Whole-Life Success Principles Podcast

Dori Etter
Welcome to the limited series podcast whole life success principles brought to you by the core leadership mastermind circle. I'm your co-host Dori Etter.

Susan Howard
And I'm your co-host and founder of core leadership circle, Susan Mayginnes Howard. So this limited series podcast is going to explore tools and frameworks that are used by our very own entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are part of our community, and also outside of our community, to grow themselves personally and professionally. So we're glad you're here with us today.

Dori Etter
And this is the very first episode in our series. And we're really going to start this series with a bit of a dive into what it is that's at the center of the core leadership circle, sort of how we think about our own engagement in our growth in the expansion of what we are creating in the world through our entrepreneurship or through what we're really up to in life. Specifically, in this episode we're going to be talking about islands of sanity. So I think it makes sense to start with the question, Susan, what is an island of sanity?

Susan Howard
So, I love that expression. And I completely stole it from Margaret Wheatley, and I'll actually quote her here. Margaret Wheatley is an amazing scientist who really became a thought leader in the in the field of leadership. And her quote about islands of sanity or this idea is that it's possible for us as leaders to use our power and influence, insight and compassion, to lead people back to an understanding of who we are as human beings. The conditions for our basic human qualities of generosity, contribution, community, and love to be evoked no matter what. So we could probably all agree that if you look around in the world today, we see a world that doesn't reflect that most of the time. It's a it's a world that in many ways is nuts. And if you watch the news, you can see how that flame is fanned. My needs tend to threat, just biologically we attend to threats. So media really just pushes us towards fear and anger as a way of capturing us as an audience, and it's really riddled in the culture. So an island of sanity, the way that I think about it, is that it's an intentional space where we focus on creating those basic human qualities that she described of generosity and contribution, love and community. And so it's a safe ground. And we explore the different ways to do that. However, the most important thing that sanity can only come through you. Sanity doesn't come through waiting for other people to become sane or the world to become sane. I have to be the source of that in my own world.

Dori Etter
Yeah, and that is definitely something that we support each other on and focus on inside the mastermind circle. And whether I'm in that circle or not, what are some of the ways that I can begin to really source this intentional space and really engage in the world through generosity and contribution and community versus this sort of insanity?

Susan Howard
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I want to use this example of a Jeffersonian dinner, but it's a great example of that. It began at the home of Thomas Jefferson, back in the 1800s. Jefferson was known to invite thought leaders and influencers from a whole range of backgrounds and fields, whether it was the arts, science, philosophy, literature, to share in conversation and debate on a particular topic. The way he set it up was only the one person that would speak at a time. Jefferson and whomever were his guests or unable to really access their collective wisdom. So the purpose was simple: to listen, to learn, and to inspire one another through meaningful dialogue around a particular topic. So I kind of contrast this to if you were to watch CNN or Fox or MSNBC, where they have different speakers on and everyone's talking over each other and no one's listening to anything. All they do is argue and yell and talk louder. So he actually said that we're not talking about diplomacy or tax differentials or Federalists or Republicans or squabbling in Congress, we're talking about ideas. We're talking about enlightenment. We're talking about the true purpose in life. And in that, he creates a safe space, the idea of an island of sanity. And what are the kind of rules and rituals that you can create in a community, in a group of people, that creates a safe space for people to really share ideas and, most importantly, really listen to each other's ideas and be willing to be influenced by each other's ideas. So the idea is we want to reclaim leadership as a noble profession, which it's just gotten such a bad rap for so long because there's so much corruption. But we want to reclaim leadership as a profession that creates possibility and humaneness and higher consciousness in the midst of an environment that is riddled with fear and chaos and anger and all that. So instead of leadership being a power that creates fear and greed and corruption, it becomes a source of sanity.

Dori Etter
Yeah. And I think that, as you brought out, in this world we have so many examples and this habitual pattern of our ego and need to be right and to be heard driving so much of what happens today. And I think that we as a as a group really work to move beyond that. And I'd love for you to share maybe a little bit about how anyone can go beyond that in a meaningful way. How do we move beyond just the ego and what I am, you know, being right and getting what I need to create this concept?

