E14 Mastering The CEO Mindset
June 2024
122 minutes
E14 Mastering The CEO Mindset
June 2024
122 minutes
Stream on:
Humans continue to develop long after childhood and adolescence. As we mature, we gain the ability to turn our biggest challenges into our biggest opportunities. To do this, we must experience a revolution in our perception, mindset, and consciousness. As the world becomes more complex, CEOs are being challenged to undergo this evolution in consciousness. Only when we can decrease the "I am" and increase the responsibility of our "I have" will we be equipped to tackle life's greatest challenges. In this episode, we explore how CEOs can take charge of their own development, increase their maturity, and ultimately lead a complex organization with grace and skill.
Key topics include:
0:00-04:04 Introduction to CEO Mindset 04:04-07:42 Evolution of Perception and Mindset 07:42-12:29 Boundaries and Impulse Control 12:29-30:16 Subject-Object Self-Awareness 30:16-37:45 Building the Mindset for Effective Leadership 37:45-44:40 Development Psychology of Children 44:40-51:02 From Self-Orientated to Mutualistic 51:02-01:13:19 The Role of Initiations and Ceremonies 01:13:19-01:36:54 Pros and Cons of Religion and Culture 01:36:5401:45:51CEOs Leading Through Values and Virtue 01:45:51-02:01:42 Transformation and Transcendence in CEOs
is a global, leadership-strategy consulting company. 3Peak creates the roadmap that aligns behaviours, relationships and Functional Human-Systems™ to achieve your business strategy.
Co-Founder holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and did extensive research in Consciousness, Trauma and Physical, Emotional & Mental Health in various Institutes and Research Centers around Europe.
Co-Founder is one of the most sought after therapists in the world, mastering diverse modalities and opening wellness centers in Istanbul, Santiago, New York and Berlin. Her approaches bridges transpersonal psychology, meditation, bioenergetics, family- and business-constellations and more.
Co-Founder has extensive experience advising Fortune 50 and FTSE 100 C-Suite Executives in leadership, strategy, team dynamics, and organizational change. Before coaching, Mino worked in finance, management consulting, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
Mino Vlachos: Hello and welcome to the three peak master leadership experience. My name is Mino Vlachos and I'm joined by Dr. Mazen Harb and Krisana Locke. We are the co founders of three peak coaching and solutions where master leaders build healthy systems. Our company provides coaching and workshops to executive leaders and leadership and well being workshops to employees. Today's topic is installment number two of our three part series on CEO's, working with and supporting CEO's. And I'm really excited for today's episode. When we did the first part, we really talked about the experience of being a CEO. Some of the challenges, the demands, the pressures, topics of control. Today we turn a little bit to the complexities that CEO's face and over time, how they can meet those complexities. And so we'll give a little bit more details about what that means. But today's episodes are all about creating the mentality, the mindset of how to lead and how to lead when things are very complicated, complex, volatile, uncertain, abstract. And that's going to be what we get into today. And so I'm going to give a little bit of an introduction and then we're going to dive into some of the topics that we'll be going through, which is really how one can evolve over time and develop over time to really be able to lead in uncertain moments. The first thing I want to just talk about is that as we've seen society change technologically and socially over the last 100, 200, 500 years, we've noticed both empirically. We can prove this quantitatively, but also qualitatively that society's gotten a lot more complicated. Things are more complex than they used to be. I think about my grandparents when they were growing up, you know, 80 years ago, they lived a life where they had challenges, but life appeared on the surface very similar to ways it did for their parents. They were able to become the professions of their own parents. They were able to pass that down. Society's rules hadn't changed that much since their parents. In the last hundred years, we've seen society's rules, technology, change quite a bit from things ranging from technology to demographic shifts. We just see the level of complexity increase. The level of our organizations has increased. So organizations have gotten way bigger, way more money. We hit trillion dollar companies for the first time. If you think about even the budgets of governments, trillion dollar budgets now, which even 2050 years ago would have sounded crazy to us. So we're managing really, really high levels of numbers. We now live in an abstract world. A lot of our life takes place online, as is this podcast. We're dealing with abstract concepts. And so we're shifting kind of from a manual labor society, which had a lot of difficulties and challenges, but we're now moving into the information age, a cognitive society which comes with its own set of problems and amazing things, but also its own complexity and problems. The question really is, how does a CEO adapt and develop their skillset in this kind of new world? And as we look forward with AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, this is only going to likely increase unless there's some kind of catastrophic event that takes us back to the Stone Age. We're only going to be increasing the levels of complexity in society further. So how do we deal with all this? How do we develop the mindset that can deal with these challenges? What happens when we're replaced by AI on technological things? And all that's left is the humanistic, relational things. How do we deal with these things? And that's what our kind of episode will start to dive into and to build a bit of a journey on how we evolve the self so we can really lead ourselves and lead our organizations. So, to begin, we're going to start, like, very basic. We're going to do building blocks and build up to this thing. And I'm going to start with, really, the concept of mindset and really just start talking about perception. When we take in information from the world, we each have a very subjective experience. But rather than have me talk about that, I'm glad we have a neuroscientist in the room. Mazen of many things. One of the things is you are a doctor of neuroscience, you're a consciousness researcher. You've done a lot of work developing people. And so I wanted to start very basic and ask, what is perception?
