Exploring Leadership with Blaine Bartlett

Embark on a journey of enlightenment with us as we sit down with the visionary leadership coach, Blaine Bartlett. With wisdom forged from the crucible of four decades in human potential and organizational development, Blaine unveils the secrets to transforming leadership and business with a compassionate touch. This episode promises to unravel the threads that connect spirituality and capitalism, guiding listeners through the labyrinth of creating workplaces that celebrate and uplift the human spirit. It's not just about profit margins; it's about building a legacy that intertwines the prosperity of business with the flourishing of all stakeholders.

Prepare to have your perspective on success and leadership irrevocably altered as we dissect the philosophy behind conscious capitalism, championed by trailblazers like John Mackey and Raj Sisodia. We share stories of innovation sparked in moments of stillness, proving that sometimes the most unconventional strategies lead to triumphant results. The conversation dives deep into the elegance of crafting a legacy through intentional living, minimizing unintended consequences, and considering the impact of our actions over a thousand-year horizon. This episode is not just a discussion; it's a transformative experience that offers a blueprint for personal rebirth and a pathway to success that honors both the individual and the collective. Join us for an unforgettable exploration with Blaine Bartlett, where we redefine the essence of true leadership.

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/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Rise from the Ashes podcast. I'm your host, baz Porter, and it's a privilege today to have my next guest. His name is Blaine Bartlett Blaine Bartlett and he comes from the old West Coast, just north of where I used to live, actually, but his story is quite incredible from a leadership perspective, from executive coaching, and I invited him on to give his perspective over a few decades of coaching and seeing the transitions in that coaching through capitalism and also sustainable success. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Blaine and, as always, in this style, he's going to introduce himself Blaine, welcome to the show. And as always, in this style, he's going to introduce himself Blaine, welcome to the show. And how are you today, baz?

Speaker 2: 0:49

thank you for the opportunity to be here. I appreciate it and I'm doing extraordinarily well. I'm like you mentioned. I'm up here in the Pacific Northwest, the sun is shining, the water is calm and I see boats. It doesn't get a whole lot more better than that, that's fantastic.

Speaker 1: 1:05

I like boats. So how long have you been in the business and tell the audience what you specifically do?

Speaker 2: 1:13

Okay, the business itself. I started my company in 19, but I was in the business for a good decade and a half prior to that, working with another consultancy and that sort of thing. Yeah, I've been doing this for 40 years. We're coming up on the 40th year anniversary of the company, so I've been playing at this game for a long time.

Speaker 1: 1:37

A lot longer than I have, I can assure you. I'm having a good time with it. That's the main thing. If we stopped having a good time, it wouldn't be worth doing. So how did you get into the business? You said you were doing it a decade beforehand. And then the transition into actual one-on-one coaching or group coaching. What made the switch? What was your transition?

Speaker 2: 1:59

The interesting kind of the backstory. In the 1970s, early 1970s I got involved in what was literally the nascent, the beginning of the human potential movement in the US. This saw the rise of a number of different human potential training companies born out of Stanford Research Institute, the SRI link there and Tavistock in the UK. But out of that came Warner, airhearts, est, the Lifespring organization, stuart Emery's actualization group. There were a number of different firms that kind of were brought up and I got involved with one of them and ended up becoming a senior executive and player. I ran one of the divisions, trained all of their programs, developed training programs for them Didn't have necessarily a background in that.

Speaker 2: 2:49

My educational background, university, was marketing. I went to school at the University of Oregon, went overseas and studied at the Netherlands International School of Business, ninerota and just outside of Amsterdam, and nothing in my formal education actually set me up for this human potential journey. But I was intrigued, absolutely intrigued, with literally the potential that human beings have to excel and to create incredible outcomes for themselves in this world. So that was the genesis of it and I spent about five and a half years almost about five and a half years working for that firm and then went out and said basically it was as a consequence of saying where do people spend most of their time? They don't spend most of their time in a seminar room, they spend most of their time at work. And most of that work experience, in my experience, was relatively toxic to the human spirit.

Speaker 2: 3:54

If you just think about it in terms of the consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 2: 3:58

We needed to standardize a lot of things and what ended up occurring? Where people began to cogs in a big industrial wheel and they were interchangeable cogs in that big industrial wheel, which led to the toxicity Do what I say, I'm the boss, don't ask questions, here's your job, all of those sorts of things. And I knew that there was a different way to do it. I didn't have any idea what that different way was, but there was a different way to do it. I didn't have any idea what that different way was, but there was something inside that said there's got to be a different solution to how we're actually doing this thing that we call work. And that was really how I got into it and it was literally a portage process of taking the human development, the human potential, context and structure and concepts and looking for how do they fit in a organizational, particularly a business organizational domain, and we were actually pretty successful at it. Long story short, I've ended up building a career out of that.

