Your Greatest Strength Is Your Biggest Blind Spot

The easiest way to find your wounds is to go to your strengths and say, what caused this? What made me want to do this? And the answer's usually in there.

What if the very thing that made you successful is also the thing holding you back? Your drive, your empathy, your standards, your humility. We tend to think of our strengths as assets, but every strength casts a shadow. And most of us can't see our own. My guest today, Thomas Droge, has spent more than 30 years exploring what it really takes to know ourselves. He's a doctor of Chinese medicine, a longtime Taoist and martial artist, chief mindfulness officer at Tiffin, and author of The Leader Within. In this conversation, we explore why you can't discover your blind spots by thinking harder, how your wounds can become your greatest strengths, And why your brain may be editing the story of your past. A deceptively simple question can reveal the shadow you are carrying. What bothers you most in someone else, and how are you like that? This one made me look at myself differently. Let's get into it. Thomas, my dear friend, I'm so delighted to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast and for you to share your years and years of wisdom and lived practice with our listeners.

Thanks, Ashish. I'm super happy to be here. I love talking to you, and I know we're going to have a fun conversation.

Well, you've done lots of amazing things, but I actually want to start with the Thomas, the person before Thomas was a teacher. You are 28 years old. You're standing in the church. You're giving a eulogy at your father's funeral when you have a thought, I don't know who I am. What happened inside you that day?

It's an irritating thought, isn't it? You know, that day I had finished I was living in San Francisco, was planning on writing the great American novel actually, and had finished my creative writing and poetry degree. And I think when your father dies, especially when you're young and your father dies, there's something quite important about— actually, it's not quite important. You're forced to ask this question, oh, that's a whole life lived to the end. What was their life about? And the immediate reflection that comes back is, what am I doing with my life? Who am I? What am I? Yeah. And I think we often get to a avoid that question for a long time because parents often live longer than that. And you don't really get slammed with that question, but it came crashing in and I didn't have a good answer. You know, I was a, I was a martial artist and I knew that I wanted to be of service to people in the world, but I had no idea what it was going to be like or how I would do it.

Mm-hmm.

And the funeral was pretty amazing for me because at the end of it, you know, you have to picture like You're in Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Boston, in this ancient stone church that we'd been going to since we were kids. And the pews are just filled with people, and a lot of them are people I don't know. And they start coming up to me after the services, and one person after another tells me some story, an anecdote about how my father helped them with this problem they were going through, or this issue they had, or this change in their lives. And As kids, you don't really see your parents' lives. You start when they're already fully grown and you're on your journey and they're doing their parenting thing, but you don't really see what their day-to-day is like except for the dramatic stuff. Like how many kids know what their fathers and mothers do at work? They go to work. What does that even mean? And so to see the ripple effect of my dad's life through all these different people really showed me that the impact you have on other human beings really every day, every moment has this opportunity to create this positive force in the world that creates a little bit of greater benefit or greater understanding or greater connection, or you can dumb yourself out or blow it off or not think about how you're being experienced or not be present. And that became a guiding principle for me. It was definitely like, what's the— if I'm at my funeral, who's there and what are they saying?

Yeah. So it brought you face to face with that question that many people never ask, right? I'm always blown away. We do an 80th birthday Meditation in many of our programs where we slow people down enough and we help them visualize them walking into their 80th birthday and really think about what they would hear from their loved ones, from colleagues, from their friends. And more often than not, it brings tears to people's lives because they realize in our busyness how often we forget what are we really yearning for, what's the legacy we want to leave behind. And I think it can be for some who do it truly go into it can be quite powerful. And I can just imagine that's just a thought experiment, but you were living that. It was real for you in that moment. And with every person sharing a bit about your father and their impact really invited you to start to say, who are you and what is your journey? What is your story going to be?

Yeah, I feel like I was lucky in that way. You don't always get to have that experience, even living somewhere where we'd lived for my whole life and it was an urban environment, so people were around so that people could just come from everywhere to share that story. And so I think I was quite lucky in that sense. I don't think I was lucky that my father died young, but that happens. And it's funny, the 80-year-old birthday experiment, we do a version of that where it's the same thing, but people come and whisper in your ear.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

That's how we do it. That's how we do it too.

And I think the whisper in your ear part really puts you back in your own body and in your own consciousness. And it's like, A whisper is something you can really kind of feel into in yourself. I don't know. There's something about the whisper that's really powerful in that practice. And it is amazing when people do it because we're pretty simple, you know, human beings. We need to connect. We need to be rooted in the ground. We need to have meaningful experiences. We need to feel valued by the people around us. We need to feel like we're part of something and that's kind of it, right? We need love. We need connection. Like it's not that complicated. It's funny how far we can drift from it in our lives.