Dr. Mazen Harb: So, to break it down in a very simple way, it's our senses, so the senses that helps us perceive, and our memories, so lived experiences. When you combine those two, you will have subjective reality. So subjective perception. So, see, by definition, most perception, if not all, are subjective for the simple reason, even how we sense, even though we have similar nervous system. But the nervous system has adapted differently. So the way how we sense, combined with memories, learning that we had, makes it different from person to person. And I will add to it one more. Right? So, senses, memory, and the third one, that it really makes it very clear that we will never have the same perception and see reality as it is between two persons, ten people. You add to it the component, as the third component of emotion, because we tend to be in different emotion or feeling state in the same day. We change multiple, multiple times. So imagine that you look at something or you hear something. You have the component of the sense. This is your own personal. Okay, I hear something. If we stop at that, we might have similarity what we hear, right. But the problem is not the problem, but to understand it is to dissect it. Once you hear it, it goes also to your brain. So the mind start to make association. It's normal something to understand it. Why we make association, to understand that sound and to decrypt it kind of sense. But on top of that, we are in a certain emotional state. Because you slept wrong, because you just ate and you're digesting, because you're tired. Because you just had a copy coffee and you're a bit nervous. This combination make a unique experience. That's what we call perception. To end. Perception is subjective reality of the observer. It's not objective and it cannot be passed on, and it cannot be similar with everyone else.
Mino Vlachos: So online, I hear a lot about mindset, right? Like the gurus online and the self development. And it's like mindset, mindset, mindset. It's just about changing the way I think about something and then everything will change. And yet, Mazen, when I hear you now describe perception, you brought way more into it. You talked about emotion, senses, memories. So tell me a little bit about evolving perception versus mindset.
Dr. Mazen Harb: Funny. It's a funny word for me, mindset. I'm just pondering about that word. It's a word I really use, to be honest. Not because of anything, just never, never used it as a tool. And probably, yeah. I'm now dissecting in the mindset how the setting of the mind, for me it is. That's the outcome. But to change your mindset is wrong in that sense. Your mindset will be changed if you do something else. If you understand that based on what I said, there are senses. There's the memory association, the mind playing something. But there's the emotional state. You can change your mindset by doing positive affirmation. That means actually working on your mind. You work so much on affirmation and changing your mindset. But the moment you're going to execute something, you thought you changed your mindset and you're in face of it and suddenly something get triggered. Your emotional body will be triggered. And when your emotional body will do, it brings so many emotions. So your mindset will be completely changed. Mindset is goes hand in hand conditioning. That's the mind with emotion, emotional conditioning as well. So it really has to be uncoupled, recoupled differently. The whole perception need to be changed. So mindset is succeeded. So body and mind. So body mindset, I'd like to call it for now as a joke.
Mino Vlachos: Krisana, I've worked with you in personal development for years, and what would be your take a little bit again on this mindset versus I don't know what to call it. I like the body mindset that Mazen introduced. Someone comes to you and they're like, I just will rewire my thoughts. And that's all I need. That's all I'm looking for. Real change is just rewiring your thoughts. What's your perception when we talk about actually working with someone and what you kind of do with them?
Krisana Locke: But perception is incorporating all those other things that give meaning, which is sensation, image, behavior, effect meaning. So the body mindset, I would call it the body mind condition. So when connection. So when people come to me and they say, I really am desiring to change something, I'm creating a lot of affirmations. There's a lot of doing this from the desire of the mind, and nothing, it will just increase desires of the mind. But for me, when I'm working with people is to bring in sensations, into bring into emotions, is to bring in behavior. So there's a different affectation that happens. So there's a new sense of reality. So I would work with them with the body and the mind and with the breathing, with breathing and emotions and associations and insights that will come up. So I work more through the body. And if someone's coming very much in the mind state, I first have to bring them. What is missing is to bring in the bottom up. They're too top. So I bring them into the body, so then they can have some insight coming up, some emotional intelligence.