Speaker 1: 4:58

The main thing is you sustained it. But there's a couple of aspects I like about what what you do. One of them is the capitalism and bringing that into the environment in a very organic way, but a very I believe in your world a very neutral way to to actually teach it in a congruent environment for your belief system. The other thing is you've managed to do what a lot of coaches and people in this industry are struggling to do or very challenging doing. That's actually building a spiritual discipline into the, the foundation of your company, and then in teaching it in in a way so people can understand it. I find that very fascinating because, as I said earlier, people are trying to do this and a lot of people are challenged with this thing of what is spiritualism, what is capitalism and mastering the sustainability of all this. That's a hell of an undertaking for anybody, let alone somebody who's gone through some of the challenges that you've had in your life yeah, it's.

Speaker 2: 6:05

I'd be disingenuous if I said that I started off with spiritualism as a focal point, but pretty early on I the notion of the human spirit, you know reared its head and I couldn't ignore it. It was, there's that? Yeah, people would. They would come to work and they'd, metaphorically, hang their hat up on the coat rack and wait around to be told what to do, what they were told to do, and then, at the end of the day, when the whistle blew, they'd pick their hat up and they'd go back out into their life and all of a sudden they transformed into this autonomous individual that was self-directed, that had dreams. They did stuff, they did stuff. They didn't wait to be told to do it, they just did stuff. So what happened when you crossed that threshold and became an employee? Where did your spirit go? That sort of thing so fast.

Speaker 2: 6:57

Forward a number of years, almost a couple of decades. Here the notion of compassionate capitalism started creeping into my awareness, and compassion has obviously a spiritual root to it and the way that I framed this and I'm going to go down a little bit of a historical rabbit hole, if you could when Adam Smith wrote the book the Wealth of Nations, it was the first, literally the first codified economic theory. That was the first one that had been written down, and part of the and this is a gross simplification, but essentially what Smith was talking about was what he called the enlightened hands of commerce. Yeah, you, as my trading partner, you need to win if I'm going to win. It's a long-term sort of a thing, so there needs to be reciprocity here. So there's an element of enlightened self-interest that comes in, which has to do with a recognition that we are connected. Now, it's that connected piece that evokes compassion. It's that what am I connected with? I'm connected to the spirit of what you're up to, the spirit of who you are, and if I actually pay attention to this, we actually find a lot of things in common that we can actually begin to leverage and the pie becomes bigger. You know, it stops being a zero-sum process, stops being a zero-sum process.

Speaker 2: 8:28

Compassion has a place, I think, in business. The study of economics is the study of scarcity, which is like why would I study scarcity? I want to study abundance. How do I be abundant in my life? See, and that's where I think we went off the rails is business? Capitalism, as it's actually executed today is an exercise in scarcity, and this is why we see a lot of folks organized around accumulation let's get as much as we can, let's get ours. Nature doesn't work that way, and Adam Smith actually used nature as a template. Nature doesn't work that way. Nature is a. Everything in nature serves as a center of distribution, not as a center of accumulation. Yeah, and it's that center of distribution piece that I wanted to be able to tap into with the work I do with my clients.

Speaker 1: 9:16

I love what you're speaking about because it's a derivative of collective consciousness and it's tapping into that compassionate side of the human nature, providing gratitude and services and all the rest of it. Absolutely, people have some people have an idea of it, but they don't actualize it and they go back into this scarcity mindset give me, give me and they put themselves on this pedestal. You've got it and you've homed it in which I love and what this is one of the in which I love and what this is one of the models I I love and adhere to and I study myself. You're giving to people, you're being compassionate, you're understanding of their world and showing a real interest in their lives and I think, attracts these. But how did the compassionate capitalism come into that in conjunction with the spirituality? Because that's a hard thing to tell you, and I love this.

Speaker 2: 10:10

I'm like how the hell did you do that one? Two things happened. One is a conversation I had with John Mackey and Raj Sisodia and they wrote a book called Conscious Capitalism, and John and Raj are both very good friends of mine, I've known him for a long time. Capitalism and John and Raj are both very good friends of mine, I've known him for a long time and in conversation essentially and this is a cliffhanger version of what we worked with here but I said, guys, yeah, I love what you did and there's a piece that's missing for me and that piece has to do.

