Healing Leaders: An Inside-Out Path to Better Decisions

0:00Leadership is having a moment and not always a great one. We see it in business. We see it in markets. We see it in headlines. People in positions of responsibility making fast decisions, loud decisions, sometimes successful, often costly. Not always from a centered place, which raises an interesting question for investors, entrepreneurs and humans alike. What if the biggest leadership risk today isn't a lack of intelligence or ambition, but a lack of wholeness? Today's conversation is about healing leaders, not as a soft idea, but as a serious one, about how interstate shapes judgment, about why long-term optimism, courage against the crowd, and sustainable compounding, financial and otherwise, may depend more on who we are than what we know.

0:55I'm joined by Raj Sisodia and Nile Mambat, co-authors of Healing Leaders, a book that's just coming out this month. We're going to talk about burnout and meaning, the wise fool archetype, and how healing can show up as better decisions in business, in investing, and in life. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner.

1:28Raj Sisodia is a longtime friend and a globally recognized thinker on leadership and business purpose. He's the co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism Movement, a professor, researcher, and author whose work has shaped how many of us think about values-driven companies, long-term thinking, and leadership that actually endures. Nilima Bhatt is the founder and director of Shakti Leadership and the Shakti Mission, a global goodwill ambassador with the World Union and a professor of conscious leadership, most recently at Technologico de Monterey. Her work focuses on inner power, resilience and what she calls Shakti, the creative life force behind wise, courageous leadership.

2:14Raj, Nilima, happy new year. if it's not too late to still say that and the delight to be with you this week. Thank you, David. Great to be with you again. Thank you, David. I love the intro. Raj, Nilima, I think the first question that is an easy one for me to ask and maybe not so easy to answer, but why does this book need to exist now? What are you seeing across leaders, founders, investors, executives that makes you say something deeper than strategy might be breaking? Well, David, I look at the world that we're in right now when it feels like the need for healing is paramount. There's a tremendous amount of suffering.

2:52There's a tremendous number of open wounds, it seems like, out there. People are reactive. People are doing things that are causing suffering for others, acting out of ego, acting out of greed, acting out of fear. All kinds of things are happening in every arena, whether it's in business or politics or even interpersonal. So the need for healing is always is there, but I think it feels especially pronounced in the world today, in the aftermath of the pandemic, and then with all of the things that are going on geopolitically around the world, and it seems like there's tectonic shifts that are happening that are creating more suffering and the need for more healing.

3:30I would add to that, we see so much toxicity around us. We see so much unconscious behavior around us. As we record, sitting here in Pondicherry, India, I'm seeing what's happening in Minnesota and in the US. And it's just one more story like that, right? So the most compassionate way to understand bad behavior is that it is trauma impacted behavior, right? That what if human beings are essentially good and we just act out and behave terribly towards our fellow creatures because we are traumatized? It's not our natural behavior. What if we look at it that way? And then the most compassionate way to say is, okay, how do we heal our traumatized psyche, each one of us, one life at a time, one leader at a time, so that we show up as better human beings and cause a healing rather than hurting?

4:31So I think that's really at the heart of this work. And Raja Nilama, specifically with the book now just coming up, with Seven Steps to Healing, how did the book project come together? Were you always planning to do this? How long have you worked together? I'm just curious about the genesis of the book itself. Well, for me, the seeds for this particular book were planted seven years ago, and actually 2018, the year that I turned 60. And that was a pretty significant milestone in a human life. I think generally, for me certainly it was, a time to take stock and look back and try to make sense of things.

5:09It was also the year I was writing the book, The Healing Organization. And this word healing had gained some weight for me. It was something that really spoke to me, perhaps because of something that I needed within me. It started out as an acronym for the qualities of a great purpose. We use healing as the word. But then I started exploring the idea that actually healing is something that businesses should be about, that the way we normally do business creates a lot of unnecessary suffering. And business in general is responsible for a lot of unnecessary suffering in this world, in addition to all the positive things that obviously that capitalism has given us.

