Happytalism: How Mindfulness Practices Redefine Success with Luis Gallardo

In capitalism, success is framed by money, power, fame. In capitalism, success is framed by freedom from fear, freedom to be, consciousness to expand and evolve with three levels of awareness.

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 Katari 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 Asha, Sh and I as we host guests who are industry leaders helping individuals and organizations to unlock inner happiness and flourishing. Have you ever considered the difference between contemplation and and thinking? Our next guest shares a game changing practice that will unlock your potential in meetings and so much more. Meet Luis Gallardo, founder and president of World Happiness Foundation, World Happiness Festival and the author of Hapitalism. He's also authored the Exponentials of Happiness and over the years Luisa has been an advisor to CEOs, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates, political institutional game changers on strategic personal positioning and brand building. Ashish and I had an amazing opportunity to discuss with Luis. His journey that started at a young Age of 25 in war torn parts of the world led him to establish the foundation, the festival and an academy with declarative missions to reach a goal of 10 billion happy people by 2050. We discuss a bit further around capitalism, which is the intersection of happiness and capitalism, as well as three key pillars, freedom from fear, consciousness and happiness. We hope that the tips and practices that we share support you. In fact, we've already invited Luis back to share more in the coming days as the insights were just too much to capture in just one episode. So hey, join Ashish and I as we welcome Louise to the Happiness Squad podcast. Luis Ashish, it's a pleasure to be with both of you. Thank you Luis for taking the time to be with Ashish and I. Before we start, I just have to say one of our favorite questions that we love to ask our guests is the definition of happiness and how it's changed for them since their younger years. And seeing your background Louise, I just feel like this one might be incredible. So I Just want to pass the mic to you and share with us your definition and how your experiences have changed it over time.

Yeah, I love being here. Thank you so much. I love what you do and I'm super happy to share with you this time. And, you know, happiness as you've been exploring by interviewing many people and by focusing on what it means, I think that the conclusion that I have so far is that it means different things to different people. What we know is that science has. Has decided to define it somewhere so we can advance the science. But in this case, for me, beyond science is a state. And I like to define happiness as a state because when you define it as a state is beautiful because then what you have to learn is how to get into the state. And once you tap into a state and there are multiple thousands, millions of different states, that's where you can feel it and that's where you can really intervene. So states exist regardless of who we are and where we are. What we have to learn is how to get into those states. So for today's podcast, my definition is a state.

I love that, Luis. And it's so beautifully put. It's a state of being. You know, I always say it's cultivating joyfulness rather than chasing joy. It is a state we can choose to be in that. And in fact, the power of that is so present right now for me. We lost our baby, our 14 year old pug, yesterday. She was old and she had lost her sight and she was completely disoriented. And Anil's been with us, so he knows I probably used to kiss her, I don't know, a hundred times a day. I don't think ever anybody kisses their dog a hundred times a day, but she used to always spend the evenings in my lap. It used to be her favorite thing to do. And we had to unfortunately let her go because she was suffering. And, you know, I experienced grief in such a deep way for a moment. Right. It goes through it when we lose somebody that is so close to you. She was close to my wife and my son. My son had her in her life from her first day of his birth. She had been a part of his life. And I can clearly state that, you know, while I can experience the emotion of grief and sadness, I'm doing it because of all the work that I was lucky enough to be initiated into over the last seven, eight years from a state of joyfulness, because our brains, luckily, are not slotted for just one emotion and how we can choose to experience that Event that experience both from the learning of impermanence, but from also a place of fundamental state of peace with peace and also just joy right around what we had and the life we had with her and the amount of an end to her suffering. Right. Makes that experience different. Makes that experience different. I can be of more in service to my wife and my son and others because I'm experiencing that event from that state versus from a different state. Right. So I think it's beautiful. And, Luis, I have a huge admiration for you. I know we were trying to connect for almost a year, and I have a lot of admiration for you both because you are help, you know, because you're on the path. Your mission of 10 billion happy by 2050 is itself so inspiring. But what I really get inspired by, and in that we are very kindred spirits, Louis, is there is the science of happiness. And we can research and we can fine tune, fine tune, fine tune away what makes us happy, what doesn't make us happy. Right. There is so much out there. And, you know, my hat's off to Tal and Emma and Sonia and so many others who are constantly advancing and kind of, you know, Marty Seligman from the positive psychology and science side, there's also a lot of spiritual wisdom that has been there forever. I know you spend a lot of time with His Holiness the Lama and so many other learned teachers. There's also the spirituality, you know, what we know from spiritual wisdom traditions. But what I really love, Luis, and what I find the most inspiring is your mission around, truly taking the science and the spirituality, but making it practical and making it accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. And you do that through the World Happiness foundation, the World Happiness Fest you've created. You and I are gonna be together at the upeace event, the Academy. So that's what I love. And that's kind of where we are, kindred spirit, where it's. We can know all we want, but if we don't practice it and we don't make it accessible, nothing becomes possible. I'm curious, Luis. I know my journey, and I've shared that on this podcast several times. I'm curious about your life journey and how life apprenticed you to get you to be doing what you're doing now.

