeling. And I was also feeling very lonely. I was actually also feeling very, very anxious. All of that was building up. We spent a week together in my second year as a partner with Amy and another one of my deepest teachers. We're going to have her on our podcast, Joanne. And we spent a week together and I had come into that retreat with a high degree of anxiety that I was waking up with every morning. I didn't know why it was. And in that work that we did together, I realized where my drive for perfection, this whole story was actually coming from. You know, I realized the seeds of that had been sown when I was 6 and 7 year old. It had been sown in the most loving interactions with my parents, with my mother who wanted me to be the best she had. She loved me unconditionally, but also had a very high bar. And so when I came home with a 97 or a 98 in math, that simple conversation around this was great, great job, but you could have got hundred solidified in me in that moment that unless you are perfect, I could lose the love, even though I would never lose the love. But that was the story my 7 year old told me every time. Then in the future, when I saw something that wasn't meeting the bar, that was what I went back to. That seven year old saying, that client will love me because they'll realize what we are doing is not good enough. So those are the types of trauma, those are the kind of things that, you know, can completely shape us. We act in ways outside because of an experience much early within. But unless we befriend, unless we learn where it comes from and we learn to evolve from it, very little growth is possible. We can learn how to be somewhat effective out there, but we can truly not be at our most joyful self because at its core, we are living lives that are not authentic. You know, I act this way, but I'm feeling this way. And only by connecting what we think, what we feel and how we act can we really be at our best in the service of others, in the service of ourselves. And that's the gift Amy gave me. That's the gift that I got from the work was truly taking me back. And we didn't do it in a therapist's office because somebody had told me to go see a therapist and I told them I don't need therapy, right? And that was the power that we could do this in the context of the work we were doing at McKinsey with my clients. And that was the power of this work. So, Amy, thank you.

Yeah, you're deeply welcome. And I just want to underscore a few things that are so beautifully articulated in your story, Ashish. One is how many children wind up thinking that the language of love is a language of doing or a language of earnings and a bar of perfection. And that drive that keeps the self blessing or self sufficiency, a goal that's impossible to reach, means we're always living in striving and exertion and effort, and we're not really ever coming back to a state of rest. And as you said so poignantly, that has emotional costs, that has health costs. And over time it means that I'm equally demanding on others in a way that's very caustic and costly. And you see many, many leaders who are in that kind of inner hyperdrive and pushing their teams and their colleagues to extend themselves past any emotional boundary, any social boundary, any family boundary, and any physical health boundary that out of their own urgency in the way that you're describing it. So that's one of the connections between inner health and leadership, which is, you know, can I respect the appropriate needs of the people around me and myself for well being and not create a structured work life that is constantly at the risk of self abuse. So that's one thing. The second thing that you said that I think is so poignant is that even in a context in which you were very well loved, you had this message that would subtle infer that you were not enough. And that's many, many children. And so part of the journey back to repair, I think is really understanding that we're not self improvement projects. We're each of us incredible, beautiful, myriad gifted people and that our job is to find out what we came into life to give as gifts and give it abundantly and generously and daily as freely as possible. And that part of the leadership journey is to identify and unlock those gifts. And the expression of those gifts brings great joy into your life. It just does. When you're doing work with your particular thing to offer. It's very meaningful.

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You know, as I listen to you both, there's so much to unpack on all fronts. So let me, let me do my best before I ask you the next question, Amy, the first thing that comes to mind is what you said earlier about the inner heart, the mid heart, the outer heart. And before we started recording, Ashish and I were talking about how we grow up. And as we grow up, this light that we have inside us, we just, we're chasing something, that success, that next paycheck, the next promotion, and those layers just start kind of forming around us, right? And you know, Ashish, when I hear what you just said, you know, from the age of 6, 7, to where you were before you met Amy, that was your life. Constantly adding another layer around it until you lit that spark and you were able to kind of almost peel back layer by layer to bring that light out. And, you know, when we talk about trauma, I was speaking to my, my, my manager the other day and I said to him, you know, I have a tendency for the last two decades to be working with individuals who are very abrasive and have a tendency to, to really push and drive me hard. And I feel driven rather than I'm driving. And for some reason, I fell into that pattern. And I, I didn't really understand that. And I'm like, you know, again, it goes back to that trauma. It goes back to that upbringing, you know, constantly seeking. And again, Ashishna are both Indian. We have that heritage, that cultural background. I'm sure other people might share it. That Overachiever, that validation that nothing is good enough unless you get better, and even when you're better, go further. And so we're in this rat race, everyone. And when I just reflect on what everyone, what you both are saying, it's just that trauma is there and we have a choice to either look at it and put a light on it and try to address it, and especially leaders, right? If you're leading teams at any level, and this is what you're, the baggage you're bringing with you, what are you going to do to ensure that it doesn't affect or suppress the potential of those that are around you? So Amy, I just want to shift and on the back of that, maybe you can help our listeners understand your perspectives on the need to integrate this wisdom that's found in trauma healing, that can enable that leadership development that can unlock some of those examples from Ashish, from myself and from others, especially for those leaders who probably either are aware, unwilling to get therapy, unwilling to get a coach, unwilling to take feedback. How do they unlock that trauma in order to really unlock their best?

Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things. The first one is around increasing trauma literacy in organizational life, which means all of us getting much more honest about how extensive the trauma aftermath is in ourselves, in our parents, in our grandparents. We know now that trauma is passed generation to generation epigenetically. So even if your childhood looked very beautiful, very loving, very wholesome, the chances are very high that there were absences of attachment or breaches of attunement because your parents themselves weren't raised by attuned and whole parents. So there's both personal, family and collective trauma. So the first thing I think is just everybody that's doing coaching, consulting or has any kind of leadership role getting a lot more versatile with the understanding the extent of trauma, being able to spot trauma symptoms, trauma related behaviors, trauma warning signs, all of that. And I think that's very urgent. Let me say that first, I think the second thing is to realize with great compassion that most of the dysfunctional behaviors that we see in organizational life, teams that are polarized, organizations that struggle to speak hard truths and have a lot of gossip, organizations that have low ambition levels or low aspiration levels because it's hard for them to dream or innovate or co create and or organizations that simply struggle with the symptoms in society of racism, colonialism, sexism, etc. All of those symptoms of social ill attunement and social dysfunction are largely because people have grown up in emotional and Social violence. They're not. Because these are bad people doing bad things. And to the degree that we can be kind to even people who are behaving in ways that are less than attuned and less than healthy, we have a much better chance of being the. Than the walking invitation that they might look at what's happening. If we go in with judgment or we go in with assessment, or we go in with condemnation, then we can't be the field in which they might be willing to actually look at what's happening. I think getting rid of our assessments or our habit of judgment is a sort of second big step. And the third step is actually being able to create context in which this kind of trauma healing can happen, Whether it's in a business setting, in a nonprofit setting, in a therapeutic setting, in a community setting, in a church setting, in a contemplative setting. There are many, many different modalities of trauma healing. There are many different psycho, spiritual and somatic interventions that people can use to start to address whatever they've walked. I think it's an obligation of every leader to do their own inner work so that they can be part of that repair process. So I do think there's a kind of threshold moment that we're in as a world because of the way things are unfolding around all of these delicate issues of historic abuse and relational harm. And so I think this. We are the generation that's being asked to start making a difference by being, at the very least, trauma literate and at the ideal, really refining and polishing our own inner heart so that we can be an agent of love and a really unconditional love and blessing. I don't know, Ashish, what would you add to what I said?

I loved what you said. And, you know, there are so many people. I think the step. I'm going to add something on the step one. Right. Of trauma literacy, because there are so many of. First of all, I actually also believe that we sometimes throw the word trauma around too lightly. So we have that.

My teacher, Thomas Hubel, has a definition of trauma that I really love. And I think it's very helpful. I mentioned some examples, but I mentioned, you know, relatively escalated example. What trauma actually means is the internal response to any event that's oversaturated or overstimulating.

Yes.

Any event that we cannot emotionally process in the moment in which it's occurring. The response, we have to protect ourself from that overwhelm. And that's what we're calling trauma.