Susan Howard
So again, coming back to you have to be a source of sanity. It means starting with yourself. If you ask any group of people, what leaders do you most admire, you will always hear Gandhi mentioned, you'll hear Martin Luther King mentioned, and Mother Teresa. People always say Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa. Now, if you look at them, these are people who didn't just come in with a mission, they came in with a different consciousness. These were people who changed consciousness, because they had a certain elevated consciousness, whether they developed it in themselves or came into the world with that. But if you look at their histories they had really developed over time. So again, it means having your core values and your spiritual principles as a place that you operate from, and what you measure all your decisions and actions against.

Dori Etter
I just want to say that's such a different frame than how we typically think about it. And again, this is why I wanted to do this series, because when we operate inside the core leadership circle, we really are focusing on understanding our core values, understanding our spiritual principle, and how do we operate from that. I know you have more to say on this, but I just wanted to say that's one of the things that I love so much about what we do and how we do it differently. And I love the three people that you brought up there.

Susan Howard
Yeah. And a lot of what we talked about in in this mastermind is not just about what your role is as a leader but what does it mean to actually have a fulfilled life. So one of the things that inspired me to create this mastermind was that so many of the leaders that I was working with as an executive coach were getting things done. They were accomplishing, but they didn't have that sense of fulfilled living. So in order to experience that you have to reconcile two worlds that seem unrelated--our work and our own spiritual principles, our own spirituality. And oftentimes work seems like anything but a place to bring our spiritual principles, because they're dominated by egos and quarterly reports and external powers and competition in the pursuit of profit. So we look at how do we incorporate our highest values and spiritual principles and practices into our life and particularly our work environments. Because having principles is easy, but what's harder is integrating them into our everyday lives. And yet, that's exactly where they were always meant to be.

Dori Etter
Yeah. And one of the ways that we talk about that inside this is this idea of really being able to question your own thinking and your own assumptions, right? That even as you're talking, you're bringing up some of the things that we hold as true. So we hold it true that in my work environment, my spirituality and my work are two different places. We hold it true that my impact is limited. And it's really as a group we begin to question that thinking and those assumptions, and that's where we get to create the space where something new can arise.

Susan Howard
Yeah, and to look at how do you reconcile it? So even if you understand theoretically that yes, of course, I should be able to bring my highest values and principles into all parts of my life, including my business in my world, you run into so many things that make it look like it's just not possible to do that or it's hard to do that. So explore that, and part of that is the island of sanity ideas. How do you be a source of that in any context, like in any environment that you go into? So one of the books that we were reading last year, I think, was Byron Katie's book. She's a spiritual teacher, and I loved her definition of insanity because there's different definitions. There's the kind of the popular one that you hear a lot, which is insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. She defines it as insanity is believing everything you think. So we think a lot of stuff; some of the things we think are really scary. And if there was somehow a way to kind of do a printout on every thought you had during the course of the day, and you were able to look at it on paper, you'd go, "Oh my God, no wonder my life is chaotic." The problem is that we do believe everything we think, only we do that mostly unconsciously. We're not even noticing that we're believing everything we think. So sanity begins with being able to question your own thinking and your own assumptions about things. And when you have a community that comes together in a kind of Jeffersonian way, where we're looking at different ideas and everyone's looking at it for themselves personally (What are the things that I'm challenged by? What are the things in my life?), and then have other people question or speak about it, or make assumptions about it (not a critical way), because what we really want to do as part of an island of sanity is create safe space. So we do it in a way in which we're interested, we care. We want to explore our deeper thoughts and feelings about things and begin to understand how we come to the conclusions we come to and what else is possible outside to really move from a narrow perspective to really widen our perspective and widen our options.

Dori Etter
Yeah, exactly. And I know that there's a frame that we use. I want you to talk a little bit about that frame. There's two elements. There's the context, right? The the context that everything is done inside of (I want you to talk about that triangle of that). And then there's the content that we put inside that triangle (what we're studying, what we're doing, and where we're shining a light at any given moment in time).

