The Power of Silence with Leigh Marz

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode, I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

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Foreign.

The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. This is a book you're going to want to get whether you listen, whether you download it, whether you get a hard copy, it's incredible. It goes from the west wing of the White House to San Quentin's death row, from Ivy League brain labs to underground psychedelic circles, all to explore the meaning of silence and the art of finding it in any situation. One of the co authors, Lee Martz, joins us today. Lee is a leadership and collaboration consultant with organizations including Harvard, Google and ikea. She has led a multi year program teaching experimental mindsets to multi generational teams at NASA. Lee is also a longtime student of pioneering researchers and practitioners of the ritualized use of psychedelic medicines in the West. Sit back and enjoy the show.

Lee. A massive welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks for having me, James. It's good to be here.

Such a pleasure. I'm very excited. When I seen the golden the book, I was like, yes, I need to talk to you. So before we get into that exciting stuff, I just want to ask you a question. When you think of leadership, what comes to mind?

Yeah, that's a big one. And it's actually changed and evolved over time. I think right now what I'm really attuned to is a leader who really knows themselves, who's really.

Attuned to themselves, but is also good at sensing the talents and the yearnings and the needs in a system and really helps leverage people in their gifts that may be way outside of their own. And I think that's really something that indicates to me a leader is really mature, is that they can nurture other leaders that have super different talents and that they can really sense the needs of the system and motivate them in that way. So it really takes. It's no small thing to be a great leader, I think, especially for the long haul. So that's what comes to my mind. Yeah.

Thank you. I really love that. You're right. I think there are moments where we can show great leadership, but to do that over a sustained period of time, I mean, that's truly a challenge.

Yeah. That is actually what I'm in the midst of, working with just great leaders, great founders who are really trying to create something that long outlasts them because the need is still there. Say they're removing toxic chemicals from our products and our homes. It's like, how does that organization live without just that one person being the face and the hard work of that? You have to really activate a whole team. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing.

We think of leadership. Sometimes it's a title, it's CEO, it's director, it's the captain of the ship. But really, from what I hear you saying, it's more. So it's ongoing, it's never ending, it's constant growth and curiosity.

Absolutely. And you really want to see it at all levels, you know, and every level that there's some ability to express and lead in some way. I think that's where we really see an organization shine.

Yeah.

And do something different.

Yeah, absolutely. You're right.

Great question.

Now we are in a world that, you know, if we rewind 50 years, there's no digital technology, there's no pings, there's no dings, there's no Instagram, Snapchat, live streaming, there's none of that. But nowadays we've got so much around us and the demand for our attention is just huge. So you have written an incredible book along with your co author, and that book really dives deep into the fact that we are in a very noisy, distracted, world. What led you to the point of being able to write that book and being inspired to write that book?

Well, at first, I think we had to be completely despondent about the state of the world. So in other words, I think we kind of fell flat on faces first felt a sense of desperation to break through the noise. So Justin, my. Justin Zorn, my co author and partner in crime, was working in D.C. as the legislative director for three members of Congress and really quite in the thick of things there. And as you mentioned, it's louder than it's ever been. And I think Capitol Hill's one of the loudest environments one could be in. And then I was also working and am still working on really complex issues that feel very urgent. So they have that charge of, oh, my gosh, it's, you know, we're working on climate change, we're working on toxic chemicals. You know, we've got to do everything we can. We got to squeeze it all in. So there's a lot of urgency, compounding the importance that we all feel. And so both of us had really hit our limits with that. More. The answer wasn't feeling like more meetings, more talking, just a different way to clever. Cleverly, you know, depict something or more, you know, I don't know, it just didn't feel like more faster was doing any good. And so we both have the same intuition that the place to look would be in silence, that maybe the answers would come from beyond and maybe between all the mental stuff, that it wouldn't come from more thinking and talking and Lord knows not. More meetings and more PowerPoints.

I'm with you on that.

Yeah.

