Unlocking Your Potential: The Path to Wisdom and Creating Your Best Life

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes.

1:04 Welcome back to the Working on Purpose Program. Thanks for turning again this week. Great to have you. The show has been brought to you with passionate pride since February of twenty fifteen. I'm your host, doctor Elise core Test. If we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm an organizational psychologist and lagal therapist, a speaker and author. My team and I at gustoe Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a high performance, invigorated culture and leadership activated by meaning and purpose. Our mission is to help our clients create a destination workplace where people flocked to join, are inturntly motivated to perform with their best, can grow to their full potential, and are committed to stay and dynamic de deliver on the company's mission, which translates into higher profits for you. You'll learn more about us and how we can work together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal site elisquare test dot com.

1:48 Getting into today's program we had with us today Ben Lydel. He's a serial entrepreneur and health care innovator known for his for being ahead of the curve. He launched several successful companies in including two on the New York Stock Exchange. The best known is Anthem one of the three leading US health plans, with the market capitalization placing it on the top thirty of the Fortune five hundred. He also founded Accordia, Inc. Which became the world's seventh largest insurance broker. He is the author of the series The Potentialist, Your Future in the New Reality of the next thirty years, The Pursuit of Wisdom, and there's a third installment coming as well. The series is. Intended as a guidebook for success during the fast changing, turbulent and opportunity rich times ahead. We're talking about it today on Working on Purpose. He joined us from Phoenix. Ben, Welcome to Working on Purpose.

2:40 Thank you appreciate being here, Doctor Bartousen. So welcome. Please call me Elise, and am I saying your last name right? Is it Litele? Yes? That's great, perfect, wonderful. I failed to double check that with you. So let's first celebrate this amazing thing you brought into this world. This is the book of the series that I have just read. As I told you before we got on AIRBN, it's just stunning. It's really really, really beautiful work. And if you would just repeat what you said to me about the effort that went involved with this book in comparison to a couple of the companies that you built. Yeah, yeah, well, it is true. It was the most challenging project I had ever taken on in my life.

3:22 To write the series, but this specific book was incredibly difficult because essentially, I'm trying to write self actualization, how you discover your true self and live it and become wise in the process, and that was and to do it in language that people can understand and grasp and in practices they could truly follow. And so to try to do that, given that Carl Jung spent twenty two volumes doing it, but of course he covered much more, was incredibly challenging. But it was all so wonderfully rewarding, and I'm proud of the work, and I hope, and it means a lot to me that you enjoyed it, and I hope that everyone who reads it finds it valuable in their life. That would be just fabulous for me.

4:13 It's incredibly incredibly needy, and there's so much there to take in and fold into your person and work with. So I really really appreciate what you've done with that, and thank you for bringing it to the world and coming on to the podcast to. Talk about it. Great, Thank you so welcome. So let's first talk about that you have actually you discovered the power potential early in your life and you chose to lean into it. Can you just kind of give us a brief version of that story. Yeah, I was. I was taking a summer elective class in college, and I was I was grown up young. I mean young people got married young and then and started life young. When I was when I was a young man and so I had two children, I was going working nights, going to school days, and I had to go year round to get out in four years.

5:03 Since I was looking for a summer class and I saw this glass that said the Introduction to Personality, And so I go to this class at summertime. It's hot. We're sitting inside of an unair conditioned in those days building in Texas. And the young professor, who was probably only in the thirties, long hair, cool guy, and he said, why don't we go outside and set under a shade tree. And everybody thought, we like this guy already, so we did. And almost the first words out of his mouth, paraphrased a little to save time here, was you do not have to be anything that someone else expects you to be.

5:47 Inside you is you and you need to discover who that is and then live it and if you do that, you will be a success in life. And even though I had oneonderful parents who encouraged me and said you can do anything you want to do, your. A little bit further into the microphone, who's there? That was like a yeah, that's just like a lightning bolt. For me, it was, and I'm sure it was not for everyone else in class, but for me that was a moment and I realized, this is something for me.

6:29 And then I've learned over the next few weeks that there was this whole body of material on how to develop your potential and to discover your potential and what it meant. And so that became a lifelong advocate avocation for me, and it and it's it is. It has been my north star throughout my entire life. I've studied it, observed it. When I would meet people that I thought were wise or insightful, I would basically interview and get the o them, learn how they became that way, and collected I kept all my notes, collected all that material and all of that's wrapped into this book.

7:09 It's stunning. And for that, let's just take a second here and just invite our listeners and viewers to come with us on this purpose journey. As you and I were talking about. Before we came on air, is that we do need to be able to hear, be still enough to be able to hear that little. Insistent quiet whispering. It's trying to get your attention. Telling you where you need to go, what is it that you're here for, what is it that you're called for, so that you can actually devote your life to that. There's nothing more fulfilling than that and where we can make the greatest impact. So I just want to situate that because when I'm ou speaking to audiences, I would say that no more than three percent of people's hands go up saying that they know what their purpose is. And it's okay if you don't, because that's part of a journey. But we just want to encourage you to come along with because it's so fulfilling. And look what you have done by leaning into your potential, by being obedient if you will to that so just amazing.

8:03 So let's talk about potential. You have a rather, I. Think studying a unique, beautiful way of talking about it, but just starting with the idea that your potential is the best you. So for you say a bit more, what is potential for us? Yeah, it's you're after what you know young and Freud called the self with the little ass or the id. I use the term I in me, which is not original, but it's but I like it because to me it spoke to me. The I in me, and your potential is when you develop that I in me, which I describe how to do in the book, and you do it by using it. Uh. And when that I and me gets strong enough, your ego is no longer in control.

8:56 H and all of us have an ego, and unfortunately for me, any many many people, they think the ego is them. It is not. It is a function that exists in every human being, just like an arm and a leg and everything else. It's a function. It's a psychological function, but it is not us. And so when you develop that I and me to where it is you all day, every night, every time, you'll be happy and you will have reached your potential. And that's really crucial. You start by learning absolutely to do it when you're making important decisions, because your ego will never make the right decision. It won't always be wrong, it just will never be the best. And so you learn it first in decision making and then ultimately it becomes you all the time. The ego is still there because there's good things about the ego, but it's but it is not in control. It's in the backseat and you're in the driver's seat.

9:58 Okay, two things to that if I can. Then, First, I've always sort of had the notion that we can always be reaching and working twitter potential, but we can never really fully reach it because we just did. The ceiling keeps going further up. Do you align with that or see a difference? Yeah, But in a sense, I do think you reach a point where you live through your your your eye and me you live through your true self and it's there all the time. But you're correct that the it's an organic Uh, it's an organic existence, it's an organic function, and so it's always changing and it's always growing. But the difference is you don't have to work so hard at it. Once you're in there, you just naturally take that step to learn. You naturally take that step to do the right thing. You don't struggle with it like you do so many times in life. And that doesn't mean you don't still have hard decisions. You do, but they're a lot easier because you know how to you know how to answer them, and you know your you trust that you're that you'll answer them properly.

11:02 The foundation is more more established. Okay, Then the second thing I wanted to cover. I thought this was quite fascinating and interesting. And so you're talking about just you know, the just the pure power of potential, and you see, and yet human potential has always been underestimated. Humanity, especially in leaders, have yet to grasp this timeless truth. Would you say a bit more about that? And then I think I've got something to add to that as well. Yeah, it's it's it's I mean, it's a it's a historical fact. You go back once upon a time, people weren't trusted to own land. The church and the clergy, and the and the and the royalty owned all the land.

11:44 And literally, conversations of that time, they're not hard to go find, were well, you can't trust people to take care of land. They work it, but they could never be responsible and take care of it today, right, people that will know, No one thought people needed to read. Why would you need to read? We'll tell you what you need to know, thank you very much. And suddenly, thank goodness, Gutenberg and other people didn't believe that, and they began to publish books and guess what, people loved to read. And in fifty years there were nine million books in Europe along nine million in fifty years. And then that triggered the desire for literacy, which then triggered desire for public education. So we've always we thought people can't govern themselves. You know, if we were all today sitting in the late eighteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, there would have been discussions all over the place. How can you possibly live without a king to tell you what to do? Today? We think that's silly. So why can't we all be wise? Why can't we all achieve our potential?

12:56 There's no reason other than our own self impost limitation, which by the way, comes from the ego. That's fascinating an historical background. From the vantaged point of leadership, of course, so much of the work that I'm doing is helping to encourage, teach, and inspire leaders to look at people and lead them to their potential, give them to help help them see right, so that they're not leading them from where they are today, they're leading to where they can become a resire to. Come or be inspired to become. So I really wanted to really accentuate the power the possibility of the leader's role in activating people's potential.

13:39 Well, and when I have talked about that event at age twenty, it became the lens at which I look through life. So I rose up very fast in business, and I was a chief operator CIO about thirty four, chief operating officer of about thirty six, and a CI CEO by forty two, a very big company. And part of that was I looked at myself, I looked at the people that worked for me and my job. I felt it was to discover help them to discover the potential in themselves. They couldn't see, but I hook it. And that's what drove my entrepreneurial drive. When I look at something, I look at an idea, or I look at a company that I'm thinking about investing in or buying, I go, Okay, what could it be? What could it be?

14:31 Now I'm pragmatic. I put all the hard business tests you would, but I'm looking at it from that lens, And unfortunately, I have sat with too many business people my entire life and see that most of them start at the other end, what's wrong with it. You can get to what's wrong with it after you first imagine what it can be, but otherwise you're judging whatever you see today and it's going to be distorted. So that looking at life through its potential is I think the only way you're going to ultimately tap its potential and also be happy. Quite frankly, at least, it's very hard for me to see if all you're doing is looking what's wrong with things, that you can possibly feel very good about the life you live in, because you can always.

15:15 Find plenty right, indeed wonderful with that. Let's rub our first break here. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortes, if we're on there with Ben Lytel. He's a serial entrepreneur, a keynote speaker, author, healthcare policy expert, futurist. And thought leader. We've been talking a bit about where his book came from, what he's trying to accomplish with it. Just getting into the bit about what is potential. After the break, we're going to start getting into what is wisdom, talking about natural laws and what's consciousness. We'll be right back.

16:00 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A. L Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose.

16:52 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to helping create a world where people lives of potential at work are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and attribute their greatness. And we do business at betters in the world. I continue to research and write my own books. So my last one came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically in liven your business. And I wrote it to help the business leaders understand today's workforce needs and wants, especially after pandemic. It's changed, and now I offer twenty two best practices to help you create a culture to provide that for them. You can find my books at leastcoretest dot com and on Amazon if you are just now joining us.

17:32 My guest is Ben Litel. He is the author of the series The Potentialist, Your Future in the New Reality of the next thirty years, The Pursuit of Wisdom. So let's get into wisdom here. So before we talk a little bit about just kind of diving into it, I have a whole section here that I want to grill you on and extract as much as I can in a nutshell, How would you describe wisdom? What is it? So? Wisdom is? And this is a classical philosophical definition you can find if you go out and google it. It happens to be my favorite because I think it's the most the greatest truth. Wisdom is the art of living well. Is that elegantly it really is. Wisdom is the art of living well. Who wouldn't want to live well?

18:24 Well? What does living well mean? Living well means becoming wise and making good decisions younger in life and continuing that throughout your life. And you go, okay, that sounds pretty good. But then how do you know your decisions are wise well? Because they serve you and others equally in balance and they are well grounded in reality. So so so then then you move to the next level of classical definition of wisdom, and it has two parts. In classical terminology, they call it theoretical and applied. I call it. I call it the capacity for wisdom, meaning that in the moment we have we have done our work to understand life as it is and and to and to appreciate life as it is. And then the other half is then in the moment of decision, you applied free of ego, bias instinct negative instincts are emotions that have grabbed you because you will not make a wise decision. I don't care how wise you are if you do that, and wise people make mistakes and aren't always wise because sometimes they don't do that second step. So then if you say, well,

19:55 what is the capacity for wisdom, it's really three things. It's perspective. That means getting up above, not living the ant life, getting up above it, seeing the forest instead of the trees, bird's eye view, whatever metaphor you wish, but everybody gets what that is. It means looking back into history. So if every time you'll hear me go back into history and bring it to today and then bring it forward, that's perspective. The second thing is seeing life as it is and accepting it as it is. That doesn't mean you don't try to change things, but you accept life as it is. And to do that that means understanding things we'll talk a little bit about like natural law. It means understanding my life and how I live. It matters answering these existential or unavoidable questions we all because they ground us and we have to always remember that our ego and you're a psychologist, so you certainly understand your ego creates distortion of reality. And that's a lot of what therapists do, right. They help people get understand you're not seeing life the way it is, so we have to be we learn to be free of those distortions, to be aware of them, know when it's happening, and avoid it. And then finally it's what I call discernment. That means sharpening our ability to really understand something. I like like honing a knife, sedge and discernment.

21:29 One classical school I know grades every kid in every class from the ninth grade on on two things. Scope of wonder. Isn't that beautiful? That is scope of wonder and depth of inquiry. Now if you as you and I just pay attention to what's going on in the world, how we're looking at a. Situation, come a little closer again, Ben, there we go. Yeah, So wonder means almost slight awe. It means I'm oh, this is fascinating, and it'll help you then dive down into the subject and really understand it. So three thanks perspective, seeing life as it is, seeing reality as it is, and then discernment.

22:20 That right there, this is just that bit there, Ben, was worth the price of admission already, So thank you for that. That was just gorgeous. And by the way, I've had people on the show talking about wonder and awe. If there's like Monica Parker wrote a whole two hundred and eighty five page books about wonder, it's just beautiful, so so much there, all right, Well, I did want to talk a little bit about natural laws. That whole chapter on natural laws was incredibly educational for me. I think I might have missed a few of those a little bit along my way and in education. There's just a couple that I wanted to talk about. But before we get into those, would you situate for us why understanding natural laws serves us? Right again, we'll go back life. Part of being wise, the capacity for wisdom so that you can be wise in the moment of decision is seeing reality of it is and understanding law and natural law. A lot of life is explained through natural law, a lot of life.

23:17 And the fascinating thing to me about natural law is it existed before. In many cases, natural law now has proof in physics and math. That's what scientists do. They discover the natural laws of the universe and of life, and a lot of those thousands of years before we even had scientists, people were already saying things that expressed their knowledge of natural law. So some examples, a stitch in time saves nne. What goes around comes around, what goes up must come down. All of those are expressions of laws in physics. There's no new idea, that's what those.

24:03 All of those are natural expressions, humanistic expressions of natural law. They are telling us this is the way life operates. And I just find it fascinating. We were talking about being revealed truth being revealed to you and how it can guide you. Long before people were what we think of as civilized today, they were using these expressions to explain how life works essentral to do that. Yes, yes, and I think you list a good ten in the book, right, so that okay, there's. At least twenty five, and they're always adding to them. One of the more recent ones that now has tons of science behind it's the law of diversity, which every time if you just want to carry a mental image of a bell curve around, Not that the bell curve is totally all expressions of diversity, but it explains so many things in life, so many things people explains, personality explains so many things. And that's what these laws are so valuable for.

25:04 So the two that I wanted to talk about. Is first the law of connectedness or otherwise known as intimacy. Could you kind of shed the light on how that law works? Yeah, one of my favorite quotes. Matter of fact, my one of my granddaughters just texted me earlier today and said, Papa, what are your two favorite quotes? And I went, oh, God, only two. I can only give two it I have so many, And one of them, you know, from Ben Frank, what's the first one in the book that says, uh, we grow one of life's great life's great tragedy is we grow old too quick? And why it is too slow? Right slowly. But the one that's relevant to this is from Dogan Zenz from like the seventh century or something, and it is intimacy is I'm sorry, enlightenment is simply intimacy with all things.

26:00 Remember that in your book. It's so beautiful as again the expression of connectivity, and it basically says, at a level, we are connected to everything and everybody in the universe, and the more we can feel that, the wiser we become. It's one of my of my top ten gars is number six. Intimacy is number six. Being intimately connected. With people that I work with people that hear about the everyday life that breathe all of that. It's so beautiful. Well, and you read my books, so you know, I try to reduce these things down to stuff we can remember.

26:41 Here's the pure definition of intimacy to me, and you can really feel it with friends, family, the simple joy of being together, no motive, no utility, nothing, You just love being together. And at the opposite end, because all of these things are on a continuum, uh, the opposite end is utility. There's a purpose here. Yes, utility is not always bad, but if it dominates the relationship, it is, you know. And so that's the trick, is to always have intimacy dominate our relationships. That ezy simple joy being together. Do I enjoy being with this person? Yes? Yes, thank you for that distinction with intimacy. That's so important.

27:24 The other one that I that I wanted to talk about, I guess it's maybe the part of it is well, I guess. It's not the other lots, it's still part of it. But but that you go on to say, you know, intimacy connects us to everyone and everything. And I just thought that just this little bit of you know you say, intimacy is a little is little understood transformative force that accelerates development to our potential. That is a fascinating concept. Can you see a little bit more about that? Yeah, so every everyone, And again you know from the book, I try to write this book to be very inclusive. So it's not it's not a religious book, it's not an irreligious book. It's it's simply trying to write. And so I give people the option of how they want to choose to believe what things are. But everyone must accept there was some creative act, whatever that was, something spawned all of this that we ultimately have out evolved out of. And what I like to think of intimacy as something most people, I think a lot of people accept.

28:30 You know, we're all connected in some ways. I've heard scientists say it's nitrogen. I'm not a good enough chemist to verify that one, but something's there to me that that force is intimacy, that that is the force that connects everything and every everybody. And a good little test. If you've got a favorite sweater, or a coffee cup or a baseball cap, next time you pick it up, pause for a half a second and feel what you feel, you've have, you have an intimate feeling with that very familiar thing, and that is to me a proof of intimacy.

29:20 We can be intimacy with inanimate things. We can be intimacy with animals obviously other people. Uh and and and again it's that simple joy of being together. I love my healthy cap. Hello, good morning. I love my baseball cap. You know, whatever it is, though, that's a good way to appreciate the universality of intimacy. So beautiful, you brought it right to us. Okay, So next where I would love to go because I I you know, I am. I'm an organ social psychologist. I staid at existential psychology, positive psychology, things like that, developmental psychology. But the way that you really distinguish the psychology functions of a person is really quite alluring and useful.

30:04 You already talked about the eye and me, but could you just had to take us through the functions? Yeah, so so, and as you know, I also use a metaphor of the physical body and the process. So so so we we appreciate that we have in our physical body, that we have organs and functions, you know, our arms, our hands, our liver, our heart. Each of these have different functions and they have a purpose, and together they make a functioning whole, which is the human body. You know, we become a physically whole person, and we know we have to take care of it. We have to we have to help it grow and give it nutrients, take good care of it. It's an amazing thing that by the time we're in middle school we understand a lot about that physical body. A lot. The time we're adults, we're doctor Google man. I mean, we'll take care of you, right, So, but yet we know almost nothing and we're taught almost nothing about the psychological body. So I try to break it down into just the four functions of the most important.

31:18 You cannot become wise unless you understand that you are not those functions. You are the I and me, which is the culmination of those functions. So and they are on we are also as you know, we are also people who are both physical live on this earth. And there's a part of us that is that is connected to something greater. And so the part and those stand in opposites to each other. So we have an ego, and the ego I describe in a lot of detail, and it has good functions. The good ego is that can do attitude. That's a good ego. The bad ego is the one that is jealous, possessive, envious, really doesn't care a lot about anybody else except itself, and that part of us we have to accept. That's also part of the ego. So we want to bring out the good ego, not so much of the other. Its opposite is the soul, and this is not the soul in the religious context. This is the soul and the context of it is a function. I don't think anybody can debate that there is not a function there that speaks to us in a very different voice than the ego.

32:37 And it's the source of inspiration, it's the source of aha moments, and it's a function. And then the other two functions are the shadow, which is on the side of the ego, and those two sides are all about human preservation. So if you were creating a species and it had to survive on the planet, it had to have these kind of carecharacteristics to first survive and then to become all it could be. It needs the soul and the conscience. And I like to think of the kind the shadow and the consciences as partially instinctive. They were probably the first level of development as we evolved as creatures. So before we had an ego, we had a shadow. And the shadow we can really recognize because it's that thing when you're walking down a dark alley and the hairs on the back of you next stand.

33:33 It's that thing that somebody says something the wrong thing to you the wrong time and it hits you the wrong way and you snap at them. It's that snake inside you and that shadows of defensive function, and so it has a function. Your ego is primarily safety. It's constantly trying to make you feel safe. The strange thing about the ego is it'll work you to death trying to feel safe. Give me more, give me more. So that's that part of it. T why you have to have it in the back seat, not driving the car. And then the shadow is more it lets you know you feel vulnerable. So just like it stares since hairs up on the back of your neck to warn you of something you haven't yet consciously aware of, it does the same thing with senses of vulnerability.

34:23 And then did you talk about conscience. And then your conscience. I know I did not not really. Your conscience likewise was probably the first stages of the of the soul for people to be aware of. And it reminded us that there's more there than just us, and that was a huge step in evolution. Yes, that suddenly there I need to think about others instead of myself. And it was probably family. And I tell a story in the book about a hunter gatherer who is starving, literally starving, as most hunter gatherers were, and so he kills a small antelope and he's about to eat it all, and suddenly something says to him, what about your family?

35:08 Why not eat some and take home the rest for them. That's the conscience, and it came out of that instinctive, but it's not the soul, and the soul is very much wiser. The skults and each one of these have a very distinct voice, which in the chapter on the psychological body, I try to I actually try to quote where you can almost hear that voice, because that's what you have to do ultimately to really understand and use your own psychologist, recognize these voice, and use it the way it was intended to be used expertly explained. Thank you, Ben. That is just out of this world. Thank you. Let us take our last break. I'm your host, doctor Ely's Cortez. We're in the air with Ben Leidel. He's a serial entrepreneur, genote speaker, author, healthcare policy expert, futurist, and thought leader. We've been getting into the depths of some of the really amazing concepts in his book. After Greg, we will go ahead and hit consciousness and also talk about learning states and few other things.

36:08 Kay. Thank you. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise A Lisee at Eliscortes dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose.

37:15 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I am your host, Doctor Release Cortes. I mentioned in the last break that my last book came out in March twenty three, The Great Revitalization. What I did for you is I created a three page assessment for you to be able to assess the extent to which your current culture meets the needs of today's discerning culture, discerning workforce. You can find it at gustodashnow dot com and decide for yourself if you are just now joining us. My guest is Ben Litel. He's the author of the series The Potentialist, Your Future in the New Reality of the next thirty years, The Pursuit of Wisdom. So I want to go next if we can to consciousness. I have to tell you that consciousness is also it's my number four value and I'm very, very fascinated with it.

37:59 So let's hear your perspective on what is consciousness. Well, what I like to think of it is as a as a specific kind of experiential learning, meaning that it's an experience and we learn from that experience. But it's very different in that it's also instant, So I also call it instant knowing, and you can, well, how can you instantly know something? But you speak to audiences a lot, and I do too, and I ask your listeners, have you ever had an Aha moment? Have you ever had an inspiration an idea? Particularly inspirations almost every well everyone has a lot of people never recognize they have them, but the average person has hundreds or thousands. And that's our opportunity to experience the expand of consciousness. And so what consciousness is is what we are after we have one of those. So there's a process there. There's that moment of inspiration or insight or clarity we never had before, boom, the Aha moment, And then there's a moment later where we process it in a half second and we know suddenly we know for sure it's not Gee, I got

39:30 to go read some more. We know for sure. One of the real tricks of becoming and expanding your consciousness is keep track of everyone, write it down, use your phone, dictate into it what you just learned, because you'll find over time that even if in that moment you don't know exactly what its purpose was, because you weren't thinking about it. I mean, that's the great thing about consciousness. It comes to you, but it's trying to let you know about something, and it's like a mosaic. It'll come together at some point. I have never had anybody talk about conscious in that way. Thank you for that. You know another reason you got to pick up the book and just read the whole thing as I did. Okay, So the next thing that I thought was pretty intriguing, and I just think it's so worth celebrating.

40:17 Here is you know you talk about in your book. We've heard the homespun wisdom that quote we can only be what we imagine, and you say, there's truth to that. Help us understand why? Yeah. Absolutely. First of all, as you know, there's good science behind this. So there is science behind the fact that when we imagine something, it is as powerful our body take to our mind. It happened. We didn't imagine it. That's the processing we do in our conscious mind, but in our minds it actually happened. We learn like this all the time. We learn how This is how you learned a load of dish washer, This is how you learn to bake a cake, throw a party, play golf, be a basketball player, hike with the proper equipment and the right amount of water. You imagine it doing it right, and then you do it right. If you don't imagine it, you'll repeat what you did last time, which was the mistakes the way we learned. So, going back all the way to Saint Ignatius in fourteen hundred and something, he was writing about this, Carl Jung picked it up in the early twentieth century and he put a name to it called active imagination, and what he said was deliberately imagine what you want to be, or in the case of when we were talking about learning about our psychological body,

41:49 imagine what your ego is, Imagine how it sounds, even when you're not hearing its voice. Imagine your soul and you'll then you'll begin to wrap your head or around it. So so it's a powerful tool for becoming what we want to be in visualizing parts of our psychological body that we can't see. You know, we've got the advantage of our physical body. We can see some of it, although we don't see our heart. A little closer again, So that's. Very that's very important is to is to imagine these things and another term I like is visualize to realize, you visualize what you want to be. And this goes back to every sports team if you look at how you build great teams in business, or how you you get people to visualize something different. We imagined Anthem and Accordion and every other company I built, we imagined that as a team before, long before we build it.

42:57 Powerful, so powerful. Yeah, there's I hope we have time for two more things that I want to get to. One is learning states and the. Other ones about reframing fear. We won't have time to really go into much depth. But your learning states, the eight learning states that you talk about in your book are so incredibly compelling. Can you just maybe if you want to talk if you want to meame them all or talk about a couple, but I just want to go. Next a couple in the time the cave writing immediately connect to. One is solitude very powerful. I need solitude. I need to be alone in the middle of a crowd if I want to yes yes. And another is gratitude. Gratitude so powerful because when we're in a state of gratitude, all of that stuff of the ego cannot survive. There it is an opposite of the ego. The ego is never satisfied. So when you go into a state of gratitude, it helps you transition to a very different place. And that's the best thing about these psychological states in that chapter is that teach you how you never have to be victim to a mood again ever in your life.

44:05 You never have to be stuck in a bad state of mind ever by using these psychological states. Fantastic and just quickly, ladies and gentlemen. The other learning states are awe, neutrality, observation, reflection, contemplation, and intimacy. So just to give you an idea of just what he covers in the book, and he's got a section on each of those. Okay, so now let's talk about. This notion of reframing fear. Fear is such a fascinating thing, and I really appreciate how you say in your book fear is humanity's most significant challenge in the next three decades. Yeah. Yeah, people are afraid right now, and they're afraid of the unknown. And the unknown is going to be most of what we live. You won't let the rest of your life with because really the known and certainty is an illusion of the ego. Anyway, it doesn't really exist.

44:56 There's no such thing as certainty in nature. We have to we learn to live with uncertainty. But fear does not have to grip us. Fear has its purpose. It's like a guardrail that reminds us, don't do that. But if it takes control of you, just like the ego, it can absolutely ruin your life and so and you don't have to do it. Usually what you're afraid of is not what you're really afraid of. You have to go down to the core, something below that. Most of the time, when we think we're afraid of this, it's something much deeper that we're actually afraid of. You have to learn to dissect fear, which I explain in the chapter.

45:37 But I will tell you that just like you can reach a point of your potential where your eye and me is always in control and you don't ever have to worry about your ego taking over again, the same thing can happen with you with fear. You can have a transformative moment. And I explain it for me, it's happened to many other people. Wise, people I talk to, they all had a similar experience. Under different circlescumstances where suddenly and a wise man said to me, I was fretting about not being a good dad because I was working so hard and so forth and so on, and he said, Ben, you seem like such a strong man. Don't you think you can handle whatever life throws you?

46:19 And I went, yeah, I think I can. Suddenly I knew I could, and I've never fear has never gripped me again. And there are a lot of people you think, well, that's an odd one person. It's not. It is not. And when you study people who did amazingly brave things, endure incredible things like Nazi concentration camps, frank and their fear, they were no longer fearful. And it's possible to be. Done so allering. I so look forward to seeing you on October ninth when you come to Dallas. And we've come to the end of our time together. And this program is listened by people around the world world who really are here to learn to improve their connection to the work, to become a better leader, to learn how to do business in a way that better is the world, and to become a better version themselves.

47:10 What would you like to leave them with. Lead that potential. Look at anything, look at life, look at your people that you lead, look at your company, whatever it is, see it's potential, and drive towards that. Imagine how you get it there, and you'll get it there. What a beautiful way to finish, Ben, Thank you so very much for putting forth the excruciating effort to render the series and being on air here with me working on purpose. I'm really grateful that our paths acrost and you are now not getting away from me. You can run, but you. Can't hide for me. That same goes the other way too. Okay, thank you, thank you. We're so welcome. Listeners and viewers.

47:51 You are going to want to learn more about this man. You can check him out at potentialist Future dot com. Again, that's potentialist Future dot com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch it be a recorded podcast where we get your podcasts. We were on air with Garon Stower, who shares his story of when life hit him with the unexpected challenge of the leukemia diagnosis in twenty nineteen and he discovered a new depth of mental strength. Rather than just surviving, Garran made the choice to thrive now. Through his company, Duramo Minds, he brings his hard earned insights to corporations, offering innovating training on the power of really being able to redefine your connection to your mindset and your improve your well being and your performance. Next week, we'll be on air with Piem Zamani talking about his new book, Crossing the Desert, The Power of Embracing Life's difficult Journeys. It will be an incredibly inspiring episode as we talk about how he immigrated from Iran, then Pakistan and made his way to the United States at age sixteen and successfully founded a dot com company called Autoweb and then later took it to an IPO status along with many other challenges and lessons he learned.

49:02 Along the way. See you there and remember that work is one of the best means and realizing their potential and making the impact we crave. So let's Work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C. Why Together We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion. Performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose. They crave see you there. Let's work on purpose.