Rise From The Ashes

Finding True Resilience and Connectedness: A Conversation with Hylke Faber

June 24, 2024 Baz Porter® Season 5 Episode 1
Finding True Resilience and Connectedness: A Conversation with Hylke Faber
Rise From The Ashes
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Rise From The Ashes
Finding True Resilience and Connectedness: A Conversation with Hylke Faber
Jun 24, 2024 Season 5 Episode 1
Baz Porter®

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Have you ever felt that your life's calling was waiting for you just beyond the edge of the familiar? Hylke, a strategic consultant from the Netherlands who transformed into a coach, shares the self-discovery that led him from the simplicity of farm life to the intensity of New York City and ultimately to a life enriched by coaching and personal essence. Join us on this episode, where we uncover Hylke's journey and the adversity that spurred his evolution, guiding him toward a life of true connection and fulfilment beyond the corporate ladder.

Wrestling with life's big questions can sometimes lead to the most profound revelations, and Hylke doesn't shy away from the hard-hitting inquiries that shake us to our core. We navigate the pivotal "fierce grace" moments, sharing how they can drastically alter our course and redefine our understanding of success. From the illusion of happiness tied to material wealth to the realizations that come from restless nights, we explore what it means to live a life of service and how it can unlock a deeper sense of purpose and joy.

Wrapping up, we delve into the essence of coaching as a gateway to truth and self-discovery. Hilke recounts a transformative encounter with a spiritual teacher who challenges the notion of saving the world and brings us back to the power of inner truth. We discuss daily practices that cultivate resilience and growth, emphasizing the importance of humility, ego management, and embracing our perceived failures. Listen and discover how aligning with these principles can carve a path to a more resilient and self-aware existence.

Colorado’s best business coach, Baz Porter, has a new mindset strategy mentoring service to help you unlock new heights of growth, prosperity, happiness, and success. Book your first meeting with the coaching visionary at https://www.ramsbybaz.com/

Support the Show.

Friends, our time together is coming to a close. Before we part ways, I sincerely thank you for joining me on this thought-provoking journey. I aim to provide perspectives and insights that spark self-reflection and positive change.

If any concepts we explored resonated with you, I kindly request that you share this episode with someone who may benefit from its message. And please, reach out anytime - I’m always eager to hear your biggest aspirations, pressing struggles, and lessons learned.

My door is open at my Denver office and digitally via my website. If you want to go deeper and transform confusion into clarity on your quest for purpose, visit http://www.ramsbybaz.com and schedule a coaching session.

This is Baz Porter signing off with immense gratitude. Stay bold, stay faithful, and know that you always have an empathetic ear and wise mind in your corner. Until next time!

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Have you ever felt that your life's calling was waiting for you just beyond the edge of the familiar? Hylke, a strategic consultant from the Netherlands who transformed into a coach, shares the self-discovery that led him from the simplicity of farm life to the intensity of New York City and ultimately to a life enriched by coaching and personal essence. Join us on this episode, where we uncover Hylke's journey and the adversity that spurred his evolution, guiding him toward a life of true connection and fulfilment beyond the corporate ladder.

Wrestling with life's big questions can sometimes lead to the most profound revelations, and Hylke doesn't shy away from the hard-hitting inquiries that shake us to our core. We navigate the pivotal "fierce grace" moments, sharing how they can drastically alter our course and redefine our understanding of success. From the illusion of happiness tied to material wealth to the realizations that come from restless nights, we explore what it means to live a life of service and how it can unlock a deeper sense of purpose and joy.

Wrapping up, we delve into the essence of coaching as a gateway to truth and self-discovery. Hilke recounts a transformative encounter with a spiritual teacher who challenges the notion of saving the world and brings us back to the power of inner truth. We discuss daily practices that cultivate resilience and growth, emphasizing the importance of humility, ego management, and embracing our perceived failures. Listen and discover how aligning with these principles can carve a path to a more resilient and self-aware existence.

Colorado’s best business coach, Baz Porter, has a new mindset strategy mentoring service to help you unlock new heights of growth, prosperity, happiness, and success. Book your first meeting with the coaching visionary at https://www.ramsbybaz.com/

Support the Show.