Susan Howard
So think of the context as, if you imagine if you can imagine a triangle, the three different points of the triangle are spiritual, which is not so much in the religious sense. Everyone has their own spirituality and their own version of it, but it's basically the fundamental principles that you believe and operate from in life. So the spiritual perspective and the idea of being connected to something larger than yourself, however you interpret that. Another point of the triangle is the psychological, which is about our thinking about things, the way we think, our personal psychology that impacts our perspective on everything, our biases, our assumptions. And then the third point of the triangle being the tactical or practical, more the physical. So if we put business in the center of that triangle and we take, let's say, a particular business issue that you're dealing with (usually business is what is in the center of the triangle in our conversations), then we will look at it from a spiritual perspective. We can look at it from a psychological perspective, like, you know, what is the thinking that that's operating out of? And we can also look at it from a tactical, practical, strategic point of view. You know, what am I going to do about it? So you can think of that as spiritual being sort of where I'm coming from, my being, my way of being in relationship to something, my thinking around it, and then what am I doing about it? So the context is the work. But everything that comes up is really called in this context of, you know, waking up in the world to who we fully are as a human being, to really being our greatest potential, and using everything that shows up as an opportunity for that awakening.

Dori Etter
Yeah. And that's what makes this so dear to my heart. I'd like for you to share a little bit more. Awakening has a lot of definitions for a lot of different people. And I'd love for you to share a little bit more about what awakening means inside the context of what we do as a group.

Susan Howard
Yeah, so in this context, we're looking at awakening as really seeing reality (I mean, getting good at seeing reality), which means having the interest to keep exploring deeper layers of reality or what is true in any given situation, and doing that with an open mind and an open heart. At core, we understand that reality has a lot of layers, levels, and dimensions, and each deeper truth can reveal a new dimension. So as a result, reality is an ongoing revelation. And that includes factual, scientific, measurable realities, but also personal experience. You know, what I believe, what I feel, what I think. This is what's true for me. And then relative truth and spiritual realities. I was listening to this guy the other day talking about an issue that he had with his 14-year-old daughter, who had been always been a really good student. Then all of a sudden, they noticed that she was moving around, she seemed depressed. Her attitude was becoming more and more negative. And then she got a report card, and she was failing. She was getting Ds; she'd never gotten a report card like that. He and his wife sit down with her and he says, "Hey, you've never had a report card like this. What's going on?" And, you know, first he wants to give her a pep talk about her negative attitude (school and all this), and then his wife kind of intervenes and gets the conversation going in a better way. And they find out that she's really having difficulty understanding things, and then they take her in for some testing and find out she is dealing with a little bit of a learning disability. Now, this is interesting because if you think about, okay, there were these signs, and then there was this report card, and then first they thought, Oh, it's this attitude problem. Then they got to this, No, here's a deeper reality of this issue that she's having about her work. But there's so much more in that, which they didn't address. The more interesting part to me was, what does it mean when parents are watching the kid walking around for months being depressed and don't sit down and say, "Hey, what's going on? You seem sad." Have that conversation. And the only point that they address it is when she shows up with a bad report card. What is the message that that sends to that kid? It's the only thing that they they really care about. So what was the opportunity there for this guy to really look at for himself. What does this mean about him, and what he cares about, and what messages? So this is like a small little microcosm that if you go deeply into it has so much to look at about what we as a culture have made important, how we deal with kids, you know, this person's own values. And that's really an example. It's like a problem arises, and what are all the different levels that you can look at it, and then what can you harvest? What can you learn from that?

Dori Etter
And I love that the way you talk about that, because that's such a great example of the way that we explore what's going on in our lives inside the mastermind. And what I want to acknowledge is how we're not saying that they did anything wrong. We're not saying that they're bad parents. We're not saying that there's a problem. What we're saying is there's a lot of different frames and opportunities for learning for that awakening, for that expanded awareness that makes the next level of possibility available to them as a family, to them individually, to the young girl. It expands things in such a way, simply by exploring it from a lot of different levels.

Susan Howard
Yeah, exactly. So sanity, again coming back to the islands of sanity idea, it's this clarity. It's this clear seeing. It's this coming into deeper levels of reality, different dimensions of reality, and also understanding the difference between what I do in the world and I am.

Dori Etter
That's brilliant. And when I share with people about the mastermind, this is the first place that I go to. And it has to do with there's a central question. And so we really look at our leadership, and we look at our professional development through a particular central question, and I love for you to share about that.