Mino Vlachos: And once I heard it described that we're each having our own controlled hallucination because we're all taking these chemical inputs of the environment and sorting it and making it, meaning of it, through our body and our biology is so incredible that it's so almost instantaneous, although it's not purely instantaneous, there is a little micro gap, right? To see something, to hear something, the speed of light, the speed of sound, the speed of touch. But we are sensing things and we perceive it as almost instant, right? Like it's happening literally in this moment, even though just like a computer is actually a little lag, that happens, but we take it in differently, we sort it differently, and then we behave differently. And so today's episode, the reason this is important is because when we talk about leadership, the way we perceive and sort our reality will never be the same. But I would argue that certain levels of perception might have different levels of strengths and hindrances when it comes to running a company. For instance, if you put a five year old in charge of Amazon right now, a five year old has one level of perception, right? Which is true to that five year old. It might not be as effective or efficient as Jeff Bezos level of perception. So as we change and grow and evolve, our perception changes, our capabilities change. And so the question is, is there a level of perception or some category of perception that will best serve us in these endeavors? My argument is that there is. There are certain elements of how we can organize our perception and guide the development of our perception that are more effective than others over time. And that is what we're going to start to get into now. And so I'm going to introduce a model, and I will give many caveats in this episode. Many like, hey, watch out. Because I know how the mind works in this model. It's one model. It does not mean it's truth. It means this is how one, I think, very intelligent person, chose to organize our orders of perception. Our orders of consciousness doesn't make it true. It just makes it potentially useful. I find it useful, and that's why we're gonna talk about it. But please don't take this as gospel truth. The other thing is that it is presented in a linear fashion. So it goes step by step by step. When I give hierarchies, the mind can very easily jump into things like comparison, into judgment, into superiority complexes, inferiority complexes. When I give these different levels of consciousness, it is not to create that ladder of comparison. So I'm going to say it over and over and over again throughout this episode. We all have the capacity to operate all over the board. So we each and every one, and we're going to start talking a little bit about children in a second. We each have the capacity as adults to act like children. There are things that will conditions that will enable us, each one of us, to get very childish. So no one is better than the other. No one is this, in my opinion, this like Nirvana, you know, enlightened being that is going to be above everyone else in supremacist like. We each have the capacity to operate at different levels. So for anyone listening, I urge you, if you find yourself, oh, I would like to be a five out of five, like, check in on that. If you're like, I'm better than those ones and twos, check in on that. Because we each have the capacity to be everything, and we all do operate in different areas of our life all over the board. So with that, and I'll keep giving lots of caveats with that, I'm going to talk first a little bit about children. So I talked about, it's obvious, if we put a five year old at the level of Amazon, running Amazon, it would be a little interesting, right? Like, because a child perceives the world through one lens. And we, for those who have kids, for parents, there's a lot of research done on child development, and you can see it with your eyes. Like a one year old and a ten year old process the world differently, they behave very differently. And so we recognize, okay, this kid is growing physically, psychologically, and then we assume that adults stop developing. But psychologically, adults do not stop developing, actually, they continue to develop. It just takes a little bit more time. Potentially it's more subtle or we haven't invested that much research into that part of it. But this evolution continues for the rest of our life. Never stops. So if you think, ah, okay, I've reached it, this is who I am. Yeah, you could choose that, but that's your choice. But life is not saying that you're done growing and evolving. It's you who's saying, I'm done evolving and growing, because there is capacity for more evolution. So with kids, as we start to look at some of the interesting research of how they perceive the world, one of the most famous examples and studies done in psychology is by a psychologist named Piaget. I think it's Jean, Jean Piaget. And what he did is he looked at, he took two glasses and filled them with liquid, and one was a very tall, narrow glass, and one was a very wide, short glass. And he filled them with the exact same amount of liquid. And the kids always perceived the tall one as having more inside. And then they would take the liquid and they would pour it into two equal cups, and you would see that the volume is exactly the same. And the kids would freak out like it was like a magic trick. And then you poured them back into the same glasses, and the kids wanted the tall one again. So even though you can show them volume, they cannot, with their mind grasp that the same amount of liquid is the same. The shape to them is very influential. And so the kids, they need to go through some evolutionary steps to learn about things like volume. And as we merge into kind of like the ten year old, twelve year old self. You start to see kids, I think, really kind of come online and start to really understand, like physics, I'll put it that way, and understand how the world mechanistically works. They get very fascinated by this level of operating. One thing that starts to happen on the kind of emotional side, and then I'm going to start turning it to you two. Chrysana Mazen to hear your take is that kids, over time, learn how to check their impulses. So a baby, when it wants something, it immediately cries, right? I want a hug, I want food, I cry. I am my impulse. I just am spontaneous. And at some point, through conditioning or through just whatever growing up, the child learns to put a little bit of a distance between that immediate impulse and their desire. But let me ask the two of you. So I'll start with Krisana. When we talk about children and that process of going from a baby to, let's say, like a 1012 year old, what do you notice are some of the shifts that occur in terms of the development of the child? It could be mentally, emotionally, practically as they're growing up.
Krisana Locke: So that's a big topic. So when you're born, there's such a. The brain and the nervous system is still developing, so we're dependent on our care takers, our parents. So we're in such a state that in that time, the body and brain don't grow. It's growing so fast. So the nervous system, the brain's developing and the whole skeletal is developing. There's so much happening in the body, there's so much energy happening in the body of that time of growth. And when we become toddlers, where the muscular development is happening. But in all of this, we have this freewheeling, wild feeling energy, which is freewheeling, that is moving around. And as we grow up, it's still impulsive and it's still moving. But as we grow up, we come in contact with conditioning. We come in contact with social conditioning, family conditioning, society conditioning and religious conditioning. And this starts to also inhibit our free natural impulses or freewheeling energy to hold back on our life. Energy to hold back on our. On our impulses. It is good for a child to go through these steps when they're around the terrible two, around two, four, where they're trying things, you know, they're testing boundaries. You do need to have healthy mirroring. How far can I go? So they're preparing themselves for life. So there's a whole continuation until 15 years of age, when there's the whole sexuality has biologically developed to a certain stage. But in that time, there's because of family upbringing, because of the environment, because of different traumas or emotional events. You can have a lot of blocking and stunting in your development, and even also in your psychological development. Through conditioning, you start to control yourself and you start to control the body's impulses. And you start to also control the body and emotions. So you can be physically and psychologically and emotionally stunted when you're locked up in conditioning, you can. Yes, I know. You can transform and move beyond conditioning and beliefs into a freewheeling, a healing body who's alive, who has emotional intelligence that is always happening.