5:43But in exploring that idea and writing that book, ultimately it became clear that the source of healing or suffering in a business is other leaders. That whether you have a business that creates suffering in the world or one that creates healing depends very greatly on what's happening with the leader. The leader hasn't healed themselves, then they're going to create suffering in the world. And so it seemed like a natural extension for me to extend that into my own healing. I was writing that book and I had the entire summer blocked out for writing retreats. And four of my women friends, including Willima, basically stopped me in my tracks and said, if you're writing a book about healing, you have to work on your own healing before you can do that.

6:26And initially I resisted, but then I said yes, and I delayed the book by five months. And I had all these experiences, including going to the Himalayas, the high Himalayas on the border of India and Tibet with Nilima and the Shakti spiritual journey for 10 days over there. That's where I had my 60th birthday in the seat of some of the deepest Buddhist wisdom in the world. I went to a silent retreat in upstate New York, a place called Peace Village. That's where I received these downloads. The seven steps we're going to talk about today actually came to me in the course of those four days of silence.

6:58And I had 45 pages of notes about a variety of different things. You know, when you're in silence, you can actually connect to source and receive wisdom. I also went to the Amazon rainforest with the Pachamama Alliance and Lynn Twist, our friend who's on our board of Conscious Capitalism. And I really connected to nature there and the wisdom of the indigenous people around healing as well. And I got a lot of deep insights about healing from that. And I also worked with a coach. All of these things kind of came together to create the ground for this. But those seven steps in a way were sitting there for a few years while I went through my own healing process and in a way tested those ideas, right?

7:41I had to go through each of them myself over these years. And then ultimately nearly about I, three or so years ago, were in Mexico and we were talking about a program that I was going to be teaching and I was looking for what should be the content of that. It was about who do you have to be in order to teach conscious capitalism or conscious business. As a professor, this was a workshop for professors. We had already done the knowing and doing part of it. We had already taken them through workshops about the concepts of conscious capitalism, about how do you consult in that arena, but then who do you need to be?

8:14And that's where we said, okay, let's create something around these seven steps. So it started as a three-day workshop and now has become this book. Yes. So, you know, as Raj may have mentioned, we have these two streams coming together. So while he was on his journey to this book, my journey was, my first book was My Cancer is Me, the journey from illness to wholeness, which is essentially an integrative medicine and a holistic health approach to heal through cancer. Then my second book is Shakti Leadership, Embracing Feminine and Masculine Power in Business. And then I realized we need a third book.

8:51I need a third book because while I'm teaching leaders to become conscious leaders through Shakti Leadership, I realized most leaders are not even at ground level in order to raise their game. They are actually wounded and traumatized and they need to do a lot of inner work to even get to base camp. you know before they can raise their leadership game so I remember telling Raj it's almost as if I need to put together my book on healing through disease like cancer lifestyle issues which is a very holistic approach and I need to put together becoming a leader and finding meaning and purpose and living into that I need to put that together now and the third book should be therapy for leaders because we need to offer just like you know the 12-step program for AA and so on I said we need a program for leaders because every leader I know carries some version of wound and trauma which is actually blocking them and sliding them back every time they're ready to grow they actually get hobbled so we were looking for a framework when I wrote Shakti Leadership I I had the five pancha kosha, you know, physical, vital, mental, psychic, spiritual, which is an integral yoga approach.

10:11You have to heal at five levels. When I wrote Shakti Leadership, it was the five elements model of presence, power, wholeness, flexibility, covrues. And so we are looking for a model around which we can gather the core ideas of what it takes to heal as a leader. And that's when Raj shared the seven steps that had come to him. And I said, that's it. That's the framework. And through that framework, we can really curate the best practices you and I have discovered and lived from around the world across geographies and ancient wisdom, modern practices, and really give leaders a summary that they can put into work themselves.