Friends, our time together is coming to a close. Before we part ways, I sincerely thank you for joining me on this thought-provoking journey. I aim to provide perspectives and insights that spark self-reflection and positive change.

If any concepts we explored resonated with you, I kindly request that you share this episode with someone who may benefit from its message. And please, reach out anytime - I’m always eager to hear your biggest aspirations, pressing struggles, and lessons learned.

My door is open at my Denver office and digitally via my website. If you want to go deeper and transform confusion into clarity on your quest for purpose, visit http://www.ramsbybaz.com and schedule a coaching session.

This is Baz Porter signing off with immense gratitude. Stay bold, stay faithful, and know that you always have an empathetic ear and wise mind in your corner. Until next time!

Speaker 1:

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back to another episode of Rise From the Ashes. It's a privilege to have another guest with me today. As always, this is about people's stories. It's about challenges, overcoming adversity, turning that all into success. There is no script. We make it as we go along. This is a person that we are very similar in a lot of ways, but he's got a unique story. He comes from netherlands and I'm going to always mess his name up because it's one of these names that people have been listening for a while. I'm dyslexic and I'm terrible at people's names. Is it hike, hike?

Speaker 1:

I've heard it that way many times it's hilka and I apologize, hilka, because I said before I'm terrible. Hilka, please say hello to the world and the world please say hello to Hilke.

Speaker 2:

It's lovely to meet all of you and it's a privilege to sit with you today, bas. I already learned a lot in our previous conversations with you, so it's great to be here and to share a bit of what it means to be ourselves and connected in the world. Yeah, good to see you, Andrew.

Speaker 1:

could you please tell the listeners who you are and why you do what you do in the world and what you do?

Speaker 2:

Who I am. I grew up in a little place in the Netherlands, on a farm, and I always start my story there because it was very foundational. I grew up amidst cows and big views and churches, and that polarity you could say formed a lot of my being, because the cows taught me something about discipline, the church taught me something about something higher, something that I was very interested in, and the views taught me something about the beauty and how nature actually restores itself. So there was a lot that happened in the beginning of my journey here. I thought I was going to be a minister or a musician or a doctor. I didn't do any of that.

Speaker 2:

I ended up doing strategy consulting in New York City for about 15 years and I loved it. I loved the tough problems. Just sitting here with you today, sitting in like a new space, like sitting, putting myself into a new space, was something I was loved. And then part of me said wakey, wakey. Maybe that was the church or the landscape, I'm not quite sure. But one of those things inside of me said hold on a second, something is not quite right for you.

Speaker 2:

So life gave me very intense insomnia, so I would not sleep for sometimes a week at all and during one of those sleepless weeks I kept persisting in my own being like I'm going to continue more achievement and do this more. And then part of me was like no, something in me broke and as I became more curious about maybe some other ways of living life, I discovered meditation and I thought I was like one of the first people there because that was part of my ego makeup and I almost became a monk because I thought that was a good way to get closest to reality. And then I discovered that was an escape and then chose to do this work of coaching and team and culture development. For the last 20 years that's what I've been doing, written some books about it.

Speaker 1:

It's a bit about me so what do you define as coaching? Because it's a very broad uh subject and we have a multitude of people who listen to this. Yes, entrepreneurs, the business owners. What do you define as coaching?

Speaker 2:

to me, there's many different ways of coaching. For me, it's always about helping people to get closer to what's most important for them and about them bring them back to their essence. And I say bringing back because it's so many things that happen ourselves, like beliefs, fears, those kinds of things in our minds that don't feel good, but we are in them for a while, like we are in a difficult meeting and we obsess. Somebody does something we don't like and we start judging them. Things go off the rails and you start trying to control all these things that we do.

Speaker 2:

So the coaching is about helping people to get closer to what's most important to them. You could say their essence, their presence, whatever we want to call that, and that's not a static thing, that's an always evolving thing. To me, that happens one-on-one, that happens one-to-many, so working with teams, and it works also with with whole cultures, and I call that developing CQ and people connectedness quotient, which goes a little bit beyond thoughts and feelings it's going through. So we all know this. What, what, what's true about you? What's really true?

Speaker 1:

about you like that? Someone once told me that the quality of our questions is the quality of our life or quality of the output. Is that true about your experience within what you?