Speaker 2: 13:23

It's one thing to be conscious, aware of connections. It's another thing to find ways to behave in a manner that says I'm connected. That behavioral analog was what was interesting and that's where compassion comes in. Compassion is a behavior, it's not an attitude. Compassion is actually a behavior that's predicated on connection, on a recognition of connection. So again, connection to what? Obviously connection to my supplier, my vendor, my customer, that sort of thing, but even deeper, connection to the spirit that informs why they are who they are. All of that stuff comes into play. So there was that piece. So that conversation was catalytic in putting the book together Compassionate Capitalism, which actually became an international number one bestseller in five different markets. We hit something. There was some resonance there.

Speaker 2: 14:16

But the second piece had to do with how I came to define the purpose of business. And the purpose of business is not to make a profit. It's not, that's not the purpose for business. You need a profit to stay in business. But the purpose of business from my perspective is to find ways to enhance the possibility of thriving for anybody that comes into contact with your service or product. If people feel as if they have the opportunity to thrive when they purchase your service, when they purchase your product, they're going to beat a path to your door because it touches something inside them, and that's when you position your business. In that way. You actually are facing some difficult choices. Yeah, that way you actually are facing some difficult choices. You literally can't make a business decision long-term just for the sake of the business. You have to be doing decision-making as a leader in service of what's the purpose of the business? Enhance the possibility of thriving. How do we go to market? All of those questions come into play, which is where compassionate behavior begins to appear.

Speaker 1: 15:27

I love that. I want to ask you something else. I title this unconventional wisdom, and the reason I like asking this question is because people have elements of knowledge that don't necessarily come to us in a conventional way leaps of faith, divine intervention, whatever you want to call it. Is there anything that served you in an unconventional wisdom way, that in your business adventures specifically, that was unconventional, and how did you discover?

Speaker 2: 16:03

this wisdom? That's a great question. Thank you for that Again. There's two things that come to mind here. One has to do with early on.

Speaker 2: 16:11

When I started my business in 1987, I got to a point where we had a pretty significant contract and we were asked to do some things and I won't go into all the details around it but I did not have a clue about how to go about doing this. I literally did not have an opening statement. I didn't have a way to position this, and I've been meditating since the 19th, and so what I did was I just said okay, stop, I'm just going to sit back and breathe for a minute Rather than stress about this. I didn't said okay, stop, I'm just going to sit back and breathe for a minute rather than stress about this. I didn't meditate, Okay, but I paused and I just noticed over on the desk that there was a Harvard business review that was sitting there and I started flipping through it. And then something else caught my eye and there was another magazine. And then there was a book underneath that magazine and I started flipping through it. And all of this was just I'm just breathing, and in that moment there was the passage, literally that leapt, literally leapt out of the book and it was like Archimedes going, Eureka jumping out of the bathtub. It's kind of oh, that's it, and I've never forgotten that and it was the catalyst for what ended up becoming a very successful project for us.

Speaker 2: 17:28

But that willingness to just stop, sit back and go it's the answer's already here. I just haven't arrived. Yet that little meme has served me very well. The answer's here. I just haven't arrived, so I'm just going to quiet myself. I'm not going to go looking for well, the answer's here. I just haven't arrived, so I'm just going to quiet myself. I'm not going to go looking for it, it's already here, so I'm just going to make space for it to appear.

Speaker 1: 17:52

It has never failed me 40 years it's never failed me. That's a huge distinction within the economics of what you're teaching, because people go and chase things all the time and they're chasing themselves essentially.

Speaker 2: 18:08

When I start to chase something, honest to God. When I start yeah, it's out there. If I'm chasing something, the implicit message to the universe is I don't have it Correct, and if I go, it's already here. I'm not chasing anything, I just need to let it.

Speaker 1: 18:29

I need to let it. People need to remember that. So if you're listening to this now and you're like what the hell was that all about? Pause, go back and listen to this piece again and get a pen and paper and write this down, Because it's key for anybody who's wanting to grow into some form of success. However you define that in your life, there's a question I like asking you specifically what is your thousand-year vision and why is the thousand-year vision so important to?

Speaker 2: 18:57

you. I came across this notion of a thousand-year vision when I was working with a client and we were literally doing some vision work. That was part of a thousand year vision. When I was working with a client and we were literally doing some vision work, that was part of a whole strategic initiative that the company was undergoing, their company was undergoing, and they kept getting stuck in the how a three year, five year, 10 year, 20 year. Eventually, we'd quickly go to well, we don't know how to do that. What's the next step? And I'm going to tell you what guys? How about? If we just jump this out a thousand years, You're not going to be around. Nobody personally is going to be around. But if this thing is ideal in the way that you are envisioning, what might it look like? What kind of a difference has it made in a thousand years? That freed up all kinds of thinking.

