The Power of a Relaxed Mind: Why Mindfulness is the Ultimate Leadership Advantage - Sophie Maclaren

Welcome to The Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host, and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, changemakers, and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science-based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work, and lead with more joy, health, love, and meaning. The most powerful leader in the room isn't always the smartest one. Often it's the one that is most present and relaxed. My guest today, Sophie McLaren, has spent her entire life helping leaders train the mind that makes that possible. Sophie is a mindfulness trainer, leadership consultant, and teacher at Oxford University. Ashish Kothari: What makes her journey unique is that mindfulness isn't something she discovered later in life, but something she literally was born into. Sophie's been practicing and teaching mindfulness since she was 9 years old. In this conversation, we explore why mindfulness is way more than meditation, why overstimulated minds weaken our ability to think long term. Leave us stressed, and we discuss how learning to work with our minds can truly unlock clarity, creativity, and human flourishing. Let's dive in. Sophie, I am so excited, my friend, to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast.

Hmm, it's such a delight to be here. Thank you for having me, and it's lovely to see you.

You know, it was so amazing. We met together almost now a couple of years ago, I think, Sophie, at the Next Practice Institute, right, at Mobius, where you and Andrew— I participated in a week-long program around mindfulness and how that can have such a big impact on how we lead. And I've loved— I don't know, frankly, of too many people who are in the business world or in the coaching world who are as steeped from a very young age into mindfulness, not as, you know, you were born almost into that, right? And we'll talk a little bit about your origin story into that. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, to co-create with you, and to bring a lot of the beautiful work you're doing and the wisdom to our listeners.

Oh, thank you, Ashish. I'm really delighted. And, you know, it was so wonderful to have you on the track that Andrew and I were leading at the Next Practice Institute because you have a lot of wisdom in this field too, and you're actually working on very similar things. So it was wonderful to have you there, and I'm really delighted to explore this together now.

Yeah. Well, my friend, listen, you do a lot of work, right? You're a fellow at Oxford. And you were doing a lot of work around human flourishing. And it's been a red thread throughout your career, right? Like all the way through. I only came to this 10 years ago, but this has been your life for a long, long time. So I wanna start by asking you how you define human flourishing.

Hmm. So I, Human flourishing is a term I came up with, I don't know, 15 years ago or something, because I couldn't quite find the right words for a really holistic experience of a human being at their best. And I tried out a lot of different terms with my clients and colleagues, and this was the one that everyone liked. So I stuck with it. And I think it's a good one because You know, for me, what human flourishing is in working with people is it's you at your best in the components of who you are that lead to a life well lived. So, you know, I think there's several components there. First of all, it means that you're flourishing physically. You know, you're healthy, you feel well in your body, you're getting enough sleep, your nervous system is regulated, that sort of thing. There's an emotional aspect. You feel well. Not that we need to be happy all the time. There's a natural movement of emotions, but in general, in your life, you feel well. In your life. And there's a mental component. You and I and most of the clients and colleagues we work with, we are basically paid to think and speak, right? We're working with our minds all day. So it means that your mental capacities, your cognitive abilities are flourishing, available to you. And there's also a relational aspect. So you're in harmony with yourself. You have a good relationship with yourself. You know who you are. Um, and also you have a good relationship with the people around you and the wider world. And all of this together is giving you a genuine, really authentic purpose and meaning in the direction of your life.

Yeah, I love it. And it's so, you know, is in line, right, Sophie? Like, we talk about well-being, right, in my book, one of the practices. And we talk about mind, body, and spirit. And so you've spoken to all three of those elements, right? How do we feel physically? How are we doing mentally? And how are we doing spiritually, connected to purpose and connected to kind of something bigger than us? Recognizing that interconnection that we are more than just this physical body and this mind, right? There is life energy that glows through us. You know, when I look at this piece and I look at it, I see today in our world where given all of that we read about, there is so much that people do on the physical side, but I find mind and spirit people are so undernourished in. And I'm curious your take on that.

I completely agree. I mean, the sort of people, we both work mostly with senior leaders in business, but also more broadly in organizations. And usually what you find is people, especially in senior roles, they're quite high endurance. And they usually, you know, go to the gym. They have some sort of physical exercise practice that keeps them going and keeps them high endurance, which means they can work when they're tired, they can power through. But usually more often than not, we've neglected the spirit, the heart, the mind. And when I work with leaders, I always start by saying, you know, in the field that we work in, what is your greatest resource? And I say this to my MBA students at Oxford too, and everyone eventually realizes, oh, it's my mind. That's the resource I'm drawing on. And then I say, okay, if that's your greatest resource, what is it worth? And with my MBA students, I have them, they have to come up with a number, work out how do they value their own mind. And we say, okay, if you took that amount of money, they usually have worked out it's the most valuable asset that they have. If you took that amount of money and you invested it in something, in a new business, in a property, how much time would you spend researching that investment? Getting to know it. How does this function? How do I How does it flourish? How do I prevent things going wrong? And that's usually a kind of moment where people go, oh, I don't understand my own mind at all. And what do I do to take care of my mind? This is actually my greatest resource. And as you've just touched on, these are all interconnected. Um, to take care of the mind, we need to take care of the heart and the body. To take care of the body, we need to take care of the mind and the heart. All of it is driven by some motivation in our life that there's something greater than us, something that makes it all worthwhile, a kind of purpose, which is usually altruistic.

