How to Shift from Surviving to Thriving Leadership with Renee Moorefield

I do want to acknowledge that for many people in the world, they don't have, they're not surrounded with the external resources. But I also want to say that as a world we are wealthier and better fed and smarter, but we have more knowledge, more access knowledge than we ever have. So we do have the opportunity more than we think we do.

Foreign welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Hello friends. Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast where we share practical tips to make flourishing your competitive edge and help you achieve stellar performance powered by well being, not at its expense. Ash I'm Ashish Kothari and I'm on a mission to help a billion people not just experience happiness as an emotion, but use it as a tool to unlock their fullest potential. If you're interested in learning more, please make sure to follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter@happinesssquad.com today we have the incredible privilege to hosting Renee Moorefield, a true pioneer in the field of well being and leadership. With over 35 years of experience, Renee has been shaping how individuals, teams and organizations can truly thrive long before words like well being and flourishing became common in leadership conversations. Renee is the founder of WisdomWorks and the visionary behind the be well lead well transformational platform that's grounded in the science backed framework of thriving she created. We explore on this podcast how leaders can use that six part framework to go from surviving to thriving not just for themselves, but also enabling their teams and organizations so that collectively we can unlock our fullest potential and create better outcomes for all stakeholders. Get ready for an inspiring conversation about leadership resilience and how we all can can elevate our capacity to thrive. Let's jump in. Hi Renee, it's so wonderful to have you on our Happiness Squad podcast.

I am super delighted to be here. It's been a while since we've been able to connect.

I know. Listen, I've been so inspired by all of your work and you're definitely what I would call, you know, one of the elders, you know, in the field. You know, as you were sharing before we just started recording, you know, you've been in this field for 35 years plus. Right. Focusing on, well, being and flourishing and thriving. Even before there were these words and there were these definitions. And so, you know, I have a lot that I could learn from you, and I know our listeners would love to learn from your years of experience in helping organizations and teams and individuals flourishing. So I'm just super grateful for this time together.

Wow, Me too. I really am.

So, you know, I'm gonna start, Renee, with this first question, which is just a little bit on the origin story. Right. So tell me a little bit about your personal journey. 35 years out, when people weren't even thinking about well being or wellness or any of this. What inspired you to start walking this path and start wisdom words?

Yeah, that's a. That's a really good question because you're right. Some of these words didn't even exist.

Yes.