Mino Vlachos: Azen, I would love to hear your perspective as we talk about going from more of that baby toddler impulsivity, to then, you know, a young child, probably around ten years old, that is able to either more control or regulate that impulse. What's that journey or what's that transition between baby to like ten year old look like? From a cognitive emotional development standpoint?
Dr. Mazen Harb: Yeah, I'm picturing it now. So I'm creating a picture in my mind. It's Krisana really drew already the understanding. I will give it similar metaphor. This freewheeling energy, like it all is out. Like it's like whatever comes out, there is no inhibition whatsoever. And from a ten years old, I will bring it back to perception. It start to have conditioned perception of reality, because already attend the mind is on. At the beginning, as a toddler, the mind is not on. I'll explain what is the mind. The mind is our defense mechanism, cognitively, a cognitive defense mechanism to deal and then adapt and cope with certain things. And there's an age, at certain point you're growing, you don't have a defense mechanism. You are in full trust each one differently. It's not one moment where the mind starts. I do remember when my mind began. It was something probably around four years of age. And I start to see myself thinking. Before that I was in pure perception of reality as it is, from a senses of a child, of a toddler. So the mind came to really bring cope and have a defense mechanism. So the voice starts to be active and there is questioning within that brain. And in that it starts to shape perception and reality as it is. And from here on, reality as it is has shifted. So you add from four year of age until I was ten, I was shaped. I was shaped by the outside, but also my. My own inner reality, my own inner voice, my own inner perception of what is happening. And then when I look at it right now, I do remember it was shaped based on something, certain fears, certain trauma that occurred to me, but I was not seeing reality. It is this. It was really, really far out. So from really being flowing until then. The defense mechanism comes what we call ego mind. By the way, ego is not a bad word. It can be used to do bad things, but it really. It's a mechanism, defense mechanism to protect ourselves that is really valuable. When I was four, five or six, what happened is I'm ten years of age. But since I created. So, my perception created for me my understanding of reality. Back then, through that perception lens of perception, created a memory. And that memory became a conditioning. Cognitive conditioning, memory conditioning and emotional conditioning. So what happened is when I'm ten, I'm really conditioned to see reality in a different way. So. And it's not any. It's outdated, based on when I was four. So here it's a really important age. And then of course, the years after teenager and all of that, until adulthood, my perception stopped evolving because of that thing that happened when I was 4567 or ten. Out of protection, I created the memory around it. It became a conditioning. Emotional conditioning and mental conditioning. And then I might be. If I never looked at it, I might be 30 years of age. And then I will be seeing reality about certain stimulus, certain topic in that lens of perception. So that's what I can share a little bit on a developmental mind, brain and then body evolution.
Mino Vlachos: Yes. And so I'm going to add my. My own two cent. And I don't know if they resonate with you or you agree or not at all, actually. But when I was in the beginning of my own journey, therapeutic journey and self development more consciously throughout my twenties and thirties, there was a point when I first started where I was like, oh, conditioning is very bad. I must get rid of all my conditioning. It's this terrible thing that's been done to me. And I have to say, the more I've grown up, the more I am. I don't know how to say it. Like I'm grateful and almost in favor of conditioning and then also having the responsibility to almost go through a process of un layering that conditioning. But as I look on myself as a young kid, like, I always joke that the first animal that humans domesticated was themselves. So to me, the process of conditioning is domestication. So we learned how to live in a domicile, right? We learned how to go into a society with one another. And the process of socialization to me is domestication and to some extent is so is conditioning. I'm not saying to traumatize kids at all. It's really not what I'm saying. But I think there are some moments where that impulsivity, that freewheeling thing at some point needs boundaries. And there's some people I've met who are on whatever, some therapeutic journey or whatever in the health and wellness space that it's like this desire to go back to that freewheeling, like pure impulsivity. I just am my impulse and that I just am my instinct, my raw, pure instinct. And that is the thing I'm trying to aim for. Whereas I don't perceive that as personally, as a very useful kind of way of maybe operating in the world. So can you start with Krisana? Can you tell me a little bit about the importance maybe of boundaries, of I'll go further and just say the word rules for children again, not in a way of, like, traumatic, not in a way of abusive, but like, there's, someone could listen and be like, there should be no rules. There should be no boundaries. Kids just be freewheeling. Do whatever the fuck you want. What's your, what's your feeling? I don't know. I actually genuinely don't know.
Krisana Locke: I think it's, it's really good for kids to learn. They're looking to learn to understand their boundaries. So the, no, you know, I want to, you know, they're testing, so they're starting to test themselves out in the world. So I would, out of ten times, I would say yes, yes, yes, you can. But there may be one. I'll say no, because they do need to learn how to tolerate their emotions, how to tolerate their impulses, because in a way, they have to live in society. So I think it's healthy. But you need to know how to do that. So you need to be a healthy body, mind connected adult to be able to do this. Or you come from your own perceptions and your own associations, from your own childhood upbringing, and you impose them on your, on the children. People who want to go back to that freewheeling, impulsive state, as you said, in some, when they do therapy or ideas of therapy and being free, they do not want to take responsibility or they want to have these freewheeling impulses, but it's not grounded in the body. So you can have this freewheeling life energy that moves and responds and is totally grounded in the body. This is very different from just I want to be free. I want to be. This is where one doesn't want to take, learn how to the ability to be responsive with their emotions, with their self, with their senses, with engaging with the world. So, yes, boundaries, healthy boundaries, not rigid boundaries, but how to in which different situations do you learn that?