Yeah. I love that framing. I have never heard it expressed that way, Sophie, and it's deeply, it's so profound. It's today, most of the work we do, most of the work we do in work, you know, in life today is cognitive and it's getting more and more. It's not physical anymore. And yet most people either don't understand what they can do to make sure they are thinking the most clearly, they're recovering clearly, right? They can truly train their brain. I mean, in fact, in the last 25 years, we've actually, if I think about our mental health, if I think about training our mind, we've actually trained our mind to be constantly absent. We've become dopamine addicts, right? If we think about, have we over the last 25 years invested in actually increasing our mental capacity, training our mind, even actually understanding and working in ways that allow that capacity to be at the best? I would say no. In fact, we've actually taken away that, and we are about to do that even more at steroids with AI, where we even give our core problem-solving ability out by just asking and depending on AI to kind of give us the answer. Physically, we've actually gained a lot, right? You know, people are exercising a lot more. People are eating. There's a lot of knowledge about eating, and people are doing that. But what crazy times that we continue to underutilize the biggest asset we actually have that is the foundation for everything we create out there.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, not only are we underutilizing it, as you say, right? There's so many capacities that are available to us that we're not even tapping into. But also we are impairing those exactly the capacities that we need to navigate the world today. Our ability to pay attention and focus and be present is the foundation for everything we are doing. It's the foundation for our work, for good decision-making, problem solving. It's the foundation for good relationships, communication. But also, the more that we are fragmented and the more that our nervous systems are overstimulated and we are in sympathetic nervous system most of the time, the less able we are to use our capacities, for example, to see the big picture, to think long-term. I've had several CEOs, I've worked with their teams, and I notice more and more CEOs are saying, my team can't think long term. They're really good at short term, but I'm trying to help them do, you know, what about 5 years from now? What, you know, especially with AI, um, you know, disrupting really all businesses, sort of, okay, we can't just stay with what's working now. We have to be thinking longer term. And they said, 'Can't do it. Why can't they do it?' And I said, 'Well, because those capacities are being taken offline, diminished, disempowered by having stressed nervous systems and overstimulated minds and loss of attention and focus, fragmented attention.' You can't think long-term. Complexity. You can't hold— that mind can't hold complexity. We have the capacity, but we've disempowered it. Yeah.

And so it's so critical. I was seeing the same thing when I was at McKinsey. 70% to 80% of time, leaders are in a sympathetic response. And talk about habits and how we have trained it. Even that, we have trained ourselves to be in sympathetic right when we wake up. How many people wake up with their phone and, right, there's a jarring alarm and then I look at all the news coming in and all the emails and right away you've basically activated. In fact, it's like being woken up. I attune it to being woken up with a cold bucket of water, right? Yes.

Yes. Like an alertness.

On your face. Except you're doing it to your brain and that's the effect. And then people wonder why. And we know from all the research, from that reactive structure, no creativity, no innovation, no long-term thinking, no, you know, that's, it's just not accessible to us. It's just not accessible. So look, for you, and I think the best way that we can do this, this is your life's work. Is one of the ways we can actually regain cognitive capacities is by really leaning into mindfulness as a practice. Not as a tool, not as a once and a done, but truly cultivating mindfulness as a practice. So I want to unravel and unpack some of the things there, Sophie, from your experience on mindfulness.

Yeah, happily. Happily. Where shall we start? What's left?

So let's start with why is it so important to practice mindfulness and how is that different than just meditation?

So good starting place. So, you know, building on what we've just said, our minds matter. So if you have a mind, just like if you have a body, you've got to do something that cares for your body, right? We've all kind of bought into that idea. But if you have a mind, if your mind is important to you, we really need, the mind needs everyday exercises to cultivate the capacities that we most need in the world. And even this is why leadership becomes extraordinary. Even cultivate those capacities and move them into kind of superpowers. Things like our ability to hold complexity, our ability to hold uncertainty and not be triggered by it, to see the big picture, to think long-term, to make good decisions. Those are capacities of mind. That we can fine-tune. And at the same time, as we're navigating the challenges of our life and our working life, there are stress responses, confusion. There are these aspects of mind and emotion that can also get in our way that are not helpful to us. So a mindfulness practice is important because it's being conscious about our minds and hearts. It's being conscious about our state of being and then consciously cultivating the capacities we need and downregulating the tendencies, the traits that are unhelpful to us. And so, you know, to your point, you know, there are many ways of defining mindfulness, but I think what's helpful in this context is that it's a whole series of practices, meditation practices being some of them, and there are many meditation practices of cultivating our awareness of our own mind, knowing our mind. Cultivating our ability to be present and intentionally cultivating key capacities. Different practices cultivate different capacities. And we sort of, you know, mindfulness became, you know, very popular really in like 2011. You see this increase. Interestingly, it aligns with the increase of smartphone usage. Which I suspect is tied. As we became more fragmented, we started realizing, ooh, I need to work with my mind. And these practices that have existed for thousands of years met us where we were. So as mindfulness became more popular and more mainstream, there were a lot of benefits to that. You know, I've taught mindfulness in governments around the world and, you know, banks, law firms, Formula 1, you know, lots of, you know, um, big clients and influential people. And I know because we've done research that it has been really helpful in a, in a number of ways to all of these different groups. Um, I think that one of the downsides with mindfulness becoming so mainstream is, you know, because it needed to be standardized so that you could do research on it, for example, that there was an evidence base. And also to train more teachers who didn't have the thousands of hours of experience of doing the practice, you lost a lot in mindfulness. We've made it quite generic, which again is helpful.

We've made it commoditized.

Yeah. Yes, commoditized. Exactly. And in that sense, really mindfulness is the practice that we've learned you know, kind of following the breath and relaxing is really just scratching the surface. You know, there's so much more available there and so many different practices. And what I find more and more is, you know, 20 years ago I would teach these things and people had never tried any kind of mindfulness or meditation practice. Often they'd never even heard of it then, you know, since 2011 onwards, so increasingly everyone's heard of it. Most people have tried it either through their workplace or their therapist or, you know, in their community center sort of thing. But what I also find now is because it was introduced in this very general way, for many people, they came to the conclusion that mindfulness is obviously great. There's a lot of research around it, but my mind is different and it doesn't work for me because I have ADHD or I, you know, um, and just, uh, I'm too creative or I can't sit still. And, and I think that's such a shame because mindfulness is not one size fits all. In the same way that, you know, if we, if we go to the, uh, if we want to exercise our bodies, some people love to run, you know, some people find yoga or swimming or walking, mountain climbing, weights. Um, you find the practices that meet you where you are and cultivate your flourishing. And mindfulness is the same. So there is, I believe, in what I've seen in my experience. There is some kind of mindfulness practice for everyone, and it's not just one practice. It will be a combination of different practices that meets you where you are. Yeah.

I think it's beautiful, the analogy. Like, look, physical activity, you know, there are lots of ways to cultivate and take care of your— just like there are many diets. You can find one that works for you. There are many ways to strength train. There are many ways for flexibility. You know, you can go to Pilates, you can go to yoga, you can do other— there are so many different ways. But yet, despite so much knowledge on mindfulness, people think mindfulness is meditation. And they'll sit with it and they'll say, yeah, but it didn't work for me. My mind wasn't quiet. I just can't quiet my mind. I, you know, this is not for me. And you said, look, there are many ways we can actually cultivate mindfulness, just like there is a variety of physical practices. There are lots of practices for this. So can you share, you know, just 3, 4 of them? We've already talked about meditation, and meditation itself has so many different types. So that's one type. But what are some other ways, Sophie, some other practices that can help people cultivate mindfulness?

So I think a good— I've been working on a formula for this. Actually, we haven't talked about this, but I'll share. I call it sort of a human flourishing formula so that people can start to experiment in their own lives with with their own mindfulness practices or human flourishing practices. And I think one of the things to think about, um, and this is from a neuroscience perspective, is look for activities that are sensorial and that absorb. So we're talking about mindfulness as practices of being fully present and cultivating particular capacities of mind. So look for practices that absorb your attention, that make you fully present through your senses. So what does that mean? So essentially from a neuroscience perspective, it's going from our default mode thinking, the blah, blah, blah of your mind where we all get stuck because we've kind of over— let's say we've overtrained that muscle. And we stimulate it by, you know, our brains are all overstimulated. The number of text messages you receive, the number of words we process through emails and being active on social media that, you know, we basically have constant words. So we have this constant narrative in our mind. We get stuck in default and then people try to go to sleep. And they can't fall asleep, or they fall asleep for a while and they can't stay asleep. They wake up and they say, oh, I must just be stressed. Well, why couldn't you fall asleep? And why did you wake up? Because someone was talking, and unless you have children, it was you, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, our brains can't turn off. And when we want to be at rest or when we want to be fully present, this default mode network is stuck on and looking for more stimulation.

Yeah.

So, you know, way that we can rewire that is by switching neural modes to direct experience network. Mindfulness practices, one way of understanding them and a link that they all have in common, which most people don't realize this, in fact, it took me a long time to work it out myself. It was sort of, oh, all of these practices are sensorial. That your direct experience network in your brain, it's— I'm simplifying a bit, but it's all the data that come in through your senses. It's what you hear, it's what you see, you smell, you taste, it's what you feel in your body and so on. So when I often, I'll do leadership programs, I'll ask everyone, you wouldn't be able to be an effective leader if you didn't have some things you were doing to cultivate your mindfulness, to cultivate your human flourishing. You might not call it mindfulness, but for sure you're doing some things. And they will, every country I've done this in, every company and, you know, field and organization I've I've done this now with thousands of people. It's pretty much the same list. What are the things that you do to switch off, to be present, to re-energize, to refresh? And it will be some sort of sports, running, swimming, will be things in nature. I go for a walk in nature, or I just kind of There's a place in my garden that I just like to go and sit next to a pond. It will be some kind of arts, crafts, playing music, knitting, you know, painting. And everyone has every, you know, basically the same list. And what I realized in doing this over and over again is, oh, all of those things that we are doing, what they have in common is they're all direct experiences.

Yes.

Right? All activities that absorb your attention in something sensorial.

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So in answer to your question, I think, you know, the practices people can do is look for the things in your life that make you feel good, that bring you into balance in some way, that are sensorial. Going for walks. And the key is that you allow your attention to be absorbed in the sensorial experience. So, I go for a 1.5 to 2-hour walk every morning in Oxford. There are lovely meadows and fields and beautiful university parks. And when I do that, it's, I also meditate, but it's part of my mindfulness practice. I feel my feet on the ground. I smell the air. I smell the changes in the air. You can smell different flowers and, you know, the mud even. I look around at the changing seasons and the trees, and my attention is absorbed in the sensorial experience. And when my mind comes in and says, oh, and I also must remember later to send this email or blah, blah, blah. I go, oh, that's my, that's just my default mode network chiming in habitually. But actually I don't have to do that right now. And it's not helpful to do that right now because every time I bring my attention back to a sensorial experience, making use of neuroplasticity, you're, you're retraining your brain and you're kind of at the brain gym. Building these capacities of mind to be fully present. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. I love that. Right. And to our listeners, you know, as I've introduced people to meditation and mindfulness, one of the most common, you know, things that you hear is, well, my mind doesn't quiet. It goes all over the place. And, you know, what you're sharing, Sophie, is That is the nature of the mind. The nature of the mind is to continuously learn from the past or predict the future to make sure we are safe, right? Our brains evolved to keep us safe, not peaceful and happy and present. That's the property of the brain. And so expecting somehow that meditation and mindfulness will result in stillness and nothing is, you know, is hard. And so the key is, right? Yeah. And so the key is how can you actually direct the brain to something else? And senses is a powerful, right? So you can direct it to the breath, which we often do, right? When we meditate with breath meditation, you direct it to the body. Which we can do with the body scan meditation. But you can also direct it to what's around us, as Sophie, you described in your beautiful practice. Go for a walk and truly notice everything around you as if you were a child seeing it for the first time.

Yes. Very good way of putting it. Yeah.

And you walk around it and you see this so beautifully. You can do it when you are eating. You have 3 meals a day. Every time you eat is an opportunity for you to be really present and make that your mindfulness practice.

Yes, taste your food. And when people do that, they tend to start eating better and less. So people say, that was transformative because when I really was present and I tasted my food, food. I wanted healthier food, more nutrients, you know, more, you know, less processed foods when I really tasted it. And also when we are present, when we eat, we usually eat a little slower and we also become aware of the physical sensation of enough, of being full. And so we know when to stop or, oh, actually that was just enough. Yeah. When we're not present, we're kind of numb, and we just kind of keep going unnecessarily.

We keep going, right? So mindfully eating. We're in meetings all day. Every meeting, when we are with others, there is an opportunity to hear and see. And so we can, again, truly, rather than think about the next meeting, try and bring our mind to be what's happening right now.

Exactly.

Right?

Yeah. And I would even add— oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, I was going to say, these are moments all around us. So when we hear from people that there is no time to be mindful, I'm like, every breath you take is a— and every experience you have, you can bring mindfulness into that by bringing attention and being present to what you're doing.

Completely. And I'm really glad you brought up especially those particular activities because Mindful, I usually call it with clients, mindful meetings. If you spend most of your day in meetings, which most of us in leadership positions do, that's your time to be mindful. And one of the ways of doing that, as you said, is just being fully present, just listening fully. But you can also, you can sort of superpower that by feeling your body. So I will give leaders the practice, you know, change your posture a bit, feel your feet on the ground. And when our bodies are naturally aligned, this is also what you use, you learn in a meditation practice sitting on cushions. When the spine is long, actually, there's a natural alignment in your body where your muscles can soften a bit. So you, it's sort of like the natural alignment means you don't have to make effort that doesn't need to be made. So the body relaxes a bit and then the chest can lift and we can breathe fully. Normally we are kind of like this and the lungs don't get, you know, enough oxygen. So just doing that in a meeting, and you can watch if you do that in a meeting, everyone in a meeting will, will change. Their posture, and then you feel your feet on the ground and relax the body, you're soothing your nervous system. And if you especially kind of breathe fully because you're sitting up, then you're activating a relaxation response. And so I wear an Oura ring. A lot of my clients, I have them work. Oh, yeah. Hey. Yeah. So, you know, this is—

Yeah, we're Oura buddies. Of course.

We're Oura buddies. And I notice increasingly the people I work with, they have an Oura Ring or something similar. And I say, track this when you're in a meeting. Normally people find that in meetings they're in a state of stress the whole time. Meetings could be— sometimes I leave a meeting and my Oura Ring, I get a text and it says, how was your nap? You know, because I've been regulating my nervous system, breathing fully, listening, and actually you are essentially putting your system into a state of recovery. And to, you know, the point we were both sharing earlier, you think better, your cognitive abilities are more available to you when you're in that state of being, when you're in parasympathetic. And as well, I often will tell leaders, Um, you know, who is the most powerful person in the room in a meeting? Um, one way of looking at it is that the most powerful person in the room is the most relaxed person in the room, because we feel when people feel out of control. And we don't respect it actually. When someone's really stressed, in a sense, they're out of control. Their system has assessed, oh, we can't handle this in some way, right? That's what a stress response is, right? But when someone's relaxed, you feel that. We respect people who are just there and calm and comfortable in their own skin and fully present. And not distracted. And as well, that person who's able to be relaxed, they'll be the person who's thinking the most clearly. They'll be the person who can be most creative. And I've found many leaders have told me that was such a game changer for me. The most powerful person in the room is the most relaxed person in the room. We can be that.

Yeah, I love that. The most powerful person in the room is the one with, who is the most relaxed with the most regulated nervous system. Because they have the full mental capacities to be able to truly dance in the complexity that's around us, to be able to thrive, to be able to think clearly, to be able to think more creatively. Versus kind of these foggy lenses that the reactive, sympathetic, adrenaline and cortisol-fueled experience of life is.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Very well said. Yeah.

So look, I think I want to talk a little bit, Sophie, about how you got into this field. As I said, you were born into it. So I want to share that story with you. Share that story with our listeners around kind of your journey into this. And I want to get into what you are creating now. We'll get to that right after that. And really excited to share kind of what we are dreaming up here for the listeners to be able to experience. But let's start with your origin story. When did you discover mindfulness and flourishing? And decided that this was something, this was a thread you were going to kind of pull all your life?

Well, when I was born, basically, my parents, my father's British and my mother's American. I grew up back and forth. My parents both studied with a Tibetan teacher who taught it, who studied at Oxford and started his own university. And so I grew up with him as kind of like a grandfather. And in those days, it was this, now I realize, a kind of golden age. I was born in the '80s and all of these Tibetan lamas were coming to the West for the first time and bringing teachings that had been held, protected, cultivated in this very rural part of the world in the Himalayas, and suddenly were coming into the West. And so as a child, there were always kind of Tibetan lamas around. We were always going on retreats and talks, and they would often give teachings to the children and blessings. And they were constantly saying, please help this world. We are all here to help this world. And that was yet to me, just, you know, without question, just, oh, that's what life is. We are here to help this world. And so, when I was a child, my mother started writing children's books about meditation. And she said, you know, we should really give children these tools to work with their mind. This was way before mindfulness was a thing. And she, her theory was children learn best from other children. I'm an older sister. I have two younger sisters. So, you know, you know, uh, you know, you copy your sibling, your older sibling, and that's how we learn to walk and talk and, you know, be a human being. So from when I was very small, I had the Tibetan lamas giving us teachings, meditation practices. They would teach us flower arranging, kudo, you know, Japanese archery, dance, calligraphy, all of these different ways of cultivating our minds and hearts. And then my mother wrote all of these books and would go into schools and teach, you know, secular. And so she had us come with her, my, my sisters and I, and help us help her design programs. So from when I was sort of, I don't know, 8, 9 years old, my mind was going towards how do we meet these people where they are with all of these practices that we've been receiving from these Tibetan lamas? Um, what's relevant to these people? How do they meet it in a way that it's accessible and accurate and helpful to them? And that just kind of continued as a teenager. I then designed programs for teenagers, and then as a young adult, I started an organization called EveryBody, and we did retreats around the world for people in their 20s and 30s and festivals. And it was a combination of lots of different meditation practices, arts, speakers on different topics related to philosophy or Buddhism or different traditions. And then in the evenings we had live music and dance parties and wine. And so I did that throughout my 20s and I trained very intensively. With, um, Tibetan lamas. I was asked to become a teacher. I was extremely shy and I really didn't want to. I found it excruciating for like 10 years, but I had to do a very intensive training program, a lot of long retreats, you know, 3-month retreats and memorizing these ancient texts. And the, the teachers in the lineage that I studied with and, you know, grew up with, they held particularly teachings on leadership and secular leadership. And it was a lot of teachings of how to be a peaceful warrior in the world or how to be an enlightened leader, all based on the idea that the fundamental nature of human beings is good. That's kind of at the heart of all of us. It's our foundation.

Yeah.

And there's, you know, human wisdom that, and practices that can help us, um, discover our basic nature or more fully embody who, who we are. So, you know, that was kind of how I got started. I never intended it to be a career, but it kind of accidentally did. And then mindfulness became popular. And I had already done my kind of 10,000 hours of practice and teaching at that point. So it was a natural, and I had all these leadership teachings, right, that I'd received and trained in. So that naturally led into leadership development and teaching at Oxford. Yeah.

Beautiful. So listen, I have changed You know, I have changed my mind on this. And I think a big part of it's been my own experience. I always thought about retreats as kind of this luxury. It's retreat, just the word used to bring up this notion of like, why would you retreat from the world, right? Why would you need to retreat? You have to like do this in the real world. My biggest transformation, you know, gosh, now close to 10 years ago, when I decided to dedicate my life for flourishing, wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been in a retreat, a 5-day retreat in Portugal with Amy Fox and, and Joanne. It would not have happened. It would not have happened. By that time, I'd already read 150 different books, but that shift would not have happened without that week. You know, the program Rewire wouldn't have been bought, wouldn't have come into the world without my Vipassana 10-day retreat that I did. And so through my experiences, I have started to realize that this is actually important. And I was sharing this with you, Sophie, right? For all the leaders who say, if you by now are convinced, number one, that mindfulness as a foundation, and like your brain is your biggest asset. Second, the best way to train your mind is to do it by actually cultivating a mindfulness practice, using every moment in the day to practice being present, and through that, harnessing and becoming a better leader. So if you're convinced about that, here's the third thing that I want you to think about. Retreats for me are so critical because think about our brains as being parched earth. They haven't been watered for 30 years. They're so dry. They're caked up. All of you have Headspace. Headspace and kind of dipping yourself into and out of Headspace is like taking some seeds putting it on that parched earth, and for 5 minutes, just putting some water on it and then walking away.

[Speaker:ELIZABETH] Yeah, it's an analogy.

[Speaker:ASHISH KOTHARI] What do you think? What do you think? Do you think you're going to get a tree or a flower or a plant? You won't. A retreat is an opportunity to spend a couple of days, a week, really digging through that cracked earth, cracking it open. Finding the fertile soil that always exists. Mindfulness is something that you have. It's the— it's a core property of the brain. It's just been caked up. So you go find fertile soil. You plant it with the seeds. And you, for that period of 2 days, 3 days, or 5 days, give it nourishment. You give it water. You give it care. Right? So mind, body, spirit. It's an opportunity to holistically create an environment to give that seed a shot at coming up. And if you do that, and then you continue that through, it'll become a beautiful fruit-bearing tree that can give you so much on leadership. So retreats are such a key part, I feel, if you want to shift. And that's why I'm so excited, Sophie, with what you're doing now. Uh, you're involved in creating retreats for a whole range, and I want you to share with our listeners, uh, the 3 different types of retreats that you're involved in that our listeners can look and see, wow, if this is interesting, go learn with somebody who was literally born into the field of flourishing and mindfulness. Yeah, share the 3 retreats that you're kind of creating in the world right now.

Thanks, Ashish Kothari. And that was such a good summary of the importance of retreats. Thank you for sharing that. And you're right. So I'm focusing my work much more on retreats now because I find them to be exponentially more impactful than anything else I've done. It's still great to do workplace programs. You and I both do them. We know they're effective and And there's something, as you shared from your own experience, when people go on retreats, that is just a much deeper shift towards human flourishing.

Yes.

So the retreats I'm doing now, I'm doing women's retreats together with my dear friend Isabel de Arenberg, women's leadership retreats, and looking at how as women leaders, particularly in business and male-dominated fields, we can lead Um, from the power of femininity. Mm-hmm. Um, I'm doing retreats for people working in AI and tech. These are meditation retreats and, you know, very specifically. So this is with, uh, my colleagues. We co-founded a network called the Wisdom and AI Network. And so we're doing summits and, and now retreats really specifically looking at, uh, how do people working in AI and tech flourish? What are the challenges to their flourishing in, in all the dimensions we talked about, physical, cognitive, and so on, by the nature of the way that they work and live their lives? And also, what are the opportunities? What are the superpowers? For people working in AI and tech? And how do we cultivate those? Because there will be mindfulness practices, meditation practices that cultivate those capacities. And all of this is working with also neuroscience and an evidence base. And then the third retreats that I'm focusing on are together with my friend and colleague Andrew White, who you know. Yeah. He used to be the deputy dean of executive education at Said. So we were colleagues there and we're doing global leadership retreats. So these are focused on senior leaders and it's particularly people going through transformations or organizations going through transformations. And actually, fourth one is human flourishing retreats. And that's my own business, which is Customized retreats, looking at any group of individuals or leaders. I do also, I design one-to-one retreats for people, could be a senior team or one person or, you know, a particular industry like law or finance. How do these people flourish and creating bespoke retreats that take them on a journey to human flourishing? And as you said, What's amazing in retreats is it's a full experience that, that you really get to till the soil and, and find that rich earth that is fertile. And it, in a really good retreat doesn't end when the retreat is over. So my, my retreats are designed very specifically that there are practices and also support for people to continue that development long after the retreat, that it's long-term benefits as well.