Speaker 1: 19:44

And literally.

Speaker 2: 19:45

The Compassionate Capitalism book for me came out of, in part, a thousand-year vision. For what could it be? What could business be as the most pervasive force on the planet? And if it was a force for good, what might it be? Now recognizing it's probably not going to happen in my lifetime, taking that constraint out of it, it has to happen now. It has to happen where I can touch it, feel it, see it and smell it. No, it doesn't. It really doesn't. If it's important, it will come into being. Everything's been invented twice anyway. Yeah, first as an idea and then in physical form. So just put the physical form out there so far that you don't have to worry about. Then you take the first step to make it happen. That first step becomes a whole lot easier if I don't have to match it against some preconceived notion of what how is supposed to be.

Speaker 1: 20:38

I like the way you remove the how from it and it removes a lot of that, removes resistance to what actually comes in organically to your space. Like you said earlier, it's already done, but in order to allow it in, you've got to make that space. Most people try the opposite way around. They try and chase it, they try and make it happen Instead of going it's done, I'm going to allow it and I'm going to remove this, remove that whatever it is. So you allow that space to happen, which is a genius. When we look at legacies and building people's resilience in legacies, is there anything that you have done or possibly could share with somebody, the audience that you want your legacy to be? Specifically, when someone says to you or says to your grandchildren or people who used to know you Blaine did this. What's that? What are they going to say in 50, 100, 200, 300 years time?

Speaker 2: 21:42

Yeah, I'll answer the question, but the preface is legacy speaks to my egoic presence and if I'm looking at this through the lens of, I'm connected to everything. There's no ego inherent in that. So that, being part of the positioning here, I work a lot with my clients around this notion of elegance and the way I've defined elegance is the way that a software coder would actually describe elegant code. It's code that does what it's supposed to do, with minimal to no unintended consequences. So I think if there was a legacy that I would be proud of egoically proud, but also spiritually proud of leaving or having people point to is I lived a life with no unintended consequences.

Speaker 2: 22:28

I, like it, was an intentional life. That was beautiful beauty. You know, plato talked about beauty being the foundational, the foundational virtue of all of his virtues, and beauty is when you apprehend beauty, whether it's a sunset or the David, or a baby or a puppy dog, these are beautiful things because the spirit that inhabits and gives life to it is actually coming through the form that it's being presented as. So when the form doesn't inhibit the beauty, that's elegance.

Speaker 1: 23:04

I love that definition there.

Speaker 2: 23:05

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:07

I've never heard that before. Put the way you've just done it, it really resonated with me, so thank you for that. We look at Rise from the Ashes as a comeback story. Can you share a touching story where you've helped somebody? That was one of these sort of stories where they hit rock bottom and then all of a sudden they're on that journey back, rising from the ashes.

Speaker 2: 23:31

I could tell one of my own personal stories, or I could relate one from a client. It's entirely up to you. Okay, I think rising from the ashes how I define success, sustainable success and that's what rising from the ashes ends up becoming is developing the capacity to continuously start over in pursuit of a worthy ideal, and it's that worthy ideal that allows me to keep going and the house can collapse around me. Worthy ideal that allows me to keep going, the house can collapse around me, but if that worthy ideal, even a spark of it, remains, I can rebuild, I can rise from the ashes of that conflagration. So when my wife died, it'd be probably the story I would most resonate with around this. This was 13 years ago, 14 years ago, devastated, as you can imagine. We had a beautiful marriage. I loved her with all my heart. Beautiful family. It was just an incredible marriage. And I was and I'll own this I was a workaholic.

Speaker 2: 24:36

I'd be on the road 250 days out of the year as a consultant. You go to where the client is, so I was a workaholic. I'd be on the road 250 days out of the year as a consultant. You go to where the client is, so I was traveling all the time and we joked about what's your vision in life? I'd like to sleep in 50% fewer beds. So she and I had this running joke going on.

Speaker 2: 24:53

When she passed, as you could imagine, my world just literally collapsed and there was Pam and Blaine. It wasn't just Pam by herself or Blaine by himself, it was Pam and Blaine. There was this conjoining that was in place in terms of identity and my business. She was a part of it. We did a lot of things together. So when she passed, I looked around and I went what's this all about? What's this all been for? It's just, yeah, none of it made sense anymore and people would initially would console me and the whole grieving process, all of that. And I started doing some interesting for me interesting work. I got a hold of a book by Mickey Singer, the Untethered Soul, and spent some time just reading that. I went quiet and the spark of compassionate capitalism was still. It wasn't quite snuffed out.

