Episode 28: Jay Rosenzweig on Purpose, Service, and the Power of Joy

Welcome to Super Connections. I am your host, Jennifer K. Hill, helping you with the Golden Triangle of Connection, where you will super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Join me each week as I will share from some of my favorite tips and tools for super connecting, and I'll bring in some of my favorite friends and thought leaders to help support you on your journey to super connecting to the life of your dreams. Hello friends, and welcome back for episode 28 of Super Connections Podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer K. Hill, where we come together each week to learn tools on how to super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Today we have a very special guest, dear friend, and man who is definitely on point with living his life purpose. purpose, and I'm going to ask him to share some of his favorite tips and tricks and wisdom today. We have Jay Rosenzweig today with us, who is a human rights advocate, entrepreneur, executive search leader. He chairs the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights and is the founder of Rosenzweig and Company, a global firm focused on leadership strategy. Jay is also a vocal supporter of gender equality and social justice and is known for producing the annual Rosenzweig Report on women in leadership. Jay, thanks so much for being here with us.

It's a pleasure to be here, Jennifer.

Yes. And I, you didn't even mention in your bio, my friend, didn't you already sell 1 or 2 companies on top of advising numerous other companies and being a venture capitalist in your spare time?

We have had a number of exits. One of the things that I really love doing is helping founders actually to scale up their businesses, given the relationships I'm so lucky to have and all the experience I've gained. I'm really able to help founders with whatever they need, whether it's fundraising or business development or strategic and operational advice, team building, as you mentioned. And so we're fortunate to have had a number of great exits. We just had one actually that was just announced a couple of days ago. Yeah, really enjoy that aspect of my life as well.

Amazing. So let's talk about this, Jay. Were you always this guy? How did you connect to your purpose? How did you come to exit not one but multiple companies and to be of service? Jay, I think the thing that I respect and admire you more even than all the companies you've exited is the people you help. You are such a generous, kind, authentic man, and I just respect and admire you so much for that. Tell us, how did you come to be this way? Were you always that way?

I, I appreciate that very much. Fortunate to have had 2 incredible parents. Who were extremely welcoming and loving. So I grew up in a very loving home, myself and my brother and sister. We never had a lock on the door. We never had an alarm. People were coming and going, and that's the atmosphere within which I grew up. And I think that's, that's a real advantage that I'm very aware of and very grateful for. And as I continued to grow, I decided to study philosophy and law. I met, I met a very important mentor in the law school who's an international human rights champion. He represented people like in the former Soviet Union, and I was an anti-apartheid advocate. And he went on to become Canada's Attorney General and Minister of Justice, where he enacted all kinds of impactful laws. And he asked me upon retirement from Parliament to chair his international human rights organization called the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. And that got me even more deeply involved in human rights activities. There was a number of kind of different seeds and moments in time Which opened my eyes to the importance of service and helping others. And, but it's always come naturally to me on the other hand. And I remember even as a young child in elementary school, my, my friends trying to rattle me by pretending they lost something of mine or whatever, just to see how I would react. And they, they always marveled at the fact that, that I stayed pretty steady even despite attempts to rattle me.

Let's talk about that, Jay, because I just shared an article a couple of weeks back that about the red mist and the red And I was definitely not that person. I was the antithesis of you. I was reactive. I was not calm. What is the secret? I, I, part of it I'm hearing is your nature. Part of it I'm hearing is being of service. I think that's—

Sure.

Paramount to finding our purpose is also to simultaneously be of service to others. Tell us a little bit about that. Number one, how do you stay calm in situations? Are there any special tricks that you use? And then number two, how do we be of service even when it's hard for us?