10:55So that's how this book came for me. Thank you. And we're going to go through those seven steps right now. Let's start with the first one, and I'm going to turn it back to you, Nilima, for this first one. And I would also like you briefly just to explain Shakti, which is a word that's relatively new to most of our listeners, me included, just so we understand where we're coming from. And then let's get right into transformative step number one. Okay, so Shakti is the innate power of existence. It's the creative energy, the evolutionary force that is innate to nature, innate to creation, innate to existence.

11:33So if you say the self-aware universe, that actually this universe is self-conscious and has the direction where it's going. This is a profound spiritual insight from many traditions, but certainly from India, which says the ground of being, the true nature of reality is Shiva or Brahman, which is pure consciousness. But it's not just an inert witness presence behind everything. There is also a creative force that then evolves the true nature of reality into everything that it can be. all that it holds potential within itself. The oneness that can then become the multiplicity takes an energy, a force, and that is called Shakti.

12:16And so how do I bring it to leadership is because I realized leadership is a power game, right? It's all about who's in power, who lost power, and do you have the power to drive change? Well, why work from ego-based power, a wing-loose power, and snatch it from someone else to rise to the top? When there is enough for everybody. You are living in an ocean of power and there's more than enough for everybody. So that was the idea. How do you tell the world and how do you tell leaders that you don't have to grab power if there is enough deep inside yourself? If you can find your core values, if you can find your life purpose, you then tap into the Shakti that drives you.

13:00All right. Well, that's a new word and a new concept, I'm sure, for a lot of us, for me included. I can certainly see things that I recognize from my own cultural background that connect with that. And as I look over your seven steps, which we're going to talk through now, you have worded these very simply and very globally and very humanly. And I think everyone who's going to read Healing Leaders is going to appreciate that. Let's start with step number one. Step number one is know yourself, right? So I think it's also credited to Socrates or It's certainly the Greek wisdom tradition, right? Know thyself, right?

13:35So know yourself is step one. Do you even know who you are? Because we carry our identity without ever having examined it. So when I unpack my identity, you know, my gender is very almost core to how I hold myself in the world. My nationality, my race is right there, you know, in who I am. When you realize that you're made up of layers of selves that come from the identity you hold, you also then realize some of it privileges you and some of it underprivileges you. So getting to know that, you know, it's not an equal world out there. So you need to know who you are so that you can come from your best power place.

14:21So it begins with know yourself. And I like that one, too. And my recollection is that on, yes, on the Greek oracle at Delphi, it was reputed to have been scrolled on the temple right there. Know thyself, as you said, Nilema. So that's a great base to start from. Strip away the masks we wear as leaders. Recognize who we truly are. Raj, do you think that the average person understands that? What is our general self-awareness? When you come across leaders, if you were giving a grade to the leaders you've coached or met over the years, zero to 10 on average, how are we doing it knowing ourselves?

14:59I think we know ourselves more at a superficial level, as Nalima said, in the arena of identities, all the different identities that we have, right? As you said, religion or gender or even your profession or your educational background or whatever it might be. But there's a deeper knowing beyond that. So there's your identity and then there's your essence. Like who are you as this unique being before all of these tags God put on you through culture and through education and circumstances of your birth, etc. The fact is that every single one of us is different and is unique. There are 8 billion of us alive today.

15:33There are 109 billion that have already died, come and gone. and no two are alike. And so knowing the essence of what makes me me and what makes you you, which was pretty evident even at an early age. Parents can see that their children are quite different, right? And they have different qualities and different values and different things that appeal to them and so forth. So I think knowing yourself at a very deep level is to understand your own uniqueness so that you can bring that uniqueness as your gift into the world. That's the idea. It's your gift to yourself and to the world. And that unique combination of things is really what you are here to manifest ultimately.

16:12So knowing that is very important and not getting, as anyone says, hold your identities lightly. You know, they are just these tags. They don't ultimately mean as much. But know deep down below that, who are you really? What is your essence? And I would say most people are not really there, right? Because we don't really talk about that. We don't understand that very much. but it's all about the credentials and the degrees and all of the other identifiers that we have. Yeah. What was your college major, Raj? How did I have an electrical engineer and how much of that am I? So those are all just milestones along the way.

16:49And they will give me to find us, right, in any certain way. What's step number two, Raj? So step number two is to love yourself. And it's not automatic that if you know yourself, you're going to love yourself. You know, some people like Bruce Lipton estimates that 80 to 90 % of people do not love themselves. Why would that be? Why would you not love yourself? Because we get all kinds of messages from the world, right? In my case, my father played a big role in that. I didn't know my father until I was seven. I was brought up by my mother, so in a way she was a single parent to me. And by nature and by nurture, I'm more like my mother in many ways.

17:26And my father is the opposite of that. And so when he came back into my life and I was seven years old, he had gone to Canada to get his PhD. He saw this kid who was the opposite of him. And every quality in me just felt like a weakness to him. So the message I got from him was that you're too trusting, you shouldn't trust anybody. You're too peace-loving, you need to be rough and tough, right? You're too idealistic, right? You can't survive like that in the world. You need to be pragmatic, etc. So everything about me that seemed to come naturally, that was part of my nature, was framed as a weakness.

17:57and when that message comes from your father you tend to believe it and for decades really that was my you know programming to say all of these qualities that are things that are natural to me are weaknesses and i need to strive to be the opposite of who i am and that is not a place for people to feel happy or fulfilled right trying to be the opposite of who you are took me a very long time to recognize those as my gifts you know they're not liabilities that they're really assets those things right and that i have to cultivate those and of course there's always room to grow so once you start to love yourself then you can actually grow from that place there maybe there are things that i need to cultivate that are not natural to me that are good also to have but it starts with that idea that ultimately if you don't love yourself then you're not going to take care of yourself physically mentally emotionally right so we need to cultivate self-acceptance self-compassion and ultimately self-love so that we can then also what the lack of being able to love yourself does is isolates you because you are not able to receive the love of others if you feel unworthy of your own love the subconscious programming is that somebody claims to love me but they don't really know me because i know me and i don't love me right and so you end up isolating yourself in that way so there are many many consequences when we do not love ourselves And then, you know, that gets projected into the world, you know, in terms of aggression and violence and so forth.

19:23Ultimately, a lot of those things come from a lack of self-love as well. Thank you for that. And, you know, I guess a lot of it is about embracing all parts of ourselves, Raj and Neelamah. I think it's easy for us to love ourselves at our best, to recognize what are our great traits and all of our best achievements. And if we have a spouse or partner, presumably they love us. They love us. So, you know, why wouldn't we love us too? But I think part of what you're saying is that we all have a shadow side. We have things that we're not proud of about ourselves. We have things that we've done that we wish we hadn't done.

19:56And I guess it's mainly about embracing all parts. Of course, we could do an entire podcast just on this important topic, but there are five other steps that we need to move on to in order to really fully see the work that you all have put out there this month out to the world. Healing Leaders is the book. Did archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture coming as soon as the Euphrates River dries up? Does the Bible condemn abortion? Don't you wish you had a trustworthy academic resource to help make sense of all of this? Well, I'm Dan Beecher, and he's award-winning Bible scholar and TikTok sensation Dr.

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21:15let's move on to step number three nilima if i have it right i think it's be yourself we need to know ourselves we need to love ourselves next step three be ourselves yeah so in a way these steps are like telescoped into each other like you can't fully know yourself if you also don't love yourself and you can't fully love yourself if you can't be yourself and so on, right? They're kind of all interconnected. You can start anywhere and then catch up with the rest. So be yourself. The focus is that the master key of presence, right? Can you have the confidence to take off the masks and stand in your essence, stand in your presence and really make yourself a person to be safe with?