Mino Vlachos: And so if I were just a little bit jokingly, but if I were to just descend to the level of me just being my impulses raw, just instinct, zero boundaries, zero self monitoring. Like, if I got angry at someone and I had a gun, I would shoot them. If there was someone in front of me I didn't like, I would hit them if there was. And there's also the positive, right? I could also hug somebody or kiss somebody, but I would just act purely on my instinct. And so as a child, at some point, I had to learn to put a healthy distance between my immediate instinct and separate it out a bit and to realize, okay, this isn't the thing I'm going to do in this moment, but as we go from baby to ten years old, there is a. You move from, I am my instinct, I am my impulse to, I have an instinct or an impulse. And so I'm wondering if you can talk to me a little bit about how that shift occurs and maybe talk about the concept of subject object, something we'll be drawing upon a lot today.
Dr. Mazen Harb: I will. I will be calling Krisana to help me once I start, because for me, based on how we're sharing, I think you're also referring to the importance of the ego structure. Yeah, actually, that's why I was like, I didn't get how to answer it before the ego structure start to happen. So before the mind becomes active in a conscious way, because the ego structure we call the conscious mind, we have to, when we say mind, we're speaking about the ecostruxure, we're speaking about the defense mechanism. And to happen is when there's a jolt or something, like, oh, my God, something like the question of trust. Like, you know, you're flowing, there's law of trust. Nothing is happening until something is happening. And where is the nuance of, like, oh, there's something other than love, there's something other than trust. And then here you start questioning, and then you create a little bit separation through the ego structure between you and your caregivers, between you and the world. And this is where the ego structure, so it's your first identity, you first time you crystallize an identity. Oh, my God. One moment. I'm not one with them right? Because you have to know, a kid comes one with the parent, with the mother first, and then see the father, an extension of it. So it's all like in swimming in one small, small pool. And then even, have you seen kids in subways? They look at you and they smile. They say hi. You know, they want to hold your hands. And the parents always tell them no. And the kids is perplexed. Why no? We're one. The kid is not thinking, we're one. But this is how we feel. Like they have to teach. The parents have to teach, he's a stranger. He doesn't know a kid. They don't know what word stranger is. So do you see how the ego protection thing. And they're like, okay, if it's, if that person is a stranger, why is it not good? And this is where the conscious mind start to awaken. So we have to teach the kids the separation game. And the separation game, somebody need to be responsible of. It is the ego mind, the conscious mind to start creating an identity of me because I cannot go and touch any pet, any animal. I have to ask, I cannot go say hi and then smile to a stranger. So those words start to be fed through learning. This is a stranger. This one you can love. This is grandpa. Okay, but why beside grandpa, this old man, I cannot hug and kiss. And this is where the kid. So that's where it's training the kid to create. So identity starts to happen. The kid with the coming of the conscious mind, the eye starts to happen. And as Kristana said, there's the pushing and then checking the boundaries. Oh, and then checking. When I do certain things like cause and effect starts to happen. When you're about ten years of age. Actually, let us, let us stop the chase. When you're seven, that's it. This is who you are. One moment, everybody. Like, what do you mean? No? From zero to seven, it will define all your conditioning, all your blueprint, all your programming for the next ten, 20. 3040-607-0809 100 years. You're gonna tell me, but what if traumas and things happen? I'm like, they will be added. But who you are, the perception you took from your father and your mother and your son, this has shaped your personality, is quite obvious by then. So by ten, and you're slowly hitting puberty, you're already shaped. You have to know in tribals and indigenous people, the rite of passage for boys and girls, it's between ten and 13 if I'm wrong, right? Like ten. When in our society. Oh, look at this small kid. At ten, I'm like, no. In cultural, in indigenous tribes, ten is already becoming a man because manhood was reaching puberty. Because at that moment, you can make love and have a baby. So you could. So it's very dangerous not to allow the rite of passage for girls to become women, for boys to be men. So in a sense, personality has been shaped, and then you acted out from ten to 20. This is what you call puberty and teenagerhood. And this is where the mess. You try to understand, but we are slightly here. We. We are in an era of. Most of it is conditioning. There is free flow. There is a spontaneity, but there's spontaneity with worry. Is it okay for society? Is it okay for my family? Is it okay for that? We still try a few things here and there, some impulsivity. Imagine with the puberty hitting. You know, it's good that puberty hit so late. We already tried so many things before and we got punished or, or, you know, or grounded or whatever. When puberty hit, we have a sense of not everything is okay because we've been conditioned. So at least, see, that's where it's not good or bad, but that's what the good thing about having boundaries and rules when you hit puberty, if you don't have in a society, we're having such boundaries and rules and sometimes punishing the kids, for certain they do. So they start to understand, this is not okay. This is okay in a society, they hit puberty. And you see, like, all right, there's a certain boundaries, natural boundaries, without necessarily the parents speaking about it. And then they start to test. And it's really weird, but this is based on the personality already that is formed in their belief system. So to end it, it's already based on their subjective perception of reality that's already molded to make them go through puberty. So we're not speaking anymore about freewheeling energy. Objective perception, forget about it. Okay, now I'm answering your question. Objective perception, forget about, is very subjective perception. And they already see themselves as separate, and they see the other as separate. It's already happened.
