S2E2: Your Evolved Self, Not Your Whole Self

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Sy Wakeman. Welcome listeners to season 2 of the No Ego Podcast. I am so excited about this season's lineup of podcasts. I just can't wait for you to enjoy every single Now, many of you that have been hearing me speak recently know that I have been talking and responding to this concept I'm hearing out there in leadership about allowing everyone to bring their whole selves to work, their authentic selves, their whole selves. And I understand the concept. I totally get that we want people to have the freedom to be who they really are at work. But I want to adjust this concept just a little bit. When people say to me, Sy, I'm gonna bring my whole self to work, I respond, please don't. I want you to bring your evolved self to work. We only need your evolved self here at work, not your whole self. And by the way, make sure that you only bring your evolved self home and to your friends or your family. See, This letting it all hang out, I am who I am, is really another way we're feeding the ego. We're really just saying, don't bother to evolve yourself. Just bring who you are, ego and all, to work. And I absolutely believe that we are beings that have 2 different selves inside of us. We've got low self, which is ego and venting and gossiping and judging and seeing the world in a very distorted way. And we have high self, which is the best of us, is when we've gone beyond ego and we really are coming from a place that's in the zone that really makes all things possible. So as I talked more and more to people about bringing your evolved self to work, I thought it would be a great topic for season 2 to talk about our evolution and what that really means. What does working in an evolved workplace look like? And what does bringing your evolved self to work look like? Now, this was happening at the same time that many people were asking me about my history in leadership. Sy, did you just show up knowing some of these very counterintuitive ideas, or how did this all begin? And so as I self-reflected, I realized that I was the beneficiary of a really magical moment, a miracle almost, in that When I was promoted into leadership in my 20s, it was the very same time I was being introduced in my personal life to the most amazing people and resources. I had just been introduced in my 20s to the Course in Miracles, which my favorite person who speaks about the Course in Miracles is Marianne Williamson. If you haven't connected into her and her book, Return to Love, you need to. And Marianne talked about just some profound, mind-blowing wisdom such as the Course in Miracles talks about miracles. And a miracle in life is any time you have a shift in your thinking, in your perspective, any time that you can see what you thought happened didn't really happen, any time there's an opening and you can come to see something differently, any time you can move beyond the distortion of your view of reality that your ego provides and move into seeing things in a much more loving and less harmful way. Once you realize that reality just isn't as harsh as our stories would make it out to be, you really can move in this opening to some profoundly different places. And I remember reading and going to some courses on the Course in Miracles and then coming to work and seeing all the suffering and all the people believing their own thinking and all the folks really stuck in their story. And I remember Just thinking that as a leader, my job isn't to lead folks that are in the dream believing their own thinking. Maybe my first job as a leader is to just help people wake up a bit and realize that if they stopped believing everything they're thinking, that suffering became really optional. And I was reading books like The Inner Game of Tennis from Tim Gallwey, and he was really talking about moving away from Being performance-driven to getting inside our own bodies and noticing where we put our attention. And at the same time, I was taking yoga and hearing from my teachers that the quality of your life is really all about where you place your attention. Where you place your attention will determine the quality of your life. And so it felt like I would be off the clock and experiencing mind-blowing growth and evolution and discarding of some of these long-held beliefs and would have this sense of happiness and freedom and possibilities. And I would go to work and almost have to check that stuff at the door to work with the people that were so talented and so bright and simply believing their own thinking. And this coupled with the skill set I learned being a counselor became a perfect storm where instead of me trying to get a corporate vision and leading people to that and trying to work with them when they're in ego and low self and operating at a low frequency, it just dawned on me that my first step in a leader, as a leader, was helping people wake up to a whole different set of truths of universal principles. And this wasn't about pushing religion or my beliefs. It was simply about having people experiment with some what-ifs. What if what you were believing wasn't true? What if you could move from low self to high self, and then letting evolution take its course. Because what fuels evolution is when we discover something that not only feels good, but works. And that combination where if I drop my story and see you from a place of neutrality, it feels better and I get better results. See, what fuels evolution is not what I tell you is good for you. It's when you try some of these wonderful techniques given to us by so many enlightened and evolving people that you discover there's a really far easier way to move through life. And I started to see my role then as a leader is not managing people or their work, but really just managing their energy, managing where they chose to put their attention and teaching them some really healthy mental processes to process what they're getting from the world differently. And a lot of that just started with me getting people to neutral. And I believe the power is in neutrality. It really is. If we can get to neutral, we can find an enormous number of possibilities. And so I began teaching people techniques to get At least to neutral. You don't even have to think positive. But if you came to me and said, I had 3 patients dumped on me, I really felt my job was to at least place this in neutral by repeating to you, you have 3 new patients, and just paying attention to language and helping you and my people step off the cliff, so to speak. They would come to me and they would say, oh my gosh, it's just crazy today. And I would say, is it crazy or is it Busy. And they would eventually say, you know, it's busy. And I'd say, well, where'd you get crazy then? How did it go from busy to crazy? And they would start to realize that they just made that up, that they added the crazy in, and that the part that felt really hard to them wasn't that we were busy. It was the part that they added in their story of it's crazy. And little by little, we started to unhook. from some of the things we thought were mandatory, we started to wake up a little bit and see that our reality and our suffering didn't have to be linked. Just because we had a major challenge come in that reprioritized everything at work didn't mean that suffering had to be automatic. It could just be that we need to connect together and do a good job of changing our priorities. And I started to notice that As people experienced and got a glimpse of seeing the world from a higher state of consciousness, that they were naturally attracted to that. And that especially those who were naturally high in accountability, they felt this sense of freedom. And, you know, I hear often from people of the Christian faith that, that the truth will set you free. And that's what I was experiencing at work as a really young leader who wasn't necessarily following along with the traditional philosophy at the time. And then I got to be a bit evangelistic about it because I believe today that it's time to admit that so much of what we're teaching leaders just isn't working. We're giving them tools they aren't using. And it's not that these tools are doomed. It's that we're trying to apply tools that will naturally be used by those in high self To those who are in low self. And we're forgetting this really important step of how do we help people move from low self and ego and all that narration on the world to high self. And I really wanted to help people see that so much of what I was taught early on in leadership just isn't ever gonna work and that we're off track. On so many fronts. And this isn't about bad people doing bad work. It's about this great illusion. It's as if we all have kind of fallen asleep and we're believing the dream somehow. And this really tapped into my life's purpose because when I was young, I grew up in a very small town, about 1,000 people in Iowa. And I can't say that we had a lot of Sufi Muslims running around in our town. But I had this incredible experience of finding in one of the houses we moved into a book by the Sufi poet Rumi. And I was young, I was really young, but I loved to read. And I opened up this book of Sufi poetry and I saw a very short poem or quote. And it said, out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. And for some reason that quote went through my brain, like into me at a cellular level. And my parents were going through a divorce at the time. And I just remember just how, how much arguing there was and how petty things seemed and how people seemed to just be believing their own story. And I remember just feeling the relief that came with the thought that what if out beyond all this judgment and who's right and who's wrong and, and this, you know, vying for power and what if out beyond there was just this field where We could move beyond all of that. And that to me became such an intriguing idea that I've had that quote carried with me. I'm 53 now, for years. And I remember my 20s as I was learning all this about evolution and I was seeing what wasn't working at work. And I had this background as a counselor and I had this personal purpose of really wanting people to understand that it could be super different. And it was just in that moment that in my own little circle, I was bodacious enough to believe that with this small group of cool people, we could make something really different. And it wasn't just me. I put it out there, but I had so many incredible people that really bought in by choice and responded. And so that, my friends, when you ask me the question, you know, where'd you come up with this? I absolutely believe that I was just an open vessel at a time that something needed to come to fruition. And so I'm going to be super committed this season of the podcast and going forward to talk about evolution, not from a place where I try and judge and present to you in this series who's evolved, but that I present to you some people that helped in my evolution. So here's my idea for this series of podcasts. I want to bring to you as many of my teachers as I can get to agree to this podcast. And I've already taped some amazing episodes. Tim Gallwey, who wrote The Inner Life of Tennis, The Inner Life of Golf, The Inner Life of Work, The Inner Life of Stress— one of my first books that I read that blew my mind about how to stop putting my attention on performance and the external world and how to go internal. He came on my podcast. He celebrated his 80th birthday. He is a legend. And you're going to hear a great conversation with him. There's other great people coming on. Mastin Kipp talks about getting out of our heads and into our bodies and really understanding trauma and understanding our responses aren't always as intentional as we might believe and what we can do to really heal some of that so that we can walk in the world So the first idea for the podcast is bringing you some of the people that I just feel are great teachers in the world that have really big ideas for you to discover that will help in your own pursuit of evolution. And then I wanted to combine that with people in the workplace, CHROs and leaders who are out there working to evolve themselves and their talent, their people, and their workplaces. Those people out there working to create these humanistic, great places to work of the future, the ones we're all craving to work in. So, I have some phenomenal guests from HR and leadership. I've got Steve Pemberton, and I recorded an incredible conversation about Not only his early life, which will blow you away, what he has experienced in his life, but also what he's creating at Global Force and so many other leaders. And then I thought I would interject some of my own riffing and rambling about my take on some of these ideas. So as you listen to one podcast, I'll try and tape an episode that Really give some of my response to some of the concepts that we've listened to. And I hope this combination, this focus on evolution, this focus on how do you bring your most evolved self to work and insist that your people do as well, and how do we create evolved workplaces, I really hope that this is a game changer for you. So you're gonna have some exciting things to listen to. And I couldn't be more excited. So I want to give you just a preamble of my hope on how you'll use some of the information that I bring to you. First of all, I hope that you share this podcast and your ahas with others. I'm going to bring you the people that have nudged me, the— those people that are working to evolve theirs— themselves in their workplaces. And I hope what it does for you is nudges you, and I mean nudging. A lot of us are seeking to wake up. And we really need to focus our attention on waking up. If you think about those moments where you see a magic trick, a great illusion, and you're enamored with that illusion, and you see a magician cut somebody in half on stage or make a person disappear and a tiger reappear, if you're, if you're looking at that from a naive place, You're very enamored and it seems so real. And then pretend that somebody's sitting next to you and they tell you how it's done. They show you, they wake you up to the methods behind it, to the great illusion. If you go back and try to see that magic trick the same way as you first did, I tell you, friends, it's impossible. Because now with that same awokenness, you can't go back and see something from that moment of disillusionment And that's what we're trying to do is give you some information about the illusion that you're in. We're all in this dreamlike state to help you wake up a bit. But the caveat I wanted to add here is think about how you like to be woken up. If you're me, I like to be woken up gently. I don't like a bucket of ice water thrown on my bed. I don't like a loud blaring sea alarm to wake me up. That is not a wonderful I, and I think many others would agree, like to be woken up gently. It's not our job to shake people out of their slumber. It's our job to interrupt people's thinking and reveal some truths, some universal principles, and then settle their minds, letting them know we care about them and that they can do what they need to do at their own pace. It's not our business. But Be gentle with the wake-up calls. If you get excited about something, please share it, but share it gently. And if you're like me, as I wake up, I press snooze quite often. And I think in our own evolution, we all press snooze. We wake up, we get fully awake, and then we press snooze and we go back into the dream for a while. And then we get awake and we press snooze and go back into the dream a while. That seems to be the way of evolution. For me. So be gentle with yourself. There are snooze buttons in life, and it's not like you can go to a yoga class and take one class and then be like, here, hold my beer, watch this. This is such a wonderful process of waking up, and I just really invite you to it, and I invite you to be wonderfully gentle with One of the things that I woke up to and continue to wake up to, because I push snooze a lot, I screw this up, but only daily, is that there's one great illusion or delusion, and that's that we're all separate. And the one thing that separates us is when we judge. And when you think about teamwork, a lot of people feel like they got kicked off the team or their team excluded them, or they, they aren't part of the team or they aren't included. And One of the things that I think about a lot is what if it isn't the team excluding you? What if you step down from the team the minute you judge? What if your pain is about your judgment, that your separation came when you judged the team rather than when they kicked you off in your own story? And so I want to explore just a lot of counterintuitive ideas, and I want to really help people understand that their natural state is really everything they desire, that innovation and collaboration and accountability and happiness and all of that is really just their natural state once the drama's gone, once they're in that field that Rumi talks about that's out beyond right-doing and wrongdoing. And I want to end with a story that I found profound in my life. I was at a conference and I was asked with a group of other people to really just notice how often we are in judgment, positive or negative, how often we see an inanimate object and label it judgment, how often we look at carpet and add that it's an ugly color, how often we are just constantly being narrated by our ego goes. And that was really just our assignment is just not only notice when you're in judgment, but for one evening at dinner, work very hard at being neutral in your language, in your actions. It's not that you can stop thinking negatively. You're always being thought. It's that you can question your thinking so that you don't automatically buy in and then speak what you've thought and Manifested. It was simply a cease and desist on fueling the fire of this ego narration. So we go out to dinner and our assignment is what you say needs to be completely neutral. And I didn't feel like that would be a difficult assignment because I tend to be a pretty positive person. I try and see the good in things. And, and I found it was an incredibly difficult assignment. So we're all sitting at dinner. There was about 6 of us. And I noticed in my mind, Even though I thought I was pretty positive, all of the negative things that came across my mind, that somebody, you know, hadn't taken his napkin down off his plate and just wasn't following the rules of society. And it was really a problem for the waiter because they were trying to give us menus. And I just noticed in my own thinking how opinionated I am about what I think I know to be true. And that was my first noticing. And then We tried to have some conversation, and someone said, "Oh my gosh, the stars are so beautiful tonight." And even though that seems like a beautiful neutral statement, we soon saw the judgment in that. And we had someone who's very good at just neutrality. In fact, he was hilarious. He said, "You know, actually, if you want to be neutral, there's 1.2 trillion stars visible to the naked eye in this particular galaxy," and he would. Start to translate for us. Somebody said, oh my gosh, this chicken tastes so good. And he would help us out. He would say, well, I'm eating chicken. At least the chef says it's chicken. And he would just translate to the point where we realized that everything we said had some level of judgment in it. And so the only thing we felt left with was silence. Anytime I thought a thought and I was going to speak, I noticed it had a lot of my own judgment, my narration of my ego, my, my color commentary attached to it. And so the whole table fell almost silent for quite a while. There was really nothing to talk about until another person at our table found something that within the rules we could all address. And it was a hope or dream for the future. And he started, he said, I know there's one thing we can talk about. It's what I wanna create in the future. And he shared with us that he was retiring soon. And That what he wanted to do after he left his current role was work to do whatever he could to ensure that people all over the world had clean drinking water. He shared a time when he was in the Grand Canyon that as a medical professional, when he came upon a group of people who one of their team was injured, one of their group was injured, he stayed behind with that person while others went for help. And they were there for a couple of days with no water. And it really left an imprint on him about what that was like and a calling to him about how he wanted to spend his time is that no one else would have to be in that condition. So he put out there something we could talk about. I wanna work towards clean water in the world. And then I was just sitting noticing what happened with our group. The energy spiked high. Everyone got busy. People were pulling out their phones, they were finding contacts, they were giving They were giving him ideas. They were working hard on making that thing happen. They were collaborating naturally. They were getting super innovative. One person got on the phone quickly and he called someone he knew that happened to work with someone at the Gates Foundation, and they had some things going on and there was this instant connection. In 5 minutes, we basically crowdsourced and loaded this guy up for success, and we took his idea and Got that thing manifesting and into creation in just a few moments and continued. Somebody else said, well, my idea isn't quite as incredible, or I guess, you know, far-reaching, but my last child's leaving home and my dream is to convert his bedroom into a really great workout facility because my goal is to become a healthier And again, everybody just jumped in and started talking about a trainer they knew that would come in and look at the room and not only get the equipment and set it up, but design workouts around it. And again, in this fury of all that's great about people, we had people taking accountability, people innovating, people creating, people collaborating. And that is when it dawned on me that my big idea Was that innovation and collaboration, all these things we're trying to teach our teams, is our natural state. No one had to train these folks how to be this way. It was their natural state once the drama was gone. Once we had started to question our own thinking, once we stopped believing everything we think, once we moved out of judgment into that incredible field that Rumi talks about, out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is this field. I'll meet you there. And I'm telling you, that field is amazing. In that moment, I experienced 6 strangers in a zone making dreams come true, creating and solving problems and creating solutions for some really big issues. And it reminded me of a story I had heard about Michelangelo. And when Michelangelo was asked if Carving David, this amazing work of art that he created, if his carving David was difficult, if it was hard. And he responded, no, it actually wasn't hard. It was easy. I simply removed all of the part, the pieces of marble that weren't David. And that, my friends, is what I'm talking about. I think we're off track in leadership development and in the leadership world where we have to teach people innovation, collaboration. We have to create for people engagement and manufacture happiness. We have to find these ideal circumstances so they can be all these things that they desire. And I'm here to tell you that my belief is that our people already are these things. It's their natural state once the drama's gone. And it's what so many of the teachers will tell you that I'm bringing to you on the season 2 podcast in so many different ways, but it's the same discovery over and over again. That it's our natural state once the drama's gone. And the leader's role is not to create, carve David. It's to remove all those pieces that aren't David, all those things that get in the way. Our role isn't to do anything but help people toggle switch from low self to high self and do it in a way that makes for a wonderful Wake up calling, a wonderful nudging people to become more engaged in their own evolution. And I think as leaders, we really need to jumpstart our evolution and the evolution of others. And I hope season two of the No Ego podcast will help you do that. So please share, share, share. Tell me what you think, and along the way, make sure you give me your ahas, your new insights, because I would love to. share those with the rest of our listeners. And until then, enjoy the wake-up, enjoy the learning, enjoy the evolving, and do your best today to not just bring your whole self to work, but bring your most evolved self to work. Until next time. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama and entitlement and transform your world place. I'm Cy Wakeman.