22:02You can reveal your vulnerability where you have nothing to defend, nothing to promote, nothing to fear and you can fully show up as you are in that moment confident that your essence is enough. So this is it the be yourself so that you give permission to others to also show up in their authentic way and not feel that they have to pretend to be something they are not. So there's a whole process on how to cultivate presence and show up as a present leader through all your situations. So that is a practice that we offer in this step. And I want to talk a little bit more about that because this is a book that isn't out yet.

22:41I have not read the book yet. So I'm just as an interested, curious reader, Raj and Nilima, I'm assuming that when we're going through a step like be yourself, of course, I think about imposter syndrome. A lot of people talk about how they're not being themselves. They feel like they need to be something else in order to be accepted. I can imagine many leaders might start from that place. And then some people say, Raj, fake it till you make it. And, you know, perhaps that's a real dynamic that if you really do try to embody something that you don't feel that you are, but you do that for long enough, maybe you become that, which is circular reasoning in some ways for me.

23:16But let me ask you, are there tools within a chapter like this within your book in order for me to score myself to know how do I know if I really love myself adequately? Or is it possible to love oneself too much. So I'm just curious how we can gauge, I would say these very introspective steps. How can we gauge that we're progressing and that we're at the place? So there are plenty of practices in the book, including assessments for self. So at the end of it, every step adds up and you will have a sense of assessing yourself. If you are honest and low on self-deception, once you read the material, you can't pretend you don't know it, like you can't unsee it.

24:01To add on the be yourself, right? So part of it is stop acting, take off your masks, you know, be the same person. You know, many of us have different personas, right? We're one way with our spouse, one way with our children, one way with our parents, one way with the people we report to, people who report to us, how we are with our friends. Can we drop all of that and just be yourself, right? Just be who you are at all times. So you don't have to switch all these different masks and cultivating that presence. And the third part of it is to understand this need for authenticity and attachment at the same time.

24:36So authenticity is being yourself, being able to say what on your mind, being able to express your emotions, right? Being true to yourself. Attachment is our human need to be connected to others, to have the approval and the love of others, especially our parents. Now, there should not be a tension between these two things. Authenticity and attachment are both vital needs. They're both survival needs for us. We have to be true to who we are. And without attachment, we humans cannot live. We cannot survive. When we are born, we are literally dependent on others, even to hold our necks up. We can't even forget about feeding ourselves.

25:14unlike other species which become pretty self-reliant very very early so attachment is a survival necessity we need it but so is authenticity if we don't speak out when we see danger then we could die right if you don't communicate that so we need both of these and the problem is that very often we are forced to choose so as a child i was in a way forced to give up my authenticity for the sake of attachment if my father wanted my father to accept me and to approve of me, I had to give up being who I was, right? I could not really express myself in that way, right? And that is not something that you should be forced to do in life, especially with children.

25:54But anyway, we need to be able to be authentic and we need to be able to be attached at the same time to know that we are loved and accepted for who we are. So that's a very important element, especially for us as parents, to know that our children should feel that they can be authentic, right? And they don't have to be the so-called good child all the time, right? To conform to what we think the way they're supposed to behave. So the combination of authenticity and attachment is very, very important in being yourself. You know, I was just reading the essays of Montaigne, the great French essayist of a few centuries ago, Raj, and one of his quotes, of course, it's in French, but translated to English, he wrote, for my part, I shall take care, if I can, that my death discover nothing that my life has not first and openly declared.

26:42And I think it's a very idealistic view of things, but surely if you are being yourself, then people will not be highly surprised by any aspect of you as more facts come out from family and friends about us each at our death. Let's return back to life, though, as we move on to step number four. So again, to summarize, know yourself, love yourself, be yourself. Raj, what is next? The next one is choose yourself. And this one is a little less obvious, I would say, compared to the other ones. I mean, you've heard those other phrases before, probably. Choose yourself. That idea came to me actually at that silent retreat where because you're in complete silence, there's no communication of any kind allowed.