Mino Vlachos: And so you might be asking, what the hell does have to do with CEO's? I'll get there in 2 seconds. But this is, this is the development of the kind of psychology, right? In the biology of humans, the perception through. Let's put a mark for now, we're going to stop before puberty. So this whole discussion will keep it before puberty. We'll get to puberty in a second, but I want to make a couple more points before we start to. Before we cross that bridge. So I'm going to say one more thing, and then we're going to turn a little bit to leadership. I'll describe a little bit what some of the research has shown about ten year olds. We're talking about ten year olds for a second because it's a pre puberty kind of age, but it's after the seven, right? I use ten. We could use nine, we could use eleven, but I'm going to use ten. When we look at kids, I'm going to do some oversimplifying. Every child is different, and every child has different conditioning, and they come in with a different soul, and they come in with a different perception. This is over generalizing. And even to the things like, you know, there's research that around one, we start to develop altruism. Babies can start to give to people. So what I'm going to say, I'm going to brush past that to give an oversimplification. Generally speaking, at the age level of around ten, in that developmental phase, kids are, generally speaking, orientated around meeting their own desires. So as opposed to impulse, impulses, I just do what I feel immediately like, ah, I'm hungry, I eat. I do, I do, I do. This desire is I want something. And a ten year old can start to be a little bit more strategical about how do I. Strategic about how do I get what I want? It's not. I just do the first thing that comes to me. It's, I can think a little bit. Even my partner Angela, was babysitting our friend's kid, who's four years old last week. And the kid who's four years old, he basically said she was putting him to bed, and she was saying, it's time for sleep. And he was like, no, it's time for tv. And my partner Andrew was like, no, it's time for bed. And he was like, you know, because we always watch tv before bed. I'm gonna tell my mom, and you're gonna get in big trouble when she comes home because you didn't let me watch tv. And they don't watch tv. That's a lie. That was a fabrication because we know the family very well. They don't watch tv before bed. And so the kid made up a lie, a manipulation, to try and get my partner to let him watch tv. And she said, okay, well, we'll talk about your mom when she gets here. But for now I'm in charge. So we're gonna go to bed. So there's boundaries, right? It's like, this is what we're gonna do. Now, there's some rules in place, but even a four year old is starting to go into manipulations to get what they want. I see even with animals, like I see with my dog. My dog, I really think, is really able to perceive and link behavior to outcomes in a way that she knows. She'll pick up a learned behavior around whining, will get this thing, barking, will get that thing. And so I'm going to use the word manipulation. I don't think that's probably thought out as the four year old, but it is a form of manipulation, I believe, to get what they want. So, manipulation is a beautiful tool in a way, and it's something that we all learn how to do. Each child, I really believe, and I say it with such love, becomes a master manipulator because it's one of the amazing tools kids learn to get what they want. It's not the only tool, but I think it's one of the tools that we learn in that age period. So I think your typical ten year old, also in the level of the cognition. They love to categorize the world, so they're in that level of cognition where they like to separate things. They create parameters, frameworks. They want to know facts about this rock and that flower and this bird. And there's a lot of putting things in categories. So it's really a mindset of kind of separation, like mazen was mentioning. And all these are beautiful. I think all of this is like, I'm really. There's no judgment, and I'm just trying to state facts as I see them, is that kids can operate with this kind of level of cognitive separation. It's kind of about my desires. There can be moments of manipulation. Typically, in our society, at least, a lot of kids don't know how to regulate stress or emotions, so they can have stress behaviors. This is some of the typical composite. And here we go now to leadership. When psychologists have studied our society, we find that amongst the general population, and I wrote it down, 36% of adults still operate at the level of cognition of a ten year old, and not until. I'm not talking about intelligence, talk about perception. That's why we start with perception, how they organize their worlds. 36% of adults who are your neighbors, your friends, your parents, your children, your cousins, your boss, they overall organize their reality in a pre adolescent way. And so what we're going to talk about now is a leader who's had this arrested development. They haven't gone through the transition, the initiation. They missed a step somewhere. And likely I will just again pause. It probably is likely due some conditioning or trauma. Something happened to arrest the development at, let's say ten to twelve years old. So first I'm going to start with Mazen. And we're talking about leadership. And I know I interact with leaders not all the time, not every day, but some leaders that really operate at this level of functioning. And I think we tend to put labels on them. So I'll even go further. And we tend to call them thing like narcissists or sociopaths. I don't believe, personally, I think there's a lot of different beliefs about this. I don't think those are things that you have forever. I think those describe certain patterns of behavior which are probably acceptable when you're eight years old. But if you're 50 years old, tend to look a certain different way. But if we were to take that as, you know, someone that is in that more selfish, manipulative. I have desires. It's about me as a leader. Maybe they're a narcissist, maybe they're a sociopath. Mahzen, what is the impact on leadership and an organization? And I also want to hear the strengths, because it's not just it's bad, but what are the strengths of putting someone like that in a leadership position? And what are the hindrances of putting someone like that in a leadership position?