Speaker 2:

do? Yeah, I would say yes, the quality of the questions and the quality of the inquiry and the presence we bring to that. So when I work with people, I can usually tell from the first minute whether we're going to go somewhere, and whether we're going to go there fast or whether it's going to take a long time. And to me, the core ingredient for growth is this willingness, this deep humility. Like being in this human form is such a miracle and my mind makes up all kinds of ideas about what it's like to be here, what I should do and so on. And when I become really curious, I'm like a child, okay, like the insight comes and it transforms itself right, and that's very exciting, as opposed to the. I'm thinking this, and it's because of that and the thicker that the resistance is often what slows it down. So, yes, the question and the quality of the question and the quality of the inquiry and the quality of the attention brought to the inquiry, those are, to me, are key ingredients.

Speaker 1:

I love that we often find ourselves in pivotal moments in our life. Has there been a pivotal moment, a predominant pivotal moment in your life that actually changed the trajectory of where you were going? You said it maybe before you were going to be a monk. Was that a defining moment for you that changed the trajectory of where?

Speaker 2:

you were headed. Yeah, I would say that in my life I've been blessed with fierce grace. In other words, I ran the quote unquote against reality way many ways and really hard like very dogged. So I think a defining moment in my life was insomnia, where I was flying first class everywhere and I was a partner strategy consulting company. I was like I felt pretty like good about myself living in Manhattan and all these things and then the body just didn't want to do it anymore. It was like I felt pretty good about myself living in Manhattan and all these things and then the body just didn't want to do it anymore. It was just floored me literally. I still remember being in this place together with friends on vacation and everybody was sleeping besides 3.30, 4 am me and something in me just, and at that that moment it was more like the dam broke. It's like okay, all right, and it was just kind of aha, almost relieved, okay, I can no longer do this, something else has to help me. So that was really helpful for me to have that moment. I felt terrible at the time and once I moved through it, a little bit like help was on the other side pretty fast and that's also helped my coaches with.

Speaker 2:

When I work with teams with, it's often that it's often darkest before dawn. We heard about that many times. So, basically, mapping out what the things are and becoming aware of the things that we do I call this a crocodiles that have some fun with us. Oh, I'm obsessing about success. Oh, I'm trying to be perfect. Oh, I'm trying to be perfect. I'm trying to outsmart you. I'm trying to be this image, and then the images just say, yeah, but it's just an empty screen. There's no fulfillment on the other side. Relax.

Speaker 1:

That was a defining moment for me I love that, and you touched on something there about personas and images that are ingrained within us. The definition of success is a high-rise apartment in New York, your Lamborghini, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but none of that when you start going in depth with it and going internal matters, and I think was that what you discovered in that journey?

Speaker 2:

Yes, and none of it matters. And yet it matters a little bit why. It's not that the Lamborghini matters, it's more that if I can find myself at a place of peace and presence and joy and wonder, then I can have the experience of driving the Lamborghini and say, oh, that's interesting, and then I'm just as happy to leave it on the side of the road, I'm not needing to hold on to it. I'm thinking of a friend of mine who actually was on our podcast Routen and Wavering yesterday, and her name is Mary Jo West and she was a TV anchor for CBS in starting in 1976. So she's been around for a few years and today she got Emmy awards and all this stuff. And so today, what she does, she works in Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix at the customer service desk.

Speaker 2:

I didn't know it well, and so it's not about the environment we're in or what we are accumulating, it's about how we are with what's here, right. And the other thing I'll say about the Lamborghini or achievement in general, right. For a while I thought I don't need this world anymore. I want to just be a monk, literally. I want to just meditate for 15 hours a day, live in nature on a mountain, but that's also an incomplete experience. Yeah, literally, I want to just meditate for umpteen hours a day. Live in nature on a mountain, but that's also an incomplete experience. Yeah, there's part of the being, just like the tree outside that wants to grow, and the process of moving towards something that's beautiful. To create something is beautiful, knowing full that it's not going to last none of it. That's not the point. The point is that the experience like oh, cooking a good meal, like oh, yes, me, if that means you want to make a lot of money, go make a lot of money, great, but don't think you're going to be happier.