Interesting, the idea of silence. You know, I've got a client who's heading to India for two months to see his family, and he ays, James, for 10 days, I'm going on a silence retreat, a meditation, and I won't speak. And so I'm very curious about it. And there's a deep part of me that wants to do exactly the same thing. I'm a talker, I like to ask questions, I love to engage with people. But actually, I'm very much an introvert, and I love my own space and I live way far from the city and I love to look at the ocean. And so for me, silence is almost essential to just thrive and survive. So what's your experience around the root of silence in our. In our civilization? What are the cultures that have embraced silence, that have really helped them?

Really? So many, in fact, in this book, we're really arguing that this is a innate human understanding that we need downtime, that we need quiet, that there's value in that time. And so one, one place we look, for example, because this shows up in all the world's religious traditions, science is proving it out. I mean, more, more recently, we look at neuroscience and we look at just physical science and how it, how the impact of noise is so great, not just on our ears, but on our entire bodies, and how silence is restor healing. Even so, there's been, you know, conventional wisdom, has known this for some time. The science is catching up. We also look at an ancient Japanese principle called ma. Ma, transliterated the kanji characters, is a temple gate. So imagine a temple gate with slats through it and the golden sunlight pouring through. So it is this word that means emptiness, nothingness. It's also defined as silence, although our favorite definition is pure potentiality. So in those spaces, like you're describing, looking out in the ocean, the time of reflection, even what your client is about to go do, that is just like it's not nothing that's happening in that time, right? It's pure potentiality. And that sentiment is found throughout Japanese aesthetics. For example, if you look at haiku poetry, what is said is as important as what is unsaid. If you look at ikebana flower arrangement, you can imagine the branches and the petals, that the empty space around that arrangement is as important as the petals and leaves themselves. Scroll painting, same thing. The swoosh of the paintbrush is. Yes, it's that. That's part of it. So is the empty space that, that it's presented on. So that balance of the content and the emptiness or the content and the pure potentiality is something that we sorely lack right now in our environment. We're a little seduced by content, I would say a little transfixed on that doing and saying and, you know, writing and posting and all in responding those actions and not giving enough space for the reflective, the space for things to emerge. And that's really the kind of work I'm doing in complexity and spaces of complexity. That's where innovation takes place. That's where novel thinking takes place. And if you're just, just going for the quick reaction, you're going to get conventional thinking. You're not going to get new interesting ideas and you're not going to include a whole lot of people who tend to be maybe introverts, maybe it's just slower kinesthetic processors. You're not going to get the kind of edgy interest ideas. So you're working, you know, you're not doing your best thinking in those situations to point to that in particular.

Yeah, that's really powerful and I really do resonate with that. So for the last 30 years, I've been a drummer and often if I have a drum line and people, you know, people are playing and all of a sudden we stop. That's where the most impact for everyone. They're like, whoa. Like, then you come back in. It's like that, that piece of silence where you guys didn't play, that was the most powerful piece of the music. I was like, yeah, but we didn't play. Like, we did nothing. Yeah, that was it. We enjoyed that bit the best.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah. Musicians never have trouble with this. Right. It's like, what would music be without those silent spaces in between? Which is also the ma. The pure potentiality and that juxtaposition of beautiful sound. Like, there's a great quote by Susan Sontag that great art leaves silence in its wake. And that's what I hear you saying. You're speaking to that. That like you're in the moment, you're feeling it, and then the silence allows you to really appreciate it, to turn, like to just recognize with that incredible moment of people playing together. And that's an old technology, if you will trance and dance and making music and improv. It's like, that's old technology. That's what I mean. This is not a new hack. This is not a newfangled idea. We know how to be with silence. We know the beauty that it can bring into our lives. And we're sorely lacking it.

Yeah, we really are, 100%. It's. We had an earthquake, well, several thousand earthquakes here in Christchurch in 2011.

Oh, you're in Christchurch. Okay.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so interesting. I'd never been in an earthquake. And in Ireland, we'd talked about it in school and been told what to do, but Ireland never experiences earthquakes. So it was in New Zealand, it was the middle of the night, the house was, you know, this is seven point something earthquake. And the house was going nuts. But when that earthquake stopped, that silence was deafening. Like, it was profound. It was incredible. I'll never forget that moment was like, whoa, the earth has stood still. But it was, I think, the contrast with the incredible noise that the earth moving and shaking to nothing. I was like, wow. The whole city, the whole island essentially had stood still for a moment. And that's something I'll never forget. It was really, really powerful.

What do you think? For you was going on in there. We, we. I asked, because we opened the book with this question. What's the deepest silence you've ever known? And I'm not saying that's your very deepest, but it sounds like it was up there for you. What's the deepest silence you've ever known? Like, and what. What was that experience like for you? What changed? Bringing in there?

I think what the deepest silence would be.

I think probably.

I just moved to New Zealand. I was in my early 20s, and I'd been running a rehearsal, a music rehearsal that was probably 9pm and my phone rang and I answered. It was my dad in Ireland. And he says, your granddad just died. And that just that moment, it was. It was true. Yeah, deep silence, deep reflection.

I felt really connected.

Yeah, there was a very deep emotion. It was sadness, but also it was joy. It's like he was the greatest granddad ever. Like, I really connected with. With him throughout my life. But, yeah, it was really powerful emotional moment. So I felt like not only was there silence between me and my dad after him telling me that news, but there was this strong emotional experience combined with that silence. So it wasn't silence, and I was numb. It was silence. And I was deeply charged in an emotional way. So, yeah, I would say that that was probably the biggest moment for me.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

I love how you describe that. And that is essentially what we found is we. So we wrote this article for Harvard Business review back in 2017. It was really focusing on auditory noise, just the loudness of the world, which is, by the way, if people are wondering, is it louder? Yes, it's exponentially louder. We use the proxy indicator of emergency sirens to look at how those decibel levels have increased in order order to alert people in these. You know, it needs to break through the den, right? It needs to get our attention. So in the last hundred years, those alarms have gotten six times louder than they were in the past. So yes, it's louder auditorily, we were interested in that and we were interested in this idea like your client, about, you know, what would it be like to even just not talk for a day, to just not be giving our, you know, to not be in that constant state of reactivity and needing to post and needed to speak and you know, to, to rest those mental reflexes. So anyway, we wrote a very simple short article for Harvard Business Review about those ideas and it went viral. And so we thought, okay, there's something to look at here. And we started asking people, interviewing people, neuroscientists, politicians, poets, executives, whirling dervish, a man incarcerated on death row, all sorts of amazing people. What's the deepest silence you've ever known? And they pointed us so much further than these auditory moments. Right. They took us to things like you described, like births and deaths and moments of awe and moments of profound connection to nature, to other people. Maybe it's auditorily loud, like maybe they're on the dance floor like I was this morning and it's really loud, but you're just, you know, you kind of lose yourself in the best way. So as we started on that journey and getting, getting those answers found that there's actually an emerging area of science, kind of across scientific area, looking at self transcendent experiences where one can feel kind of a shrinking of the egoic small self, the part of ourselves that's always telling us stories about ourselves, but an expansion of self too, because you know, even what you just described with your grandfather and your father and feeling that, and these are my words, but sort of that connection to ancestry, to the profundity of that moment, how it was going to shift your whole system, how fortunate you were, the gratitude that was in there, probably the very few words that you and your father needed to convey the like, how huge this was. All in, like that moment, all in silence. And now that changed you and that that was the thing to come up like. So this doesn't require 10 days of going away. This book isn't for people running off to retreat, although they might enjoy it and I hope they would. It's really for those of us in the thick of things, in the fullness of this life and living our lives and just appreciating that silence, making more space for it.

Yeah, that's amazing. And in terms of the. If we don't engage with this silence and really make space for that, what's the potential consequence or outcome if we constantly just surround ourselves with distraction and noise.

I say it, it'd be the antithesis of what you're here to do on your podcast. Like we, we are not on purpose. We're not, we may not be leading that well. We're certainly not on purpose. So for Justin and I, when we look at this, the importance of this, it's, you know, silence is enjoyable and it brings us all kinds of riches and sen. Connection. It helps us discern what is noise in our lives and what is the true signal, that which really bears our attention. Because in that noise, there are some things that really need our attention.

So without that, it's hard to attune to. And the louder it gets, the harder it gets. Like our instruments, if you, you know, I kind of use that type of language art, the instrument that is sensing things in the world, it gets kind of cluttered with all the, you know, all the interference and all the static. And so I'll use an example. There's a gentleman who comes in early in the book to describe this, the importance of this. His name is Cyrus Habib. So Cyrus Habib is the son of an Iranian immigrant, was blinded by a childhood disease at age 8, but still went on to go to Yale and was a Rhodes scholar and all. I mean, just incredible achievements. And after he learned how to read Braille. So we climbed the ladder here in politics and became the lieutenant governor in the second ranking office in the state of Washington by the age of 30. I don't know, let's say young, 30s. I'm not entirely, I'm not remembering the exact date, but by the time he was, you know, in his mid-30s, people were thinking, okay, he's going to run for senator. He's going to run for governor for sure. He's amazing. You know, he's just such a heartful politician, really. A rare, rare breed. But when we spoke with him, he had decided.

Not to run for Senate, not to run for governor, but to become a Jesuit novice. Wow. And yeah, to take a step, step back. And he says, you know, yes, politics was loud and yes, it was hard, but I'm not trying to escape here. He was just feeling the sense that he would. He was incapable of discerning what was true. The true signal from his heart is how he described it. So he decided to, to take those vows and go into a 30 day silent meditation where what did he notice? He noticed how loud, not the outside environment had been and was no longer or the informational Environment, the dialing for dollars and all the stuff politicians do in this country. But how loud his internal chatter was. So that was the loudest thing. And he was constantly like worried, what will people think? And is this crazy? Am I nuts here? And so he spent, spent if you can imagine, like 30 days of listening to that and got really clear that no, this is where I really want to be. So he will go, no doubt back out into service and he's, you know, to. The Jesuits are known for that. So he'll probably come back out into politics but with a much clearer sense of what he's here, what his purpose is and aligning to that because his, his devotion all along has been to, you know, anti poverty work and all kinds of great work that we could get behind. But he wasn't feeling like he was quite, do you know, he's getting distracted a little bit. And we all might, you know, a lot of us, I think there are times where we're just like a little bit off from our real purpose. But a couple of degrees, you're on a different continent in navigation. So you got, you want to watch it and really tune in and get, get aligned in that way. So we look to Cyrus Abib to kind of help us get the taxonomy of noise. So we look at auditory noise, informational noise. So auditory, that's what's coming in our ears, informational, that which is usually coming at us through our screens. And you mentioned the binging and the pinging and oh my gosh. So the past CEO of Google estimates that from the dawn of civilization to 2003, we generate as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilization in 2003.

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Oh, that's like shocking.

Yeah. In the United States we take in something like five times more information as the past generation did. So we're cramming ourselves with information, but it's also grabbing for our attention, as you pointed out. So it's aggressive. And then we look at, well, what does that do to our internal landscape? What does that do to the soundscape in here in our minds? And Ethan Cross, a professor of a professor at University of Michigan, estimates that we listen something like something to 320 state of the Union addresses every day. Now, State of the Union addresses, United States are probably not that different than they are in other countries, but let's just say they're often very, very long winded.

Yeah.

And yeah, tons of words, tons of promises, very few made follow through on. So the issue, like there's feedback loops between all this noise and that's what we're wanting to cut through, create more permission, more space for us to drop into silence and appreciate the many forms it takes. It may be meditation, which we hit upon as one of the ways, but this is really a non meditator's guide to getting beyond the noise. We're interested in all the other ways that people find silence in their days, which could be flow states, you know, it could be moments of awe, it could be any number of things.

I'm very excited to look at some of those. And before we look at some of those options for people, I was just thinking about the well being of Today's workforce in the corporate world, the amount of anxiety, the amount of people taking sick days that are mental health related. So in your studies and research, have you seen connections between all this noise and urgency and are essentially a pandemic of anxiety?

Yeah, and that's really how we're defining internal noise is that rumination, fixation, anxiety and depression, which seems to be quite on the rise. I would say it's a pretty new area of study in terms of the link to the neuroscience. But neuroscientists are interested what are the states in which we are not preoccupied with all that internal chatter? What's happening in the brain when we measure it? What is it?

Is the activity of the prefrontal cortex down regulated, which some people hypothesize.

Transient hypofrontality is one of the theories. And then others say, well this has more to do with attentional networks being firing in a different way, maybe that's what's happening. And others look at the default mode network being deregulated. And so thanks to a lot of studies that are taking place with medit.

With people using it mind expanding drugs like psilocybin and another LSD and other things, they're getting to map the brain. And some of what we thought was true, like oh, when you're taking psilocybin for example, it looks like a dreaming brain, it's really active. It's like actually no, the default mode network, that's the area of the brain, the ME network it's sometimes called, where we tell ourselves stories about ourselves. That area of the brain is actually quite quiet, not silent because actually a silent brain is a dead brain. So you don't want that.

So this is why it's such an interesting area to be looking at is like what is happening in the brain? What is not happening in the brain? Why is it that it feels silent and quiet to us and what are some of those activities? So looking at self transcendent experiences there, I mentioned flow states. So that's what's so lovely about looking at flow states. I mean it's hard to measure that because you're usually, you know, like maybe you're on a ball court or maybe you're skiing and there's not the machinery for that yet. But we know like it's a pretty universal experience. Most people know what it's like to be in a state of flow from at least from time to time. You know, some people really know that that space really well. Other people talk about moments of awe and where you might be looking out some beautiful, vast, you know, landscape, or maybe you're contemplating something like string theory and you're just like, whoa. Another that, that sense of self, egoic, self shrinking, but the sense of interconnectivity to, you know, you're getting larger and smaller at the same time, you know, so there's something really beautiful about that. There's something really quietening about that. Also those are experiences brought about in meditation, maybe through mind expanding drugs, things like that, and mystical experiences which are hard to measure because they're usually spontaneous. And you don't tend to have an FMRI on hand when you're becoming one with God, it turns out. So we look where we can and it's just a fascinating area. We had so much fun looking into this. What does it mean to be quiet? Quiet is what we think quiet is. And that's one of the things we point the reader and your listeners to, is that it doesn't matter what, what anybody else is doing for their, you know, form of quiet. They may be meditating, they may be not meditating. You know, around where I'm in Berkeley, California, there's a lot of finger wagging if you're not meditating enough, mostly to ourselves, but it's like, oh, you're not. I should be meditating. I've been meaning to meditate, but forget that. Like, if that's not how you find your silence, don't worry about it. If it's gardening, then then perfect. If it's dance like I just describing in a loud studio, perfect. You know, whatever. The way that we find our way is, what's important.

What this book is about is the many, many routes to silence.

Yeah, I love that you actually redefined silence. And silence is not nothingness and, you know, zero sound. It's actually, it's finding a place where you're in flow and you're deeply connected and essentially you've silenced the distractions of your mind.

Yeah, when we look at this, we say silence is the absence of noise, but it's also so much more than that. And it was our interview, interviews with people that pointed us in this direction, that silence is the absence of noise, but it's also a presence unto itself. So we turn to all these just brilliant thinkers for definitions. And a few of those are like, or Gordon Hempton, he talks about silence as the think tank for the soul.

Pier Shabda Khan, who's a Sufi mystic and musician here in the Bay Area. He says silence is not silent at all. It's Teeming with life and joy and ecstasy. But it's quiet of thoughts of the self. It's quiet of foolishness.

I love that. Yeah, that's so powerful.

It is, it is. And we just had a blast talking to people with their definitions and that's it. Of course, another thing we love, for people to find their own way to silence. What is, is silence for you? You know, what is that, that moment you described, and thank you, by the way, for sharing such a, such an important moment. That's the other thing, is that these deepest silences, they're pretty profound moments in our lives and very tender. So you know what is happening in that space? I mean, I mentioned there's that sense, can be that sense of feeling connected to something way bigger and deeper than this present.

Timeline. You know, the full ancestry, the whole lineage, all the, all of those things. And the gift of being raised in a, in a kind family with a kind grandfather like you described.

Yeah, yeah, Very fortunate. Very, very fortunate. And I think, you know, I think of say the CEO or the leader and in the back of their mind they're going, you know what? I have to be busy and I have to be always doing. And if I just be silent and I get into flow state and do something that's not work related, I'm going to miss, going to drop the ball. What's your message to that individual that's almost borderline addicted to work and addicted to urgency? What's your message around silence and its place in their role?

Yeah, it's sort of, it's, in some ways it's twofold. We definitely have to look at our own patterns here, our own habits, and we are addicted. We can, many of us individually take, us take that into account, seem to be pretty addicted to being busy. And we have a whole chapter that is titled why Silence is Scary. Because our suspicion, and this is from the inside out. Like I said, we're not experts on silence. We just, we're just walking. We're walking through this curriculum like everybody. Once we called this in, we sort of had to walk the talk. Right. So why is silence scary? Why am I resisting this time with myself, with my family, to facing this, maybe my career choice, my marriage, my life choices, whatever that is. You know, we honor that, that silence can be scary, that the noise, the busyness can be really masking and covering a lot of things that are not working in our lives. So acknowledging that is so. And also there is a system in place in the United States anyway. It's the gdp, right? It's the gross domestic product. Everything is driving towards more noise in this country. We don't value a pristine redwood forest. It's only valuable if we, we cut it up, chop it up and sell it at Home Depot. The same is true of our pristine attention. Unless we cut that up and make turn it into click throughs and eyeballs on a screen. It's also not valuable to the system. So there's a bit of a both in. There's a personal responsibility and something to investigate for sure. And the system is rigged at least here and in many of the countries where I know you have your listeners the system is rigged and so there's something to change on a bigger, broad, broader scale and that's we so we in this book look at our individual practices and the practices we might have with co workers in the office and also those on at home with loved ones and family and friends. But also how we as a society can honor silence for what it actually gives us which we believe is you know, the ability to connect, the ability to get true on our purpose, the ability to heal, the ability to reflect and all of this is so needed these days. So we miss out on a lot when we don't make time for that. Like everything, everything that matters.

Every leader needs to hear that. That actually the gold is in the silence.

Absolutely. So we. I found this time and time again. So I, I mean I was guilty of. I was hired by NASA Goddard Space Flight center to do some work in their communications for multi generational teams and to help they're keeping in touch with their experimental mindset that they stay nimble right in their problem solving particularly around climate. It was a great honor and pleasure to work with them and I was scared to death when I first got in there. So what did I do? I did. This is a total rookie move. I packed the agenda so full that there wasn't even a moment for them to breathe or reflect or object or anything thing. You know it was just like two weeks worth of workshop in two days just now NASA self described workforce is self described 75% introverts. So by the end of day one they, they looked like they'd been through a hurricane. Right. They were wreck like shells of themselves. Anyway, by the end of day two they were just flattened. So I realized that okay, this is not going to work like we want to. This is not going to work. So we pulled out all kinds of. So that was a ma less free for all if we go back to the Japanese term. I was, you know, There was not a moment of ma. So we really like to encourage people in the workplace to bring in ma. Now if you think about those types of meetings where you're trying to idea generate, if you can actually build in some time for reflection, maybe it's just for the introverts to do some personal reflection, everybody to do some personal reflection to make it friendly to the introverts and then share ideas. Or maybe it's you post ideas, ideas and have some quiet reflection and even, you know, anonymous kind of, you know, voting and things like that, or sleep on it for a night, come back the next day. If we can add some spaciousness in these kinds of idea generation things, we're going to see much better thinking in the. As the end result. So that should be very tempting to anybody unless you're going for conventional thinking, which most of us are not. You need some, you need some edge, right? You need some breakthrough. You need some novel thinking. That's how you do it.

Also, looking at our schedules in a day, many of us especially, oh, you know, now with Zoom, you know, we're going zoom to Zoom, to Zoom, to Zoom, you know, and, and here we are, we're tethered to these, you know, to these computers. We can't even move about, can't even, you know, quite stretch and, and things like that. So we need to build in time for preparation for reflection and integration on the other side. You know, we need to do things a little differently than we are. So, so even thinking about just what used to be the smoke break, right? Bringing in these little moments for resetting, reflecting, connecting to ourselves, connecting to our breath, just getting a nice glass of water or stepping outside into the rays of the sun and connecting to the sounds in the wind.

Song, young bees. It just even like that can be a reset mentally and can bring a lot to what comes next.

Really powerful. What, what does a day look like or a week look like in your life? What, what kind of space do you create in between the noise and in between the commitments of parenthood and your professional career? What, what do you do?

Mm, well, I really look and we do this in the book as well. We're looking at micro moments. So, so there really are these tiny. We have a little chapter called the Healthy Successor to the Smoke Break where I confess that I was a smoker. And it's not so much that, it's that I loved being a smoker. Like I loved, loved, loved the ritual of a deep inhale and a deep exhale. That break built in, in the day. And I was working in crisis, High stress work. Right. Crisis shelters for runaway youth and battered women at different times. So. So it was a real need to have that moment. But I'm glad I quit. But when I quit smoking, I also quit taking those breaks.

Until now, right? Until recently. Until I realized, oh, my gosh, my body can't stand being at a. At a desk for this long. I actually need to move. I'm a dancer and a choreographer. Like, I actually cannot be tied to a desk like this. So movement, little movement, stepping out into the garden, watching bumblebees, things like that. Just like. Like, you know, doesn't have to be big or complicated. It definitely doesn't need, like, rules and tools and of, you know, bells and cushions and specialized things. Just whatever brings you joy. So those micro moments are pretty important. And then I think there's something there to be just said about really deeper, more immersive practices. So one that I really love. I mentioned Gordon Hempton before. He's the one who defined silence as the think tank for the soul school. He talks about taking his to do list out for a hike. So he has this. He has this. I guess he keeps some pretty hefty to do lists. And if they. When they get to a certain length, he's like, okay, I gotta stop. I'm gonna print it out. I'm gonna take it out as far into the woods for him as he goes out into the whole rainforest in. In Washington state. And it's one of the quietest places on earth. He, according to his, you know, instrumentation and his recordings, which is what he does. So he heads out there and he lets himself be immersed in that quiet, in that silence. For him, nature is one of its places of quiet. And after he really feels this, you know, the effect of it, he'll take that to do list out, unfold it, and start slashing all these things that he just doesn't want to do. Doesn't feel important from this place, from his desk, he's convinced he has to do it. And it's the most important thing. From there, from the quiet, he sees otherwise. And so the last time we talked to him, he had removed something like five months of work that he swore to us felt really important at his desk. But in that space, not so much. Folds up his list and then hikes back out five months later. Later.

Wow, that is golden.

Totally.

I love it. I need to try that.

Yeah, we need those deeper moments. So not just the micro moments. That's not. That's not Quite enough. We also need to build some capacity with some to be with ourselves in that place, to be, you know, real with what we're actually devoting and putting our time to and what, you know, what that trajectory is. Is it, is it, is it on course or is that couple degrees off course like I talked about, that's going to send you into a different continent. It eventually.

