I spent too much time bringing the wrong energy back home from work. And it affected the most important relationships in my life. Especially after I became a father.
There’s something broken at the core of our work culture that makes us this way.
In biology, if all the cells continue to die, it means the cell culture is contaminated and toxic. But in a work environment where 8/10 of us are overstressed, and 120,000 people die from this in the US alone…somehow this is okay?
We have to be our own leaders, because no one else is going to do this for us.
I am strongly started to believe we need to get out of the survival mode that modern work puts us in.
“What would self-actualization mean for me?” “What is my dharma here?”
It’s time to brewing our own culture…and leave toxic cultures behind.
That’s the only way to remake work.
This video shows what I noticed and how I started to take charge…by doing something counterintuitive.
I’m taking the leap into something I care deeply about.
My lifelong spiritual practice has been at the heart of everything I’ve done.
When I work with my clients, whether they be attorneys with their own practices, startup founders, or social entrepreneurs, our discussions often take on a philosophical or spiritual dimension.
Sharing this dimension has added immensely to our work.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the world needs this urgently.
Our world has become ruled by outdated ideas and conceptions. And I’m convinced that if we are to get past this phase, we need a new way to look at ourselves and the world. Before we divide and separate ourselves any further.
At the heart of this transition lies a concept that is barely understood or talked about. Consciousness.
Exploring consciousness (or the atman) has been at the heart of my spiritual practice all of my life.
I’ve kept this part of my life hidden from most people. Because it can feel woo-woo, esoteric.
This isn’t about meditation, self-care apps, corporate wellness programs, or mindfulness. This is about completely changing the way we see ourselves, each other, and the work we do.
Understanding this can remake businesses, governments, and the world. More than anything, it can remake me and you.
But I’d now like to invite you to join me on a long journey as I unravel how concepts of consciousness and dharma can help you and I be better leaders, create better organizations, and ultimately begin a new chapter for our world.
What ideas from the old world do we need to put to an end? What role does consciousness play in your work and life? Let me know!
For 20+ years, I have known that there is an energy that has been waiting to be unleashed.
Society tells us to say “no” to this. Maybe the same has happened to you.
After a lifetime of saying no, I am finally choosing to say yes to the creative urge within me.
I have bargained with it, negotiated with it, and have supressed it. I have tried to manipulate it and convince myself of alternatives.
But, as I near my 35th birthday and look at my baby daughter, I realize I need to have the courage to be the person I am.
They say I need to be practical. But the practical reality is that I will be a lot more successful doing what I love. Because I can give myself fully to my work.
I am scared to do it. But it is scarier still to hold myself back and look back at a life that is half-lived.
They say leave work at the door and focus instead on what actually matters – family, spirituality, yoga, etc. But what if work itself can be a spiritual practice? What if being creative means to show up with an energy to engage more fully in my relationships?
Creativity is the natural order of life. Life itself is creative energy. Creativity is my gift from God. To use this creativity is my gift back to God.
What does creativity mean? Does it mean to write? To paint? To make music?
I am choosing to think of creativity as a way of letting the higher power create through me. Some days, it will be in the form of a written word. Other day, it will be in the form of videos. Or products, services, talks and more.
To create is to give myself fully. To feel into things. To trust. To leap into the empty void. To lead with my heart and then engage the head to stick the landing.
This is a scarier way to live. I am sometimes jealous of my friends who are doctors, lawyers, actuaries, engineers, and more. The small shop owners.
But as the world economy evolves, I realize that to live a creative life is the only real game left. It is a game that never ends. You play it because the game itself is endlessly interesting.
While with other jobs, people play will play until they win the Monopoly game. Their homes are made.
Not so with the creative. My game is endless and I wish to play it forever.
My inspiration to play this game in my own way comes from a man who gave himself to the world. Pramukh Swami Maharaj. He taught to live and give abundantly. To hold nothing back. To love freely and openly. To always inspire. To always give.
Why would I not want to live like that?
If you have been waiting for a sign to live creatively, take this to be it. And join me for the journey!
A re-frame of the old adage that “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop”
If you have ever felt a lack of focus, purpose, and a sense of disconnection from life, the reason might be that your mind is just too cluttered. This is how we change it.
My experience at de-cluttering
For the first time in months, I slept without a phone next to me. And I woke up without a phone next to me.
In my bed, I visualized and felt my goals coming true. I arose from my bed calm and ready for the day. I got ready, did my morning meditation and prayers, had brunch with my wife. All this without a single screen to look at.
Remarkably, I felt an immediate change in the way I felt.
Let’s contrast with how things usually were for me.
I would go to sleep at night with a phone in my hand. I would use it to read books, so I would tell myself at least I was being productive late into the night. But of course the mind cannot be productive all the time. It just isn’t built for it.
Because of this habit, I would not be able to spend time with my wife as she drifted off to sleep herself. It was an incomplete way to end the day. Not having a phone between us allowed us to sync with each other as we fell asleep.
In the morning, I would also reach for my phone. I would again start the day with spiritual readings, but my mind is never ready for it. There is something about the device that makes me want to search for the next hit of information. I would soon find myself catching up with work emails, messages, and personal direct messages and start responding to them.
“They’re just for work or family” I would say. But at around this time, my mental peace is already disturbed. I’m in a state of chaos already, sucked into a tumultuous world.
This would happen even on weekends.
Not today however.
What Inspired Me
I have felt a lack of focus and a real sense of disconnection with myself as of late. The pace of things had been increasing but I felt I was staying in the same place.
I came at a crossroads where I realized that until I change something inside of me, I will be far away from my ideal life.