Speaker 1:

True, completely true. There are two things that I've found in life and I'd love your take on this. People do things for status, only for status, and that comes with all sorts of things, and people are conditioned to be self-serving. We're never conditioned to be of service anymore. We're conditioned from very young to be of self-serving as it's got to serve me and that's it. But the reason people do things is for that status. Whether you're buying something a Lamborghini, purchase a house, whatever it is it's always for that status. Would you agree with that statement?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love how succinct you say things about. It's a very beautiful way. I appreciate that. That doesn't make it bad, no, it's more. I look at that for myself like that, that that attachment energy that wants to have a nice house, that wants to look nice, that wants to come across well, that wants to do right all these things. And when I think about why does I, why do I do that like, why does the mind do that? And stop, I can just look at it. To me it comes from a innocent motivation. It just wants to be loved and it wants to be safe and it just doesn't know that. It's not out there to find it. It's here already. So what? Whitman had these beautiful two words he saw he talked about unfailing sufficiency. If we can find the unfailing sufficiency being enough, that's already here, doesn't matter what you do. Then you don't have to go anywhere, and if you go somewhere it's going to be a lot more fun.

Speaker 1:

So become a CEO of a big company, the best CEOs that I work with are not attached to being CEO.

Speaker 2:

They laugh at themselves and they're very firm, but they're not being all pickled up about having this big role or this big title. That's the lightness where status becomes more like a card in a game. I'm going to play this. It's useful to have status in this life. Right, you have some status with this podcast that you're having. It's nice that there's some million people or people people listening to. It gives you a way, or gives us a way, to influence, but it's not going to make us happy.

Speaker 2:

It's not going to detract or subtract or add to our unfailing sufficiency it's already here so I know that I'm grounded, when I'm just as happy being by myself working in a mail room, being a ceo doing podcasts, doing the dishes, going to the bathroom, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

It's how I and what I bring to it, and that's the work that I think we need to do I love that distinction there and it's if you're just listening to this now, tuning in please go back and listen to what I just said because it changes your perception of life. When you have humility, when you have the awareness that everything is temporary but you can bring your message to it. You can bring your love, your compassion to something, you change the dynamics and structure of what you are doing from like we were just saying a CEO, but you're human. You're a spiritual being living a human experience. You're not a CEO. You don't need the labels.

Speaker 1:

When we talk about unconventional wisdom, people have all sorts of tidbits. They have and I love this question because I ask this because I want to convey your wisdom but it's a lot of what you, we do as individuals in our workspaces is that unconventional stuff and people like, really, what are you saying now? But it's true, is there any parts of unconventional wisdom you'd like to share with your clients or with the audience that you've picked up along the way?

Speaker 2:

Let me start by saying there's no such thing as my wisdom as far as I can see, and maybe that's my wisdom, that I understand that and I try to help people understand that whatever we see, just like our house and our body, is not ours. It's something that we get to express and let me just share, if I were to share, what has really struck me over all these years. I'm 52 years old, I've been doing this coaching for about 20 years, doing lots and lots of meditation, and what struck me through all these years was that being really honest with myself is always the beginning and the end. Was that being really honest with myself is always the beginning and the end? Like that very simple question, like I think something and I ask myself is this true? Is that true? Is that really true? And so much in me might be invested in that being true, because I want to save my team or relationship or somebody's approval or whatever I was doing or all the investment I made in the. Is this true? Is this true?

Speaker 2:

I remember being at a retreat by a spiritual teacher that I love and I was feeling all up in arms because I've been meditating for a week or whatever, and I was thinking, oh, and the world's going to pieces and there's global warming, and this is terrible and I gotta do something about this. I can't do this anymore. So I raised my hand and I told him about this and he looked at me and he said helco, you must think you're very important. And everybody started laughing, including me. Is it true that I need to save the world? It's a beautiful thing as it's and I'm so grateful that we, as humans, have the capacity for truth, because it's so liberating. Yeah, if we're waiting, and the second part to that, which goes back to your earlier question, boss is the quality of the attention we bring to the inquiry, because is this true? Is, yeah, it's true? Is this really true? At the source, the universe, the groundedness is that really true.

Speaker 1:

One of one of the things that I was always taught and I think you can relate to this, is nothing's ever right or wrong, but it's in a perfect balance according to the consciousness in the planet and universe now. So nothing's out of balance. It's a response from the frequencies that we are as human beings, as spiritual beings, that are we admitting into the vibrational vortexes of whatever you believe in the universe, god, whatever it's all the same thing. It just means different things. Yeah, one of the things that happened, not just for me when I realized this, but but it affected the way I viewed the world and, a bit like yourself, I was trying to save the world, but I couldn't do that until I focused on myself first. Is that what you found in that moment with your spiritual teacher?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I realized that there's no saving Correct, which doesn't mean that I don't want to help. I try to help every day, right, but not to say and this goes back to your first question what's this coaching about? This coaching is to help people to connect to their truth. That's it simple, right? So when there's challenge, I always tell myself and my coaches that you can see everything that happens as a character in your movie. It's your movie.

Speaker 2:

So imagine that nothing in the movie is going to change nothing. How will you respond? What will you do in response to that? Which doesn't mean you're not going to stand up to one of the characters who's doing something atrocious, right, you can still be a Martin Luther King. However, you're not going to be attached to what happens next, because that's not that. That's that that is outside of truth, left truth. But we then I'm imagining something that I then I'm in my head again. I'm not here. And the other thing I will say about this you talked about unconventional wisdom earlier, the wisdom of I don't know. I would love to have leaders in the world this is my movie right, that say a lot more. I don't know, I would love to have leaders in the world. This is my movie, right. That say a lot more. I don't know yet what's good, how we're going to do this. I don't know yet. I don't know yet.

Speaker 1:

Let's sit with that I'd like to add to that. I don't know yet, but I will endeavor to find out what's your opinion. Yeah, that's beautiful. Collective people are. With like-minded people are stronger than individuals 100% of the time, but there's always resistance because we're afraid of our own power and when we really focus in on who we are, we discover rituals and habits that we do and do not like. Is there any habits and rituals that you have in the day, whether it be meditation, getting up doing a morning routine? What have you discovered on your part, on your path, that's really helped you solidify and build a solid foundation to serve your people?

Speaker 2:

I'll mention some habits and unhabits awesome, and those habits help me to inhabit myself. That's really what it is for me. It's everything I do is about building deeper connectedness with myself, with others so-called others, purpose just becoming more in reality. That's everything for me. So very simple practices. I get up in the morning, I meditate how long Half an hour.

Speaker 1:

What sort of meditation do you do? Because this is meditation is important, but there's so many different forms of it. Can you explain what you?

Speaker 2:

do yeah, I do a form of no forms, which is, I may start with resting the attention on the breath a little bit as an anchor, and then I allow my awareness to rest on the void, on presence, on nothing on itself, and I allow myself to dwell in the stillness you could say that's the peace beyond understanding and I allow myself to really dip into that deep ground of being. These are words, right, these are just words. They make no sense or just pointers. They're not itself what it but it is. It's a resting in basically no sitting, just being attention, being totally here. That's that's what I do. And then I I say some prayers, help my mind to open to higher wisdom and set some intentions for the day, those that's very important for me. And then actually having breakfast very important for me too just sitting reading a little bit from my daily reader to help me stay humble.

Speaker 2:

I participate in a program that gives me lots of humility every day, that asks me to take personal inventory every day. What did you do yesterday that was connected and what was disconnected? How are you coming from truth and how are you not coming from truth? Where was your ego going off the rails here and how can you do something else? That's something I do, so that's the beginning of the day.

Speaker 2:

The other practice I have is service, so, and I deliberately schedule workshops and coachings. They're for the people there and they're also for me, because that is like the energy flows right doing the dishes, the unhabits that I have, and then some other things. I do some yoga and I walk through throughout the day. That helps me stay active. Uh, the thing I find really hard, boss, is to not practice, and I think that's part of my growth edge to sometimes to not be in a space of practice and just to be, to enjoy whatever's here, whatever. That is. My own habit that I am still working on is to allow myself to not be productive for parts of the day.

Speaker 1:

There's a multitude of things that we can do as mentors, as teachers, and there's a multitude of things that we can do as mentors, as teachers, but there's one thing we sometimes don't do, and that's allow ourselves to be taught, because we forget that we're all a work in progress and, like you said earlier, there's not just things. Perfection doesn't exist, but failure can also be used as a fuel. Is there any failure? I always put that in quotes. That's actually supported you in your growth, but at the time you were like, oh my god, the world's falling apart and I'm never going to get through this and etc. Etc.

Speaker 2:

but it actually was a catalyst for you for elevation I was going to say if you have 24 hours, I have a few examples for you. Let's start with one, and that is my marriage. I was not able to have fulfilling relationships, intimate relationships, with another human being until way in my 40s and I always thought that if I become enlightened enough, it's going to work. Didn't work. Then I met somebody and our relationship was one of the most challenging things I've ever done in my life, and I remember our first therapy appointment together. We had to fill out sheets for the counselor and guess what Huka did? He filled out the sheets for himself and for his boyfriend, guess who got most of the attention from the therapist. It was H welcome at first.

Speaker 2:

So I got to fit, got face to face with this deep sense of codependence in me that did not trust other people at all, which was one of the reasons that I almost went to the monastery and which was one of the reasons that I actually emigrated, turns out, to go out to the us. I didn't trust people, I was scared and we were breaking up pretty much every month for about a year and I kept resisting and resisting and resisting and resisting, thinking like if I just become a little more compassionate, a little bit more eloquent, a little bit more loving, a little bit more fill in the dots, and what I found after about a year was that it was all self-serving. I was not practicing unconditional love, even though that's what I thought I committed to. I was practicing unconditional self-critification, and with that comes a lot of manipulation and control and judgment and obsession and feeling very much out of body a lot of the time. And it was not until I started to see that and not make that part, because that was a very important step.

Speaker 2:

Not make that part wrong. But of course and that's one of the things I teach my or try to pass on to my coaches of course you're thinking like this look, how could you not like? Your survival strategy was exactly like that. This is the only way that this little person knew how to make it happen. So, of course, nothing wrong. When I got to that place of more of acceptance, the, the stuff started to loosen. It's loosened from my grip. So from that I learned surrender, deeper humility and seeing that I and I alone, am responsible for dealing with my own pain, including not getting what I want. Nobody can give me what I want, not even the person that I'm now married to the same person.

Speaker 1:

It's sometimes the difference between freedom and letting go of certain situations where we have no control. But it's a level of self-awareness and once you become aware of this, not just externally but internally, whole world changes things completely differently. And, as you experienced during the relationship development, of going I'm not worthy of this and then accepting. That's what transitions you from into the person you are today and still growing. But it builds resilience and it builds concepts of resilience but also misconceptions in your experience throughout your life. What are the resilience and mispermitted the conceptions? Between resilience and the misconceptions? Between resilience, because you have faux pas and what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in this realm and as coaches, we are always distinguishing the foundation of why things happen.

Speaker 2:

We have to understand it, we have to have knowledge about it, the difference between resilience and false resilience, or maybe misplaced resilience, correct, yeah, so in the Netherlands there's a lot of wind. Oh, I remember. So you and biking against the wind is like something that I learned because I had to. I got to bike about an hour to get to school and the motto of the Netherlands is je m'entendrai I will persist. It's a country that is a lot of it is below sea level will persist. It's a country that is a lot of it is below sea level.

Speaker 2:

There's this sense of I can for me. I interpreted that as I can control things, I can make things happen, no matter what. So false resilience is to me thinking that here's the world, there's the world, there's me and I'm the director. And if I become starts with good enough in school, wise enough, strong enough, compassionate enough, loving enough, empathetic enough, diverse enough, filling the dots, energetically evolved enough, higher vibration enough, whatever you want to add to it, right, then this thing will happen. That's false resilience.

Speaker 2:

True resilience is being grounded in truth, which means I allow myself to be connected to what's true, no matter what, even if it means a total dissolution of myself. That's true resilience If I'm willing to say yes. My mind, I question it, my feelings, I question it, my body it's going to go. My partner, my house, whatever I put my to, I let that go. Then I discover a place of indestructibility that goes way beyond the person called Hilger for these few decades. That's resilience to me. And connecting to that is not just an esoteric thing. It also becomes then like living that, because I now can say, oh no, I on that and take us, have a cigarette and be fine. Then it becomes living that through my values true in my case, truth, love and service. How can I be truthful, loving and of service right now, without any attachment, and that, to me, helps me to enjoy resilience.

