How to Stay Grounded When Everything Falls Apart | Fox & Janni

We are living in a time where leaders being asked to make more, bigger decisions with less certainty, more pressure, and fewer stable reference points. The old leadership playbook told us that we have to move faster, control more, push harder, and stay composed. But what if that playbook is part of the problem? In this episode of the Flourishing Edge podcast, I sit down with Amy Elizabeth Fox and Nicholas Jani, Co-authors of Leading in Chaos. Amy is the co-founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership and a pioneer in vertical development, transformation change, and trauma-informed leadership. She's also my teacher and someone who helped me wake up to a different ways of being and the inspiration behind my decision to dedicate my life to amplifying flourishing in the world. Nicholas is a transformational leadership teacher a visiting professor at IMD and the award-winning author of Leader as Healer. Together, they offer a very different invitation. Chaos does not just demand better strategy. It demands a different kind of human in the leader's seat, someone that is more grounded, more embodied, more present, more awake, more humble, and more capable of holding fear, uncertainty, and complexity without reacting from them. This is a conversation about healing, humility, spaciousness, and the deeper human capacities that leaders need so much more now than ever before. Amy and Nicholas, it is such a pleasure to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast. Thank you, my dear friends.

Thrilled to be with you.

Delighted to be here.

You know, this book, You Had Me at Hello, When you describe this crazy polycrisis world that we are living in, you called it a truly destiny-shaping moment right now for humanity and leadership. It's a place where either we will numb ourselves, harden ourselves in order to protect what we perceive as ours, or we are going to actually use this as a moment to really open ourselves and awaken our deepest humanity and a way of interbeing to amplify flourishing in the world. And in your book, I found every chapter was like water to a parched throat in the desert. So full of wisdom, so full of teachings. So I wanna start with that origin story a little bit. Amy and Nicholas, tell me a little bit about why did you want to write this book now and the urgency with which you've been spreading this message?

Well, I think you described it, Ashish, very, very beautifully. It's a time where the unhealed generations of trauma are repeating patterns of violence, of degradation, of dehumanization, because that's what unhealed trauma does. It is a compulsive repetition. And so we either sleepwalk through that repetition and allow the many, many costs of that repetitive cycle to affect the next generations. destroy the planet and put us in a precarious situation as humanity, or we wake up and we start doing the deep healing and restorative work that's being asked of us and that our generation has the tools to engage. And we start to put ourselves as, you use the term interbeing, which is Thich Nhat Hanh's phrase, but you might say just acknowledge ourselves as interdependent and interwoven and part of the unity of life. And in that perspective or that understanding or that wisdom, embodied wisdom, one makes very different choices. And the Alignment to life becomes a natural impulse, not something you have to prescribe. So I think that we would, Nicholas and I, describe the inflection point that we're in as a species very much the way you described it. And Leading in Chaos is our effort to call people to alert and invite them to start this dance of healing and awakening for themselves, for their family, for their ancestors, and for the future of life.

Beautiful.

Yeah. And you know, I hear people say, we've been in crisis before, it's not really that different now. And I really disagree with that. Intellectually, I disagree with that because I think the nature of the crisis is different. We've never been one civilization and we've never had so many crisis points. I feel in my bones that something very, very critical is happening. And I note all the traditions that foresaw this exact time for humanity as a threshold point. So I think we are at a really unique, extraordinary time, as we say at the beginning of the book, of immense challenge and breathtaking possibilities.

I so agree with you, Nicholas, you know, and I've been sensing this for a while myself. It was one of my biggest drivers why I left McKinsey to start Happiness Squad, because I was seeing You know, this world where, yes, we've had wars. Yes, we've had ecological disasters. Yes, we've had economically challenging times. Yes, we've had, you know, these periods of social unrest where whole civilizations got overthrown, but we've never had all of them together.

Exactly.

And when combining that with the kind of AI technology revolution and what it is doing, you know, what it has the possibility to do to the core of what it means to be human versus do human things. For sure, it can do a lot of things humans can do, but till that moment of it cannot replace our way of being. And in a world where we are actually focusing more on the doing and tying worthiness to doing, I think we actually have a risk of dehumanizing humans themselves.

Absolutely.

And one of the things you're implying, Ashish, that I just wanna underscore is part of the risk that we have is that we've put such a primacy on our mind and our intellect and our effort and exertion as the coinage of the realm, as, as our way to legitimize our right to be here as our value, then it is easily replaced by a technological substitute.

Absolutely.