Speaker 2: 25:53

But I also knew that I didn't want to do it the way I'd been doing it. I didn't. That was I've got five and a half million air miles. I don't need another airplane flight. I really don't. So if I was going to continue teaching. If I was going to continue consulting and coaching, it had to be different. Yeah, it needed to look different. I had no idea, absolutely no idea, what that might be. So I just peeked out from under the covers and took a tentative step yeah, how about if I did it this way? I'd never done it this way before and it actually worked. I'd never thought about it because I was so caught up in the way that I was doing things.

Speaker 2: 26:35

And somebody, a long time ago, literally I was in a rut. It was a successful rut. We were doing some great stuff, we had offices in four countries, but it was a rut. And an old mentor of mine said to me at one point a rut is nothing more than a coffin with the ends kicked out. And that's where I found myself.

Speaker 2: 26:55

I wasn't growing, and when Pam died, it was a wake up call that I had stopped growing, that I had stopped learning, that I, my spirit, had a lid on it. And rather than people told me it was going to take a long time to get over this death, I said no, it really doesn't have to take a long time. I really don't believe it has to, but I don't want to short circuit the process. I don't want to not grieve, because I know grieving is healthy, and so I started doing some really intentional things to develop a capacity that would allow me to start over. And that capacity had to do with courage to take a step, not to move on, but to move forward, with courage to take a step, not to move on, but to move forward. So I start playing with linguistics. Language creates reality. It also reflects reality. So moving forward rather than moving on. That felt different. So I could take a step with moving forward, okay, taking moving on kind of I don't want to move on.

Speaker 2: 27:57

There's too much that I value, so I don't want to leave it behind, those sorts. I started looking at different ways to do things, so I started different types of practices. Practices create the whole notion of identity. I mentioned identity, pam and Blaine. I started researching what is identity and if you take the word apart, you go back to the epistemology or the etymology of the word. It has two Latin roots, one about being and the other about repetition, so being repeated and the repetition of beingness. I wanted to be something different, I wanted to be a different way, so I started practicing repeating, being a different way, those sorts of things. They seem very subtle but they were enormously degenerative. As a capacity building process. Everybody can rise from the ashes. It takes a couple of things Spark of meaning and then capacity Building, the capacity to continuously start over.

Speaker 1: 29:06

Yeah, that's very sound advice, coming from experience and going through that transition into forming a new person, forming a new belief system, identity and also a new belief system identity, and also a new purpose an elevated purpose, if anything, and that's highly commendable for anybody to do, and you've turned it into a very successful model that you can then build other people's lives and businesses with, which is phenomenal. Thank you very much for that. Before we go, is there anything you'd love to leave with the audience, whether it be a gift or a book to go to? This isn't, as I said, it's entirely of service to you, so please anything you can.

Speaker 2: 29:45

I'm talking about developing the capacity to continuously start over. I was asked to give a keynote address in Japan last year and the organizer wanted something to leave behind and I've done a lot of work in Japan, so I ended up and the talk was on sustainable success. So I put together a very simple little toolkit around five different elements of capacity building. So on my website, if you have blainebartlettcom, if people are interested, the price point on it is $98. It's just yeah, I wanted to make it very accessible. Just yeah, I wanted to make it very accessible. But it gives some very, I think, intentionally specific and easily digestible tools that you can use to continuously start over.

Speaker 2: 30:28

Capacity building around self-awareness, around courage, around discernment how do I make decisions? Practices are most important. And then inclusion how do I? I don't do this by myself. Other people need to be involved. So this little toolkit is designed specifically to help frame it, but also here's some suggestions about how to do it and answering the question out, because that will pick people up sometimes. So absolutely feel free to jump on that, yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:56

That comment, that link will be in the blog and also in the description below. I encourage you to do get on it. Blaine, thank you very much for joining me today. It is an absolute privilege to interview you and share your message with the world. If you have any final thoughts, any final words of wisdom, please share and, as I said, it's amazing to finally meet you and chat with you.

Speaker 2: 31:20

Thank you, Baz. I think the only thing that I'd leave as a parting gift is find a way to be a center of distribution in your life, not a center of accumulation. In my experience, my life works a whole lot better when I'm just giving.

Speaker 1: 31:32

Yeah, giving with no expectation. Exactly, I love that message, blaine, thank you very much for joining me. As I said, it's always a pleasure. If you need anything from me, please reach out. You know where I am. Thank you, baz. Thank you very much. Please share this message. You will undoubtedly change someone's life. I'm Baz Porter and this is another insightful episode from Rise for the Ashes podcast For myself live with purpose, my friends, and inspire with legacy. Have a fantastic day.