In this solo episode of the No Ego podcast, host Sy Wakeman (also known as Cy) presents his central thesis that happiness, success, innovation, collaboration and teamwork are not goals to be pursued but our natural state once ego‑driven drama and judgment are removed. He introduces the idea through a personal anecdote from a Byron Katie retreat where participants were instructed to stay neutral and avoid judgment. The exercise reveals how even positive statements carry hidden meaning, leading the group into a quiet, uncomfortable silence. When one participant shifts the conversation to a purpose‑driven vision—providing clean water in retirement—the group instantly moves into collaborative, innovative problem‑solving. A second example (building a home gym) shows the same pattern. Wakeman argues that these moments illustrate the ego‑free “natural state” where teams naturally innovate and help each other without needing extensive training. He connects this insight to his work at Reality‑Based Leadership, describing “ego‑bypass” tools and reality‑based rules that help people shed judgment and access this state. He likens the process to Michelangelo’s sculpting—removing what isn’t part of the masterpiece—and ends with a Rumi quote about a field beyond right‑and‑wrong, inviting listeners to meet there. The episode serves as both a conceptual framework and a call to practice self‑reflection and ego‑bypass to unlock innate happiness and success.
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Hi, I'm Sy Wakeman, and you're listening to No Ego, a podcast where we teach you how to ditch the drama, end entitlement, and drive big results in your workplace and your world place. In this episode, I want to share with you what I think is potentially my biggest idea. In my business at Reality Based Leadership, I have worked hard— in fact, it's one of our values— to boil things down to their essence so that we can simply state and teach in a very memorable way those things that are universal principles, but will help you most at work in And at home. And the idea I wanna share with you today is really exciting to me. It came to me after a really great experience in Los Angeles, and I've been reminded of it again recently as I've really worked in the book, No Ego, to boil things down to the essence. And I was asked, Cy, what is kind of your bottom line? What's your biggest idea? What do you think is your biggest contribution to the field of peace in the workplace and in the world place? And it's this. My belief is that happiness and success aren't something that we need to pursue or learn how to have or go after. That happiness and success is really our natural state once the drama is gone. Now, this does take some explaining, and I get that. So I wanna just talk to you about how this concept first came to me and how it— started to really be the lens with which I saw my work through, but also that I use as a great reminder in my own life. I was at a wonderful conference in Los Angeles with the wonderful teacher Byron Katie. And if you haven't listened or, or checked out byronkatieatthework.com, that is definitely a worthy, worthy pursuit right there. So I was at a conference and it was a weekend retreat of sorts. And one of the assignments she gave us as we left the day after taking a look at our own thinking and how we can inquire on our thinking so that we stop believing everything we think and that we realize that reality just isn't as harsh as we make it up to be. And it had been kind of a mind-blowing day. And she sent us out to dinner with the following assignment. She said, now at dinner, I want you to act intentionally. I want you to really stay in a neutral place rather than naming things and assigning motive and judging. Mm-hmm. And adding meaning to things, which is all the work of the ego. I want you just to have this direct relationship with reality. At least those are my words, how I understood the assignment. I want you to just stay neutral and stay in a place of no judgment. So watch your language, you know, watch your thoughts, watch your action, and just be intentional about it. So I went out and there was probably 6 of us at the table. And we took the assignment really seriously. So we're sitting down and, and we're outdoors. And it's just a beautiful night. And so being positive, which comes pretty naturally to me, I made the statement, oh my gosh, the stars in the sky are absolutely beautiful. And someone in my group shared with me that even though my statement was positive, they had the notion that it also contained judgment. And they were right. Because if I were going to say with just the facts, I might state something like, you know, there's approximately 1.2 trillion stars in the sky visible to the naked eye, or whatever I don't know what that number is for all of you that are well-versed in astrology. And I, I noticed that even when I was positive, I was adding meaning, I was adding judgment, and our goal was to get really neutral. So another person, after a bit of silence, said, oh my gosh, this chicken that we're eating is fabulous. It tastes great. And again, we laughed because even that was judgmental. So we'd given up the negative judgmentalism, at least even though we were thinking it, we weren't saying it. But we were coming up with most of what we said, and our realization was that most of what we said was really also judgment, even when it was positive. So when someone said, you know, the chicken is really good, we all laughed, and she immediately kind of edited her own sentence, and she said, well, at least we're eating chicken. And she edited it again to say, well, at least we're eating what the chef calls chicken. And actually, I'm not eating right now, I'm talking. And we had some great laughs because we just started to notice how almost Almost everything we stated, so much of what we thought really had meaning added or story attached to it, whether it was positive or negative. We also came to the point where we realized how hard it was to be in the world and connect with other people without our statements having judgment. What naturally happened after we realized this is that we all got very quiet. There just didn't seem that much to talk about, and it was a bit of a of an uncomfortable feeling. So as we got quiet and each of us were trying to think about what is it that we could talk about that we could use to connect with one another, how could we be together without judgment, positive or negative, without adding kind of our own meaning to it, without creating a story or assigning motive or judgment? And, and so during that silence, I think all of us were busy in the process of self-reflection, which is one of my favorite, favorite things to do because that personal curiosity generosity really is the antidote for so much that is wrong in our own lives and in the world. And after a while of silence, one gentleman broke the silence with something we could actually talk about. He started talking about his vision for the future, his desires, what he hoped to create in the world, what he wanted to be part of that would hopefully help others. So he started the conversation out with, I want to share something that's been a goal of mine in retirement, and I'm retiring in the next year or so. I would love to make sure that people in the world have clean water. And he shared his experience of a time when he had been hiking in the Grand Canyon. And during that hiking trip, there was some weather that actually left them stranded. So they thought they'd be out for a day, and they were actually out for close to 3 days, and they didn't have enough water with them. And he talked about how difficult that was to not have water and how it