And I just want to say for the listener that's listening right now, you're probably on your phone. So please take a moment, get the phone and go to Amazon or whatever book reseller that you like to go to and download a copy, buy a copy. If you'd prefer to listen on audible, go to audible and search for golden. And it's going to do you good. It's going to do yourself, your family, your colleagues, the people that you lead and love. There's going to be gold in, in the book. So thank you so much for taking the time to actually create the research, to create the outcomes from the research, to put the book together, to give us access to that. Because we are too nosy, too busy, too distracted to go and find out for ourselves and for you to bring it together in such an incredibly distilled and powerful way. Like I read Arianna Huffington's testimonial. It was just like, wow, mind blowing. And Pema Chodron as well. Yeah, the who's who of well being and spirituality just singing your praises speaks volumes about the quality of your work and the importance of your work. So today I'm inspired after this actually to create some space and I can hear the birds out through the glass, but I'm going to get out there and be with them for a moment. Thank you for that.

Oh, you're so welcome. Do it, do it. And I didn't mention this, but I just want to give a little shout out for finding those practices with your friends and families. And there's a, a whole section on that and then really getting deeper into that. What does it mean to do this work together, those of us who are working in teams and things? Because there's a lot of deep work that's missing, a lot of deep, thoughtful, you know, work that's missing because we're just getting interrupted all the time and we can feel that it's like there's a quality that's not there. So there's some solutions there as well as what we can do as larger communities and society to really value silence. So that's what this book is about, is appreciating appreciating silence. And again, gifts it brings. Thank you so much for your, you know, your appreciation of it.

Oh, my pleasure. Absolutely. My pleasure. And I guess one thing I hear a lot from clients and friends who've got kids who are late teens or they're adults just saying, you know what? That time goes so quick. I'm so guilty at times I was too busy to be present. So I imagine this book and some of the practices within it will allow parents who do have kids that are still kids to create space for deep connection that they can be so proud of when they look back in later years.

Absolutely. In fact, Justin and I, so Justin has twins who are almost three and a six year old. So we're. We're really not messing around here like it is. We're like, living it, living it in our lives. And I have a teenager. And really our kids are some of the best teachers about silence and about quiet. They bring in that childlike wonder, those moments where there's just like, no, you know, there's not that internal chatter going on. They're just appreciating, observing, especially the natural world or reminding, you know, Justin, like, oh, shh, be quiet. This part of the walk, Daddy, because this is where the fairies live, you know. And it was my daughter's idea to be in. To be in silence for a day on one of these deep camping trips we did in Alaska. We just didn't talk for a day and watched the puffy clouds. And that was her idea. So kids, kids know their way around silence. They actually do. It's beautiful.

And talking about kids, I've got just one last question, but before we. We wrap up. So if we were to fast forward, forward to the very last day of your life, and you know that it is your last day and someone very young in your life, maybe it's a grandchild, asks you this question, how do I lead my life on purpose? What advice would you give them?

I feel weepy. You're asking me that question.

For me, it feels increasingly that it is about giving oneself full permission to do what it takes to, to tune in. So there's that space to reflect upon it. So when we're scrambling out there for the answer and leading on purpose, it's very confusing, right? Gets very loud and we don't get very far. So really giving oneself full permission to take the time, whatever that looks like. So that may be quiet reflection, that may following this kind of bizarre area of interest or passion, you know, like, no, but you don't know where it's going to lead. But yeah, you know, you're just following that, that, that inspiration. So I think there'd be something about that for them just to really follow that energy, notice and honor it. And when you're not sure, to just give yourself the ability to slow down and listen and tune into what's being asked of you.

That's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that and thank you for sharing your space and your time. I really appreciate it.

It's been a joy. Thank you.

My pleasure. We'll talk again soon.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button. And I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.

Sam.