Dr. Mazen Harb: I will definitely start with the strength. And really to say there's lots of bad wordings coming out. Oh, you know about leaders and how, you know how they are or the word narcissist is overused. I understand it. The idea is we have to understand that most biggest challenge of companies, that crazy thing against all odds happen with people, leaders with the ego structure that it's about them. The strength is when sometimes you want to build an empire to make benefit and profit, you have someone on top. He's really consider his success is who he is and who she is and who they are. And their failure is really something that will really make them hate themselves. So this is ego structure makes most of the companies started with leaders that way. So they dare, they, they reach the moon, they reach the space because it's about themselves. So when it's seen, oh, it's about themselves most of the time. That thing that is about themselves, it happened. They have that. They have a company that serve the other. So this is why I see it as strength. I'm like, okay, it's about that leader. It's about me, me, me, and taking credit. And then. But actually, the company is making. Giving a really good service outside. So this is the first strength. Does that make sense?
Mino Vlachos: Yes.
Dr. Mazen Harb: And now you want me to go to weakness. Weakness is in this self absorbed way. And not understanding that certain things has to change because it comes with to be able to converse and communicate. Everything is a competition. Everything is a battle. Right? And that competition makes those individuals very high on top and make those companies amazing. But whenever someone. Other leaders want to rise, it's probably they're not the best to help others to rise, or they cannot be challenged because they take things personally. So it's not here about the company. Again, this is now it's the person themselves. So it's about the person. So this person will take things very personally. So probably they're not. They're very susceptible to feedbacks. This is susceptible to people who will answer back. So it creates a more authoritarian way of seeing things. And on the long run, it's really not helpful, in a sense, if the company needs other leaders, other thoughts to make it more. Yeah. To flourish in a different way.
Mino Vlachos: And this is where I return to we define perception. I really like what Mazen said. There's different elements of what our perception entails, and one of it is emotional. So even if cognitively you evolve, let's say, beyond, you know, your mental, your mindset evolves beyond a selfish orientation. The moment that we experience stress and overwhelm, we want to defend ourselves. We go to protect ourselves, we adopt a selfish posture. So I would. I would even posit that most of us, when we're stressed, we go into more childish kind of orientation. That's my belief. Krisana, what do you perceive? You work with a lot of people in so many different capacities. What are some of the things that you see that might impact someone to act, let's say, more childish, within a kind of work capacity? And what are some of the resources that help them get back out of that?
Krisana Locke: I think it's a form of a defense mechanism that comes from stress. So not every. I don't know if everyone becomes childish, but they do fall into that childish state of trying to. With emotions. Cognitive functioning. Cognitive functioning is not very good. Emotions take over either shutdown or high emotions. They're not so connected to sensations or their body. So they're acting out. They're reacting out on emotions, either in a shutdown way, or in a highly activated emotional way, either through being angry or being very sad, in a sabotage way, shut down, way fearful way. So to get them to be, to resource them, is to find ways that they can come into a resource state through the body or through support, through methods I give them to help that. So their behavior can, their behavioral state can change. So it depends on different people, how they react. For example, for me, if I'm in a stress state, I think I don't get emotional, I tend to get quite rigid, I tend to hold back on my emotions they withheld, I go more into a perfect state. So I tend to hold my emotions to keep it together, but I may lose sense of what I'm feeling. So a resource for me is to, if someone says, open your heart, I'm like, I don't even, you know, in my earliest self, it's like, what does that mean? It just means how can I get a sense of how do I feel? What am I feeling? So this is so everyone has. So you, can you find a roadmap to understand how to come out of spaces when you have emotions and stress?
Mino Vlachos: Yes. And something I'll add is at this kind of level of operating, there's a lot of interesting dynamics between rules and authority. And typically what we see in the research is that a lot of what happens is I'm going after what I desire, and the only kind of check on that is rules. Can I get away with it? Am I not getting caught with it? So there's this. I go for what I want, but the. What's the likelihood that there will be some repercussions or punishment? Which is like for me, why I go back to rules, boundaries, consequences, accountability are important because for someone that is operating at this kind of level, having repercussions and accountability for actions is very important if you're going to just act in your own self interest. And this is one of the ways to start to identify where each one of us is sometimes operating. Because I said this at the beginning, and I'm going to say it continuously throughout the podcast, we each have the capacity to act at these different levels, even if we're 100 years old. It's really, we have all the capacity, whether it's stress that puts us in that state, whether it's a situation. So, for instance, some of us act differently at work than in our personal lives, our romantic lives, our health and wellness. So I would say, like, for me, just very bluntly, like, when it comes to my health and wellness, I'm still at a much more immature level. Like, that's just where I, relative to my work capacity. When I'm at work, I operate and I think in a much more kind of mature capacity. When I was about taking care of myself, I'm still in a very immature capacity at this point. So it's not one thing, you're just one thing all the time, right? If I get into a very stressed day, I can start to act out more. So it's not about, again, like this ladder of like, once I've achieved it, then I'm like, great, forever. It's just about kind of how you generally start to organize your reality. And so now we've talked a little bit about the kind of more self orientated leader that's really about their own desires. As Mazen mentioned, they can get quite a lot done. So there's a lot of like, efficacy for whatever reason, because they're so strong in getting what they want that they move things. And there's also research that shows that most people in leadership positions, especially in the government, they have some like heightened little. I'm not saying they're narcissists, but they have some heightened level beyond the general population of narcissism because they have to be a president of the United States. There's something in you that's to say like, yeah, I'm good for