really shaped in his mind the importance of water. And so he committed then and there that if he could do anything to help others get clean water, that he would. Now, what a great goal that he put out there, that he wanted to use his retirement time to help people get clean water. And it was something we could actually talk about because it was his desire for the future and what he wanted to contribute. It was his vision. And then I noticed that But as he put that out there, our behavior around the table became a wonderful experience of helping. As he said that, people jumped in to collaborate and work with him as a team and innovate and come up with ideas on how we could all help him accomplish this. One person said, you know, I know a person who is part of a foundation and they do exactly that. Here's their number. And another person said, well, gosh, I would be willing to contribute. And others just helped him brainstorm about all the ways that he might get involved with different organizations, and really make his dream come true. Now, this was incredible, because when we were talking before, it was about some lower conscious things. It was about, you know, things with meaning. But when we really were elevated into talking about the future, what we could create and how we could help this guy, the energy was amazing. And we really felt like we connected at a higher level of consciousness at this higher frequency. But somebody else followed that, and the energy was pretty high. And they said, you know, my goal isn't quite so aspirational as helping people in the world get clean water. I, though, have been thinking about next month when my son moves out, I would love to take his bedroom and turn it into a gym. I really want to work on restoring my own health and my own strength. She had just started her recovery from a lengthy illness. And the same thing happened. The minute she stated her goal, her vision, her desire for what she wanted to create in the future, Everyone again jumped in to help. It was just a natural occurrence. Someone said, you know, I have this great trainer, and he'll actually even design your weight room and your workout space and take what space you have and make it super efficient. He'll even go buy the machines and install them for you. And it was then that as I sat back, because I was so enthralled with the energy around the table, that I thought, what is going on here? We were uncomfortable and disconnected and really struggling to talk to one another without judgment when that was our assignment. We tended to talk about very trivial things like chicken or the, the beauty of the skies instead of really what we could do to really make a difference. It was when the drama, the judgment, when we left all that behind, when the drama was gone, that our natural state— was innovation, collaboration, teamwork, helping each other, working for the benefit of one another. It was abundant. It was unlimited. It was a state of teamwork that most leaders want to create. And in fact, they call me and say, Cy, I want my team to be more collaborative, or I would like my team to be more innovative, or do you have a class on innovation and teaching my team how to work better together or resolve conflict? After that experience, I started to realize that every single thing that people were calling me to train their team on, to add to their team, to develop the team skill set in, to bring into their organizations, everything they asked me for— innovation, collaboration, teamwork, success, engagement, happiness— every one of those things was our natural state once the drama was gone. And that was really mind-blowing for me because as we sat at that table, I realized we were so innovative, our authentic states. We didn't have to teach anybody how to work together or to be helpful. In fact, most of these people I had just met. We didn't have to develop trust. We didn't have to get to know each other and go on team-building excursions. It was our natural state at the higher level of consciousness that moved beyond our ego, our stories, our believing everything we think It was actually a place beyond ego. It was this incredible space where we had really tapped into a better part of ourselves, and I think a better part of our brain. Because when you're operating through ego, and that's your filter, your ego narrowly defines the world. And there's a lot more already out there. It's just not in your perspective. It's not what you can see in the way that you're looking. But once you can move beyond ego and bypass that ego into that part of your brain that is so capable and so conscious that you really can start to build things that you never thought were possible. And those ego bypasses that we teach in the book No Ego and in our organization are an important part of this concept that happiness and success are our natural states once the ego is gone. So now when people call me and they want me to have a program on helping people move through change without attachment, I know that they don't need me to teach their teams much beyond some ideas and skills because it is their team's natural state. It's their authentic way of being. Everyone has this in them. It's already there once the drama's gone. So what we work at is making sure that we can teach groups the principles of reality-based leadership and the principles that we call reality-based rules of the workplace. Once we teach them these universal principles and they start practicing those principles and using that concept of self-reflection, And so when people do the self-reflection and ego bypass tools, once they do that, they reach this state where all of that already exists. And I think that's such a powerful idea. This concept reminds me of a story I heard, and I don't know if it's true or not, but someone shared this story that as Michelangelo had done incredible work such as sculpting David, he was asked what it was like when he encountered difficulties or, you know, what the process was like, what were the challenges? was, it was easy. I just removed the parts that didn't look like David. Now, most of what we teach in my work is really counterintuitive. In traditional leadership, we're talking about what we need to teach people and what we need to add on to them and skills they need to develop. And wouldn't it be amazing if that was already there and that our jobs as leaders weren't to teach and do all these things to others? It was simply to help others use great thinking processes and wonderful things like self-reflection to simply take away all that doesn't look like happiness, success, innovation, results, teamwork, collaboration. I think that would be an amazing thing for all of you to ponder until you tune into my next podcast. I want to end by sharing one of my favorite quotes by Rumi, a wonderful poet from the 13th century. He said, out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is twofold to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other just doesn't make any sense. Now, I absolutely believe that there's this field out beyond ego, beyond right and wrong, beyond assumptions and judgment and always adding meaning, beyond the filter of our ego. And that's why I talk a lot about no ego and beyond ego, because I believe there's this field out there Of no ego, and I would love to meet you there. So I hope you keep tuning into our different podcast sessions because I'm going to continue the discussion of what it looks like out in that field beyond ego. I hope you have a great day. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining the episode today. If you're loving this podcast, just make sure that you check me out on Facebook and Instagram and especially YouTube.