Well, that's what I'm so excited about, friends. So Sophie and I have been thinking about this for a while, got to close to like 6, 9 months. And this year, we're going to join forces and create a retreat bringing the best of Rewire with her lifelong work around flourishing. And we're going to create something that really takes these 9 practices that are in the Hardwired for Happiness book—awareness, mindfulness, purpose, compassion, connection, intention—and we're going to really put them all together into an offering that, for those who want to really make flourishing their competitive edge, this is an opportunity to step back, dig your own— dig through all of the hardening that we have all become accustomed to operating, and you want to operate differently, come back, spend the time with others who want to make flourishing their edge, and then go back and create a community and a practice that continues way beyond. We are so excited to create this. We're going to make something happen this year. And, uh, and as you listen to this, and if you say, wow, I want to know more about that, just email me, um, ashish@happinesssquad.com, and you'll be the first to know, um, as we put this together.

Oh, wonderful. I'm so delighted, Ashish. I'm really, I'm so much enjoying exploring and finding the we have so many similar approaches to the work we're doing. There's so much alignment and, um, yeah, I have so much admiration for the work that you've done and the way you've cultivated it. It's really extraordinary. So very much looking forward to co-creating. Yeah.

Well, my friend, uh, I am so inspired. Um, and just, I just love, uh, what you do, what I experienced. Like for me, this is a 10-year journey, right? I'm still very much a learner. And this is close to 40-plus years. And so to be able to truly create something with somebody who doesn't just teach it, who doesn't just practice it, but who truly lives it, I think is such a gift personally for me and for all that are going to experience. So thank you. Thank you for being on this podcast. Um, you know, I'll end with a series of rapid-fire questions. Ah, okay. Uh, if, if you're up for it. Um, so first question is, what's a belief you've changed your mind on?

Hmm, the most profound one has been that to work in male-dominated spaces as a woman, you need to suppress your femininity and be more masculine to be listened to or taken seriously. That I was sort of trained to do, I mean, particularly by, yeah, I think more colleagues, um, or older, you know, male mentors who would constantly tell me, no, don't dress too feminine, you know, dress like a man. And, uh, you know, these people can smell that you're not like them, so you need to be more And what I realize now, and I always share with other women in leadership roles, when we do that, we're disempowering ourselves. Absolutely. Yeah. There's, you know, I can say from my own experience, the more that I am just authentic, as a woman, I think I'm also quite feminine. I feel very feminine. And I find the more that I am authentic in that and really embody that, I'm more relaxed, I'm more confident. And I, most of my colleagues are men, most of my clients are men, most of my close friends are men. I'm very often the only woman in the room and I'm usually the youngest. It's so much more powerful to hold the space in your femininity because you're allowing everyone else to kind of drop into more spaciousness. And these qualities we were talking about, the ability to hold complexity, the ability to hold uncertainty, to make decisions, that is all served by a certain amount of spaciousness, which I think is— you and I have talked about this, but in many traditions, that's the feminine principle. So, yeah, love it. Yeah. Be more feminine if you're energetic. And couldn't agree even more.

Couldn't agree. But we need that, more of that in our world than just the pure masculinity power of cutting through, you know? I think we need more of the connection.

Exactly. We need both, right? Both are important. We need them to be in harmony. Yeah. In harmony.

Yeah. What's a habit or ritual you rely on, Sophie, right now? When life gets hard?

Always meditation. That's my lifetime practice, breathing practice, but also especially when life is really hard, I find doing a compassion practice or tonglen kind of practice really important because I find for myself, and I know other people I work with, when things are really hard, we, we get a little more self-focused, um, and, uh, that can be unhelpful and claustrophobic and actually increase the difficulty of the situation. There's something quite powerful in, you know, when you do a compassion practice, especially Tonglen, you're kind of reversing the logic of ego. You're also going beyond yourself because everyone has difficulty, everyone is suffering in some way that we know or don't know. And there's some, there's a relief in the common humanity of that, which I find brings me back into balance and a wider perspective beyond myself.

Yeah, beautiful. What's a book or a research finding that everyone in this field should know about?

