The Wisdom Wall

“self-awareness is easier to train in world-class leaders than self-acceptance. Most of them have a superstitious belief that if they granted themselves a moment of self-acceptance, they'd lose their edge. That absent being constantly, um, self-critical, self-evaluatory with a slightly negative spin, uh, absent that…”

“The antidote to fear is not courage. The antidote to fear is acceptance.”

“Integrity then tends to have more of a, like a moral or an ethical Kind of orientation. And the way I play with integrity is none of that. But again, let's just do a little etymology here. So integrity from the root, uh, same root as integer. So think of whole number. Think of wholeness. So that's where I like to…”

“There are genuine victims in the world. Victim consciousness is if I'm 70 years old and I'm still blaming my mother, my brother, and my father for my current experience in life.”

“You are not the cause of my experience. You're not. However much we ever relate in life, you are not the cause of my experience. I would say it this way. I actually won't grant you that power. I am the cause of my experience. You act, and in this case, technology acted, and it stopped working. Yeah, there was an…”

“I've learned over the years, if you pick a surrogate and reveal them to the surrogate, you will experience the liberation of candor.”

“Facts never cause drama. Stories cause drama. And then you learn that you are the source of your stories, and that your drama is caused because you're wanting to be right about your stories, prove you're right, and make the other person wrong.”

“Well, there are different consequences for integrity breaches, but energetically there's no difference.”

“Emotions are not thoughts. They are literally sensations in and on the body.”

“It's not that people even don't know how to change from victim to creator. It's usually that they're unwilling.”

“being overwhelmed is actually optional, and it's useful in the short run, but very destructive in the long run. It gives initial energy burst, but not long-term sustainability.”

“If everything you're complaining about, really complaining about in people in your world, if you were willing to eat the projection and see how the things you're complaining about, about other people are true about you, you would increase your learning agility exponentially.”

“if you create feedback rich environments, like we're talking about here, you can let go of most formal feedback tools. You don't need to do a semi-annual or annual feedback things, which, you know, still gets rated as one of the things most people hate the most because you've created such a feedback rich environment.”

“We say, we use this little formula, when you withhold, then you withdraw, and then you project. Which means you disconnect from relationship. So when we look at high performing teams, one of the things we see is they don't have many withholds. Everything is transparent to the, to the decision process.”

“A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness, my day-to-day experience of my vitality is to live in victimhood. Blame the weather. Blame the traffic. What I notice is if I stop blaming, and I choose to move the locus of control back over here, and I choose to have agency to be responsible for my experience, not the external…”

“We say, we use this little formula, when you withhold, then you withdraw, and then you project. Which means you disconnect from relationship.”

“So when we look at high performing teams, one of the things we see is they don't have many withholds. Everything is transparent to the, to the decision process.”

“And I find that one of the ways people bleed off life energy is they don't make clear agreements. When they make clear agreements, they break their agreements, which creates a life force diminishment. It also creates drama and relationships.”

“After about the age of four to six, we forget that we already have all of these on the inside. And so we outsource them, and we spend the rest of our life thinking that if we get enough money, we'll feel safe and secure.”

“But for most of the people you and I know, they've created a world where they're safe and secure enough that the infringement isn't that. The vast majority of the infringement is the infringement on the identity. It's the infringement on the ego identity.”

“when I say I grant you agency for your experience, that's not, it doesn't live in me as a license for me to be an asshole. It doesn't go there. It doesn't say, well, you're responsible for your own experience. If you're upsetting yourself, that's your problem. So I'll talk to you however I want. It's not that at all.”

“And then what we discover is the half-life of any set of sensations tied to an emotion is fairly short. It's minutes, maybe even seconds. It's not hours and days.”

“That turns into this cognitive motive loop, which you can stay in for years, and to your point, that turns into a mood. It's not a feeling anymore. Now it's not a feeling of anger. It's a mood of resentment. It's a mood of bitterness. Now it becomes a posture, all because I didn't release the energy out of my body by…”

“There are two dimensions to repairing that relationship. One is literally repairing it with the other person, but there's a repair that can occur that doesn't require or even need to involve the other person. That's incredibly important because I don't need the other person to cooperate And to be co-committed to…”

“control and approval and survival, the three core wants of any ego structure.”

“It shows up first in your body. You'll know in your body, there'll be certain somatic signatures, and then it shows up in your thinking structures, and it shows up in your emotional state.”

“when you're already contracted, curtness comes from contraction as opposed to openness, and then you pile on With self-criticism or self-judgment, you actually contract further.”

“If you're motivating your team solely by extrinsic reward, one of the things you know is you've got to keep increasing the capacity to keep feeding the consciousness that you've created. And it also creates people playing a zero sum game, which creates tremendous win lose consciousness and all this kinds of stuff.”

“So these are intrinsic rewards, and they actually are the first level of motivation that doesn't leave a toxic residue.”

“all drama in relationships, personal or professional, is caused by unaligned commitments. That's that word commitment. We're not headed in the same direction or unclear and unkept agreements.”

“It takes an unbelievable amount of energy to resist reality.”

“Anytime I feel isn't followed by an emotional state, like the five we use, sad, angry, scared, joy, or creative energy. If it's feeling, if it's followed by a thought, it's not a feeling.”

“And research, I first read this from Joe Bolte Taylor in Stroke of Insight. Great Ted talk. And then the follow on book, the Harvard brain researcher who said that feelings last less than 90 seconds. And that's true. In my experience, they actually often less last far less than that. If I don't feed the feeling with…”

“I can only be as empathic or compassionate with another as I can be with myself.”

“So many times in the investment world, we want people to have conviction, but so much of this conviction is occurring at an egoic state from below the line. Now, what I mean by that is in order to get the PM to believe that my research is viable and to pull the trigger, I've been told I have to have conviction, but…”

“When they get feedback, they do not ask the question, is it true? They ask the question, how is it true?”

“Here's what I didn't know, is the amount of energy it takes to repress and suppress emotion. I tell people now, it's like your emotions are like a beach ball, you know, and you take them and, ah, you try to hold them under the water, And the more inflated the ball is, the harder it is to hold under the water, and if,…”

“the first key skill of conscious leaders is self-awareness that leads the pack. And the first act of self-awareness is, can I locate myself in this now moment? Am I open or closed? Am I in a state of trust or a state of threat?”

“there are three ways you can grow in self-awareness. One is to become more self-reflective... The other way to grow in self-awareness is to use some instrument... And the third way to grow in self-awareness is to create an incredibly feedback rich environment where the people around you, the most direct form of…”

“what we find is that when trust is low in relationships, teams, and organizations, people start withholding. And when people withhold decisions become far less effective and they get muddied up, we call them sludge. And so they get slower and wrong decisions get made.”

“Every agreement needs to have a who is going to do what by when. And agreements that don't have a who and a what and a when are sloppy.”