Yes. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for all your kind words. And I know what it feels to lose a pet animal and a service dog, because I've been through that before. And, you know, pets and especially dogs are pure, pure joy and happiness. It's one of Those examples of animals where it's unconditional love, unconditional happiness, unconditional love and joy every second you can leave the room for a few minutes and you come back and they get excited, super excited. I mean, that's pure. That's purity in the joy and the happiness is just remarkable. And we should always look at that emotion and those animals in a way to learn how we could at some point, behave as well as humanity. So, yeah, I'm with you on that grief, and I understand very well, and I completely agree with your introduction. Because we can be in our mind all our life. And when we talk about the states, actually you say the state of being. And I love it, because beyond being, there is nothing. It's pure consciousness. But if we want to be practical, we have to put happiness somewhere. And in this case, what we've decided is to start with the mind. So what we say is that happiness is a state of mind, but we can live in our heads all our lives, because that's the way we are as humanity. We create through our mind, but nothing happens beyond our mind unless we are pure manifestos. We really manifest another state of energy. Unless we do something, I can actually have it through energy as well, because that's our energy. So this is the important part and the strategic part that brought me where I am today. I understand and I want to focus happiness in our mind. Our mind is a combination of multiple and relationships between different elements. And that can be the body, that can be our consciousness, that can be our mind, that can be our brain, that can be. There are so many different elements. But at some point we have to simplify this into, okay, what do I do in my daily life to make a difference and to make a change? So that's why I think that we have to be inspired by wisdom. In Buddhism, wisdom and compassion are the two wings of realization. So wisdom, compassion, you cannot fulfill and you cannot get out of suffering without those two winds. Here we have already a path, is how do we cultivate wisdom? With compassion. And then when you go into Sufism, when you go into Kabbalah, when you go into Buddhism, you go into Islam, you go into so many different spiritual traditions. They all get to the same point. And it's a point of suffering, and it's a point of love is a point of happiness, and there is a point of trauma, there is a point of joy, and there is a point of path to those states. I think that we have a framework like this. And I say that because I'm Coming from the consulting space as well, I know that you were at McKinsey. I was at Deloitte for 12 years. In this case. My job at the corporate level was to create and develop the brand from a study point of view for both employees, clients and stakeholders. So when you work with a strategy team with a chief financial officer, when you work with a C suite, in order to elevate the value proposition for clients and customers, you have to be very, very practical. Is like, okay, this is where we want to be. This is our aspiration. Then what are the key performance indicators and what do you measure in order to. So that was my first book. My first book is Brands and Browsers is a whole business book focused on six elements to create high performing business careers and brands. Before I got into the corporate world. And that took me actually creating that, writing that book took me 12 years. And that's why probably Deloitte today is 450,000 people. Billions and billions of dollars we were able to build. And I was. I'm very proud that I helped to build the foundations for sustainable growth for a huge multinational. Before that, what I wanted to be was a diplomat.