One of the things that, that I think about a lot is that life is a process. It's not a problem. So really the main question is, have you prepared yourself for the life process or not? So what the world throws at us is not necessarily our choice. We have to understand that what the world throws at us, we do our best to manage things and to stack things as, as greatly as we possibly can in the direction we want. the universe to cooperate with us, but it'll never cooperate 100%. But what the world, how we react to the world, or how we respond rather, is completely our choice. We always can choose peacefulness over agitation. We can always choose joyfulness over misery. We can always choice— choose blissfulness over suffering. So the thing to keep in mind is if you wanna live a conscious life, You should not be in reactive state, but be in a responsive state. But how do you reach, how do you reach that, that way of being? I think there's a lot of things you can do. For example, things as simple as exercising. I exercise every single day. I just finished exercising. And the exercise and the movement that you do actually changes your chemistry. You're releasing toxins when you sweat. That's a very important thing. I have many things on the go, as you described in my bio. So how do you— how are you able to accomplish all those things? One thing that I've learned is a person with a sufficient level of energy can accomplish in 1 year what it might take others 10 years to accomplish. So if you lived 100 years, it's as if in terms of impact, you've lived 1,000 years. So it's not only about the exercise, it's meditation, it's yoga, it's putting positive content. Into your brain. It's not gossiping. It's not taking meetings for the sake of meetings. I don't get distracted by a lot of things. I stay focused. And those are some of the exercises, but there's many other things. Music is important. Sports, especially for young people. Music and sports often is neglected in the early years in school, and I think that's a big mistake. But there's many ways you can reach that level. And it takes practice and it takes exercise if it's not something that's more naturally innately in you.

I wanna backtrack for a moment to something you said that I think is paramount to everything you're talking about in this incredible successful career you've had over many decades is this idea of discipline. I think you used a different word, but what I heard on my end was discipline and focus. How do you determine what meetings to say yes to, which ones to say no to? where to invest your energy. I think I did an episode on that maybe in June about that. We all have 168 hours to spend in a week and how and where we spend those hours is up to us. So what are your ways that you cultivate discipline and discernment? I would think would be hand in hand with that.

One of the things that's really important is if your spidey sense is telling you that somebody's sucking your energy in a negative way, even if it's individuals who are close to you, it might even unfortunately be family members who you don't necessarily want to shut out completely and you want to always be friendly and loving to. You may want to scale back a little bit. You may want to subtract the amount of time you're spending with individuals, whether they're friends, people in the business world, family members. You want to eliminate as much toxicity As you possibly can emotionally. That also includes physically. I mentioned exercise is important. You want to eliminate bad food. You want to eliminate alcohol and drugs to the degree that is possible. So those things are very important. I find that even in a business sense or in the nonprofit world, very often you, you get sucked into these meetings, whether it's on Zoom or in person, where you could have gotten Done most of what you needed to get done within 5 minutes or maybe 15 minutes. And there you are 2 hours later listening to people just who wanna hear their voices heard and whatnot. So even if it's a meeting that's important, I may set it for 15 minutes because more often than not, you can get as much done in 15 minutes if you know you have that short period of time than if, if it was a much longer scheduled meeting. But it's often actually quite obvious whether or not meetings, proposed meetings are important or useful or not. But you just have to be brutal in a compassionate way, if I should put it that way, in terms of what meetings you accept and which you don't. Now, having said that, I'm in the executive recruitment space, leadership recruitment, leadership strategy. There are many times when I have friends who will ask me, As a favor to meet their son or their daughter who just graduated from university, or a friend who unfortunately was just fired from their job. They'll ask me to spend time with that person to give them advice on next steps in career, and I will pick and choose. But if it's a really good friend and, and I feel it will be helpful as a service, then, you know, I will take on certain meetings that are not necessarily of tangible benefit to me, but you have to have compassion as well. So you mix that all in and you use your intuition and discerning what to take on and what not to.

Yeah, I think a good formula I had heard years ago is it's almost like that idea of tithing of 10%. I've always looked at what—

That's a great way of looking at it.

Yeah. Yeah. Whether it's speaking gigs, if we have 40 hours in a week, then 4 of those hours that I would spend working, I'm going to donate to People maybe have service, offering people resources. But I think in the same way, in many different cultures, people might tithe the money towards a certain organization. We can also tithe our time. And I remember a spiritual teacher once taught me that tithe or give the thing that's hardest for you. So if you have a lot of money, give time.

That's a great point.

If you have a lot of time, give money, even if it's just a small amount. And by doing the thing that's hardest for us, it's always constantly expanding

It's interesting. I had, I interviewed actually a well-known guru, Sadhguru, and I'm paraphrasing him, so I may not get precisely what he was saying, but we talked about the notion of giving. And one of the things that he says is that physical giving of money, giving of material things is actually not even giving because it's all of these things have been bestowed upon us by the divine. It's already there. We came here with nothing and we we don't leave with the container service. So basically, basically everything that exists on this earth is already here. So it's just moving something from one place to another. So we're just moving things around, but it's stuff that's already been given to us. So it's not even giving in a way. And then he said that if at all, and I still haven't gotten into what he means by if at all, but he said if at all, The only giving is giving of oneself. So quite an interesting perspective and one that I continue to try to dive into and learn more about. But at the end of the day, you talk about purpose. Really all you have, I've come to realize, is how profound, intense, and beautiful is your experience of life. That's really all you have. And what I've come to realize is that true success is As another teacher would say to me, is how joyful you are. So the measure of success is joy. Because if you're not joyful, what's the point of everything else, really?