Can I share the epiphany I shared with you a year or two ago about VUCA? Yeah. Is that still relevant? Totally. Okay. So when I started leading these women's retreats, I found so many women leaders said, I've shut down the feminine, my feminine side. So much that I start to realize I, I don't feel fully myself, and I feel like I'm, um, missing like part of my toolbox, part of my skill set. Um, and I would like to embody the feminine more. And so I said, great, let's design a program for this. But I realized in doing that, in designing this program with, with my friend Isabelle what is the feminine? If, if we all say that, um, like, to bring the feminine back into balance, what are we actually talking about? And so I did a kind of deep dive into research. Um, how do we define— in Buddhism, it's the feminine principle. In Taoism, you talk about, you know, yin and yang. But what I found is through so many lenses, there's this idea of, and I think you actually said once when we talked about this, it's so helpful to think about it as energies, right? We're not talking about gender, men and women, talking about kind of masculine energy and feminine energy that we all, right? You and I both have this. Absolutely. So I won't form a rabbit hole. I'm also an academic, so I bought, I lost track at 60 books, uh, looking at it through the perspective of neuroscience, through mythology, through different philosophical traditions, um, through, you know, biology and health sciences, and trying to get a picture of what do we mean by feminine and masculine, what, what are their distinct qualities and characteristics, and how can they be in balance, in harmony. And in doing that, I started making a chart of what are the words that are used to describe qualities of the feminine through all of these different lenses, the different philosophical traditions, religions, cultures, indigenous sciences, and some patterns started to emerge. And the words that came up again and again were things like wisdom, spaciousness, things around compassion and caring and relational, but also this red thread of the great mystery, the unknown. And as I was doing this, I started to realize, ah, even trying to clearly define the feminine principle is maybe missing the point. Maybe it's partly the, a mystery, right? And, and then I, when I came to, um, certain texts, particularly actually alchemical texts, said that the, um, element associated with the feminine is mercury. When I looked into it, it said the quality is volatility. And then I had this chart and I was sort of staring at it. Saying, okay, what is it? And then I had this kind of, oh, volatility, uncertainty, complexity. And then I realized, oh, VUCA is the feminine principle. Absolutely. That for me was like, oh, that changes everything in the way that I teach, in the way I understand. I know you work with VUCA as well. A lot of people in our field— I love this idea.

I've never heard it said that way, but it is so true. VUCA is the feminine principle. And to thrive in complexity, that's the reason why we need to cultivate and bring harmony to the masculine and the feminine, right? Exactly. Because this environment calls all of those attributes that a feminine energy can enable in us, right? That's what's critical. It doesn't— yes, it would be great if we had more, you know, equal men and women and women got paid in parity to men. We have all of these differences in the world. But friends, you can start, if you're men, by just cultivating these feminine energies in you. You can— we all have them. They're just imbalanced. And I think if we do that, it'll help you thrive in complexity.

I totally agree, you know, because then VUCA, I mean, I always taught the human, human beings have a natural stress response to VUCA, right? Now I realize, maybe not. Not all, not all. Not all. Maybe when we're stuck in kind of dysregulated masculine, VUCA becomes a threat. Uncertainty is threatening. Complexity is threatening, but actually it's not inherently threatening. And so I suspect, and this has completely changed the way that I teach everyone I've shared this with in our field is like, oh my God, that changes everything. I get it now, right? You know, the more VUCA is only a threat if we're stuck in dysregulated masculine. When we learn to bring those energies into balance in ourselves, in our systems, our organizations, VUCA is not a threat anymore. It's the nature of things, and then it's a superpower. I love it.

What's a question you wish more leaders asked?

Hmm. How— I learned this from my father. How do I get my ego out of the way So that I can really be of service. My father also taught Buddhism and psychology, and he lectured at a university. And when I started teaching, he told me, every time I give a talk, I pause, I do a little meditation before I go into the room, and I do almost like a prayer. He said, I say, help me, or let me get my ego out of the way. So I can just be helpful.

Beautiful. What's a playlist song that turns your frown upside down?

Anything Brazilian. I love Brazilian music. My friends will tell you I overplay it. Everyone gets sick. But I love Brazilian music. It's the sound of my heart. It brings me so much joy. If you haven't listened, try some Brazilian. I will.

I have not. I will listen to it this weekend. Well, my friend, this is—

I'll send you my playlist on Spotify.

Please send me your playlist. Yeah. Is it on Spotify?

Yeah, it is. It is. It's on my favorite songs. I'll share it with you.

Please share it. And if you're open, maybe we include that in our show notes for others.

Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, let's do it.

Awesome. Let's do it. So please send it to me. Sophie, this has been such a joy, my friend. And I'm so excited about 2026 because of what we're going to create together. And again, friends, if what we've talked about resonates with you, you'd want to shift and say, hey, you know what, I could benefit from this, email me We'll get you added to our list as we create and we send announcements around this retreat. I promise you it'll change your lives. All the transformations in my life have come from that. I've experienced the beauty of the program Sophie runs in the one we did about 2 years ago. You're in for a treat. Sophie, thank you.

Yeah, well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's always a delight. And really looking forward to collaborating. Take care, my friend. And to you, bye for now.

Bye. 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.