And I started, you know, in college. I knew, somehow I knew because there weren't. There wasn't even career counseling and all that at that time. But I knew I wanted to be more in the space of wellness. I was trained as an exercise physiologist and a wellness educator, so I knew I wanted to be in that world in some ways. My first job was with five, or, excuse me, six cardiologists at a healthcare system. And I was seeing people really at the back end. So when they had had heart attacks and I was trying to teach them healthy lifestyle prescriptions, diet, exercise, stress management, et cetera. And remember, I'm. I'm super young, and here I am teaching people about managing stress, and I haven't even quite lived yet, although I understood what it meant, given my own upbringing, to be dysregulated and to try to use strategies to find regulation. Again, I wouldn't have had these words, but I had somewhere in me a knowledge about that. But I. I learned there that I didn't want to be at the back end, like downstream of some of these effects. I really wanted to be upstream and wanted to be about building capabilities. So that first job out of college was super formative for me because it helped me see that. I see that there is a way of being in the world, a way of living in the world. And at this time, leadership hadn't come to mind, but a way of being and living and relating that could help us thrive, could help us thrive and live more fully, and also could prevent disease and illness, et cetera. So that was one big shift. I then joined a global corporation. Never thought I would work with corporations. I thought at the time that they were the evil of the planet. Never thought I would work at one and. But I joined a global corporation and it ended up being a really incredible experience for me personally. I ran the health promotion department and that was my first job as a leader. And I realized in that very first leadership role where I was managing a big budget and fitness centers and stress management programs and you know, all of this work for 41,000 employees. I realized at that time that I could do more as a leader in creating the conditions for my team to thrive that I, than I could have done as the exercise physiologist. So I really shifted my focus from a specialist to trying to understand leadership. And I, I can see now that I always had this motivation to understand what makes people tick and how do people show up with their full potential, not just individually, but when we are together. Because when that happened together and I, I felt it on that team, we got better results than we ever could have gotten alone. And we really became quite valuable to that organization. I left there and started for the organization. The organization was growing by merger and acquisition. Grew from 41,000 to 110,000 employees, mostly by merger and acquisition. And the technical side of those transitions was done very well, but the people and culture side was not. And so at the, you know, in the health promotion department I said hello, here's, here's what we're seeing in the downstream. A lot of stressed out people. Could we do this better? And so that organization said, well, why don't you go figure it out. So I built for the organization a change management, a change leadership practice where we skilled people at a large network across the company to help humanize the change process, humanize the merger solutions. Again. Remember this is like 1993, this is really early. And John Kebbat Zinn had just come out with his book Full Catastrophe Living. Margaret Wheatley had written her book Leadership in the New Science. Ken Wilber had written something. So these were such deep influencers and shapers of me as a 20 something year old at that time. And one of my mentors was Peter Kostenbaum who just recently passed just a few weeks ago at the age of 97. And he was a philosopher that wrote about and brought into business the study of real responsibility, about freedom, how we can have freedom in our life and with responsibility. So very existential questions. So I was with that company for eight or nine years. I lived in a number of different countries for that company. And when I repatriated, I joined the Coca Cola company because they asked me to do basically the Same work that we've been doing, very transformative leadership work. By this time, I'd gotten a master's in business and human relations and I'd gotten a doctorate with a real focus on what is the role of spirituality in leadership. So just a little double click on that. We found that when leaders are more spiritually centered, whether that's a faith, whether that's a spiritual practice like meditation, whether that's a relationship with nature, whether that's a deeper purpose. So however they defined it, without us defining it, however they defined it, they had lower triglycerides, fasting triglyceride levels, they had lower cholesterol, cholesterol levels. They had greater tolerance to diversity. They had greater relationship skills and better leadership effectiveness. So it was pretty remarkable, of course, that because your spiritual sensibility is, for most people, the deeper questions of existence. And so that was also part of my, my study.

Well, I think through, you know, Rene, through all of the work that I've done, I mean, it all makes sense, right? Because it also implicitly, no matter what door you go through the door to spirituality, in effect, you are working on dissolving your ego and, you know, really connecting to the state of inter being and seeing as whole rather than one. And with that, you will experience less stress and less fear and less boundary of me versus other. Right. So the health outcomes, of course, are better and that relational ability to connect, I think you break that barrier, you break this us versus them. And I think you can just sense differently, you know, so that makes all the sense in the world to me. That's beautiful.

So it's why to me today, the work of evolving leadership is such profound work. Sometimes it is about behavior change and that that's positive as well. When someone starts to decides to have a new exercise program or decides to learn how to manage conflict better. So that's great behavior change. But the real deep, deep work is why are we here? Who do we think we are? Truly, who do we think we are? And what does it mean to lead? What does it mean to stand for something? What does it mean to be the kind of leader that leads in such a way that creates the conditions for all people to thrive?

Yeah.

So that's really the deeper work. And I would include the planet as well, for all beings to thrive. So that's really the deeper work of leadership that we founded WisdomWorks on 25 years ago.

Amazing. Fundamentally, you know, enabling a shift in the root perspectives, right?

For sure, for sure, for sure.

If you shift the being, the doing follows if you just teach the doing, it might not stick it out.

That's true. That is true. Yeah.

Right. So I love that. So share with us a little bit and with our listeners. Renee, you know, the six part framework that you created that WisdomWorks really works on and maybe give a little bit of an overview and pick one or two of those that we can go deep into to bring to essence. You know, the how to actually make it practical. Right. What's how. If somebody was listening, what could they. What's something that they could pull and implement right away?

Sure, sure. And if I'm not doing a good job at that, you make sure, you.

Know, and I'll ask you. I have, I have them here.