Yeah, that's it. To be joyful, to be filled with joy. And when you get to that level of joy, I remember, do you know David Hawkins' Levels of Consciousness, Jay?

Yes. Yes.

I love Hawkins' Levels of Consciousness. For any of you out there, he's written many great books, Power Versus Force, Letting Go, among many others. And he has these ideas of consciousness that start at 0 and go up to, say, about 1,000. And up to 0 to 100 or so is shame, guilt, fear, et cetera. Eventually you elevate your consciousness to courage at level 200. And then I think 400 is the rational mind, 500 is love, and 550 and above is joy. There you go. And I remember exactly where and when I was when I hit that frequency of joy. And we all have a set point, whether we're consciously aware of it or not, is asking ourselves. You can look at David Hawkins' map of consciousness as reference, or just check in for yourself and ask yourself every day as you get outta bed, what's my set point today? Am I coming from joy, fear, logic? Mm-hmm. None of these are good or bad or right or wrong. It's just seeing where you're at on the map of getting to wherever you wanna go. And if joy is where you're getting to go, then what do you need to move through emotionally, psychologically, Internally to get to that state that's your desired state.

And I find that a lot of people in my world and people that I've observed publicly, they, they find temporary or maybe faux happiness in being one up on the other. So from the day a child goes to school, it's like, what'd you get on your test? Where did you finish as compared to your other friends? It's all about being one up on the other. My house is nicer than my neighbor's, or I went on a better vacation than my friend. All that stuff, it's like a faux happiness. It's not real success. Like, why would one be happy with another person's failure or someone falling short? So one way of looking at that is that it's not success, that's sickness. It's really about realizing your full potential as a human being. So every other creature on the planet, just strives to be their full-fledged self, whether it's a grasshopper, whether it's a donkey, whether it's a cow, whether it's a mango tree. And we too, as humans, that's our calling, is to be the very best person we can possibly be, realize our fullest potential. So that if you're walking next to somebody and they're walking a little bit faster and you're a little bit upset because you can't walk as fast as them, You may not realize what's to stop you from actually going for a run and eventually flying. Just because human beings have never flied, it doesn't mean it's not possible. So we actually limit ourselves by trying to be better than our neighbor or better than our peers. Who knows, maybe Jennifer will do something so extraordinary that no other human being has done. And to have that kind of mindset, you can't be about comparing oneself to others.

100% agree, Jay. There, my teacher used to say, there's no power in comparison. And the minute we get into that, it's just a trap that traps your mind and the ego, and you're in what we call the rat race. So Jay, tell us, you have so much wisdom. I'm sure people would love to hear your interview with Sadhguru. Where's your website? Where should people go to connect with you if they wanna learn more?

Yeah, so the best place to find the most information on me would be name.com. So jayrosensweig.com, that's my personal website, and it has a tab for the advocacy I do for women in leadership and my executive recruiting business and my purpose-driven impact work, some of my media interviews, et cetera. And you could certainly find me on Instagram at Rosenzweig_Company. I'm on LinkedIn and all the various social media apps. And happy to stay in touch with all of you in the audience and those listeners and any friends of yours, Jennifer, are a friend of mine.

Oh, thank you, Jay. I'm so happy to know you. And speaking of friends, shout out to Moshe Gersh, who introduced us.

Yes, a beautiful soul. A really beautiful soul.

Bestselling author, thought leader. Go check out Moshe. In fact, it's reminding me I'm going to have to message Moshe after this and say, dude, we got to get you on the show. I miss that man. He's such a beautiful guy.

Yeah, he's so great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm grateful for Moshe, for sure. Have an awesome day, Jennifer.

You too, Jay. And wishing each of you too an awesome day filled with magic, miracles, and the ability to fulfill your destiny and purpose in however that shows up for you.