I can see that, Luis, with all your travels and what you do, I think you are a diplomat.

Yes, My space is listening. I love listening. And in order to actually be a good diplomat, you have to listen a lot. But that was my. What I study. I study politics, sociology, international relations and peace studies. So I was actually part of the first class of the first ever Master of Art MA at Richardson Institute in the United Kingdom on peace and conflict resolution. But that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get into the roots of conflict and understand it. So I did that from a theoretical point of view when I did my master's, then I did that from a practical point of view when I was an international observer with the United nations and I went to post armed conflicts such as the one in the former Yugoslavia. So when you are there as an international observer, you are observed. And the first thing you realize that just by being an observer, you change the reality. Because the moment you are there, present people behave in a different way. So this is so interesting because normally we talk about theory, the theory of quantum mechanics and quantum physics, about the observer changing the reality of the particles. I saw that as an international observer, I was just there going from one school to another school and the behavior from everybody in those schools change.

And Louis, it's so true, isn't it? It is true. You know, at friends, I'm Going to repeat what Luis just said, because, you know, for those who are scientifically inclined and kind of feel that this is one of the most core elements of spiritual traditions, but science, quantum physics in particular, clearly highlight that there is no impartial observing. The act of observing changes what's being observed. That moment changes it, because whatever energy is imparted to see changes the direction of the particle and in fact, many things. Waves, when trying to see, become particles, right? And particles, we manifest in certain ways the classic dual split experiment of photons. If not, look it up around how light acts both as particles and waves. The same is true for our own mind. So if you are experiencing rather than being caught and becoming the thought and emotion, stepping back and observing the thought and emotion is a wonderful exercise of awareness and seeing how you change your reality, how you change the reality, what comes up for you. So I invite you tomorrow, take any thought, take any emotion that you're experiencing. But as Louise suggests, just become an observer of the emotion and the body's feelings and the beliefs around it and notice what opens up for you. Something will change. And we are curious to know what that is.

Absolutely. So when you have that in mind and you understand that observation changed reality, then that was my breakthrough moment when I was observing how people reacted to war.

How old were you, Luis?

I think I was 25.

Wow, what a gift.

Oh, my goodness, that was an incredible gift. I was the youngest international observer because I was there with politicians, many other diplomats. But because I was the first class of peace studies, the Foreign Office wasn't able to say, no, you don't go. Because I applied as the first class of professional peacemakers. So that was a huge gift. And, you know, being there and observing the drama, terrible situation of the victims of war, that's when you say, how is this possible? How can we as humanity commit such crimes? And what are the roots of all this? And now we look around and we see this in Ukraine, we see this in Gaza, we see this in South Sudan, we see this in Mexico, we see it in the favela. We see this everywhere. At some point, we get into estates where we use violence, heavy violence, to defend our positive intention. Because this is something important. This is something important that you discover once you go into deep psychological route of decision making and is the positive intention that we all have when we even kill somebody. There is something that is because I'm defending myself, because I'm defending my beliefs, because I'm defending, defending my family, because they deserve this, because I believe in Something, there is a subjective truth in everything and that we do rooted in positive intentions. So imagine. Everything gets so complex when you think this way. And that's why we cannot solve even conversation with friends that ended up with fights. So that was really the. The beginning of my search. It was 1997. And I tell the story that I met this woman, 85 years old, Blickna. She was waiting at 4am to cast her boat at the school. And I approached her and I asked her, what do you do here? As he said, I have hope. Wow. And I said, well, it's very early. The school opens at am. You're going to be waiting. Do you want a chair, please. She said, don't worry. I have hope to live in peace and to be happy one day again. I lost my family, I lost my pets, I lost my neighbors. I lost everything in my life. I have lost my hope to live in peace and to be happy one day again. Okay, come on, you are 85. You've lost everything. You have a lot of hope to be in peace and happy one day again. Oh, my goodness. Hope, peace and happiness come as seeds. They were planting seeds in my mind. It's like, wow. I mean, I have to explore this. I was doing my thesis at that moment and that's what I wrote. The first thesis that I wrote was the Fulfillment of Identity as a way for Conflict Resolution. I went deeper into the fulfillment of our identity. And this is very important because most conflicts, I would say 99% of conflicts in the world happen because they access, access to resources, material resources, combined with our mindset. That's it. That's how all conflicts are around the world.