If we were engaging, as we encourage in our book, all of the dimensionality of the human experience. It would become so obvious that there's something distinctive in human consciousness that cannot be replicated. And that actually our way of being and our way of being with each other is a huge asset above and beyond what technology can offer. And I think increasingly organizations are going to have to learn how to cherish the full dimensionality of human intelligence and human possibility.

So beautifully put. So In this book, Leading in Chaos, you say that we are— we definitely are. I experience it, right? It is not just rising complexity, but I think we have kind of— we are in the terrain of chaos in the work of David Snowden. You identify a certain set of competencies and ways of being. That's what's so beautiful in the way the chapters are organizing. And so I would love to kind of go through some of those and bring to life the richness that exists and the importance of that competency.

Wonderful.

And so the first one that we start with is sensemaking, surveying the terrain. Talk to us a little bit about why that is so critical and some ways in which we can start to harness that.

I think the first thing is we need to recode what we mean by sensemaking, because if we treat it as a purely intellectual activity, that is the problem. Sensemaking invites us to perceive many more dimensions. of reality, to know the world in a way that includes our thinking, but is much bigger than our thinking, to intuit the world, to feel the world through our body, to feel the world through our heart, and therefore to arrive often at a very emergent sense-making that is quite different from, I have to figure this out.

Yes.

I have to understand what's happening. No, sensemaking is a much more profound process and a very beautiful process. And that requires individuals and teams to learn to sit, for instance, in unknowing, to learn to sit in emergence, to learn to include all the different emotions that are here without trying to push them away in order that a higher level of intelligence starts to flow. This is what I see happening. When teams can do that. So it's very different. It's much bigger than what we've meant in the past by sensemaking.

I would just add that there's been historically reward for a leader who was expert and had a stance of certainty and strategic acumen. And we're living in a time where the picture is so swirling and interdependent and unpredictable that that kind of rigid authority is not what's needed. It's needed sensemaking that is truly collective to, as Nicholas is saying, slow down and let the picture of what's happening permeate us and inform us in intuitive ways. We listen deeply to one another. It's not individual sensemaking anymore. It has to be distributive sensemaking. And in fact, I think we are going to have to learn to scan the periphery even of our own organization or industry. In order to look for early signals of where the risks are and the opportunities are. And we're going to have to make spacious time to really make ourselves available for revelation, for some aspect of the future to whisper to us, because we're not going to be able to predict it and we're not going to be able to control it and we're not going to be able to plan our way forward.

You know, it brings up in me this beautiful thought around we have to quieten the noise in our heads to listen to the whispers of the universe. We're so noisy in here. We are constantly thinking our way out, only relying on our 5 senses when we have such a much deeper way of sensemaking within. But what you also call, Amy, to sensemaking together. We don't have to rely on just our instruments because we never will at the pace of change. We never are in all the places we need to be.

That's beautifully said. It's poetically said, Ashish. And I just would add The mental activity on which we rely is heavily rooted in assumptions that the future will look like the past.

Yes.

It's predicated on a notion of rinse and repeat. And it's not designed for exponential imagination. It's not designed for catalytic change. It's not designed for adaptive leadership. Exactly as you said so beautifully, we have to make time to let a new world arise in us. And with us together.

Yeah.

This speaks to what you said about a different way of being. I mean, 100%. It's why I love Einstein's question, is your mind your master or your servant? Because in 90% of the leaders I work with, it's naturally become the master, partly because we were taught that. And then it also becomes the way of not feeling, using our mind in order not to feel. That has to be dismantled, our mind becomes the extraordinary instrument that it is, but not the primary faculty, because I don't feel anything with my mind. Yes, we seem to have forgotten that. I don't have any experience of the world with my mind. I walk around thinking about them. I can't experience the world other than through my body, my heart, my intuition, and my subtle senses.

So in a, in a world where so many leaders are Operating from their mind in disembodied states of being. What are some practices to be able to gain back that way of sensemaking through our whole selves? What are some practices you recommend?

I'll name a couple and then Nicholas can build on my list. I mean, one that we, you know, is fairly universally recognized now as being very important is to have some practice of contemplation, of meditation. some time of stillness and digestion of your life experience. So just to slow down and unplug, you know, sort of go on a diet from technology for a period of time every day, once a week, once in a while to really create quietude inside is one practice. The other practice is journaling and just helping yourself be self-observing so that you can learn what's moving in you, what's important to you, what's touching you, and what fresh ideas you're having and start to harvest the, your own intuition. I think a third one that is really desperately needed is to practice the skill of deep listening. So many times when we're listening to each other, we're listening to respond, to refute, to dissent, and we're not letting what people are saying really permeate us. And when we can feel each other and learn from each other's life experience and wisdom, Then we have the possibility for synergy. So that would be at least 3 practices I would think of. Nicholas, what would you add?

Yeah, well, I would add, of course, absolutely all of those. And I would add what for me is really foundational, which is embodiment. And when I run programs, once we've kind of agreed the cognitive territory, that's a very big first step to help leaders really connect with the body, which is very different from doing things to the body.

Yes.

It's a process of softening, of really feeling the body from the inside, of breathing more properly, of getting more grounded. And I do a whole process with that at the end of which leaders are often sitting there with the kind of, wow, I'd completely forgotten what it means. Because that, by the way, automatically changes our brainwave frequency. So we move into alpha And people are like, the mind quietens down. And then I teach practices about what it means to walk through the day very deliberately, intentionally practicing being more in the body because we started leaving the body very early on.

Yes.

I mean, I've worked with the body for over, well, nearly 50 years. Coming home to the body in the end means coming right down back to the pelvis. That's our home base. And very early on, we started lifting And when you see and read energy, it's very, very clear. And often, for instance, when someone does some emotional integration work, one of the first things they say is, I feel my legs, which is fascinating. So it's like there's a deep inner softening in the body because when frozen energy is allowed to flow, people feel their body more. So I add everything Amy said and I add the critical element of embodiment.

What you said, Nicholas, there's so many, you know, as you take leaders through some of the practices that allow them to connect to their body, would you share a couple of those that our listeners could try?

Well, you know, I mean, I'm thinking about how many thousands of senior leaders, including top government people, I have lying on the floor and guiding them through a whole process. But, you know, the simplest thing really, and sometimes the most powerful, is to actually Pay attention to your breathing. That's step one. And when I say pay attention, it's not the same as thinking. We pay attention to all the sensations of the breath. That already slows us down. Then, as a very simple but also potent next step, relax the out-breath, because the out-breath is what we keep contracted, and that keeps us lifted. So at the moment we're even in a big way, but then a subtle way, each out-breath, soften the out-breath. You feel your chair more, you start to feel your legs more. And that's something that can be done throughout the day when you're in a meeting, when you're walking, whatever you're doing, when you're driving. So I really, you know, this is part of conscious intentional practice. It's a foundation of presence.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Amy, one practice I always tell leaders, because in the contract it said, I myself hold my breath. And I just invite people to think about how deep is your breath or how short it is. And then something I learned from you in the program is I say, as you said, Nicholas, breathe. But the second is literally plant your feet and feel your feet. Because in that state of, as you said, you're so out here. They're not even feeling. We're out of touch with the ground. No stability. And we are trying to bring stability to others.

Exactly.

And literally and metaphorically.

Yes. I love how it's literally and metaphorically, we have no ground.

And that's particularly poignant and problematic in a time of chaos. The structures and systems and predictability that we count on for security and that we rest in are currently falling apart and fragile. Take up ground to get rooted. To have a much different relationship with a sense of place and belong to that place at a whole new level in order to be able to rely on our own inner ground.

Well, that's where I wanna go next, right? So we can find our ground, we can be stable, and embodiment and connecting with our body is a powerful move to do that. But we need to then learn to open our heart and truly leverage that relational intelligence in the system. So I wanna go there next, Jamie. I wanna invite you to talk a little bit about The practice of opening the heart and why it is so critical in this time, especially right now.

So most of our organizational cultures have been in, as we've already been alluding to, are built on a technical or industrial model of the workplace. So they're disembodied. We're working people past their mental and physical limits, and they put a primacy on self-reliance or autonomy, self-directed work. But emotionally, we need relation. We need to belong. We need community. And so what happens is people are self-protective because there's been a very strong bifurcation historically between personal and professional domains. And it was thought that you should, in order to be professional, check your emotion and your relational needs at the door. But neurologically, we know now it's physiologically impossible to do that.

Yes.

So people wind up hacking their emotions and Breaking self-contact in order to be able to oblige that requirement. Almost all the leaders that Nicholas and I work with describe feeling like they live behind a wall, mask, and that their emotions are, are, are really held in a private context. And when we allow people the opportunity and we offer the invitation to, in a safe and calibrated way, drop that shield and start to look at the facets of their heart they turned away from, often very young, and that have been walking in a state of numbness. and disconnection for decades. It's a profound process. I had a leader say to me recently at the end of a program, thank you for helping me to cry the tears I walked with for 63 years. And I thought to myself, I thought to myself, we're trying to make wise decisions functioning on a lake of frozen tears of uncried tears. So it's not actually true that you can set the emotions aside. They're the, you know, Bessel van der Kolk says the body keeps the score. They're in our muscles. They're in our neurology. They're in our perceptual fields. They influence our relational habits. And so the important work, exactly as you said, Ashish, of opening the heart and making room to host emotions, both historic and current. And why is it critical now? It's critical now because as the stress and anxiety and fear levels go up, current events are going to trigger unfelt feelings. It's going to be far disproportionate to the business circumstance in which they're being triggered. And we'll see one of 2 survival strategies kick in very quickly. Hyperarousal, where people are aggressive and rigid in their thinking and assertive and domineering, or hypoarousal, where people are pulling out, withdrawing, going inward, and not contributing their ideas and their thinking and their energy to the conversation. And both of those for team dynamics, for problem solving, for innovation are deadly. Not to mention the strain on team dynamics when people move into a reactive mode. They get angry, they get more blaming, they get more judgmental, they get more caustic and cynical, and we shut down the hall of possibilities that we wanna tap into.

Yeah.

So it's not emotional intelligence for the sake of feeling touchy-feely. It's emotional intelligence for the skill of self-regulation. And being able to stay in a productive mode, even under stress.

Nicholas, what would you add to that?

I would add that there's a profoundly simple and yet initially very challenging principle here, which is that all emotions need to be welcomed and felt, and none are positive and none are negative. Take fear, for instance, or anxiety, which almost everyone has some degree of. And then people say, oh, fear blocks me. But it's not true because once someone feels safe enough to actually allow anxiety to move through the body and I have no resistance to it, very quickly I start to feel very open and very present. And then I understand, no, fear doesn't block me. The problem is I block fear. Crying, if I'm blocking my tears, I'm freezing my heart. So Yes. There's something really fundamental here. It's a rewriting of how we think about emotion and having a safe enough space that everything is included. And, you know, I'm thinking about, I have an invitation to work with some very senior religious figures in the autumn, and I was speaking with the head of their team and he said to me, you know, what they aspire to is to have a non-anxious presence. To which I said, well, the only way that's going to happen is if they're willing to feel their anxiety, which will be a huge breakthrough for them because like most leaders, they're doing everything possible to push those feelings away. So everything needs to be included is the radical principle at the core of this. And then the heart naturally opens. I don't have to try and open my heart because if I'm feeling more and someone else is feeling more, then, you know, we have the absurdity of I need to go and learn empathic skills. I mean, it's so insane that it's hardwired to care for each other. When I feel more open emotionally, I naturally care for my neighbor. I don't have to go to a class to learn how to be empathic. That's a sign of how disconnected.

And, you know, I'm reminded of the fact that we get programmed this way. We are to The first sign, the first act of a newborn is to breathe, and the next is to scan for somebody to bond with. Every young child reaches out, connects, and they're looking for that bond. We are compassionate by nature. We don't have to learn compassion. But as we grow up, we are taught that emotions are not good. Don't— boys are taught to be stoic. Be stoic. Boys don't cry. Girls are said, don't be melodramatic. So like in both ways, we are actually creating where we get to as grownups, where showing emotions or even acknowledging your own emotions is considered a weakness. And I think what you're inviting us to is there is so much richness in emotions. And if we can truly learn to lower our armors and again, open up our heart, there are so many possibilities that we can start to, but most importantly, opening our heart is the pathway to our own healing and the healing of so many others around us.

It's absolutely true. And I just wanted to capture something you're invoking, Ashish, which is when a young child needs that kind of, is looking around and wants that kind of relationship and intimacy and holding and nourishing. Too many children do not have a parent Who's online to respond. And longing to be held, or that longing for safety, or that longing to be seen can walk with them for decades. And it's something that we can actually offer each other. And as you're both saying, people don't have to be taught how to hold one another's heartbreak. They don't have to be taught how to witness one another's hardships. They don't have to be taught how to invest in and care in and care for somebody who's vulnerable or shaky or sharing something deeply authentic. That's a natural impulse within a group. But we do need to create conscious, safe settings where people can start to unfold themselves and go back for some of that very tender holding that they didn't get as young people to fill in the holes and liberate the energy that, as Nicholas suggests, is underneath the tears or underneath the shake or underneath the fear. And what's very beautiful, at least in both of our experiences, is we're talking about something that when it's done with intention and it's done in a sacred way, doesn't take a lot of time. Potency of what's happening. And you know, it's like, it's electric in the room because you know that you're repairing something that when filled in is going to enable somebody's full potential in their life.

Well, I want to also emphasize that this is how we come to think better. Because we prioritize critical thinking. Critical thinking is at its highest level when our system is in flow, when energy is moving through us. So we're not doing this only for healing, which is a very important— we're doing it so that our levels of creative intelligence can flow. When I work with, like at the IMD, and I have leaders from all around the world and I have them working in small groups, And they do exercises where they start to become much more emotional together, and we come back all together, and it's very powerful sharing. And then I say, so if you were an intact team, having gone through this emotional opening together, would you be working much better? Of course, it goes without saying. So this needs to be remembered as well. We're doing this in order to perform. In the truest sense of the word, in the way that's needed.

And to do this, you need emotional literacy. Again, something that so few— 3, 4, or 5 emotions that we can mention. But as we know in the field, there are so many emotions. And even being able to name the different emotions that in a moment I might be feeling allows us to actually recognize that There are different moves that we might need to make, take the intelligence, but actually be able to work through them.

Yes. And also to remember, which is sometimes a huge light bulb for leaders, we can feel other people. So sometimes I'll invite a leader in one-to-one coaching if they're having some problem with someone in their team. Let's slow down and let's feel the interior world of that person. This is not psychic woo-woo. This is our natural capacity once we are more open. So we also get a whole different level of information.

Yeah. Beautiful.

I just wanna add one thing that, to what you said, Ashish, we need an emotional vocabulary and we need a relational vocabulary. I often ask leaders, if you wanted emotional support, not problem solving, emotional support, what could you ask somebody to do that would nourish your heart? And almost every executive group I've worked with for 20 years can only come up with 2. Somebody could hug me or they could listen to me. And then I say, we're gonna come up with 100. So you're gonna have to get a whole lot more creative. We are starved for a vocabulary of how people could dance with us in a way that would be emotionally nourishing. And once you have a vocabulary, then you have a capacity to make relational requests.

Mm-hmm.

start to interrupt this habit of walking in too much isolation and loneliness.

Amy, what are some other ways beyond hugging and listening? As it is so true. This conversation is brought to you by Happiness Squad, where we help leaders build new mindsets, new habits, and transform their ways of working to truly flourish. If you're ready to unleash the untapped human potential in your organization and operate at your best, come visit us at happinesssquad.com and start your journey today.

They're infinite. Cook a meal for me. Walk in nature with me. Sit in silence with me. Pray with me. Read me a book excerpt. Read me a poem. Share a story from our mutual memories. Cradle me. Cry with me. Grieve with me. Dance with me. Sing with me, go in, go to some elevated place that means something to you and teach me the story of that place. There's really just an enormous diversity of things that fill our souls and bond us together. And we've been, we've just been devoid of a really rich vocabulary for ways we could connect, ways we could cherish each other, ways how much we mean to each other and ways that we could support each other.

Beautiful.

So those are just some examples.

Yeah. I'd love to ask— beautiful. I'd love to make one more point, Ashish, about the word vocabulary, because one of the things I notice all the time is how lazy and imprecise we are with words, particularly in the corporate environment. And when, when we're working with emotion, being precise with language is very powerful. For instance, I was working with someone actually in front of a very large group recently, and she was saying, I'm feeling a lot of grief at the moment. And tuning into her and feeling her, I said, I think what you're feeling is sorrow. And it was like, oh yeah, thank you. So the unity, the union of word and energy is a competency that we have lost.

Yeah.

And that's something we really need to practice together.

I would say, Nicholas, even forget about lost. I don't think people, we even learn it in the first place.

No, we were never taught it.

We were never taught it.

No. And I have a friend actually in London who has a whole company about going into schools and teaching children the vocabulary for their emotions. It's amazing work. And then they go home and they teach their parents. It's very powerful work.

So I want to move from the space of heart to something else. And I'm so glad that you wrote a whole section on this competency is the competency around creating spaciousness. 60% of time of leaders are in meetings, and 60%, 70% of most people will say those meetings are ineffective and continue this madness, leaving no time for actually space to think, space to kind of intuit, space to connect, space to feel. And so I wanna go into that space a little bit. And talk a little bit about why this is so critical if we, in the world we are living in today, if you don't create space, you won't be able to lead.

That's right. And I think there's a, oh, I know there's a very old and important principle here, which is that until we slow down, we cannot go really fast without being some kind of headless chicken. So it's from an inner space, from an inner stillness that we can actually start to move with far more precise speed and far less effort as well. You know, it's like sports people when they're in the zone, the first thing they say is, I have all the time in the world. And we're hearing all the time, I'm so busy, I don't have time for everything. It's got nothing to do with the watch. It's got everything to do with, do I have space inside? Am I grounded? Then miraculously, everything seems to get done.

Yeah.

So it's multiple levels of importance.

Amy, what would you add to the topic of spaciousness?

We're moving with information saturation and that is unnatural. It's not a rhythm of wholeness and it's not connection and it's not a rhythm of emotion and it's not a rhythm of soul. So the call for spaciousness is a reordering of our relationship to space and time and the importance of really slowing down, as Nicholas said. My friend Bayo Akomolafe has my favorite phrase about this. He says, the times are urgent. We must slow down. And that's, that's like a call to wisdom. It's a call to embodied intelligence. It's a call to feel the interconnectedness of things, dispersing our energy through our speed, and then wondering why we're not being impactful and potent. So the spaciousness is a requirement if we want to intelligently dance and fluidly dance with an incredibly swirling context. And I would add a second thing is, which is when we think if we have time for some of these practices and that somebody would say, I don't have time for a few minutes of meditation, it's because we've also been taught to commoditize our attention only in terms of short-term value. And these are a time when I think each of us is being asked To engage in an act of cultural creativity, to be co-emergent with the future arriving, as we already said. And in order to do that, I have to make time to really bring all of myself to the moment and not be willing to participate in this commoditization. The cost of not having time may be short-term ROI, but it's long-term creativity, innovation, audacity, boldness. Precision, as Nicholas said, if you wanna make a move that's an acupuncture needle, really feel what you're placing that needle into in a kinesthetic and dimensional way. But I have to be present and available in order to feel that. Important reasons for spaciousness.

And if I may add, you know, we have this expression, the idea came to me, but we can use it. But if we really take the implication of that, That is how new ideas come.

Yes.

And, you know, all creative people in the arts, but not only, also scientists know. Einstein used to say that his best ideas came when he was in a particular kind of receptive, relaxed state. And I love the image in the traditions of we have a book and we open a page and we have the black letters and there is a white page and we're so fixated on the black letters, but the white page is always there. This goes into also the higher levels of awakening because we're talking about a different dimension of our consciousness, which is always there. It cannot not be there. It's only we who contract our attention and don't notice. And the white page is there all the time. It's there. We're sitting in any meeting. It's there in the middle of the noisiest city street. And we can begin to develop an intentional practice of noticing. in the noisiest environment. So when people say, I can't meditate unless there's silence, they haven't understood the deeper silence, which is the white page. Yeah.

Beautiful.

And Nicholas and Amy, for many who go, they are, they're like, I don't know what Nicholas is talking about. White space, black letters, and I believe in science. Well, you can go to science and look at the science and relativity. 99% of all atoms is empty space. 99% of the universe is empty space. You don't You don't have to listen to Nicholas, Amy, and Ashish. Go listen to Einstein. Go look at the fundamental state of nature. Wisdom tradition has talked about emptiness, solidity and emptiness being such small parts that is solid, but we get lost. We think this body is human, but so much of the body, right, is again, not just empty space, but most of the living cells in our body are not human cells. So about who we are and how Space is all around us. Space is that white. Our attention is only going to the solidity.

And when you really can attune to the space all around you, you discover it isn't empty. It's vibrating with intelligence and life force and intricate order. And as you said, it's a higher level of stillness that enables you to start to be, have an antenna for that additional source And it's very simple actually to guide a meditation, you know, in a leadership program.

And within 10 or 15 minutes, many people will have a real sense of the white page. And then as the bodywork happens, as the emotional work happens, the white page gets more and more open.

Yeah.

I have people sitting on day 2 of a program and someone will say, yesterday I would've hated this silence. Today I love it because the whole system has relaxed and opened.

I want to go to the next piece, which is also something that so touched my heart, which was around cultivating humility. And there's a beautiful quote by Thomas, right? People understand humility as playing small and not putting yourself on a pedestal. And I loved that quote. Amy Yules may say it better, but it's about humility is about occupying the right space. What is being called right now. Don't make yourself too big or too small.