Susan Howard
So the central question that we're looking at is what is the experience of life that you want? What is the experience of life that you want? And I don't mean, what is the lifestyle you want or the life situation, although that could certainly be part of it. But what I really mean is what is the inner experience of life that you want to have as you navigate through your life, in the process of, you know, creating business opportunities for yourself and in the relationships that you have in your life. What is the experience that you want to be living inside of as you do that? And so the questions that we begin to look at (and that's the whole process of really exploring that and defining that), but it's a great question. If you're listening to this, just ask yourself. It may not be a question you've ever asked yourself, What is the experience of life you want? I mean, we do all these things, because we think they're going to give us an experience of life. You know, we pursue all kinds of things in life because we think it's going to give a certain experience. But we never really defined the experiences that we want. So then the questions are, once we get clarity about what is the experience we're really wanting, is does your way of being in the world support that? Do your beliefs support that-- your underlying beliefs? Does the way that you think about things and situations support that? Does the way that you show up and participate support that? And even does your work the work that you do in the world support that? Because if it doesn't, then maybe it's because it's not your work. Maybe you're doing work that's really not yours, or is it something about the way that you work? So again, this comes to another aspect of this, which is that everybody has goals in all different areas of their lives. But we operate from the premise that the purpose of goal is to help you for more in love with your life. And for your goals helping you do that, and if not why?

Dori Etter
Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I've been now, I think, five years in this. And the notion of goal setting inside a goal that helps me fall more deeply in love with my life is just such an empowering question. And I want to just acknowledge that inside that triangle that we operate under (the spiritual, psychological, physical triangle), we put your business or your work in the world in that as a mastermind. But you can also put relationships in the center of that triangle. And we do that from time to time as well. Because there's an opportunity to see every relationship interaction as an opportunity for that same level of growth and expansion (like we referenced in the report card story). There's a lot of things you can use inside that context when you are really asking yourself, What's an opportunity for my awakening? And we're actually going to talk a little bit more about this sort of relationships aspect in episode number two. So Susan, I'd love for you to give our listeners (as we're wrapping up here), just something to take away from today's episode. What is something they can do to begin to explore this idea of an island of sanity?

Susan Howard
I think one thing that we could do is really ask the question, What is the experience of life that I want to have? What is the experience of life that I really want to be having in my life? And to just sit with that question and be curious about it, wonder about it, ask other people about it, you know what they think about it. So one of the things is kind of bringing the idea of a meaningful conversation into your interactions with other people. So that's one thing, and then the other thing is just to notice your own thinking, particularly when you're thinking is stressful for you. So if you begin to notice in any given moment when you're feeling stressed, what is the most stressful thought that you're having? What is the number one thought that's generating your stress? And see if you can actually isolate it, and then question is that true? Is that really true? Again, you can engage in conversation with other people who have different perspectives about it, maybe somebody who can broaden the assumption that you're operating from. So questioning your thinking and then just really beginning to give thought to what is the experience of life you want to create? And is my is that present in my life?

Dori Etter
It's great. I love both of those exercises. And I know that anyone who actually takes that on over the next few days will actually experience some of this idea of awakening and start to see some things differently. And if this has sparked your curiosity, you can certainly find more episodes on iTunes and in all the places that you listen to your podcast. We will also have this and the transcript available on our website corelc.org. And many of our upcoming episodes are going to feature other members, and you can find out more about them at the members page on that same website. Susan, I want to thank you so much. This has been super powerful and valuable today. And I want to thank our listeners for listening as well.

Susan Howard
Thank you, Dori.

Dori Etter
Thank you for joining us today. We conceived this series to share more broadly some of the powerful people and processes we use to create what we call whole life success in our mastermind circle. If you're an executive, entrepreneur, thought leader, or innovator in your field who would benefit from this kind of community and support we would love to hear from you. Now core leadership circle is a curated community, so you can find the application and contact information at corelc.org. From there, you can schedule a personalized call to see how and if this mastermind group may be beneficial to you. You can also find and follow all of our episodes on iTunes, Stitcher, and other places you enjoy your podcasts.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai