We the Walking Wounded: Our Invitation to Step on the Path Toward Wholeness and Awakening

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, explicit or implied 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 Relise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program. Thanks for doing again this week. Great to have you. This show has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of twenty fifteen. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortes. If we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm an organizational psychologist and logo therapist, speaker and author, and my team and I at Gusto now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting in purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant destination workplace. There people are

1:33 intrinsically motivated to perform at their best and can grow into their fuller potential and are committed to stay and dynamically deliver on the company's mission. Yewing more about us and how we can work together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal site at least Coortes dot com. Now Getting in today's program with us back for a second time is doctor Raj Cisodia, a founding member of the Conscious Capitalism movement. He has also a Femmes, a Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise and chairman of the Conscious Enterprise Center at technol Technol Holico di Monterrey, and he is the co founder and chairman emeritus of Conscious Capitalism, Inc. And President of Awakened, Inc. He has consulted with and taught executive programs for numerous well known companies, and since two thousand and seven, he has spoken over one thousand times on conscious capitalism and related topics to audiences around the world, including at the White House, the Vatican, and the Vatican. He co hosts the podcast The Conscious Capitalist with Timothy Henry. And He's published sixteen books, including Firms of Endearment and The Healing Organization, which we talked about last time together on air. Today we're talking about his latest book, awaken The Path to Purpose, Inner Peace and Healing. He jointed today from Boston.

2:43 Raj, a hearty welcome back to working on purpose. Thank you, Elise. It great to be back with you. Really appreciate you the human walking the planet in this latest beautiful book that you brought into the world. Raj. It's beautiful, just almost as beautiful as you than you. You're welcome. Thank you, Raj. You know, I really commend you and I thank you for writing such a beautifully personal narrative. You said that this was your most personal share of all of your books, and I've read a few of your books and it really is you, and I just want to say thank you for modeling such inclusive leadership, loving conscious leadership by sharing your story so intimately, Raj, I know you know this. You then allow us to be able to see our own So I want to start on that flavor if we can. Well, thank you Earlie's. Actually it's the first time I've written at all about myself. All the other books. You know, we're coming in from from an academic perspective, where you're supposed to be detached and an observer. But I realized that books that have had the biggest impact on me are the ones where the author does share personally from their own life, and that that which is deeply personal is also completely universal, as many readers are discovering. Even though my story is pretty unique in many ways and my background is quite unusual, and yet there are so many points of connection and commonality that people are from diverse backgrounds and cultures are finding in the book. I appreciated this, and this is increasingly what I'm seeing in some

4:15 of the other work that I'm doing inside organizations and in my coaching. But you say this specifically in the front of your book, just a couple of sentences. I want to read from the front. But you say you've written this book to understand, you said, my life in a deeper way, so I can live more consciously while helping others do the same. It is about looking back, not with anger, resentment, or regret, but with awe, wonder and curiosity. It's about making more explicit what has been so far implicit. And you go on, So the point being is that you're really trying to showcase through yourself what you hope to help us see in ourselves. And it's just it works. It's beautiful. Yeah, thank you. I think you know. When I reached the age of sixty five years ago in twenty eighteen, which is when this project really had its roots, it was a natural advantage point from which to look back at life because it's kind of the end of the second act, in the beginning of the third act.

5:11 Hopefully there's a full act, you know in front of us. Yeah, right, age, And you know it's it's about making sense. You know this. We go through life and we cannot connect the dots except looking back. But when you do stop and look at your life in that way, it turns out that there are patterns and there are things that you can learn by looking back, and that other people. I think the ultimate goal of anything like this is to help other people learn some of those lessons or get some of those insights without having to go through some of the pain. You know, some of that is inevitable. Every life has to go through difficulties and painful experiences and learning. But I think we humans are unique among all species in that we can not only learn from our own experience, which anybody can do, but we can also learn from each other's experience. I think that is really the intention behind this, especially for my children, but really for everybody. How can you learn something from what I've experienced and hopefully avoid some of the pain that it took me to acquire some of those lessons.

6:19 Indeed, and you did mention speaking of when you turn sixty, you mentioned in the book that was the year twenty eighteen, and you talk about having a year of metamorphosis that year. There's a few things that were happening that year that I think would be great if you could just showcase what they were and why they were so meaningful. Yeah, So they didn't just happen, I mean I consciously chose. So I call it my year of conscious awakening or metamorphis. I was treating it like any other year up to a point. I knew I was going to turn sixty that June, but I was thinking my next writing project, which was the Healing Organization. I had done all the research, I had collected, all the stories, the interviews, et cetera. And I had planned a series of writing retreats that summer to get the book finally written, which is how I typically work, you know, I go away for a week or two at a time and have an intensive period of writing. And so I had said no to a number of opportunities that had come up, including going to the Himalayas with the Shakti Spiritual Journeys. My co author on that book. Shakti Leadership organizes these journeys, and this one was going to be right around the time of my birthday in Ladakh, which is a region way up in the High Himalayas on the border with Tibet and the seat of the deepest Buddhist wisdom in the world.

7:40 Between Tibet and Buddhism, and then that it's just there. And so I said no to that. And there was a silent retreat in July in Upstate New York that I had said no to, and other things as well. There was a trip to the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador in August that I had also said out, I don't have time for any of this, you know. But I got four women telling me the same thing that year, and I was talking to them about my my next project. They all said some version of this, that you're writing a book about healing, but what about your own healing? How can you write a book about healing if you don't work on yourself on your own healing. And I said, well, I don't have time for that. It's got a book that line, you know.

8:26 I know, and I know because I was in that mode almost of a sense of panic urgency, you know, I was running from project to project. One book wouldn't even be published yet, and I'm already worried about what's the next thing, and you know, never taking any time off, never being with myself. Really in a in a very road to burn out in many ways. And so when I said, well, I've got this book deadline, and they said, no, book deadlines are flexible, and I said, well, I don't think I need any healing. I think I'm okay. Well, now everybody needs healing, and you know a little bit, you definitely need to do that time off, be in nature, be with yourself. Somebody said, smoke some pot you know, which I don't do. But you know, just do all that you know. So I had the wisdom to listen to those four women way trusted friends, and I delayed the book by five months, and I said yes to all the things I had said no to, including the MLAs, including Amazon Rainforest, including the Silent Retreat, as well as some healing experiences that a friend of mine in Boston told me writing about healing. I've been going to these healing journeys, these plant journeys, which I didn't know what she was referring to.

9:35 I honestly thought that she meant that you go there and you eat some potted plants, you know, organic vegetables or something, you know. But I trusted her and I said, okay, sure, let's I was open to all experiences at that point, and so all of these turned into profound experiences of healing and understanding, of self awareness and understanding my life. And we can talk about each of them if you like. But that was really and then I worked with a coach for the first time ever at the end of that summer, and that too was profound. So these were all things that gave me such deep insight for the first time into life in general and my life in particular, that I think I need to write another book after.

10:18 You need to keep moving on those books. Don't stop writing these books rush, They're too beautiful. I agree, well, and that's where you talk about you also describe. So you've been talking about this transformative, transformative journey that you went on intentionally. But I was really surprised that you say in your book that you were You realize that you were unconscious for most of your first six decades, which is incredible for someone who has done what you have done and written what you have written. Well, yeah, I mean I was conscious in certain dimensions. I suppose I had become right. I had awakened the many aspects of our being that need to be awakened. One part of my being had been awakened through my work, which is the discovery of purpose through my research, which kind of came out of my frustration with business as a business professor who really didn't believe in the story of business.

11:11 I was never inspired and I was never emotionally engaged or moved by the story of business and what I was taught and being asked to teach. And so that unhappiness and later on dissatisfaction led me to ask the question, is there a better way to think about this? You know, as I said, my business education was all about the head and the wallet and never touched my heart and soul. I was never inspired a single day in my six years, my two years of MBA, four years of PhD. Never inspired and never emotionally touched or moved. And for me, those things matter. I think they matter to all humans, but some of us might matter a little more, and so I was hungry for those things. And in the process of doing the research when I asked is there a better way? And I looked for companies that I love for everybody. I literally had tears in my eyes as I was writing some of the stories of those companies. That book became firms of endearment, and that really changed my life because it connected me to my purpose. I said, oh, my god, it is possible to do business with love and care and such deep humanity can exist inside the business. And I was never taught this. I was inspired, and I was moved to tears, which is a very rare thing, to have tears of joy. So that connected me to my purpose. In that instant, I knew that this is what I've been looking for without even realizing it, that I want to dedicate the rest of my life, my working life to this, to understanding and then telling this story of business and deepening it.

12:35 So that connected me to my purpose. It led to led to the conscious capitalism movement, and it elevated my consciousness in that dimension about work, about business. But I thought that was the end of the journey, but it's not really, you know. That's why the subtitle of the book is the Path to Purpose, Inner Peace and Healing, because I did not have inner peace. I was quite unhappy in my personal life, and you know, both in terms of my relationship to my father and my marriage and my you know, being as a parent. It was very challenging all of it. And so I, in a way, my work became an escape. It was a way to be away from all of that. And I was literally traveling maybe eighty percent of the time and speaking all over the world a hundred times a year maybe, And you know, I was more comfortable in the airport lounges and in hotel rooms, you know. And and you know, I thought I was doing important work, and yeah, it was important for the conscious capitalism movement, but in a sense, I was running away from the rest of my life and I was not living in integrity overall. You know, there was no alignment between different aspects of my life in that sense.

13:50 So yeah, there was a lot more too that I needed to do, and I didn't realize it. I just thought my life, you know, mm hmm. I do want to spend a little more time after the break talking more in depth about the Firms of Endearment book and what that launch, So I want to get there, but I want to surface this bit here. Raj. It's so incredibly it hurt my heart when I read this because of all the beauty and love that you've put into the world, and to learn that you realized in writing this book that you had been unhappy virtually your whole life. And I'll just read a couple of these sentences, and I'd ask you to respond, is but this is incredible, you said. In writing this book, I had the sobering realization that I had been unhappy for as long as I could remember. I had minimized or denied my wounds and traumas to myself, did not have the courage or ability to face them.

14:35 Here was too much darkness there, and my sensitive soul just could not take it. All I expired to was survival. If I could just make it through the next fifteen or twenty years, I would be done with it. I found myself looking at obituaries and at how old people were when they died, wondering how much longer I had to endure. A line I read years ago from The God of Small Things kept resurfacing in my mind. Old, not young, but viable, diable age rash. That is an incredible place to be. Yeah, yeah, I mean it was. It was how I felt at the time, you know, because life was hard, and yeah, yeah it was. It was something that I felt. I was in survival mode. So even though the work was meaningful and those books mattered to me, but at a personal level, like I said, I didn't have that sense of peace or happiness, and I thought it was not in the cards. I thought, you know, different people have different things in different lifetimes, if you believe that, and for me in this lifetime, happiness was just not in the cards. So I didn't even think that it was attainable. And so that was really something that starting in twenty eighteen, I was able to start to look at more deeply and understand and do something about it. So grateful for that, Raj, on a number of levels. On that note, Let's let our listeners and viewers just take in what we just surface there. There's a lot to it. We'll take our

16:06 first break. I'm your host, doctor Releiecortees. We are on the air with doctor Raj Sosdia, the author of Awaken, the Path to Purpose, Inner Peace and Healing. We've been talking a bit about the where this book came from and why he wrote it. After the break, we're going to talk about that birth to purpose that he mentioned earlier when he started working on firms of endearment deal with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, an inspirational speaker and author.

16:48 She helps companies visioneer for a 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 Elise 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 a lease A LISEE at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to a world where people can actually realize their potential and are led by inspirational leaders that help them find their greatness. And we do business at Betters in the World. I also need to write my own books, so my latest one came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called a Great Revitalization How activating meaning and purpose can ratically enliven your business, and I wrote it to help leaders understand first the lay of today's workforce, land do they want and need? And then I offer twenty two best practices to help create a culture to help them find that and offer that. You learn more about it at my website at least qure test dot com or find it on Amazon if you are just now joining me. My guest is doctor Roj Sisodia.

18:12 He's a founding member of the Conscious Capitalism movement. He is a FEMSA Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise and chairman of the Conscious Enterprise Center at Technoljo. I can't say that. I don't know why I can speak Spanish, but I can't say that de Monterrey and he is the co founder and chairman emeritus of Conscious Capitalism, Inc. And the President of Awakened Inc. So before I realized, we get into more of your journey on how it is that you came to forms of endeavorment and concious capitalists, and I want to introduce to our listeners and viewers more of your background. That so set the fertile stage for really I would say what got catalyzed in your life? So first talking about your parents, That's where I want to go next. And that I want to talk about where your emotions got stuffed. So let's introduce our listeners and viewers to your parents. They're very dynamic people in your lives.

19:02 Who were they for you? Yes, So, my my father another were both uh, you know, grew up in little villages. It came from these farming backgrounds, but actually from a very feudal background. So both my grandfathers were they call them landlords, but they were really kind of the feudal overlords. I suppose you could say those villages. You know, they had huge amounts of land, they have a big house, like a fort on a hill, and you know, dozens of servants and so forth. So a very feudal culture. I've come from the warrior class in India. There's the there's the cast system, which is the Brahmins and then the warrior cast and then the others. Uh. And so I grew up in a very feudal environment which was very extremely patriarchal, hypermasculine, almost misogynistic, I would say. I mean the women were really in many ways subjugated and ill treated us, certainly on my father's side of the family. Uh. And my father was a product of that he kind of had those qualities in many ways, but he's also brilliant and he was ambitious as well, and so he wanted to get an education, which my grandfather really didn't believe him. So he went off to college and got a gold medal there, and then went off to grad school in India and got a gold medal there, and then went to Canada to get a PhD in agriculture science. So it was a brilliant scientist. But as a result, I didn't know my father until I was seven years old, which is when he came back from Canada, and

20:33 he was this larger than life figure in the world, and for me, certainly as a little child in a village, you know, he seemed almost godlike. My mother, on the other hand, was very simple, very loving, very gentle, not that highly educated only until the eighth grade, didn't speak English, but just was a pure, loving soul. Never ever got angry at us, didn't raise her voice to me even once in sixty one years that I had her. So she was the polar opposite. So in a way, she was almost pure feminine energy without any masculine energy. My father was pure masculine energy without any feminine. And what I've learned is that when you don't have a good harmony or blend, then you can end up with sort of the over waiting. You know, if you only have masculine becomes the hypermasculine, it becomes the toxic masculine in some ways. And my mother was loving, but not empowered. She didn't have a personal power.

21:33 So I had these very very polar opposite influences in the first seven years when my mother was essentially a single parent to me, even though we were in a joint family setup, but she was the only parent. I was very much like her by birth, so by nature and by nurture, it became more like my mother. I inherited many of her qualities of being peace loving, of being gentle and so forth. And you know, she also in a way that parented me to be that. When my father came back into my life, it was again a drastic contrast, and he wanted me to be more like him, and he didn't see a kid who was at all like him, right, so he started to see every one of my qualities as a as a weakness. I was too trusting, I was too ideal. This day, I was too peace loving. I was too much, you know. Intellectually in my head he wanted me to be the opposite of all of those things. So I developed this inner voice that basically said, everything about me is faulty, then I need to be the opposite of who I was. And so that became a real challenge. You know, you can imagine for anybody, if you're trying to be the opposite of who you are to please somebody else, you kind of lose yourself in the process.

22:44 So I've learned lately there's a choice that some of us have to make between authenticity and attachment. And you can either be who you are or you can suppress who you are in order to belong. Right, if you're getting the mess, is that in order to belong you need to be somebody else, be speed difference. So you suppress your emotions, you don't express yourself, express your anger, and that just mutates in your body and shows up decades later, as in my case chronic pain, and for many people it can show up as disease as well, you know. And so that was I think one of the things that I've realized about that. So, yeah, I grew up with those very very different influences both parents. I was like my mother, but I wanted to be like my father, you know, successful in the world, recognized getting awards and gold medals and recognitions, and yet by nature I was much more like my mother. So it was always this stug between me within me, and I kind of rejected that identity of being more like my mother. I was almost ashamed of being. And finally it was in that same year twenty eighteen, when the coach that I worked with kind of made sense of that whole dynamic, and she said to me, do you realize that you spend forty five years of your life trying to impress your father, and now you spend the last fifteen years honoring your mother with your work, That everything you've done in conscious Capitalism and all the books that have come subsequently and even before forms of endearment really starting there, that that is a reflection of your mother's energy into the world of business and

24:17 leadership where it's missing. And then before that, you were just trying to embody what your father valued, which is power and success and money and status in the world. And so that was a big revelation in a way. It made clear to me what part of my journey is about is bringing That's why I wrote that book about the feminine right. But I also learned over time that I had to experience the worst of the masculine in order to be sensitized to that the need for more feminine, So its a combination. I started to look at my life experiences as a gift, even though they were very hard and I wouldn't wish them on anybody else, but they ultimately guided me towards what I was meant to do, contribution that I'm able to make in the world because of those experiences. Yes, and you say this in the book, and I very much align with this. Fraus. You talk about how you know, when we really lean into ourselves, that we can see things and do things that only we can do. And you have had a remarkable you know, it seems like there's an intensity I would describe to the way that you were weird and you just talked about your parents, but then you also talk about your worldview and experience the depths and lows of what human beings are capable of was very much intensely informed by being both in India and America. So you also had it there too, So if you could say a little bit about how those experiences colored or your opened your perspective.

25:45 Yeah, I mean, this is one of the gifts of the experiences that I had and what I'm very grateful to my father for because when he came back when I was seven, so I had grown up in a little Indian village without running water or electricity, and you know, you can just imagine what it was like there. But then suddenly we are moving across the world. He got a job in Barbados, so we go from a village to suddenly I'm in an airplane and I'm in London watching the changing of the guard, which is literally like my father is not taking over, it's the changing of the guard in my family as well, you know. And then we're in Barbados and this beautiful sunny paradise there, a completely different world. So I was seven, seven to nine in Barbados, and then my father was away, rustless soul. So he got a job in California, and so we moved from Barbados to California near San Francisco Salinas in Monterey County. And from the age of nine to eleven we were there and these were pretty momentous years. So this was nineteen sixty seven to sixty nine. This was the Vietnam War was raging, the anti war movement, you know, the hippies, the psychedelic stuff, the political upheavals, Martin Luther King getting shot, Robert Kennedy getting assassinated live on TV. I remember watching that as it was happening, and you know, the riots that were happening at the conventions and all of that. I was just becoming aware of the wider world, and it was a momentous time. And then in nineteen sixty nine, Man landing on the moon, right, so you can see all the you know, on the one hand, we are murdering leaders and on the other hand, we're doing these extraordinary things. So I could see the extraordinary things that human

27:22 beings are capable of, both on you on the positive and the negative. And then we go back to India. So I'm almost twelve years old, and suddenly now we're parachuted back into that environment which hadn't changed that much those in those five years, and I'm suddenly now looking at and immersed back into that feudal culture which I came from. But now I've got these different eyes because I'm now an outsider here. So I was an outsider in the West, and then I climatized, and now I went back to India, and now I kind of had these Western eyes, right, a more modern perspective, And now I'm looking at this feudal culture and what my cousins and uncles and others, you know, how they thought and lived and acted. And it was quite a shock and I could see things that they couldn't. So one of the early memories that I have is we were living in a city close to our village where my father had his job at a university, and they sent a kid to work in our home as a domestic help, right like a servant they call it in India. And his family had worked for our family in the village for generations, you know. It was one of those kinds of things. And so he was my age. He was twelve, and so he came and he was living in our house and working, and at some point he did something that he wasn't supposed to do. He sat on a chair he's supposed to sit on the ground. Or he picked up a piece of fruit and ate it. And he's not supposed to do that, and he's supposed to stay confined to his station, right, And you know, I didn't think anything of it. I don't think my mother did. But my cousin in my village found out, and he came to

28:52 the city specifically to deal with this kid. And he dragged him out of the house and he took a rope and he tied him with with that rope to a tree in the yard, and then he took off his belt and he proceeded to whip him in public for whatever minor thing he had done. And I was looking at this with horrifies, you know, just just horrified. And in the moment, I couldn't really say anything. My cousin was much older than me, and I just was, you know, I didn't even know how to react. I was just frozen. But it was it was a symbolic thing of the culture that I had been back into. So I could see the ills. I could see the cast system, you know, which we were the beneficiaries of, right, we were in one of the upper casts. I could see the so called untouchables, you know, who came and cleaned the toilets and did the menial work and how my aunts wouldn't even look at them, because even to look at them was to get soiled. And then you have to purify yourself, you know. I can.

29:45 I could sympathize with the lives of these poor people, you know, and I could see that way. I was very egalitarian always, you know, and so these things affected me so again, having it was the gift of that outsider objective lens that I think was was part of what I know why I could notice things that others didn't. And then fast forward a decade and then I come back to the US at the age of twenty three to get a PhD in business. But now I've accoumatized to the Indian culture as well, right as a young adult, and now I'm looking at the US through somewhat objectivize and I'm saying, oh my god, what I look at how we do business here and all the manic energy behind the marketing and all the crazy ads and the coupons and the junk mail, and you know, and I just started asking, what are we doing and what are we getting for all of this? So I think that that gift of objectivity and not drinking the kool aid and looking at things in that way, I think ultimately led me to to try to look for a different path for business. Yes, and I think it from my perspective as an outsider, knowing you somewhat and having read three of your books, I think that it also what it did is it like it was, It just greatly expanded what you could actually see in the world. Most people don't have that kind of purview, So I think that's why you have such an expansive way of thinking about life and what it can be in business for that matter. So that's how I see it, Raj. Now, if we can really quick, I just want

31:18 to. I can't not presence this for our listeners and viewers. One of the things I've been trying to do in this program. I definitely want to help more men also when all of us are walking with ladies and gentlemen, and I want to also help more men, because I think you get more unfairly imprisoned, especially in the emotional emotional realm, than most of us do. I should say that we women do. So I want you to share briefly the story about how when you first got married and you and your wife sat down to watch the movie Ordinary People what happened there. Yes, so you know, I had gotten married to somebody that I didn't know that well. I've only known her for about a month actually, when I proposed to her. And then I read about this in the book, and like other reacted so violently to that idea. Yes, he instantly kind of locked me into a position. He said, you must choose between her or us.

32:09 You know, if you do this, then you're dead to us. And then he tried every possible thing that he could to dissuade me and get me to not do this. But for me it became a matter of self respect, and I said, I cannot help my father dictate my life. And when he rejects somebody without even meeting them, I said, yeah, this is my life, you know, not dependent on him. I don't need. And in all my life until then, I had seen that we were so different and our values were so opposite of each other in so many ways. But as a result, I ended up marrying somebody I didn't know that well. And I was completely isolated in the US because my father did cut me off for five years and I got married all alone. It was a very difficult time, and and so in our first week of living together and being married, and we watched a movie ordinate People I think Won the Oscar a couple of years before, that very good movie. It's directed by Robert Redford. Incredibly sad movie. And as we're watching, I had tears in my eyes because I always I've always been quite sensitive, you know, in that sense and emotional. And my wife looked at me and said, what are you doing? I said, what do you mean? So are you crying? I said, it's the saddest movie I've ever seen. And she said, I've never seen a man cry. What kind of a man cries?

33:30 Right? And so that reaction just shut something down in me. It was the kind of thing maybe my father would have said or I could have heard, because he saw everything in me as a weakness and you know, not what he wanted. And I had just gone through this huge battle to actually be married to her and give up, you know, be disconnected from my family, et cetera. And suddenly I'm hearing this and I didn't have the wisdom or the maturity to actually engage in a conversation about it. I just felt a sense of shame and I just shut down and I said, I cannot show emotion at a subconscious level. I don't know if I consciously made that decision. I said, it's not safe for me here to show any emotion, and so I kind of built a wall around my heart and I did not allow myself to feel sadness or express that. Right. And what I've realized, I think all of us now know, is that if you can't express, if you can't express or experience the sadness, you also can't experience the joy. You basically shut down your ability to experience those emotions.

34:31 And so after that, I could not cry for any reason whatsoever. Somebody could die and I would not be able to cry, right, I mean, all kinds of things happen the next twenty twenty five, thirty years, you know, I just couldn't cry, And so, yeah, it was a it was a It was a really significant thing in my life, and it has taken me a long time to get back to be able to be in touch with my own heart and be able to express those emotions. So tragic, and I know so many of our listeners and viewers can relate to that, which is why I wanted you to share it. So thank you. Raj let's grab our last break here. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortez. We run there with doctor Raj Sosodia. He's the author of Awaken, The Path to Purpose, Inner Peace and Healing. We've been talking more about his background and really what allowed him to be able to render his message and develop it over the years, and after the break we'll get more into detail as to how it is that he found his way to purpose and ultimately to peace. Stay what this will be? Right back? Doctor Release Cortez 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 Elise to speak to your organization,

36:05 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 a lease A LISEE at eliscortes dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. I mentioned in the last break about that my latest book had come out last March of twenty twenty three, The Great Revitalization. What I did for you is I created a three page assessment for you to be able to download from my Gusto dash Noel site, and that will allow you to determine the extent to which your operation and your organization are operating at a high level of MEMI and purpose. If you are just joining me. My guest is doctor Raj Csodia. He's the founding member of the Conscious Capitalism movement. He is a FEMSA Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise and chairman of the Conscious Enterprise Center. He is the co founder and chairman emeritus of Conscious Kepel's Ink and the president of Awaken, Inc.

37:20 So, now for this last bid here, Raj, I want to really focus on your path to purpose and peace, and so I want to start with where I first originally met you, which was when you were working well, I met you after you'd written the book, but when you were working on firms of endearment. The story that you tell in the book about how you were listening, you were gathering stories, and maybe it's good for you to tell that about that you were gathering stories to try to help find companies that were loved by people, but they didn't spend a lot of money on marketing. And we run across UPS and Christine, and Christine is a ninth she's ninth grade education. She works at UPS and she says, I'm never leaving. They gave they allowed me to get my ged, they allowed me to go to college. I never want to leave. And you write in your book, which is so beautiful, which is why I wanted to say it right after your story about the ordinary people and stopping your tears, is that you said that was the first instance where you got choked up and that you experienced what would you say, the possibility the joy, the joy of the joy in business or something like that. Yeah, as I said, it was the first time my heart had been touched in all my years as a business student and then professor. And I realized that there could be such deep humanity within a for profit business that can exist. And I found many such stories after that, And so that really spoke to me, because that's something that I craved without even realizing it explicitly. But I was, you

38:52 know, Andrew Howie talks about following your heartbreak. I had been following my heartbreak for the previous twenty twenty five years. In my profession. I could see all of the downsides and negative consequences of the way the heedless pursuit of profit at all costs was creating on people, on even the customers that we were selling stuff, to the rise of obesity, using women's bodies to sell products, which leaned leads to eating disorders, embody dysmorphia and depression, and all the other stuff, you know, the ethical marketing to children and so forth. I could see the downsides and the costs, the real costs of the way we did business, And now I discovered the other side of that. So I was following my heartbreak, and now I discovered my bliss.

39:34 As Joseph Campbell talks about find discovery bliss, and somewhere between your heartbreak and your bliss, I think lies your purpose. Those are clues to what really lights you up and what you're meant to do here alleviate that suffering and elevate that kind of joy in the world. So from that point on it was pretty clear to me what my work needed to be about, and that's what led to then the conscious capitalism movement and so forth. Yes, and it's what I love about the story. It's just I always like to say that. To me, it's a kind of you listen to that voice that's trying to tell you what's right for you, what's next for you. You trust, you put your foot on the next right lily pad, and then you can hear the next voice, and the next lily pad presents itself. So the next lily pad for you. After you were writing, after you wrote, the firms of Evandearman get the manuscript, you had the opportunity then to get to put it in the hands of John Mackey, who was the former CEO of O Foods or at the time he was, and that set off something pretty fantastic. So if you could just say a little bit about meeting John Mackie and then where that led into the conscious capitalism work. Yeah, So my co author David Wolfe was on a flight before the book was published.

40:42 It was still a word document and he mentioned to some of the person sitting next to him about the book, and she said, oh, my friend John Mackie would love that. Can you send it to me that it's not done yet, he said, no, just send me the word document. So he did and she forwarded it to John, and he will tell you that had a three hundred page word document. And then he reached out to us and said, I read all the business books and this is the best one I've read in a while, and I completely resonate with this, and I'd love to meet you and so forth. So I was able to then go to Austin a few months later, several months later and spent an entire day with John and got to know him. We got a tour of the store and talked about life, and at the end of the day at dinner, I shared with John my mind map, a vision for what I was calling the Institute for New Capitalism or INC. And I like to make these acronyms, and he said, well, that's exactly my vision. But I like the phrase conscious capitalism, and I had never heard that phrase before, and the phrase actually was coined by Mohammed Yunus, the creator of the Gamine Bank in Bangladesh, but he was using it in a narrower sense to define describe what we would today call a social business, which only has society as a stakeholder. But we were using it, or John wanted to you that in the broadest sense, to describe what I had uncovered through that book, the four pillars, the higher purpose, the stakeholder orientation, the conscious leadership, and a caring culture. So that then we said, okay, let's try to start something in this in this area. And so a few

42:15 months later we had a retreat at his ranch in Austin near Austin, and October of two thousand and eight we had our first conference and that was the launch of the movement and it was the most inspiring three days of my life, you know at that point, And yeah, it was the beginning of something quite special. So we just had our fifteenth CEO conference in Austin, Texas, just a few months ago. Of course, that is how I met you, because I am I serve on a board of Conscious Capitalism here in Dallas, and that's how I met you originally. But for those listeners and viewers Roger who don't know what conscious capitalism is, can you just give it a bit more of a description. Yeah, so it is telling a new story of business. It's a new philosophy of business that says that we need to rethink the four fundamentals of business, the why, the what, the who, and the how. And the why was about profit. We said, well, there needs to be a reason why you exist beyond profit.

43:10 It's something you're trying to do that is meaningful and needed. So there's a higher purpose. Just like you, as you write about in your book A lease and all of us are now recognizing that we need purpose in our lives as human beings. That's what ultimately gives us the ability to have an impact and leads to deep life satisfaction and so forth. So we need to have a purpose not only for us as individuals, but for our organizations as well. And the second is the idea of stakeholders and creating value consciously for all the stakeholders, not just thinking about how much money we can make for the owners, and so consciously creating value for all of them so that we recognize that everybody matters and everybody needs to flourish who's connected with our ecosystem of business. The third is conscious leadership, that we need leaders who are primarily motivated by service to the purpose of the organization and to the people whose lives touch And they're not just about power and ego and money. If you get a leader whos about power and ego and money, they're going to be terrible leader and they will cause a lot of suffering in the world. And yeah, they might make some money, but at the same time, they're going to create much more harmful effects you're not in the pursuit of that money.

44:15 And then the fourth is a caring culture. Most cultures are very stressful. We have a lot of very sad statistics like heart attacks are twenty percent higher. On Monday's hundred, twenty thousand Americans die from stress connected to work. Every year, six hundred thousand Chinese die from too much work. I mean, that's the way in which we work in this world, and we sacrifice our well being and even our lives in that pursuit of profit at all costs. And conscious companies have cultures that are rooted in trust and authenticity and caring. People can be who they are and they feel genuinely cared for. So when you put those four things together, the research that I did and others have also then supported with their work, is that you actually have a much higher performing business. I found that those companies that I had in firms of endearment, twenty eight companies in all, eighteen public and ten private, they had outperformed the S and P five hundred by nine to one over a ten year period. So this wasn't a choice between being good for people in the world versus making money. This was saying that the pathway through true profits, not false profits, because many companies make false profits. They make money, but they're damaging much more the well being of people and the environment and the communities. The pathway to true profit lies through creating value and giving meaning and purpose to everybody. That's the world that I want to live in, Raj, and that's the one that I'm out trying to help steward as well, thanks to your guidance and tutelage. So we're close to the end of the show here, and I know one of the things I love about your book

45:49 that you situate is here you've now really discovered and are now living your purpose through the work that you're doing with conscious capitalism everything else. But still you didn't have peace. We don't have time to go through how it is that you went to find that too much? So I want to just say, have you just speak a little bit too, you know, the what maybe how you found it and what was the end result. But then I want to really showcase the promise of this awaken and staying awake as well to finish the show. Yeah, so I think to find that piece, you know, we have to first uncover our wounds. We all carry wounds and traumas. You know, life is hard and every life we experiences significant trauma.

46:30 I think it's a universal condition. You know, thirteen million Americans have PTSD, but the rest of us have PtSi postomatic stress injury. And that's true for humans all over the world. But most of us don't acknowledge that, and certainly we don't do anything to heal from it. We tend to minimize it because we say things like I didn't get sent to a gunceran or Iraq, or I was on a first responder, et cetera. That there are many worse things that happened to other people, So what right do I have to complain about things that may have happened to me? And I think that is a very very dangerous thing to do, harmful just because somebody else has it, Well, it doesn't mean that you're suffering. Doesn't matter that you don't have trauma. You do, and unless you acknowledge it, you can never heal it. As James Baldwin said, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. So we have to look at our lives and recognize where we got wounded, where we experienced trauma. And now the great thing about the time we live in is that there are many many pathways to healing, many modalities. I have a list of like twenty four different things that are available to people, from plant journeys, you know, to compassionate inquiry, to emdr to family systems.

47:39 I mean, there's all kinds of things that we can do. So we need to do that. We have to. As we say, most people they conceal their trauma and then they numb it with drugs and alcohol or other escape mechanisms. But then they wake up and they're still living with it. What we have to do is to reveal it and feel it right and grieve it in order to heal it and ultimately, if we are able to do that, we can emerge stronger because we had that trauma and we healed it. Then if you never had the trauma in the first place, yes, you are much stronger because you heal your trauma. It's like you know you're the wanted warrior, but you are able to now help other people in a far better way than if you never have the trauma in the first place.

48:19 I think that is the gift of trauma in a sense, if we are able to get to the other side of it and the healing from it, that we become healers. And I think all of us think of ourselves in that sense as healers. So that's a big part of it. Addressing those knowledging those wounds and then learning how to heal them and finding the gift in them. I think that's what leads to in a peace, and that's why we need to get to healing. That sounds good to me, Roj. That's why we need to get your book in more people's hands across the world. We have run out of time. You are a precious gift to the world, Raj. I really really admire respect and love learning from you and being inspired by you. Thank you very much for coming back and working on purpose. Thank you, Alise. I appreciate that. And as I say at the end of the book, is one thing to awaken, another thing to stay awake. That's right challenge we have to once we have these realizations, we have to live according to them and remind ourselves of these things, live consciously and live in an awakened state. Yes, please, listeners and viewers, you're going to want to learn more or you want to stay connected to Raj. Learn more about his books, what he's doing at Awaken, what he's doing at the University in Motrey. If you want to learn more there, just go to Raj Sisodia. Let me spell that for if you don't know how to spell it, it's Raj r Aj Sisodia s I s O DA Rajodia dot com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch a VIP recorded podcast. We were on air with Roger Feierstein talking about his book Solve the Real Problem Because what you think is the problem is usually not the problem. He taught us to think creatively about

49:52 the problem and find at least forty different ways to consider it before we ever moved a solution. He helped us to help us each to realize that we're far more rave that we tend to believe. Next week will be on the air with doctor Neja Sanguan, the founder and CEO of Intuitive Intelligence and the author of the new book Powered by Me From Burned Out to Fully Charged at work and in life. See you there, and remember work as one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential 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.