Yeah, sure, I do that. So, so, you know, our 25 years ago when I co founded Wisdom Works, the whole focus was, was on this different model of leading to really hold thriving of people in the planet as part of your leadership self and how you showed up in your life. So we did that work for many years through a qualitative assessment that we used that was looking at different factors linked to thriving that we just built ourselves. But I wanted to be able to do that. I wanted our team to be able to do that with more people at once. And so I wanted to build a framework and an assessment system that actually could be used with thousands of people or millions of people at once. And first what we did is went out kind of out to the market and see has any. Does anyone have this? Because honestly, I can tell you it takes a lot to build that kind of assessment and make sure it's as valid and reliable. But we couldn't find it that had all the different factors. Because now you've probably heard there's biopsychosocial, spiritual. I mean there are very many different factors we've tried to pull together. So we partnered with the Positive Organization center at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. It's part of their business and management school and they have a group of social scientists that agreed that they would help us pull together the insights that we had from the qualitative work that we had done and turn it into a quantitative tool. So the framework has six dimensions. You mentioned you've got it in front of you. So it's got six dimensions. Thriving is the centerpiece. And that dimension, if I were just to define it in a, in one kind of sentence, thriving is the extent to which you feel internally well resourced to handle the complexities and demands you face in your life and work and to do so with a high quality of life, a sense of growth and a sense of competence. So you can already see there's lots to that definition.

Yes.

So do you, it's that it's those times when you feel like, you know, there's a lot going on in the world. But I have a right relationship with all that and I have right relationship with myself in that. So that's thriving. Then there's a dimension called fuel. And fuel looks at what people traditionally think of as wellness behaviors.

Yes.

The extent that you are eating, moving, resting, breathing in a ways that helps you manage your stress, manage your energy, optimize your performance. So that's what many tools in the market right now, that's actually what they look at the most. And, and we, but we're looking at how do those wellness behaviors help you manage your stress, energy and performance. So it's really kind of a consciousness raising factor. Then we've got flow. Flow is looking at the extent to which you feel engaged at work, that you gain energy from the work that you do. Not every moment, but overall there are, there's enough engagement at your work, enough energy you gain, that you gain well being from your work, that you gain self esteem and a sense of self worth through your work. So you have that kind of relationship with your work and your sense of mindfulness, your ability to be present in the moment without judging it, good or bad, right or wrong. Then we have a dimension called wonder. And wonder is probably my personal favorite. I would say you can think of all of these as pathways that lead you back, that help you bring your system of connection online, all the way down to your nervous system. They help you bring that sense of connection with yourself, positive connection with yourself, positive connection outside yourself to help you bring it online. So wonder is what does it most for me in this phase of my life. And that's bringing a sense of awe and appreciation to your life and work. The ability to seek perspectives that are different than your own. So to kind of get out of your own box, get out of your own worldviews and like discover and then learning and growing to be able to mine your experiences for your growth as a human being. That's the fourth, the fifth dimension is wisdom. And wisdom is about, in our framework, having a vision and purpose to guide your life and work. So what we find often our leaders or teams that we work with, people that we work with, where they use their team's vision to guide them or the organization's vision, but they themselves. If you ask what does thriving mean to you for your life and work. They won't have an answer. They'll have to really do some reflection on that because they've just never had that thought before. So vision and purpose is about stepping into the person you want to become, the leader you want to become about self authoring. Then in that dimension is also wholeness, your sense of relationship with like you have an integrated, a coherent life, you structured, a life of coherence and emotional capacity. You're the extent to which you can bring lightness to your responsibilities. And then the last dimension is thriving, amplified. And that's a big ring you can see on the outside of the model, because all the five dimensions I've just mentioned so far are very much a focus on you being, well, you, your thriving, your flourishing, your resilience. But the sixth dimension, thriving, amplified, looks at the extent to which you are an agent. You're an invitation for thriving for other people. So it looks at the extent to which you energize others, you maximize the potential of others, and you cultivate an environment of what we call pro social behaviors, collaboration, care, respect, et cetera, reciprocity and so forth. So that's the whole framework.

It's beautiful, Renee. And you know, as I hear you speak about them, so much of the work that you've been doing, and it just resonates so much. Right. With our own thinking and what's needed. I'll just highlight you mentioned thriving notion of, you know, your own evaluation of well being. Right. I was looking at this research that we were doing at McKinsey, and if you combine that with kind of the Harvard work on complexity theory, you know, really only 20% of leaders and individuals today are at a place where they'll say they're thriving.

Yeah, for sure.

The complexity, the volatility, the uncertainty has, you know, is stretching our own, is stretching us to a limit where our ability to hold that complexity is much lower than the complexities demanding. And so most people are stuck surviving rather than thriving.

I totally agree.

I totally agree.

To me, that's the real point of the work is not just so that we can exist in our own little happy lives by ourselves. We exist in a larger world where we all need to live on this planet together. So how can we meet those complexities in a way that we are resourcing ourselves in them and we're learning and we're growing and we're innovating through those complexities rather than being defined by them?

Enjoying this podcast? If so, you will be excited to know that Happiness Squad is launching a free online community on International Day of Happiness March 22. This is an opportunity for listeners like you to integrate the nine hardwired for happiness practices that exist in every wisdom tradition and are backed by scientific evidence from the fields of psychology and neuroscience into your daily life and rediscover your well being, balance, purpose and connection. Check out the details on our website or drop us an email. Excited to see you in in the community. Yeah. Or trying to dumb them down or pretend that they're not there Totally.

Or trying to deny it.

Yeah, it's in either or. So I love that and I'm going to go to your sixth one first. And by the way, there is so much and I also love that at the heart of your model is thriving and the outer rig is amplified. And I love it for two reasons. I think the first is there is so much of this work that is done trying to create well being at work when the leaders themselves are not well. So if you're not thriving, it's very hard for you to amplify thriving for others because it doesn't matter what words you say, how you're going to show up is going to have a much big ripple effect. And more importantly, you know, all the change work that we did at the firm, role modeling is a big way. Sure, right. So I really love. But I think also the second reason why I really like that is because in the end if you ask the why, why do you, Rene, 25 years, 30 years, 35 years, right. 25 years since you've started WisdomWorks in 35 years show up and keep doing this work? It's because of the bigger service to other. So I think, you know, even in Buddhism you talk about this notion of the desire to be a bodhisattva is not for yourself but for the other. Mm. If you do it just for nirvana and liberation for yourself, then you're just playing another ego game. It's just an illusion. So I love that that I think you hold both that as you think about this, you kind of hold the higher, bigger reason why. And by the way, you need it because it's hard work, you know, it's hard work that you outlined through the other four. So how do we get to thriving ourselves versus to amplify it? And I love the fuel flow, wonder and wisdom and friends, just assess for yourself, right. How energized as you look at the fuel dimensions, you know, do you feel that you're moving enough, eating well, resting? Simple question. Are you sleeping More than seven hours a night. If you're not, you can assess your own ability, your fuel to be able to do what you want to do. How often are you in flow or back to back meetings? Or do you find meaning in what you're doing? Ask yourself that question. Because if you're not, again, that's a dimension that is will be lacking and will be lacking for your teams. Right. I love these, you know, wonder, you know, do you wonder about, you know, we're in a world where there are no knowns. In fact, the last two years there are more unknown unknowns. And if you're not able to cultivate the skill and a mindset of wonder, you'll be left grasping for old knowledge to come find answers to new problems that never existed for that knowledge. And I think that's where wisdom comes in. But these are just new problems. You know, the deeper wisdom over years and centuries is where we can find it if we tap into it, away from our egoic structure. So I love how intuitive the model is and I love how holistic, Renee, the frame that you're putting around it.

Yeah. Thank you so much. I am really appreciating right now. I can literally feel it in the center of my chest and my heart, everything warming up. I can, I'm. I'm appreciating the extent to which you get it just intuitively without having ever taken the assessment, without having seen all the scales, without seeing the science. Like you don't need all that at one level. You just already get it because of the path that you've been on personally.

Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you. So talk to us a little bit about the scale because I think it is, I think the beauty is sometimes, you know, it's a beautiful mirror that people and leaders can actually put very quickly. So talk to me a little bit, Renee, about the be well, lead well, the platform that you ended up creating and bring to life a little bit of what's become possible in the context of a client study or a client story.

Sure, sure. So the Be well Leadwell platform is a set of resources, programs, trainings, content, newsletter, you know, all sorts of resources to support people and remind them you are hardwired with this capacity to thrive. You came already hardwired with it. You also have the hardwired capacity to survive and you get to choose in every moment how you're going to show up in that. So you're. We're hardwired with this capacity. It's also to help them remember and try on different practices to build as we were talking before, not just different behaviors and not just different patterns of behavior and thought, but different deeper questions that help them see the role of leader is a role to steward the environment of thriving for others as well as yourself. Of course, that includes yourself. And when I say leader, by the way, I want to make something super clear. Everyone can be a leader. To me, leadership is about how you use your life energy to get outcomes that matter. So it's like, how are we choosing to use our life energy in this conversation? How are we choosing in the next thing I do right after this, the next meeting? So everyone can be a leader, not everyone is a manager, but everyone can be a leader. And so everyone can ask these types of questions of themselves. So the platform itself, Be well Lead well, has all of those resources as part of it. Be well Lead will pulse is the assessment and it does have fueling it. These 19 biopsychosocial spiritual factors that I've just shared with you earlier, I showed you at the dimension level, but there's all these scales underneath it. We've used the assessment with about close to 4,000 leaders in the last couple of years. And what we know by doing some meta analysis of that work is about 34% of a leader's reported impact is linked to their psychological well being, the relationship they have with themselves, their capacity to thrive. So it's pretty significant when you think of all the things that make you a leader, you know, or all the things that help you show up well, all the things you need to get those outcomes that matter, the relationship capital that you and I were talking about earlier, task management, financial resources, all the things that you need. About 34% of it. This is not causal, by the way, but it is a correlation. About 34% of it is linked to your own sense of yourself and your capacity to thrive.

Yeah, I'm surprised it's only 34, by the way. Like, like I would have, you know, sort of almost 80%. Right?

Yeah.

Um, I, I'm surprised it's only 34, but no, I think it makes all the sense in the world. You know, we see the world as we are and we create the world from the actions from that place we take.

For sure.

For sure.

So, so part of the by leadwell platform, part of what we've been doing is we've been doing the work with clients. You mentioned case studies. We've been doing the work with clients for 25 years with this tool for the last few years, you know, because we've just now created this tool a few years ago. But also a few years ago, I started getting lots of queries from leaders and practitioners, people who are into leadership development and wanted to. To bring. To help leaders become more effective by cultivating their thriving capacity. So they really wanted to do this work. So we created a certification program. So we now have a coach for thriving program that. And we have about 240 practitioners and leaders around the world that are skilled to bring the framework and assessment into their work, which is exciting. It's exciting to have those people around the world.

So, couple of questions as they relate to that, Rene. Number one, is this something that leaders take individually or is this something that, you know, if you. Let's say if you were working with an organization of thousand, all 1000 employees would take it.

We haven't had the all 1000 employees yet. Take it. You mean the assessment or the coaching?

Yeah, the assessment. The assessment.

Oh. We have had whole organizations, smaller organizations take the assessment. In one pharmaceutical giant that around the world we have skilled, a whole group of coaches. They have a network of internal coaches across their 110,000 employees. So these are internal coaches that already have professional coaching skills. They knew how to do team coaching work. They knew how to do individual coaching work. They knew how to do executive coaching work. And we've built the skill of a subset of them to bring this different framework around thriving into that work at those three levels individually.

I see.

And so we're interested. It certainly can be used with all employees, but we're interested in building capacity within an organization so that at some point they look at us and go, you know, why are you still here? I mean, that's actually the whole goal. If you're really doing capacity building, absolutely. You're. You're not there to keep selling work. You're there to build capacity. Because then that organization and those people, wherever they go, their families, their communities, et cetera, become amplifiers of a different way of thinking and being in the world. And that's the real vision and purpose.

Yeah, I love that. And so you typically will deploy that with leaders. So it's more of an individual assessment that you take to see where you are doing, or are you also deploying it where you get a few into what an organization overall, as an organization, are you thriving?

Great. Good question. So with the assessment itself, there's three ways to deploy it. One is with the individual leader. So the individual leader basically says, I want to see how I'm doing myself and I want my developmental journey. Okay.

Beautiful.

Second is a team. So you have a group of people who come together, they are trying to accomplish some of something as a team, and they want to start having different conversations about how to create a thriving team. And this becomes an avenue in to help them have new language for doing that. So that becomes a part their assessment and their group report, which we can produce, becomes part of their developmental journey as a team. And then at an organizational level, we have a mechanism where an organization, employees can take it and we can code it in certain ways that we can start to do demographic level statistics on what's happening in an organization. So those are all three ways that can happen.

I see. That you can actually apply it.

That we can actually apply it.

Beautiful. You know, I'm. I was reflecting on your initial statement that you made, and it just kind of, you know, invoked a particular reflection on me. You said, you know, we are hardwired for thriving.

Yeah.

And we are hardwired for survival. And, you know, it brought back all the work that I do. I fundamentally lead with this notion of we are hardwired for fear, you know, while holding. It reminded me of the story of the full picture. You know, you heard the story of the two wolves, right? And the grandfather of who is going to win. And you know, it's the one you feed, right? It's the one you feed that wins. About the two wolves that live in you, the one that is trying to tear the world apart in service of you, and the other that is the good wolf that is trying to serve the world, you know, through you. I was reflecting on it and it's so true, right? Like, the reality is we have both of those capacities in us, but I think so many today, majority of people in the way we grow up, through small little things that happen developmentally to the way the world kind of apprentices us, you know, keep feeding the bad wolf. And so, you know, we find ourselves in a world where 80% have become hardwired for surviving. They don't know any which way how, and they're afraid of the moves around wonder and flow and wisdom and a higher calling rather than like man, like, you know, how do I get past it? Right? But I think the beauty of this, and you know, that you create is, look, look, there is a possibility. And if you know where you are, you can move.

I do want to acknowledge that for many people in the world, they don't have. They're not surrounded with the external resources that they need that, you know, this external conditions, they need good food, a Safe place to sleep, contact with nature. I want to really acknowledge that. But I also want to say that as a world we are wealthier and better fed and smarter. I don't, I don't know if that's the right word, but we have more knowledge, more access knowledge than we ever have. So I agree with you. We do have the opportunity, more than we think we do to not be defined by the circumstances we're born into or thrown into, but to really expand our capacity to thrive and that be our, the place we respond from when we are dealing with our life challenges. I will say that most often our family systems, our school systems, like you were saying, our work systems, reinforced often a fear based mentality. So making this shift or fear based might might be a too strong a word, a reactive orientation. I'll say that although that is very much driven by fear, but a reactive, it's a lighter word, a reactive orientation. So making that shift to in the moment, to noticing what your state of being is and making that shift from a state of being that is feeling more reactive or dysregulated to one that is more regulated and more balanced and a place of well being, even that, making that shift, that's an act of personal leadership. It's challenging to do in our world, especially if you have the news on all the time, if you've got media on all the time, if you're barraged with all of the things that are happening in our world, if you're constantly on social media, if you so, and if you're constantly on the computer, so if you're constantly giving your energy away to those things, it becomes even more challenging to make those shifts. So I just wanted to reinforce what you're saying.

Oh, absolutely, yeah. And I think that's why we've got to do this word with a lot of compassion for sure, rather than judgment. Right. Of meeting people where they are. Rene, we could talk for so long, but I know we have a hard stop in 10 minutes, so I want to actually go next to, you know, from all of your 30 years of 35 years of work in this space, what might be four or five kind of interventions that, you know, you have found to be the most effective that our listeners who might be stuck in that place of reactive or saying, yeah, this is interesting, but what do I go do now, what do I go do tomorrow? Like what can I try to see if there is, you know, if there is a shift that's possible, what might you, what might you suggest? What might be those things that you.

That's such a good question. Because every person is so different, every team is so different, every organization's so different. So it's very personal. But as a pattern, just as a pattern, I would say just what we were talking about. The ability to notice yourself in the moment without judgment and with compassion is the difference between being driven by your stress and by your dysregulate, your internal dysregulation and having a little bit of space between that, being able to name it and being able to respond a little differently. So that ability to notice where you are in the moment all the way to noticing your own signature of stress. So I know for myself that I have an expansion across my chest when I am feeling in a place of just expansiveness and wellbeing, I, I also get a contraction across my chest and I get a sore throat. If, if I am not being honest about something like if I'm not really telling myself the truth, if I'm trying to make the situation better than it is for say I will get a. So a sore throat and contraction on my chest. So knowing your own signals is really important then. But that, that's a, that's a great act of interoception, really bringing those cues from the body forward.

Yes.