Speaker 1:

That makes sense. I love the answer, which brings me to my next question. If you could, how would you use your influence and success to elevate others and leave that lasting legacy for them?

Speaker 2:

Elevation to me happens inside. To me, true success is when people feel taller on the inside, even if the outside falls away. So I would love a world in which all 8 billion people felt tall on the inside, truly tall on the inside, and have that sense of self-respect and dignity and extend that to each other. That would be tremendous to me.

Speaker 2:

I had this dream in my 20s where I saw all of us standing in half circles, like humanity being a collection of half circles, and each of us stands at a different place in the circle, and it's not that there's any particular great place, but the purpose of the half circles is to be connected to truth, love, light, whatever we call that. There's just some grounding which was like the, the lighthouse, the church, the, whatever it was, when I was younger and I saw myself standing on one of those tips of one of those half circles. This is one of them. So my dream and my deepest desire would be that all of us become curious about what's true and live from that place, and if I can contribute a little bit to that, that's great. And hopefully people forget me as soon as I'm dead, but they remember their truth much more important.

Speaker 1:

I love that, and that's very humbling to hear from somebody. I don't often hear that, so thank you for that. When we look at movements in a global aspect, if you could create a global movement today and execute on it, what would that movement be? That?

Speaker 2:

would be a movement of people that practice together, that see this the practice of being connected to ourselves, each other and our purpose like developing our cq, our connectedness quotient as one of their core life orientations, connectedness quotient as one of their core life orientations that's what I would like to see. The reason I called it cq is because I was looking for and actually it's interesting how these things happen, I was listening for the word that I thought might unify, because we have so much polarity going on in the world we forget ourselves and each other in that way. So I was like what if we could have a word that would just like love. That also has a lot of baggage, so, unlike love that maybe brings us together, that is that sort of Beacon or a beacon. So I would love people for people together around beacons, common orient, whether that's CQ or something else, I don't care where.

Speaker 2:

People practice together and they support each other with a lot of empathy to rise up. And then there's part of me that is a little bit of an activist. I've never guessed, so I think at the current rate at which we're going, we are accelerating humanity's extinction, which is not a problem in many ways because it's part of nature that happened, right, it's not a very nice thing to say. I think that we have the power as humans, by doing deep work on seeing what's true, to also elevate our institutions and I don't know much about the government, I don't have much faith in it to be honest, but that doesn't mean I do have a lot of.

Speaker 2:

I spent a lot of my years working in corporations, and I think corporations have the ability to become much more conscious and actually be part of that uniting force in the world, by not only becoming wiser and compassionate, but also seeing their stewardship role in the world. So how are we taking care of the divides in the world between rich and poor, between countries, the divide between us and nature, the divide within ourselves? I think companies have a role to play in that, and I think part of my movement would be corporations playing an active role in reinventing themselves to become stewardship of humanity as opposed to stewardship from like a small derivative, which is money, and I think governments can play a role in that too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I know you've written a couple of books just a couple and you've got a lot going on at the moment. Where can people find you? Where can they get your book? When have you got a website? Please share.

Speaker 2:

So the books that are out are called Taming your Crocodiles, and you can get them in bookstores or Amazon or wherever you get your stuff. A new book that's coming out next year is called the Connectedness Quotient. That will be also available on Amazon, and people can connect with me on LinkedIn or on our website called Growth Leaders Network. So that's some of the ways people can find me.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. I want to thank you for your time. You've got an incredible story and you've got some wisdom beyond most, and you're very humble, and that's one of the qualities I really like about you, so thank you for being here and sharing time with me.

Speaker 2:

You know it's been an honor.

Speaker 1:

You hold a space boss in which things arise it's designed to do that, and I like being with like-minded people, so it's never. It's a passion and it's an enjoyment for me being here with you. It truly is from myself. Ladies and gentlemen, if you like this, please share it with a friend. Inspire somebody's day. This is about you and your elevation growth. Learn from these episodes. Go back, re-listen to them. Download it if you want to. It's only three bucks. You can do so. It helps support the channel, but it's not necessary From myself. Have a blessed day. Remember my friends. This is about your journey, so live with purpose and inspire with legacy. See you soon.

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