Yeah. There is this whole dialogue around needs. What do we need versus what do we want? And so much of us spend so much time chasing the wants, chasing the cravings. And I don't think— who said there is— we need 8 or 9 more Earths to satisfy the wants of everyone, right? But the Earth has more than enough for all of our needs. So my friend, look, you've spent so much of your life— you've studied Chinese medicine. You've studied contemplative traditions. You're a leadership coach. You've thought a lot about it. What do you think most people misunderstand about knowing themselves?

I think probably the biggest thing that people misunderstand about knowing themselves is that there's a whole part of ourselves that we can't know on our own. So when people talk about blind spots, for example, like that's something people talk about a lot. Like you don't actually know where your blind spots are. You find them through interaction, relationship, misperceived outcomes, all those kinds of things, right? So I think the inquiry and the fact that we are all mirrors for each other and that we need lots of different mirrors in order to really know ourselves through the world around us is probably what gets overlooked the most.

Yeah. So this notion of discovering ourselves through reflection and reflection on our own life and reflection through the eyes of others, through our interactions of, of others, right?

Yeah. And I think that's what the village gave us, right? The village had like all kinds of archetypes in it and they were often multi-generational and the landscape didn't change. And so you could kind of test out and feel into all these different mirrors of what's the grumpy person, what's the skilled laborer, what's the wild card, who's the shaman, like the whole nature of this centralized village and the way that we would all reflect each other and do it in this safe context that we understood is just— Yeah. Been lost. And I think the workplace is actually one of the places that that exists the most, at least pre-pandemic.

That exists the most if we create workplaces where people, when they walk in the door, are comfortable leaving their armors behind and truly connect with their hearts. Otherwise, what we see are just shadows of people walking through. We see armored peoples. We see people acting in roles of leaders, barking orders, pushing for performance, Because that's the role they are. And oftentimes, they themselves get blind to their own suffering, but most importantly, suffering of others around them.

Yeah, it's true. After the pandemic, when everybody stopped working in offices and then tried to come back and is, I think, still trying to figure out what that looks like, that put into question the whole kind of nature of the relationship in person in a company and put a big strain on being able to create environments where people can connect because they often would pop in for 1 or 2 days or not at all or just on quarterly offsites. And so the norms and mores that evolve naturally in cultures don't get to form in that structure.

I love your core idea of to know ourselves, we have to learn through movement between the inner and the outer worlds, right? It's the notion of reflection. Like, we have to really— knowing the others, connecting with others teaches something about us, and knowing ourselves teaches something about the world. And this notion of discovering elements of our own memories where our brain tricks us. You talk about this beautiful story about spending 3 in nature alone and realizing that there are all these memories of your childhood that the brain had just edited, and you recognize how unreliable our perception can be. Bring that story to life and what that experience was like and what were some of the things that were edited out that when you spend time with stillness emerged for you.

Yeah, I think it's on the neuroscience side, it's funny because the more times we access and repeat a memory, the more, I'm sure you know this, but the more we overwrite And so the memory we tell becomes the memory over time, even if it wasn't the fact, but we—

Absolutely.

But we experience it like it's a photograph, like it's a fact, but it's constantly being changed by our perception. And I think for me, because the story of my childhood was one of an alcoholic father and a 10-year-old pretty dangerous brother who also had drug problems combined with a mother who was trying to keep 5 children together inside of downtown Boston in the 1970s while she also was a full-time public school teacher. And the sort of confusion and uncertainty and lack of safety became the dominant theme. And so that, because our brains are designed to protect us from injury, the most emotionally charged situations get the most traffic to a memory. And so we end up forming through our perception These ideas of whole eras of our lives. And for me, my childhood was magical and amazing, but also home life was quite dangerous at times. It was unpredictable. It could be magical and wonderful, or it could be terrible. And so I think I built a world where that narrative formed and became the kind of bedrock of my memories. And when I went out on that solo, I'd spent a lot of time in nature and I'd done that kind of thing in different versions before, but it was something about that land. We were up in Crestone, which is a pretty magical place physically of like the largest underwater aquifer in the country and surrounded by all these 14er mountains that are filled with all these metals that create this electromagnetic field rooted in water. So it's a pretty active conduit for your body to start to pair with nature. And you're in a site alone. It's about 180 feet In a circle that you stay inside of. And I was on the side of a mountain, it was all rocky, and I was there for 3 days. And I had a lot of fantasies going into it of, oh, I'm going to have an amazing journey and vision quest, and the world's going to open up in front of me. And I'm going to have all these amazing visions of what's happening. I'm going to know exactly what I need to do next and whatever. And, and actually it was at first kind of boring. So the, the beginning of the downregulation, there's no phones, there's no stimulation. The first thing we go through, we call it boredom. It's really withdrawal from all of the like dopamine triggers we've been living in. And then you start looking around and as soon as your body and nervous system start to downregulate, you go into what actually is like my biggest premise in the world, which is slow is the fast way. You slow down and you don't have to be a contemplative person. You don't have to have any skill to do this. The environment itself will start to cause you to mirror it. So it'll become a mirror that you start to synchronize with. Yes. And there's a beautiful quote in the Tao Te Ching that says, human beings mirror nature, nature mirrors the heavens, the heavens mirror the Tao. And so this idea that there's this system called nature that we're part of, that if we just spend time in it without all of our abstractions, it will start to teach us through its just being. And we'll start to model it naturally because we're filled with mirror neurons and sensory systems and we regulate to our environment. And so I started to really slow down and then it started raining and it was very wet and cold. And I was going through frustration, all these different emotions and wanting desperately to have this epiphany. And it wasn't coming. You know, I'm like, where's my epiphany? I'm ready. Let's have it.

Cold. I'm freezing. Where is my epiphany?

Like I haven't seen a bear wander past, or I'm just alone in this thing. And, uh, the, on the last night, the rain stopped, the sky cleared completely, and stars came out. And I was sitting, uh, on the edge of this rock by the cliff, quietly, not doing anything, not trying to meditate, just sitting there. And I started feeling, and I'm not like a, I don't talk to guides or anything like that, but I started feeling my father on my left and my mother on my right. So the idea, the memory, the consciousness of them that lives in my body was able to start to conjure them, connect with them, remember them. And because I was in such a safe, downregulated, quiet place, I started having all these memories of these moments together where I was baking bread with my father at home, which we would do on Sundays and spending time fishing with him and my mom teaching me how to make scrambled eggs or like sitting by the fire in the winter. 'Cause our house had fireplaces everywhere and In the winter with the dog curled up to me and my mom reading on the couch and just all these incredible moments of time we spent together. And I had this like flush of how much they loved me and cared about me and how much they wanted for me to have a happy life and how much they loved each other even. And all of these moments that had been kind of lost to me started coming back. And it was like a balance suddenly came in where my whole childhood had been like this and it suddenly came into balance with Of course, there was all of this love and care and creativity and joy. And my parents were actually quite funny. Like they would do lots of really funny things. And, uh, my epiphany in the mountains was actually being able to slow down enough and mirror this natural environment enough that all of these other parts of like deep emotions that were in my body got to come through into my consciousness and give me this feeling of like tremendous joy and gratitude for the love that my parents had for me. And it was incredible. It was amazing.

Such a beautiful story. You know, this notion of all of a sudden you have a story of what your childhood was and you've forgotten so many of the things on the other side, right? The light and the dark. I'm sure, you know, leaving that place, becoming whole again.

Yeah.

About that period of life. So how do I know, Thomas, as if our listeners are listening, How do I know, or how do they know what my mind may be editing out right now?

Such a good question. First of all, I would say if you unconsciously edited it out, you're not gonna know. And so the question wouldn't be, what am I editing out? It would be, how can I quiet down enough and open enough to see what might be there that I don't know about?

Yeah.

And that's—

So it's not grasping, but emergence from cultivating a stillness within.

That's right. So we say like, everyone's like a puddle and it's all murky, but if you sit still long enough, it becomes clear. And when it's clear, you can see everything that's in there.

Yeah. Beautiful. Something that we have so lost in our world.

I would say since the Industrial Revolution, when we started scaling machines and we started measuring productivity on this speed and efficiency model, and we started judging humans based on how well they compare to machines. That's just kept going, right? So it's continued to happen. And what got lost in that was everything that a machine doesn't have to offer, which is soul connection, love, a good joke, a moment of like someone patting you on the back or turning to someone and being like, I can't believe this is happening right now. Right? Like just all of that stuff gets completely lost. Our ability to be with each other was, you know, slowly and systematically, I don't think intentionally, But it happened this way since the Industrial Revolution.

Well, so I want to go there next because there is a part about knowing ourselves, and I think it's important, but there are many people, and we've talked about this, I've talked about this with Amy Fox quite a bit, unintegrated shadows and how so much of the trauma that leaders carry lives underneath boardroom tables, and they don't realize the depths that they're in. And from where it's coming. There's a phrase you say, which I love, the brightest light casts the darkest shadow. What does that mean in the context of leadership?

I think what it means is that people who have like highly refined superpower capabilities, the narrowness of focus to develop a skill or an ability at that level requires usually the loss of development in some other area. So to be like a virtuoso, if you're gonna play piano for 6 hours a day every day, you're not doing all of these other things, right? Yeah. And so, and I think all of us have some version of this where the things that we identify as our greatest values live on the opposite side of our shadows. So the incredibly empathic person has trouble managing conflict. The person who grew up with nothing financially has trouble living in financial uncertainty or scarcity. And so their decisions all track against these things. And I, the inquiry is pretty beautiful around it because the inquiry is, what are the things that bother me the most in someone else? And then how am I like that? What is the thing that I love in someone else and how am I not like that? But that one's a little more damaging. The first one usually tells you the thing that someone does that you don't like, that really triggers you, is usually the shadow to your incredibly bright light. So if I focus on the fact that my humility is an incredible value that I've worked really hard on, then I have all this trouble with other people's egos when they come too hard into the room. This is my personal, this is one I've been working on lately. And the shadow for me is I don't know how to construct an ego in a healthy way to get what I want or my needs met in the world because I've focused on this other tool of humility and others first and empathy. And the balance is—

Or the inability to— you are such a wise teacher, but inability to be able to share from away. There's so many who don't know but confidently can put something out there and people go to them. But for those who are so humble, who know so much, feel like, who am I to talk about this? Or this is not even—

It's true.

Is this really good? Like, is this worth sharing?

Yeah, I get really uncomfortable when people use words like wisdom around me, and I'm sure it's true, but that immediately sounds like a trap in my mind of, you can't be the guru. Gurus make huge mistakes. Every guru I've met who reached a certain point in their path had to fall pretty far in order to reconnect with what they're doing, because at some point, so many people around you are putting you on pedestals.

Absolutely.

That you end up Not being able to see yourself. And by the way, it's the same thing for the CEO. This is where leaders get into big trouble and struggles. If they don't have a group around them that can give them critical feedback in a way that they're gonna be uncomfortable with, but can experience, then they'll get stuck.

So I love this idea, right? That your strengths, the very qualities that make you successful, can often act as also your biggest blind spots. I think it's fantastic. And you talk about these 3 shadows in your book, right? Strengths is one thing that casts a shadow. Wounds, Amy talks a lot about that too, around stories, things that have happened to us, and they cast a shadow. And then values, things we so strongly believe in, there is a shadow, there's a shadow side of that. And oftentimes they create these areas of great certainty that we never question. So let's walk through those. What does the shadow of a strength look like?

Let's say I'm a leader with incredible focus on delivery, and I can achieve with my team at a speed of 4x all of my competitors. My ability to do that is based on incredible focus and holding people to accountability to this point where they deliver their top level of output.

I can think of Elon Musk.

Elon Musk, great example. My shadow is that if I've trained myself or if I have the natural inclination to operate that way, then I probably either don't have or haven't trained in the ability to understand the organic rhythm of life and the, the way in which people's ability to be present and do good work and have high-quality output actually moves in a very natural waveform. Where it has peaks and troughs and they're based on individuals' needs and the way that they operate. Some people like to blitz for 3 days. Some people like to chunk it out over 7. Some people work better in the winter than the summer. You know, like there's a lot of factors. And so this same person, this Elon Musk character doesn't spend time building long, long systems that would say, okay, well, over this long period of time, we can have the same output. in a much more balanced way. And so that piece of the, of the puzzle's missing, right? The person who's incredibly strong usually isn't very flexible.

Yeah.

The person who's really flexible usually doesn't have that much structure. So you look for the opposite in all of these. And, and I think that's just because I've been a Taoist and a martial artist and a Chinese medicine doctor, and that's how your body works and that's how nature works. And

yeah,

we're all designed.

And so the key becomes, how do you surround yourself with those who can actually be, in many ways they might upset you, because they're very different than you, but you so need them because they balance— in a bigger context of an organization, they balance you out. They give you access to different perspectives, different ways of thinking about the problem, being in the world.

Yeah, and what that should feel like when you're experiencing it is cognitive dissonance. This is a person who I would probably habitually identify as weak, and I'm instead going to take that off the table and see what else is there. Okay, I need this person to tell me what's the rhythm that's going to be most effective long-term for our people. How do we get to that information? What questions could we ask them? So I'll use my focused brain, but I'll trust this other person to come up with a way to do that. And then we test the model the same way we do everything.

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. So let's go into what's the shadow of a wound.

Ironically, our strengths are usually, you know, the lotus that springs from the dung field of our wound, right? So the classic healer wound Right? The healer's wound is usually some kind of pain or suffering that caused them to question why this pain or suffering exists. And that forced them to then start looking. If you grew up in a happy, healthy home, you probably wouldn't do most of the things that I do, 'cause you wouldn't have been driven to them. You would've done something completely different. But the wound itself, after it drives to this new outcome, it still lives underneath. And so if we don't at some point take our strengths and say, where's our symmetrical wound that probably drove those strengths? And how can I begin to work with that? Then we won't find that information. And so the easiest way to find your wounds is to go to your strengths and say, what caused this? What made me want to do this? And the answer's usually in there.

Yeah. I think for me, I've talked about this a lot in my conversations, often on the podcast. I had a wound at the age of 7 where I internalized the story of perfection is the price you pay to be loved. I was one who was always willing to work things, keep refining them till the last minute. Nothing was good enough. The only thing that made it finished was time. It was time to submit a deliverable, make a presentation, give to the steering committee. Otherwise, there was always something else to think about and more, more, more, more, more. And only when I discovered— and obviously, my results were great. My clients loved me. My colleagues loved me because they could bank on me to solve the hardest challenges in the fastest possible time with the least amount of resources, right? But it also created massive suffering around because anybody who wasn't perfect, I was always judging them. I carried a lot of stress because I was like, I don't get why people don't do good work, right? It is something I still work with even today, right? It never kind of goes away, but at least becoming aware of it, you can start to work with it rather than it running your life unconsciously throughout.

I would say there's probably also a lot of people that experienced the wake of that behavior where they actually suffered because it was probably good enough 3 iterations before the last one, and they knew that, but you were like, no, we can make it better. And they were, they said, oh, okay, fine, we'll go another round. And so there's a question of, so from an efficiency standpoint, if 3 iterations back it was done well, then you could have moved on to the next thing, but instead you go 3 more iterations, right? This is like a common— That's right. Problem with the perfection model. It's also, I find that people who have that wound have trouble teaching because it's easier for them to do it themselves and they'll do it better. And so the whole learning curve process gets eliminated and the people that they work with don't actually grow unless they have the natural proclivity to figure out what's going on because you didn't take them through the leader, the learning of how to do these things better.

Yeah. Well, this was quite present for me. My wife and I, you know, she does a lot of our social media posting. She's not, she's a recruiter. And she decided to join in on this effort with me. And we were talking, and she wanted to brainstorm ideas. And she was talking about how she was going to go about the process of discovering them. And we had a podcast together. And what was going through my head is like, I haven't reread your write-up, and I haven't reread the questions, and I want to get through it. And I was like, yeah, all of that is great. Can we actually generate ideas together? Let's focus on the ideas, not the process. Why do we need to talk about the process? Let's generate the ideas. And we just put up what I've always done, right? Put up a white thing and we said, okay, tell me what you got. Tell me an idea. So she had one and she had two. And then I was like, here are 6 others. What about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? What about this? And then she had a couple more and we generated 10 ideas. That's 10 ideas for posts that are going to cover the next 10 weeks. So we got it done. But as she left, and I never had a chance to tell her this because I jumped onto this podcast. Right. But she's like, this is what you always do. You don't brainstorm. You just tell people what to do. And I'm like, but we did this together. And she's like, no, you didn't. I had some ideas and you told me the rest of them. Right. And I think it's— I'm just reflecting on it. This is a very 30 minutes ago

event.

Right. Right. But it is true in my pace to get there. And I think what she was really hungering for was kind of really to think through it. And maybe I'll go back after and find a little bit of time. to go through that process with her.

Be interesting. My question to you would be, what do you think would or could happen if you did it this other way?

Many things would happen. I think she learns a process and kind of figures out through that what works, what doesn't. Longer term, it'll free up time for me. But in the short term, you know, with all the things that are actually in my plate and all the things we're trying to get done, I think it would have been— I showed up unprepared. to our conversation or asked for a reschedule, which I already did by 15 minutes before we started, because I needed that time to actually read and think about our flow for the conversation, because I appreciate the time you're investing.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's funny that it's your wife, right? Because that's your partner in life as well. And the first thing that came to my mind was your wife will see you as valuing her more. And the other thing that I think is And I'm sure this is more male than female in our culture, but I think it's also, there's some hardwiring on men with like doing and fixing. But there's a hidden oasis of ideas that people only find when they're in conversation around something enough that suddenly they stumble onto, what about that? That neither one of them would've gotten to alone. And I think that's the hidden benefit of those kind of collaborative brainstorms.

For sure.

But it's interesting that you just had the experience. That's amazing.

Yeah. So look, I think we covered already what the shadow of a value looks like with the example of humility. That's right. But recognizing our own shadows, recognizing our shadows of our strengths, of our values, and of our wounds connects us back to what we started this conversation with. It actually requires space. It requires stillness. It requires actually elimination of things for emergence of what needs to emerge and for us to find things. And we are living at a world, we are living at a time that the world is speeding up faster than ever before. And I love this, that you argue in a lot of your book that when change moves faster than analysis, leaders need something deeper than another decision framework. You call them precepts, this notion of you need another way to be able to find a way. You need another way to be able to make decisions very quickly. So I want to pull on that a little bit and chat about what those precepts are and how does one find them.

Interesting experience to write this book because I think I wrote 3 books before I ended up at this one. I just kept changing it and editing it. Took me a long time, actually. Many, many weekends in the office is when I wrote it. The whole first 2/3 of the book are sort of these foundational tools, and the precepts is the pivot point. And what I found, I worked with a lot of companies and a lot of leaders, and there was this idea of values that everyone had, and they'd put them on the walls and they'd do all kinds of things with them. But if the values of a company are going to be the precepts of the company as an organism, then they have to be lived. And it's the same thing for the individual. So the way that I built it, and I did it, a lot of this stuff, even though it comes from esoteric systems, I tried to make it all really grounded and accessible. And the precepts tool is funny because I would have people pick 5 people that represented a particular quality that they really wanted to embody that mattered to them. And then they would do all this writing, really fleshing out every aspect of it. And then come down to just a single sentence mission statement for it, and then a word. And that's all great. The idea of the precepts is that you have 5 of them. You're in a complex situation. You don't know what's going on. You have integrity, love, honesty, whatever, you know, whatever your 5 values are. And you say, okay, am I out of alignment with any of my values? And if the answer is no, I'm in integrity with this, I'm in trust with that, I'm in love with that, I'm in clarity with that, Then you can say, okay, well, it doesn't seem like it's happening inside of me, so let me look at the outside system now and see where it's out of alignment with my values. And that's how corporate values are supposed to work as well.

Yeah.

Like, what was, what was Twitter's famous, uh, communicate fearlessly or something like that was written in giant letters on the wall or whatever. And, uh, and that's all well and good as an idea, but unless you live it, it doesn't work. And so with the individual values, it's much easier to track one person's values than an organization's, right? And what I would have people do, once we got the values clear, I built a little tracker and 6 times a day, I would have them just mark with a little check anytime they were out of alignment with any one of their values. And when you do that 6 times a day, what happens is it's not just the big infraction, they become more and more subtle. So if integrity with my word is one of my values, then Well, I wasn't way out of integrity. I wasn't lying, but I could have been more kind, more stern, more clear, more sharp, whatever it is. And by bringing it into your consciousness 6 times a day, you start to see all the little ways that you negotiate a little bit off that value. And it just really hones your awareness all the time of how you're living them. And it takes about 3 months before that's just in your consciousness. And you're like, I'm out. I'm in. I'm out. I'm

in. You're living in coherence with your values.

You're living in coherence with your values. Living in coherence with your values.

Well, I think it's a powerful step. It reminds me most people couldn't even articulate what their values are.

Right.

So I think that's a good place to start. The second after that, as you're saying, is are you living in coherence with them?

Yeah.

And if you are not, how do you shift? How do you change to be in coherence with them? Or maybe change the value. If that's not you and you're like, I can't do that, then at least don't call it a value. Find another one.

I think the reason I limit it to 5 is because it forces people to really choose, like, what are my values going to be? And one of the things that we do in those first 3 months of practice is, look, if one of these isn't working or you want to change it, change it. This is the time, like, let's try and And people would often, you know, think that this was the value that they held highest and it was actually this one over here. But they didn't really realize it until they were tracking it and practicing it every day. I think my ideal is for the core leadership in any company to do this. This is like my fantasy is to work with founders while they're designing their culture and helping them figure out how to actually live it through these kind of practices.

Yeah. And values that are not lived are not values, right? They're just Nice, pretty words.

Values that aren't lived when it's difficult also, which is, I think people often live them when it's easy and don't when it's hard. And I think that's where, that's also where they get honed. Like a corporate value, like fail fast is a classic corporate value that people use these days, right? Well, fail fast actually has parameters on it. So let's talk about fail fast. When the stakes are here, we want to fail fast a lot. When they're here, we want to be careful when we're failing fast, right? So Iterate fast, get your MVP out fast, like fail fast at the beginning, get a lot of data, start to make something that isn't going to fail as fast. Maybe fail a little more carefully after that.

Look, I think one question before I actually go there. Is there a particular list of values or a tool that you use for people to even recognize, here are 50 of them, choose your 5? How do you get them to discover those values?

I don't use those kind of tools because I want them to spend the time going inward because I think we've all had either a public figure is really just a projection that we have, project an idea about, right? Like Martin Luther King, Kennedy, Jesus, whatever. Right? So that's one place. The other thing is there's usually been someone in your life or people in your life who have explicitly shown a particular value that really impacted you. And you may not really have focused in on that until you do this exercise. So I like people to go inward and think about I ask, I mean, in the practice, I ask them, you know, like, describe your ideal day. Like, how do you live in your day? Describe the ideal way that you interact with people. Describe the ideal way you take care of yourself. So there, there's a pretty clear, like, fantasy of how we want to be living. And inside that fantasy is values. And then if you're missing something, it's like, well, I had this one teacher who took the time with me to help me understand how I could actually excel in this place where I hadn't. And those people and experiences are the places where those values got ingrained in us because they mattered to our happiness.

Yeah. Look, I think there are a couple that I love that, right? One is think about it. I think the second is live your experience through people you admire, people who affect, you know, who've really, really made an impact on you. And what about them do they appreciate? I think can be good mining field. You know, I have, but many people, unfortunately, it's a little bit like emotions. Most people don't know anything other than I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm happy, I'm anxious, right? The vocabulary runs out at 5 or 6, maybe 8.

Yeah.

One of the tools that I found to be quite helpful is, you know, I have people do the VIA, Values in Action, character strength.

Yeah.

It's free. It's from the positive psychology, Marty Seligman's work. I found that to be quite helpful. And I think in leadership context, I found actually Brené Brown's list updating greatly. She has a list of a lot of values. Yeah. To be able to even put it out there, and especially if you're doing it as a company, to just put that list up and do a word cloud. Have everybody independently, rather than the CEO and then everybody is having the sunflower effect, just see what's present for all of you. Because as a company, if you adopt certain values that are not coherent with you all as a leadership team,

That's right.

Right? And then have a debate about it. Have a discussion about it. It's just like you just choose the 5 top ones. You talk about what's missing. And I think if you're able to create a process where people get heard and you kind of really think about it and you translate into where you're going and how it shows up in a behavior, what would it look like? Would we be able to live into this in a hard time, or is it just something we're kind of putting out there because it looks really cool?

Yeah, I think that's— when I work with companies, we use the word cloud also. I haven't used the VIA or Brené Brown's list exactly, but it's good ideas. It hadn't really, I haven't really run into people not having their own value ideas. Maybe that's like the kind of people I'm talking to.

Yeah.

But,

but you know, that's why this was, you know, 7 Habits of Effective People. That was one of the core elements. I mean, the fact that it was there was because most people live so much in the doing, they actually don't stop enough to actually look at who am I? What do I care about? Where do I want to be? What's the legacy I want to leave behind? What do people want to remember me by? I mean, these are questions you discovered early. I can tell you, I did not think about this till I was 44, right?

So I would say that you've uncovered a little blind spot for me. I couldn't see that, but of course, in retrospect, that makes perfect sense.

Yeah. If you asked me, what are your values? I would've said impact, performance. Yeah. Connection, connection, because that's been my core essence, relationship. And then I would be, I don't know, speak the truth. Don't

lie.

Do I live that all the time? Yeah, I don't lie. But your example of how much of the thing am I willing to cut off? I'm feeling this, but I'm only going to go say so much. So what's, what does that talk about your relationship with it?

Yeah. And they start to get into these 5 ingredients. You can cook a lot of different meals. So my integrity mixed with my kindness, mixed with my compassion caused me to not slam that person for canceling on me, but instead I said, no worries. Let's reschedule when the time works for both of us. And 3 of those values went into that outcome. And I think that's where, when you're really dialed into them, it's a pretty powerful way to operate and it's simple.

Yeah. I love that. You know, the core undertone behind all of this is one is stillness, space, but the other is what's the state of your nervous system? You can't do this work. You can't think about this work from an activated, triggered, nervous system running on adrenaline and cortisol. And, you know, you have a powerful practice and it's a breathing practice that can enable people to very quickly quieten the nervous system. And I would love to have you do it together live as for people to discover and, you know, maybe find a moment in their day when they're listening and hopefully not do it while they're driving, but find a time when they get home and try this practice.

I think one of the big misconceptions about all of this work is that I need to sit on a cushion for 45 minutes and stop my thoughts. We have a simple phrase, which is, if the problem's in your mind, go to the body. The problem's in the body, go to your mind. And for all of these nervous system regulation things, it's usually that the mind's running on a flywheel of some projection in the future or rumination on the past, and using the body to put you in the present will take you out of it. And we do this on, on Mondays before all of our standups at Tiffin, we do between like 3 and 5 minutes of this meditation before we start the meeting and it sets the whole week up. And a lot of those people don't meditate, never did meditate, don't want to meditate, but centering practice and breathing together and doing a little guided self-hypnosis actually to come into the present moment and downregulate. Over time, it became something that everyone would immediately step into. And if you're watching, You can see their body language neutralizes, their muscles relax, their facial muscles relax, their breathing changes from shallow to deeper. And when they come out of it, they're in a different state. My point is just that it's easy and it doesn't take a lot of time. So don't let that be a barrier for you.

So let's do it together.

Let's do it. So put your left hand on your abdomen, your belly button, that area. Put your right hand on your heart. In the center of your chest. Close your eyes. If it's comfortable to breathe through your nose, breathe through your nose. If it's not, breathe through your mouth, whatever you need to do. We like to breathe through our nose because it filters the air as it's coming in. And we start with just natural breathing. It's deep, but no effort. So just follow your breath to the deepest breath you can take without strain. And you want to feel your abdomen lifting into your palm, sort of pushing your lower hand away from your body. Both your feet are on the ground. As you inhale, you feel the abdomen expanding. As you exhale, you feel it gently falling back towards your spine. Brings the vagus nerve into play, which is the parasympathetic or the relaxing nerve. It's the easiest way for you to gently calm down your nervous system. And you do that about 7 or 9 times and you start to feel your body relaxing and kind of anchoring down into the abdomen. Maybe you feel your hips relax, your lower legs relax. And now as you breathe in, you want to breathe in, expand the abdomen still, but now expand the chest with your breath too. So breathe into the ribs. A little more effort to engage all of those rib muscles. Exhale, feel the chest fall back down and the abdomen go in. And if it's feeling hard to inhale into the chest, sit forward on your chair and just lift your body and let it come forward a little bit. And you'll notice when you're not leaning back, it's easier for the middle spine to open and the ribs to lift. And see if you can feel that in-breath come all the way into the top of your shoulders. So you breathe in the abdomen, the chest up into the shoulders. And as you exhale, the shoulders fall, the ribs fall, the abdomen goes in. You notice a natural waveform in your body, like the ocean rolling in and out from the shore. And then as we keep doing this breathing, we're going to add in our imaginal cells, our imagination. Because we've already got this rising from the abdomen into the chest, we're going to imagine that we can breathe all the way up through the throat and the roof of the palate, all the way up to the top of the head. Feel your head pressing up with the in-breath, your spine relaxing down with the out-breath. The ribs falling, the abdomen going in. And if you want, you can visualize light coming from the lower abdomen, turning crimson gold in the heart, and then a bright white light coming all the way up to the brain. Feel your mind clearing and open, your chest and heart relaxed and open, rooted in the belly. Do a few more breaths like this. Spine expanding all the way to the top of the head with the in-breath, relaxing down with the out-breath. Take one more breath in. As you exhale, let your hands slowly back, slide back down to your thighs. Feel your body in the present moment. Maybe you feel the ground on your feet, your hands in your lap, the air on your skin, the light on the surface of your eyelids. And then following this rhythm on your next breath in, as you breathe in, flutter open your eyes and you're back. It was a gift for me to get to deliver it. It's funny, the true secret that no one knows about facilitating a moment of meditation is that I also get to go into that space 'cause I'm just narrating what I'm experiencing. So I drop right in with you. And I've found from teaching online that even online, the coherence field that happens between us is real.

Yeah. So Thomas, as we close, what are 3 actionable do-this-week practices that you would recommend for our audience?

Well, I would do the one we just did. I think anytime you can take a few minutes and do that, it's so easy. It's incredibly powerful. The nature solo, it's funny. So in the book, I talk about this a lot. But if you go out into nature with a problem, just go to a local park or your backyard or whatever it is. If you're comfortable, take your shoes off and feel the grass on your feet and then see what attracts you in that environment, whether it's a tree or a bush, or maybe just sitting on the grass and bring the issue you're struggling with a little bit into that space and observing this natural environment and this one thing in particular that you've been attracted to. Notice how it operates. Like if it's a hot day, notice the, if you're looking at a tree and you see the shade that it's creating, the leaves want all of that sunlight, right? Because they're creating photosynthesis and using it. What's growing in the shade of the tree is everything that doesn't want that sunlight. And so the harmony of these 2 completely opposing forces often have a relationship. In this case, it would be the trunk and roots of the tree, and it pulls you out into a systems viewpoint really quickly. And don't try to solve it, but just let yourself observe how whatever you're looking at and connecting with is operating. And then come back and try to look at the question through that viewpoint. The last thing I would say is, and it's make physical contact with someone, like spend time, like give someone a hug, hold someone's hand, put your hand on their back, ask someone for a hug, lean in on someone. Make some physical contact with another person and just see what comes up when you change the information flow from translation of my thoughts and feelings to words that are then sent at a tone to the immediate information that's shared from a moment of contact.

Beautiful. I love all 3. Thomas, thank you. For our listeners, we'll put it in the show notes, but Thomas just released a book called The Leader Within. 14 Foundational Practices for Leading a Meaningful Life. Thomas, brace yourself. You are wise, so you should own that. Thank you for all the work you do. Thank you for the different ways in which you're actually bringing so much of the wisdom traditions and science behind what allows us to be at our best in the theater of work where we spend most of our lives and where we are at the least, you know, in terms of our full potential. Because of all the friction that exists, because of the level of work that we are trying to get done. So thank you for bringing healing to workplaces that are not associated with healing. You're a gift.

It is my pleasure.

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