Exactly. And it's beautiful that where I was going was, Amy, there is, you know, what I was saying is while there are some who might, you know, quote unquote, talk about trauma too lightly, the reality is most of us, and I was kind of in the biggest denial of this is we say, no, no, no, I don't have trauma in my life. You know, because people do think about trauma as like sexual trauma or I was abused really physically. Right. We kind of relate only those to that. But, you know, as I've been on my own path, you know, I'm going to give three simple events that we all have experienced as children and we all actually manifest and pass forward as parents. Okay? The first one I invite you to think about. Has there been a moment, if you are a parent at some point in your young child's life where you said, don't do that. They might have been putting their fingers into a light socket or whatever. They were about to go do something that could actually physically harm them and you leapt out and you shouted, don't do that. In that moment, a two year old, you are the giant who is completely. They're dependent on. And that loud voice can leave an impact in the psyche, right? It can really make somebody afraid. Or that moment when your six year old came to you really excited about something and you were so busy finishing that project, that email, that conversation, and you said later, can you not see I'm talking ignorance, right? Being ignored, feeling, oh, I'm not loved, I'm not important. Or even third, this notion, when we said compared, you know, did you see Rob's son and what he's doing? What are you gonna do with your life? Where are you going? Why are you wasting your time? These conversations happen with families. They have happened with me. I have done that with my. And every one of these moments, they might be small for us, but for our children, often they're coming from the biggest source of influence and they stick, they really stick and then they grow. So we need to actually really go back and kind of make peace with kind of one obviously why they come from, but also how they have shaped us so we can do our own work, right? Trauma informed. You know, really being informed around this is really important. And I'll share something with you which was. And if you say, well, none of that happened to me, that's amazing if that was. But let's for a moment say, I don't do that and that didn't happen to me. I'm reminded of this teaching by Thich Nathan where he Said the first moment that when we are born is that time of struggle. For nine months, the baby is cradled in the most comfortable place, shielded by light, constantly fed. The first moment is a moment of struggle because in that cry is the exhalation of the. Of the fluid that is in the baby's lungs. The baby's drowning in the amniotic fluid. And the first act is actually an extreme waking up and a shaking up. Right. It's a struggle to live. And that by itself is where sometimes the seeds of suffering first get, you know, get sown. And that's what often creates attachment. So I actually do think the start of all of this work is actually us getting really connecting with and really getting really informed about trauma. How we get it, what it is, and how it shapes our way in the world. Because if we live in denial that that's not me, without awareness, growth is impossible.

Yeah, it's very touching what you said, Ashish. Maybe I'll just add a few things. One is all the examples you pointed to that might impact a young child. Point to the fact that as children we have very different interpretive systems of self safety. And that moments that can feel existentially scary to us as a kids can be much more benign than we might interpret from an adult perspective.

Yes.

And to go back to my definition or Thomas's definition of trauma is anything that the person experiences as overwhelming in that moment. It's not what might be objectively safe or not safe. And for the same reason that what Anil finds traumatizing I might be able to handle easily, and somebody else might find what I find traumatizing very easy to hold. So it's not to compare traumas. It's to honor that many of us walk with an unconscious level of habituated fear and act from that fear much more of the time than we think that we do. That's a simple call for all of us to get more conscious when we're acting in ways that truncate our choicefulness, narrow our behavioral repertoire, and distance us from the present moment in its full, rich source of information, connection and possibility. Those moments when we're acting out of unconscious fear really are a ceiling on our leadership capacity. And that's why it matters. And that's why it matters in organizational life. Because much of the time we're acting out of a much more primitive behavioral repertoire of fight, flight, flight and freeze than we think. And when we look at moments of high charge inside a team meeting, and you ask, as I often do with thousands of leaders, Describe to me in that moment of the upset, what were you emotionally feeling and how did you behave? And you can map verbatim every one of their behavioral responses to the neuroscience. We know of what happens when you're under threat. Then we know that we have people who look like fully functioning executive adults operating from very narrow parts of their cognitive capacities. That means really writ large. It means we have organizations making unethical decisions. We have organizations stuck in inertia, which means we as a planet are allowing our world to deteriorate in seismic proportions and great speed without responding appropriately. All of the numbness that we see of responsiveness, whether it be in a team dynamic that's, as you said, getting tense or getting difficult or getting emotional or getting aggressive and violent and emotionally violent, or our failure to calibrate humanity to operate in ways that are just and inclusive and equitable and climate responsive, all of that is numbness that comes from much earlier hurt. So we don't have the liberty nor do we have the time anymore to, to continue to operate in denial. So I think those of us that have the privilege of consulting to leaders who shape cultural architecture have an urgent need to start asking people even the uncomfortable questions about what is shaping your behavior and what is it that you're driven by and not yet aware of.

Yeah, no, I think what, you know, there are a couple of things that come to mind. The. I think everyone, let's be honest ourselves, everyone's a leader, right? In my opinion, at least, everyone has at least the potential to be a leader. So if we're targeting, let's say, leaders at a senior level who are leading teams and definitely leaving that impression, I think it's. For those listeners out there, I think it's a real important sentiment that both Ashish and Amy are sharing is if you're someone who can relate to this and think, okay, hang on a second. I guess the question we're asking here is take a pause and just reflect, right? Self awareness is at the core of the hardwired for happiness practices that we share. And I think that the questions and the thoughts that we're raising here are simply to almost give yourself a moment to step back and go, could this be me? Is this me? Okay, what does that mean? And what do I want to do with this? And how can I apply some of these ideas that Amy and Ashish have shared? And I think, Amy, just to kind of move us through, maybe you can share some examples, you know, maybe a case study of how this traumatic healing has actually made A difference either in an organization or in an individual's life that you've worked with to help our listeners almost kind of relate to how this actually comes to life.

Yeah. And Amy, as you reflect. Right. I mean, I was just going to say we had Raj Sisodia last week and he was talking about he's just coming out of the book Awaken. And you know, he was sharing his beautiful journey of he was writing healing Organizations. And you know, several of his teachers said, have you done your own work of healing? Because you can't write healing organizations unless you're willing to work on yourself and heal your life. Right. And so he wrote Awaken. He obviously had his own journey that he went. It was so beautiful. I would love for you to kind of share a bit, Amy, around both the individual journey that you might have taken a leader through, but also how this work you led that helped an organization at scale heal and become a different kind of organization. Because oftentimes people have this myth that, oh, this work needs to be done one on one by yourself. And I think that's powerful. But I think that's one of the beautiful parts of the offering that you have is you actually take at scale organizations through this. And it is possible. And it doesn't take years. I mean, it doesn't take days, but it doesn't take years either. It is possible, it's emergent and it can have huge impact externally, but it needs work internally.

Let me try to respond to both of your questions. First of all, I want to say something about time, because it's something I've struggled with since founding Mobius in 2005. I started the company in part because I was doing leadership development work and our clients were saying something like that two day workshop is great, but what could you do in a day and a one day workshop? That's really great, but what about a brown bag lunch? And I really just felt heartsick. I felt like there's a pandemic of time scarcity that business operates under and a kind of pressurized volatility that is a symptom of the trauma we've been discussing. And to yield to that as a reality that you create, couldn't as a leader, and I agree with you, Anil leadership could be leading a family, leading a community, leading a congregation, leading many different versions of ways to lead others as you learn to lead yourself. So by all means, let's not restrict ourselves to simply talking about corporate executives. But the idea that any of us don't have a few days in the course of a lifetime to make this profound shift from looking outward to looking inward that Ishish pointed to. I just don't believe it. And I think if any of us collude with it, we're just deferring to a trauma symptom in the cultural agreements that is highly dysfunctional and highly costly. So Mobius went the other way. We do our programs three days, four days, five days. On rare occasions I get people for two five day programs for a journey of 10 day days over a several month period. And I don't believe that one can rush this significant shift because it takes a day or two to detoxify from our habits of putting our attention outward, being in constant commotion, having our minds racing with to do lists and discourse, the settling or the sort of quieting of the mind in order to allow for one's early life to start unfolding itself as memories, as symbols, as dreams, as sort of synchronicities. It reveals itself in many different ways, but it won't make that gesture of revelation until we hold the intention well enough to slow ourselves down and show up to the conversation. So that's the first thing. I don't believe this kind of leadership development can be rushed or should be rushed.

It should not.

The second thing is I really do believe that a group of colleagues who have this shared aspiration to go on a healing journey together and to make that shift from looking outward to exploring the inner life of each leader can be an extraordinary resonance body to support each person's courage and each person's vulnerability to open up because they watch others do it and because they feel held and witnessed by others presence. And we're not meant to go it alone as I said earlier. So I have, you know, as you said, Ashish, I've taken thousands of people in 24 person groups and it takes only about 24 hours to constitute that group as a climate for growth or as an ecosystem of safety and unconditional caring. Because it's such a natural, as I said, it's such a natural way for us to be together. And what I see as a result of that is that people walk in and the first day they're very formal, they shake each other's hands, they don't make a lot of eye contact, they're sort of stiff and routinized in their exchange. And by four or five days later there's a kind of raw beauty in the room which represents people having dropped the shield, people having told significant parts of their life story to each other. That mostly they had never shared inside of a corporate setting. People having cultivated the wisdom from hearing those stories, to understand that every life includes fear, every life includes a state of fragility. Every life includes the desire to be seen and cherished and celebrated. Everybody wants all these sort of natural relational needs. And yet our society puts such a focus on autonomy and self independence and what we call, quote, resilience that people honestly believe it's more mature to do it alone as opposed to it's more healthy to do it in an interdependent, interwoven world. But once you can create that kind of permission for interdependence, then it becomes very natural to rely on each other. They start hugging each other, they start dancing together. People often write poems for the first time in 20 years or pick up a musical instrument they haven't touched since they were kids. They start spontaneously dreaming about fresh possibilities for their career, for their lives, for their family, for their self expression. And when you unlock all of that vitality and possibility and as you said to your word, emergence instead of frozen, stagnant, repeat patterns of interaction, they start saying things they've never heard themselves say before. They start thinking things they've never thought before, they start sensing things that weren't available to them before. All of that, I believe, is going to create and does create organizations where people are much more engaged, much more committed, much more safe to learn and to fail and to pick up, talk honestly when they need help. There's just many, many things that are required for organizational thriving that we start to see as cultural tenants in organizations that take this kind of a healing journey and it sustains over a very long time. That little upfront investment is like a giant unlock that lasts for. It's very enduring, which I find very touching also.

Yeah, Amy, we have, you know, we have a pending conversation around this Perl model that we've created. But you would be so proud because implicit in that pearl model, in this pearl journey, you know, this operating system that we're calling the Perl operating system to upgrade the human that's operating within. Right. Every organization, we've actually even taken your. I took from you like this notion of five days and 10 days. And we're actually saying these are journeys, they're actually multi year journeys and it needs to be in the context of the work. Right. So even if you do four or five days up front, that is fantastic. But imagine if you can weave this continuously over the next year or two years and the rest of the times don't need to be that long, but we need to kind of continue learning, developing, progressing, not holding ourselves to a bar of perfection, being compassionate, seeing people different, you know, that awakening, it's what happens in those amazing retreats that you do that we are now weaving into journeys is this is what happens. Dear friends, in a retreat, you for the first time, first notice the stars. That happens the first day or two. You just learn to notice the stars. That's it. Half the time we run around, we never actually even look up. In fact, in today's world, at least earlier, we used to look straight. Now we look at our phones. So we actually never even look up at the beautiful sky. So in the first day or two, we just stop and start to look at the stars. By day three and four, you actually notice that they're not stars, but constellations. Once you see a constellation, you can't unsee it. And that after day five, when you go back, you have a new way of seeing things. And that is the transformation that lasts forever. You are changed. The sky is no longer the same. The next time you pause and look up, you see the beauty. And that's what we see in all human interactions. You know, when you see somebody struggling, you don't see the struggle, you actually get curious. You really connect deeply your heart. You connect to the heart level versus the behavior level. You get curious because you recognize that just like you, they want to be happy, they want to do their best job. And that is hard to teach.

I really want to capture two things you said. First of all, a deep bow to you and your colleagues for the thoughtfulness and meticulousness with which you're articulating for people the practices in everyday, in weekly life that really will make it an ongoing journey of unfolding and developing and healing and the cultivation of happiness as even an emotional important path to take. So I hugely honor the work that you're bringing to the world. And I do think that a five day experience like that, at its best, it's an opening to the path.

Yes.

So what you're bringing to bear through the book and through your work and your trainings, I think is just going to be such an unbelievably useful, practical resource for people who are committed to the journey being longitudinal and life changing. And I'm so, so grateful for that. I also just wanted to, I don't know, smile at your notion that the program helped you see the stars. I might say it this way. There's vast beauty in our lives, in nature, in the relationships that we have in the work that we do, in the opportunities every day to serve others. And we are inured to that beauty by our busyness and by our dulled heart. And some of the healing that I'm talking about does include turning towards things that are painful and in our shadow, but it also means activating joy, activating abundance, activating beauty, activating inspiration. You know, it's one journey. The journey of openness takes us to our pain, but it equally takes us to grace.

Yes. So beautifully put. Thank you, Amy. And it means a lot coming from you. It means, it means so much. Thank you, Anil. I pass it to you, my friend. We can keep talking forever, but I know Amy probably has somewhere to go and I know you do too. So do you want to bring us home with our set of rapid fire questions that we are trying out as part of our ending of our podcast?

Just before we do that, can I just mention that Thomas Hubel and I are conducting next year year long certificate program for practitioners, for coaches, consultants, facilitators who might be interested in this refining of their professional capacities to do trauma informed work with coaches and with organizations. And we'd welcome you to look up www.traumainformedconsulting.com and think about joining us for that journey. It will start in March of 2024 and we're really delighted so far by the response we've had to this offering and we look forward to meeting more of our colleagues on this global journey that we're about to undertake.

No, I appreciate that, Amy. In fact, what we'll do is we'll make sure we get that website into the show notes. So for the listeners out there, if you didn't catch that, no stress, just take a look at the show notes. We'll make sure that you can follow along and partake. That'd be absolutely brilliant. So, Amy, as mentioned, rapid fire time as we come to a close. This is meant to just be a bit of fun and help us get to know you in a, in a quick way. So first question out of the five.

Rapid fire question is Bruce Springsteen.

I was going to say favorite song. Wait, no. Favorite artist though. What's your favorite book on the topic.

Of flourishing, Thomas Hubel's book, Healing Collective Trauma.

Yes. I knew you would say that. I love that book.

Me too. Nice.

You're the thinker or teacher. And this can be spiritual psychology, philosophical. Who has influenced you the most?

Oh, I have to name a few of my teachers. I can't pick one. So I've already mentioned Thomas and Shai. I would add to that the exquisite work of Patrick Connor and my sister's work at Harvard Law School, Erica Ariel Fox, which undergirds almost everything I have the privilege to do with clients.

I'm going to make sure that those go into the show notes because that's brilliant. I think I'd love to even look into them. So thank you for sharing that. The third one, the latest show that you are binge watching.

Oh my gosh, there's so many, it's embarrassing. I'm binge watching the Diplomat only because it reminds me of West Wing, which I'm still grieving the end of. I'm an Aaron Sorkin fanatic and I just had the great pleasure of seeing his production of To Kill a Mockingbird in London. And if people haven't seen it, they should run because it is such a profound teaching on racism in our country and it's very important work.

Ironically, just on that one, my wife and I were meant to go see that last year. She thought it was in 2022. Sorry, 2021 after Covid. She was wrong. They actually rebooked us to 2022. So it was a two year wait after Covid. So I agree. It was absolutely brilliant. Please definitely check it out. What is your go to practice for renewal? To be at your best.

Prayer, honestly, is my go to reaction. I use it all day long. I use it in any difficult moment. I use it in any moment of gratitude. I use it in any moment where I'm trying to be a custodian of someone's holy process. I use it to open our meetings. I use it to close our sessions. And just remembering that we are not the ones doing anything but that higher realms are supporting everything we do. And every word we speak I think is very liberating and also gives me a lot of peace.

That's beautiful. No, thank you for that. The last one. What would be the advice you would like to give to your younger self based on your life experiences to date?

Hang in there. It gets better.

Every day is more beautiful, right? Like we grow. Absolutely. The best is yet to come. The best is yet to come.

Amen. Amen.

Amy, this was such a joy. Thank you for spending the time with us for I know our listeners are going to get so much from it. I learned so much. I feel it's my life's privilege and such a gift to have met you and to continue walking the path with you together. Thank you.

Thank you both, Anil, you too. Thank you for your generous questions and for hosting me. I'm really happy to have been with you both, Amy.

It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your time. Listen, lots of love and big hugs. Take care, Amy, and I'll look forward to speaking to you again soon.

As will I.

As will I. Bye Amy. Bye.

Bye. See.

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