It's exactly as you said. People who have shaky self-esteem run the risk of doing one of two things. And this is beautifully expressed by my friend Terry Real in his work on relationships. They go one up to make themselves feel better, to soothe their shakiness. And they appear as arrogant, overconfident, narcissistic, but they're not actually overconfident. They're shaky. And another possibility is you kind of implode and, and you're flooded with shame and low self-esteem and a sense of unworthiness. Neither of those are wholesome. So what, what real humility is, is standing in the unique blessing that you are for life and occupying the wingspan in which your gifts are meant to express themselves. And for some of us, that's a very micro context, like your family or your school or your congregation or your mosque. And for some of those, us, that's a very large global contribution. And every person's contribution has equal value. That's the thing we miss because we're so addicted to scale and size and growth. But actually, when you feel life, you realize each person occupying their instrument of the orchestra is how the symphony happens. We need everybody's music. And so our job as individuals are to really go through a process of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance so that we can comfortably sit in our own chair and then discern and sort where it is that we wanna sing.

Yeah. Beautiful. And may I add something?

Please.

It's, it's so beautiful what Amy's saying. And then there's another aspect of humility, which would be captured in the notion of bowing. And I bow to the fact that there's so much I don't know. Show me. And we're on the edge of prayer here as well, and devotion, devotion to life. Show me, show me, show me the way forward. Show me what I'm being called to do. Not that I know. It's another level of humility as well.

And, you know, in today's world, I'm reminded of, I think in a world where the old paradigms of the leader as the know-it-all visionary who's going to motivate and guide people to the promised land, completely broken down, leaders to know you don't know and nobody else does either. And oh, by the way, everybody knows you don't know.

And that's okay.

And that's okay. So the humility to say, I don't know, but collectively we can get to know or find what we need to do to move there. I think humility is so needed right now because so many people are kind of playing, acting out what they think it means to be a leader.

When a team can sit together in, we don't know, and let's not rush to fix the way forward. Maybe we're anxious. Okay, let's include it. It's okay that we're anxious and we don't know. Let's stay with that. Let's stay with that. Let's listen to all the signals, listen to the inner signals, and trust that A way forward will be emerging maybe sooner than we think, and almost certainly different to what we—

I was going similar but different, so I'll just maybe add, in a time where everything is so unpredictable and chaotic, we can't make a plan, execute the plan, and arrive at reliable outcomes. We're going to have to experiment and iterate and learn as we go. But for a team to be equipped to try and fail and shift their strategy and, and, and be nimbly moving with an iterative experimentation. They have to be able to be secure enough in themselves and have enough humility not to have their ego and identity tied to the need to control outcomes. And that is a softening of identity that is part of this moment. Exactly as you said, Ashish, leaders that are acting from their own puffed-up confidence will fail. And they won't fail in a developmental way. They'll fail in a colossal, costly way.

Yeah. And if we can be humble enough to recognize that I don't know and we don't know, it brings us beautifully to— then we automatically move to intuition and willing to listen to the field intelligence, your next section of the book. Because only from that place do we look for answers out there. Otherwise, we look for answers in here. And as you so beautifully put in your book, the answers are not in here, so you're not going to find them. And if you find the answers, they most probably are not the right ones anyway.

There's also an unspoken truth, which is when you're taking action that is aligned with life and guided by having listened to the field, the efficiency with which all the needed resources will show up, all the necessary doors will open, the distance between Ideation and manifestation gets truncated into a nanosecond. So even though it takes more time to wait and listen, it takes far less time to actually accomplish the thing itself because the resources of life line up to support you. And that's extraordinary, miraculous things about working with the field.

What are some ways in which we can start to truly harness the intelligence of the field?

Nicholas talked about devotion, and I think a part of it is the stance of your offering. So rather than seeing yourself as the doer who's exerting and driving and making something happen, when you start to reconceive of yourself as someone who's being moved, who's being breathed, who's being action on behalf of life, that shift or stance in re-understanding How you're playing, I think, invites a level of guidance into your life that's very meaningful. The second thing I would say is that when you open your perceptual field and start paying attention to the little voice in your head that says something kind of unusual, or the conversation you're in that seems to have it be pregnant with a new depth, give that energy. Take the time to pursue that because that is whispers of, of Fertile ground, I would say.

We're coming right in a way full circle back to the original point about sensemaking, which is lovely. And, you know, I often invite leaders and myself to practice presence as much as possible during the day. That means wherever you are, actually notice people. Every person is a rich story. You know, there are beautiful cafes here where I am, and we sit and life is happening, and it's amazing just to watch and notice. So much. Who needs a book? The book of life is happening moment by moment. But most of the time we're so in our little bubble of identity that we simply don't really notice. So how can we make sense of everything for not actually noticing what's happening around?