And being able to work with them, being able to then make a state shift so to really self regulate taking a breath, a conscious breath. There are literally thousands of breath practices. Some of them help you lift your energy, some help you down regulate, some help you balance. So knowing given the state of stress, if I am a high anxiety, am I feeling low, what do I need to balance myself so that I can walk into this next sales meeting in a different place or I can walk into this feedback session that I'm about to do with an employee in a place of well being so that I am radiating well being and not performing it, I'm radiating it so it's coming from within. So using a breath practice, taking a walk. For me, sometimes when breath doesn't do it, just taking a quick walk, moving the body moves energy. It's always a wonderful thing. We literally ashish have about a hundred macro practices and micro practices linked to the six pathways in our framework. And we have many, many, many more we've been looking for. What are those? The science based practices that really help you make those kinds of shifts because those are shifts in your personal empowerment in that moment. And then there are macro practices that are bigger questions. Like the question we talked about earlier. What does thriving mean to me? Everyone can do that. Everyone can put a practice in place, start to notice themselves for the next month or the next week, even week, and begin to just notice. What does thriving mean to me? Let that question sit in your consciousness and notice what shows up in your waking life, in your dreaming life, and you will start to get answers and insights, if you are open to it, about what thriving means to you. And then the next big step is to design your life and work around that. So those are a few small practices and then bigger practices.

I love that, you know, awareness. In a lot of the work we do, we have this thing called awareness. Pause and shift, which is kind of the first meta practice. Right. Know your story, know your feelings, notice your breath patterns, know the emotions. Pausing and, and then really choosing to shift. Yeah. Into what's called for. Yeah, right. What's called for in the moment rather than just your patterned conditioned approach through which you always show up. Right, right. Choosing if that's the right way to show. Maybe it is, maybe it's a different one and maybe you want to show up differently. Right.

So, but I, and I want to acknowledge that, that pausing and shifting, as you mentioned, becoming aware, pausing and shifting, which is just what I was, we were both talking about here, takes energy, takes thought. Like you have to have that intention. You know what, I have a sense that I would be more effective and more fulfilled. There'd be more meaning, I'd have more vitality, more, more thriving overall if I actually put some energy and conscious thought.

Yeah.

Into my own journey and I supported others in doing the same. And what I can guarantee, what I can literally guarantee, I don't need the science anymore to do this because the science already says it. What I can guarantee from all of our experiences with clients is you see the results, you see the results personally and you see the results in how people show up for work, how work gets done and the quality of the results produced.

Yeah, I love that. You know, and listen, I love the fact that you said you have hundred plus micro and micro practices. You know, these are just one move. Right. Three or five practices embedded together. So we'll put in our links, you know, where people can find you, where they can do the assessment and also, you know, see how they can avail of all the different practices that you curated, created and implemented over the years with leaders to help them thrive and through that just create a much better, better outcomes out there. Right. For each other, for the customers, for the humanity, for the climate, for all of that. Right. For, for the whole being, you know.

Ashish, the last thing I would say, based on what you just said, there is a practice that all of us can do, especially now, is to look for those other people that are on this journey as well. Because it can feel lonely if you feel like you're the only one trying to step up to flourishing, to step up to thriving in the face of all the challenges we've been dealing with in our world. So places like the Happiness Squad, you know, like places like your community, places like our community where we're saying, okay, we want to build a whole network of people that does this kind of work in the world. And, you know, we have a whole certification for that. And then beyond that, we're growing a community together. These are important places right now. Margaret Wheatley, I mentioned her book Leadership in the New Science from a million years ago. She has some new work and she calls finding those places islands of sanity.

Wow.

And I, I like calling them islands of thriving. You know, islands where when you forget you have this innate capacity, others can remind you, we need that right now. We need each other. So. Yeah. So I'm really appreciating that you asked me to be a part of this conversation because we need each other.

Absolutely. And listen, thank you for really a lifetime of work, Renee. As I said, it's been a 10 year journey for me. I mean, you've got three decades plus. So thank you for really leading way before others even thought about this. I've learned a lot and I really hope to continue and collaborate in ways to amplify your work and our work and see if we can create even something beautiful. So thank you for joining. Thank you. Thank you.

It's been a gift.

That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care of care and see you next week.