You're so right.

So, yeah, that's the beginning of the research that I did, Luis.

It's so amazing. We had Professor Sri Kumar Rao and Sri Kumar and I are spending some time exploring what our collaboration looks like going forward. You know, this notion of awareness and mindset is so at the heart of the work we are doing as well, because. And it came my first introduction to awareness, actually, from the work of Julio Olala and Flores Fernandez, which is all around awareness and our beliefs in the unique observers and the power of assessments. Anil's going through a new field certification program right now as well. Awareness is at the heart of our model around Hardwired for Happiness. Because to your point, the identity and beliefs are at the heart of how we create our own suffering. And that's the work as well of Professor Sri Kumar Rao, where he says, you know, his. Literally, he says, if there is one learning from me, it is our mindsets shape everything. And if you want to be happy, change your mindset. If you want to be, you know, create something and everything. It is true, as you also said, everything we manifest there, we create here first. And almost everything we create, we are the hero and somebody else is the victim. Because otherwise it's hard to take action that hurts another. You know, compassion is also deeply rooted in us. But somehow we have to make the other person, the villain, something who is not even worthy of living. And then that gives us the right, you know, and that force to take action. And you're so, so right. I loved how simply you put it. Resources, access to resources, and our identity, our mindset and the story we are holding is at the heart of the conflict. It's at the heart of suffering.

But you know, that's why I've been able to create a new paradigm that I call capitalism. Because, you see, is access to resources. Why do I need resources? Because I live in a material world. Because the resources are going to bring me more success, they are going to bring me more fame, more power or more money. And that's the framework that we use to measure success in the world that we've created. When I saw hope, peace, happiness as the ultimate goal of Bligna, that's when I started to work on new framework. It's like, and you know this because you were from McKinsey and this is the way we think in strategic, when you build strategies, what is the framework? Now the framework that I started to build was a framework based on ultimate happiness. As the goal is not accumulation of wealth, it's accumulation of happiness. So how do you get into there? Well, you have to redefine the framework for success. And if in capitalism, success is framed by money, power, fame, in capitalism, success is framed by famous freedom from fear, freedom to be consciousness to expand and evolve with three levels of awareness. So the first level is awareness itself is what is happening. The second level is mindfulness, why something is happening. And the third level is transcendence. What for? So those are the three level of consciousness. And then the third element is happiness. Happiness is the activator of the system, but it's not happiness for oneself, it's happiness to share. It's not about being happy, it's about being. Happiness is the incarnation of what you want to manifest. So that's the new framework, completely different to money, fame and power. It's our freedom, consciousness and happiness. So how do you reframe a whole system world system in order to achieve that level of happiness for all by 2050, well, you have to make many changes, but especially the changes have to happen at the imprinted beliefs that we have. So this is another conclusion that we go to. Where do you start? You have to start by imprinted beliefs. And then when you go through imprinted beliefs, then you get into one key activator which is compassion and self. Compassion is love and kindness for yourself. So that now from there you have a whole system. Super practical. Because when we do the festival, when we do the training for the academy, what we are providing all the time are tools, practical tools for founders, for leaders, for mayors, for school principals, for anybody, for psychologists, for medical doctors. Tools that can be applied right away to switch and to make that switch in our imprinted beliefs. That's what we are doing now.