I believed my path to the ideal life was a macho push-through-everything way of looking at the world.
The picture of a hyper-connected, hyper-responsive executive, making a million decisions a day is firm in my mind’s eye. This is also extremely destructive.
What I want is calm. I want peace of mind. I want to engage with my work as an instrument of my life; something that I play with to create music because I enjoy it. Not be ruled by it.
The means of doing that is not through being more productive, more systems and processes. Not more left brain. But more heart. More soul. This is a difficult proposition at times since as of the writing of this post, I work in the legal industry where I’m often surrounded by hyper-logical and critical lawyers. But I also see a destructive lack of meaning, connection, and significance when I speak with many lawyers up close. I see broken marriages, addictions. I see brewing volcanoes of stress and burnout that is barely placated with another training on productivity, efficiency, surface-level mentions of self-care.
A hyper-active cluttered mind cannot find peace. There is no productivity hack that will reawaken your heart to work. You will be more productive at making yourself unhappy, drifting further and further away from peace of mind.
The Need for Space
I was inspired by this talk below:
It spoke about a different way of getting focus. But focus is just one benefit of removing the clutter.
The real benefit is getting greater peace of mind. More space.
When there is more space, the heart and your true self (the atman) can be heard.
This morning, I find myself more connected than ever before to myself.
I know weekdays will be difficult since I am going to work and I often have morning calls. I will have to find a way to maintain my peace of mind as I design the future.
This is just day 1. I will report back what I learn from this journey as I go through it over the coming weeks.
Consider removing the phone from your life for just this weekend. At least in between bed-time and the start of your workday. See what happens. If you’ve already done this, what has been your experience with decluttering your mind?
You might be drawn too much to one medium to miss out on ways to fast-track your growth if you just shift the medium.
I have been looking to learn more about tax fundamentals now that I’ve been living in the US for a few years. However, all my previous attempts at trying to understand it have been in the form of books. I would procrastinate with it and never read it. The numbers, concepts, and ideas were too difficult to digest for me.
Based on my search history, I soon started getting YouTube recommendations as well. However, YouTube optimizes for recommendations and watch times, and I soon started getting recommendations for highly polarizing videos.
I would see videos like “here’s why you’re poor,” or “what to avoid if you don’t want to get audited.” These are shocking videos that makes me less likely to engage with them (although I see why others would be drawn by the click bait titles).
What I needed was a calm way of being explained basic concepts, without the hype. I needed this knowledge to be transmitted visually with examples shown to me as I went through it.
I finally realized that I need to learn this from almost a university like lecture format. So I found a course online and I’m now learning about these concepts in a more constructive manner.
The same goes for other things. For some other business skills, I am finding that I do better looking for live communities where I can engage with others who are also trying to master the same new skills. So I’m looking for that.
For deeper ideas, I still find myself looking at books. For bite-sized digests of ideas, I go to podcasts.
If you’re struggling to acquire a certain skill, or grow on a certain path, it might just be that you’re using the wrong medium to learn it. You are perhaps using the medium you are most familiar with, not the medium that works best for you to learn it.
Find the right medium and accelerate your learning.
Caveat: it is just as important to avoid the wrong medium. Reading a book isn’t always the best idea for example, sometimes a TED talk is enough to grasp the big ideas. At the same time, a talk is not always the right idea and you can understand it better if you just read the book or original paper behind it.
People believe that the more expensive, exclusive and complicated something appears, the better it is. This is certainly the case for legal conferences.
We chose to do the opposite. Here’s a list of what worked and what didn’t work that well. Please learn from them to make your event not suck.
I want to pull back the curtain on how we got 1000+ people joining from 20+ countries at our Authentic Lawyer Summit earlier on this month.
We focused on simplifying everything as much as possible.
WHAT WORKED:
1. MUSIC! 🎵 Most events are dry, dull, and lifeless. Too serious for their own good. We sparked every session, break, and outros with music (good music!). People literally wanted to get our playlist.
2. NO BARRIERS! 🚧 We got rid of complicated conferencing software. It saved us thousands of dollars, and allowed hundreds to join us live instead when we broadcast on YouTube instead.
3. NO PANELS! 👯 These are always so boring and people tend to arrive at a consensus. We chose people with spiky points of view to lead the stage.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK AS WELL:
1. SHORT TALKS. ⏲ We thought the more focused and shorter the talk, the better it is. But some ideas, speakers, and more were so engaging that we wish we could’ve given them more time.
2. POWERPOINTS: 📈 The minute you start screen-sharing, the more people start tuning out. We were lucky that we didn’t have much of this, but we definitely saw a dip in engagement.
3. LOW-KEY PROMOTION: 📢 We managed to get 1000+ attendees across the 3 days, but we wish we’d done a better job of reaching out to more leaders who can change the industry to attend the event.
What would you like to learn about our event? I will continue sharing more insights about running this event, running our legal firm, and insights from coaching lawyers and accountants. Drop your biggest question/comment below and I’ll be sure to address it.
It’s not about how long you’ve been a practicing attorney.
It’s not about how big or small your law firm is.
It’s not about how impressive your network is.
You can get outsized clients if you know how to construct the buying experience.
The research backs me up:
“The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) found that 53% of customer loyalty is attributed to the customer’s buying experience, according to a survey of over 5,000 people at members’ customer organizations. Compare this to company and brand impact (19%)…and value-to-price ratio (9%).”
Have you ever constructed a Client Buying Experience (CBE)?
I’ve identified 9 different variables you can use to construct your own CBE in 5 minutes or less.
I’ve created a short email course to get into this topic.
5 Ideas. Shared over 5 Days. Actionable in 5 Minutes.
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