You know, Nicholas, your chapter on wellness and transformation, where we're spending close to $6 trillion on wellness, very much grounded in this notion of I. And I think what you invite is this notion of breaking away from I identity to kind of what's really needed around us. I thought it was very, very beautifully put around wellness versus a truly trans— you know, a transformational flourishing.

Right, right. And there's a— I've been teaching a lot in the last few months around a phrase that I think came from California. In the '60s, I think, which said, you have to be a somebody before you can be a nobody. Now, what I understand by that is that we have to become an integrated somebody. We have to do the trauma work. We have to do our awakening so that we become more and more coherent. And then there's a natural dissolve that happens and we become inherently residing in a much, much bigger field. That's how I understand that actually simple but profound statement. But it's not that we dismiss the somebody. The somebody needs to be integrated.

I also wanna really honor Ashish, what you are devoting your life to now with the Happiness Squad and principles and precepts and practices of genuine human flourishing. It's an urgently needed, as you said, water to a parched soul as well. And I, I'm really just so grateful that you're carrying the flame that you are.

Well, my friend, you are the one who lit that flame. And so I will, my life will be eternally grateful to you. I remember my 40 years of living in, in a state of doing and tying my worth to all of the hard work, achievements, et cetera. And what you awoke in me at that week, magical week in Portugal, you know, that flame is just That's it. I think that's what, that's what I feel I was put on earth to do. So now I'm grateful to you.

Beautiful.

And you write so eloquently about it. I read your post today on LinkedIn. I mean, that's, everyone should read what you're—

thank you.

I wanted to add just one element that we haven't touched on yet, which I think is a vital resource for people who wanna give their lives to service, who wanna step in and become involved in the renaissance that we're pointing to. Which is places of serenity and beauty. And wherever you find your source of uplift and inspiration in beauty, whether it's the built environment, the natural environment, the artistic environment, poetic self-expression, intimate caring and service. The notion that we're going to have to refuel ourselves, engage with what Francis Weller is now calling the long dark, is one theme we hadn't touched on yet that I don't want to end without.

Yeah. Talk to us a little bit more on that and the fact that it is a long walk to freedom and it requires a social restoration process for all of us to be willing agents rather than shift away from feeling like victims. It is so needed today. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, that chapter and what you're just calling, Amy, right now.

Well, I think there are 2 entwined strands of the walk to freedom, as you quote it. One is the critical work of social justice and equity and racial healing and collective trauma healing and ancestral healing. That is one of the pillars of our book. I think both Nicholas and I have devoted our lives and will continue to devote our lives to refining the craft and showing up and raising our hands to be part of the struggle for a liberatory impulse in the social fabric of humanity. And I think The other facet of the long walk of healing is a walk of spiritual development and character maturation and consciousness evolution, which requires, you know, let's just use the Buddhist version. It requires the teacher, it requires sources of wisdom and teachings, and it requires a community or a sangha. And I think as people devote themselves to the process of their inner life, if they gather those 3 resources or essential factors around them, they will find they can see more, can feel more, can offer more, bestow more, and there's more grace and blessing in their life. So that's what I would say.

Thank you. Nicholas, what would you add to that?

Actually, I don't have anything to add to that. I really don't. Very beautiful statements from Amy.

Well, my friends, I am so grateful for this conversation and to all our listeners. You know, there are certain books that you can open up on any page, and in a moment, if you're feeling out of sorts, let's just put it that way, you're feeling triggered, you're feeling whatever you're feeling, this is one of those books that you can pick up and let the book and the moment and the universe guide you to what page needs to be opened. Because I promise you, it doesn't matter the page that opens, the words and the space on which the words are written, but more importantly, The hearts and love from both of you that comes through it, I promise you, will give you a path when you feel lost, give you that love when you feel alone, and will give you the wisdom if your way of thinking and your brain is struggling. That's the thrill of this book. Thank you for bringing it into the world. Thank you for joining us and for doing this so important work right now that humanity needs. I bow to both of you.

And to you, Ashish, and to everyone. This is the time. This is the time for us all to heal and awaken. So thank you.

So touching.

Thank you. Bye, my friends. Thank you for joining me on The Flourishing Edge. If today's conversation inspired you, share it with someone who's ready to flourish too. Subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected for more tools to achieve breakthrough performance through flourishing. Until next time, keep learning, practicing, and growing into your fullest potential.