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 reach 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.

You know, it's funny how we all make sense and sometimes those sense making independently points to the same pathway. So, Luis, you know, my book Hardwired for Happiness actually was not the title of the book, the book that I actually wrote, Luis, because it came from my own sense of feeling anxiety and fear. And then I wrote the book in Covid because I could sense the huge amount of fear that was present. Right. That was only making things worse. So the book that I had written, Luis, the original title was from fear to freedom. Wow. A journey from within to live your best life.

Amazing.

And that's how it makes sense, right? Of course, awareness makes sense as kind of the center part of fear. Because what is fear? It's what we are creating in our brain. And so knowing why we are creating the fear, and hence the fact that we are our own prisoners and we have the keys, we have to go there to free ourselves and then everything else was after. So I thought it was just really, really coincidental that your first principle is freedom from fear.

And it celebrates a lot of the work that Ashish, you're leading, that we're doing. And I just think on the back of that every time I have a conversation, Luis, with colleagues of mine around happiness, you know, people think, okay, you know, but I'm afraid. What does that mean? What does happiness mean? They're more comfortable being in fear, spending more time, stressed, anxious. And I love what you're talking about in terms of each of you, in terms of, hey, how do we unlock our consciousness, not just being aware, but actually becoming self aware? How do we identify that we are experiencing fear and how we can free ourselves from it? Because this is something we can rewire away from. And I'm hand over heart saying this because part of the journey I'm on with Ashish is I'm actually doing our rewire program, which is allowing me to understand where are moments when I'm triggered, when are moments where I need to pause Brandy to breathe, where I need to almost just observe and give space rather than react. Right. It's a matter of being measured and being responsive when you've identified how you're feeling. So I really love, Luis, how you and Ashish really framed that up for our listeners. And what I'd like to do is just, I would like to shift and just understand a little bit more about Happy Talism.

Right.

So there, there are a few things that are playing in my mind. So one is I want to talk and understand how our listeners can incorporate and integrate what you've been doing. And the reason why I say that whenever I speak to people at work about this work, the signs of happiness, I get a lot of questions. A little funny looks like, okay, happiness, science of happiness. What is this? And it's like, no, no, this actually works. You know, this is not mainstream maybe yet, but it's becoming there. So I think when we think about capitalism, what I'd love to understand is you really talk about this in your book, about how it is a super and pan systematic way for us to solve crisis and issues that we face. Collective trauma requires collective healing. I would love for you to just start sharing with us a few of those practices that you've seen. Businesses that you've worked with, governments that you worked at, schools that you've worked with. How have they actually started to adopt these capitalism principles to, to create that positive impact on society that you, I, Ashish, and many others that you guys have listed really want to see in this world?

Yeah, that's a big question. And I love it because that's the gateway to new paradigms in many ways. And capitalism is a new paradigm. Ism is basically philosophy, is the philosophy of something and there are thousands of them. So the first thing that came to my mind, okay, if we are going to create a new philosophy, a new paradigm, and it's going to be based on ultimate happiness, well, it had to be an ism, it has to be capitalism. So that's the combination of philosophy and happiness. So overall, capitalism is a philosophy, it's not a religion, is not just an economic system, is a whole philosophy about how to achieve ultimate happiness. True happiness, supreme, call it supreme happiness in many ways. And when you explore how other isms have been created, they all have their principles. So in this case something that we knew. Because after you come up with an idea, what I and this is my, my way of creation, I co create. So I ask people, I get the experts around the world and I ask them from there you start creating the path. So one thing that we all know is that in this world we need big things going on for people to attach to them from a strategy point of view. So that's how we came out in this case with my partner Jamie, to actually lobby at the United nations level to create the International Day of happiness. And that's March 20th. So that was 194 countries signing and passing resolution in order to have an official day on the international agenda that nobody can forget because it's there forever. So imagine how simple things are really complex, but they are really systemic. You have to play with the system. So right now, thanks to many people, there is an International Day of Happiness. And there was a second resolution where basically all countries and institutions are invited to think how to create new paradigms for human progress based on happiness and well being. And the Kingdom of Bhutan led a whole symposium at the United nations level in order to gather and in order to brainstorm and think what we could be doing, including the oecd, including the United nations, including big companies, including small individuals, everybody really got together from the positive psychology point of view, from the behavioral economics point of view, and in order to rethink and in order to say, okay, what are new paradigms of human progress based on happiness and well being? My contribution is this term of capitalism that it has basically two fundamentals. One is the individual and the other one is the supra individual, which is the community. And when you go deeper into those, then you see that at the individual level we have to go into a state of what you call awareness. The second step at least which is mindfulness. So we have to be mindful. That's why the work from Ellen Langer and so many others around the world, and the chair that we have now at the University of Zaragoza with Javier Garcia Campago, who is my co author of the Spanish edition of Capitalism, we go into the space of the mind and be mindful. Not just from a meditative meditation point of view, but from a whole picture and understanding the why. So this is core to Habitatism is being mindful.

It's being mindful. And I love the distinction you make between mindfulness and meditation. Meditation is a way to access the mindful state, you know, train our brain to be present. But a lot of people, just like everything else Louis today think about, well, I meditate for five minutes and I'm good. But it's more about are you mindful through the day? Right. Are you mindful about the state and really the state of inter being in which we live? Are you mindful of our own thoughts that are shaping our realities? Are we mindful of. Can we be mindful and present with what's present for the other person versus just trying to force our point through? Right. So I think it's beautiful. It's so, so resonant with me. And it's unbelievable what you've been able to create at the scale of the United nations and countries. It's so inspiring.

Yeah, but it's not. I mean, as you know, because you work in a big company, it's not just you. Then the idea is there and suddenly happens because the energy brings together many, many more people. This is a co creation process of so many people. And I'm just one, I'm just one of the. But the second element is very important for those who really want to go deeper into new paradigms is what we call contemplation. And this is a big deal because contemplation is not meditation. We meditate, we are using a technique that is being aware of your thoughts and letting them go. You are away, you label them, you let them go. In contemplation, you keep them. So when you contemplate, you observe whatever you want to observe. As I was doing in Bosnia, my job was to observe the reality and making sure that there was not threats for people who wanted to vote freely. That was my job. Basically. When you contemplate, it's amazing what happens because the moment that you master the technique in few seconds, it might take minutes. Something happened with your contemplation, something happened with your thought. What it means that you don't have to think and you don't have to act. And this is what we are recommending in order to get into another state. And a new paradigm is you don't have to think, you don't have to act. And this is how humanity behaves. We have thinkers and we have doers, we have activists, we have those who are everyday acting autopilot, and we have those who are always thinking how things could be in a different way or a better way. What we are saying is there is another space. There is a space of contemplation, and it's between acting and thinking. Let's explore what that means. And that's silence. So everything starts with silence. Everything starts with letting things happen in an harmonic and balanced way by themselves.

When I think of contemplation, I think that, you know, things that make you go, right, you're in a meeting, somebody says something and you're again, not reacting, you're holding it, you're contemplating, you're observing the room. Just for our listeners say, because this is something I can truly benefit from. What would be then, a technique to observe that silence or to practice or form that habit of contemplation that works for you, that we can try and use ourselves?

Yes. The first step is similar to meditation, which is you focus on your breath. So basically you start paying attention, your breathing. So you inhale, exhale, and at that moment you focus on the way you inhale and you exhale. That is the fastest way to get your focus on something. Once you are in that space, then you open your eyes, or you open your mind with your eyes closed. And you expand wide out, wide out. And then you start expanding awareness. And once you expand wide out, then suddenly you see a bird, you see the movement of a tree or a leaf. That's where you are going to be observing. And then you decide what you're going to be observing. Maybe you have a thought and you observe that thought. But the first step is you focus on your breathing. And then you go from there. And then there's a whole system. There's a whole system. When you get. And when you want to focus on something, how you can focus on that thing. But you say, the example that you gave is great. You have a meeting room and people are talking. Normally there is one and everybody's listening, but normally everybody is thinking about what that person is saying. And you are getting ready to respond. Or you, in your mind, you are resisting the thought or you are agreeing with the thought. That's not Contemplation. That's thinking or that actually excluding yourself from the. From the conversation because you are not interested. So there's a whole ground in that technique. We are bringing that technique to schools because now we have a whole program called Schools of Happiness. And contemplation is part of the system. It's an evolution of what Education for Peace is, is Education for Happiness. There are many examples. Casel is one of those organizations that brought social, emotional learning to so many schools. We are building on that, and now we are working with thousands of teachers around the world on that framework of Schools of Happiness that uses contemplation as part of it. We incorporate this in the framework for companies as well.

We, as Happiness Squad and the Rewire program that we're running, you know, we share with our friends, hey, these are habits that you're not taught at school, at University Network. And I'll be honest with you, even what you're saying, I've not heard about it. And I want to learn more, Luis. Just given time, I feel like there's so much more we want to unlock with you. I read through your blogs last night around the Chief Wellbeing officer, the work that you just described. I feel like we need more. Ashish, if you agree. So I don't want to limit the conversation, but I'm going to ask Luis that we wrap for now, but we bring you back and we talk about the work that you're doing in the academies, the schools, and the way you're looking to challenge the status quo and examples that you have on how Chief Wellbeing officers truly can make a difference at the corporate level.

I would even say, you know, I've never heard such a beautiful distinction that you just shared, Luis, between thinking and doing a third state, which is in the middle, which is contemplation. And I even, I think even just doing a podcast just on that, you know, especially with your role as an observer into an actuator. You are not an observer, Luis. Now, right, you are an observer, but you are truly one of those in the middle who is observing and nudging. Because, by the way, only through contemplation can you nudge systems to move the way you want. And it is such a needed skill. It is such a needed way of being. If you would honor us, we would love to actually bring that distinction. Because I never hear that word out there, and it is so, so needed.

Yeah, it's so needed and so powerful. So, yes, I'd be happy to talk about whatever you want. I Love it.

Oh my God, it is so powerful.

Luis, I want to say thank you. And again, I know there are a few more questions we have for you, but we're going to answer that in the next episode. So listeners come back, come. Cause I'll tell you what the difference between contemplation, thinking, meditation, I personally know I can benefit from it. Luis, thank you for your time. I wish you well and I look forward to our next conversation soon.

Yes, thank you so much.

Thank you, Luis. And just for those who are still tuned in, what are the two or three dates? I think there are two or three dates that are coming up where you're holding fest in Miami. We're gonna be in ups. If there are dates that we wanna invite people to check out and actually get involved. Not just thinking, not just take in, but show up and act. What might be some places and dates that we should invite?

Okay, so March is a big month because that's when we celebrate March 20, International Day of Happiness. So gross Global Happiness at the University for peace. That's March 8th to 10th. Then we go to Spain, World Happiness Fest in Spain from the 15th to the 17th and then Miami from the 22nd to the 24th. Then we are going to be doing more festivals in Chile, Peru later in May, June and now because we have more than 100 cities around the world with chapters, they are doing their own events. But I think those three dates, Costa Rica, Spain, Miami, those are big moments where we can get together, we can cook, create new paradigms for human progress based on happiness and well being.

Thank you Louis. Such a joy. It'll be amazing to be with you of course in Costa Rica. I'm going to try and be in Miami as well with you and thank you again for joining and sharing your insights and the beautiful work with our listeners.

Thank you.

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