that. Like, I'm the one. And so there's something in you. You have some little ego that says, yeah, I'm the one. And so that's, I think, a bit of a natural thing, you see, and it's echoed in some of the research. But now we're going to talk about transitions. We're going to talk about initiations and crossing thresholds. So now we're going to return to adolescence and our teenage years offer us this kind of big, big transition. It's actually a complete revolution of how we operate. If you think about a ten year old and then let's say a 20 year old that has gone through socialization and teenagehood in a quote unquote healthy way, they operate very differently. And so there's tremendous demands placed on teenagers to make a shift. And that's where the parents start to say, like, I have higher expectations of you. You're a part of this family. I expect you to help out around the house. So maybe you're going to do chores, maybe you're going to, you're going to basically become a part of the culture of this household. It's not about you anymore, buddy. It's about the family structure. And so we see this constant kind of demand and challenge placed on teenagers. But teenagers are going through this big developmental journey to become, what I would say, kind of socialized members of our society. They start to adopt the kind of perspective taking that the other person also has desires and needs, and they're actually not less important than my own. A sort of mutualism can emerge in our social interactions. And this is where we go from just selfishness to actually, it's about some kind of unit. There's some kind of tribe or some kind of community. There's something where I'm a part of it and there's expectations of me to not just do what's my just for me before the other. A sort of. Again I say mutualism and empathy starts to emerge. And this is the kind of volatility of the teenage years, is this push pull between, I just want what I want, but I'm learning through my interactions with my peers that, like, actually there's something, like, there's like, they matter too. And if I do something, they get upset with me and, like, what's going on here? And so I actually turn it to a very practical thing is when I first started working with the two of you in personal development workshops, I remember some of those early workshops were about relating. And for me, those were, like, so eye opening, and, like, it was like a revolution I went through, because I think in some aspects of my life, I did go through this initiation. In other parts, I had some arrested development, and I was stuck at a very selfish level. Like, when I came at work, I was extremely machiavellian in my early career. I would sit with my friend and just plot, like, chess pieces on the board constantly, and how do I get what I want? How do I get what I want? I didn't care about anyone else in the workplace. It was just all about, like, what I want and how to move the chess pieces and be super political and machiavellian and get what I want. And then I go to your workshops and I was like, oh, shit. Like, there's other people and they have needs and wants, and I'm not more important than them. And so I'm going to ask Krisana first whether it's the actual workshops I'm talking about or whether it's just your general work working with people. I'd like to just talk about this transition going from that very kind of, like, ten year old mentality to something that emerges into young adulthood through the teenage years. What is happening at that time, like what is occurring that enables someone to go into more healthy relating with other people.
Krisana Locke: I just want, I'm gonna have a spin on this, but when you're a teenager, you go through this stage of, you know, I'm an individual, my parents are uncool anymore. Other parents are cool, other people are cool. I think this is a biological instinct that comes from you go out and you mate in other tribes, you go out and you know this. You don't stay in this, in this family tribe. You go out and you want to pursue, you want to meet other people, you want to be able to merge. This is just a theory I have on a biological instinct about it. How to relate at that stage, in the teenage stage, how to healthily relate. I think at that stage they have to. At that stage, what teenagers are doing, they're testing and they're trying to find their individuality. And I think the more that they test the boundaries in a safe way and through healthy testing, I think it's really good for teenagers, because if you don't do that, then you get stuck at being a teenager, and then you get to 60, 70 years of age and you still see people still trying to act out being like a teenager because it's been repressed or inhibited.
Mino Vlachos: Krisana, you tell me a little bit about the difference if we have an individual that's still in this very selfish me, me, me, me mode, and then they emerge into reciprocity, mutualism, empathy. Like, what do you see as the difference between those two developmentally?
Krisana Locke: How does it happen, the process for that to happen? Yes, I think it's more when you have more experiences, when you, with other people, you start to, through experience, you challenge and you start to be mirrored, that you get mirrored back, and you start to understand in yourself how reciprocity happens. They exchange giving and you give, and then someone wants to give back. So you start to learn this through from mirroring and being with other people. So the more that you have more experience with people, and also in a lot of the group process work we do, you have spaces of where you honestly, in a safe space, can share how you're feeling, what's happening for you. So you start to mirror that people have different experiences. And then I can learn how to. How to see how another person, a person's emotional, healthy emotional state, vulnerable state is, and how I can come and share my own. And then we have a sense of reciprocity and not thinking, am I empathic or am I in this state? We start to through each other have experiences that are beyond just self serving. So then you get some insight, perhaps, and some emotional intelligence grows from those experiences, those group experiences that we have. I always give it group experiences in those processes because it's through the body, it's through the body mind that you get insight and emotional intelligence happens out of this. I do not find to give it. We don't try to give it just cognitively. It's just then a concept, it's just an idea. It has to be through a lived experience.
Mino Vlachos: And this absolutely checks out because what you can see is people who are operating what again, I'll just call more self orientated disposition, whether it is more narcissistic. They can learn the behaviors of relating with people. They can put on the show of mutualism, but under it. And this is why it's hard to really understand what's going on with people under it. It could still be coming from, I'm just here to get what I want. And this is where we go into, again, the manipulation. Some manipulation can be very, very crafty because you feel like they did all the behaviors that someone who operates at a level of mutualism and empathy would do. So behaviorally, operationally it looks the exact same, but under that, the fuel for it is still I want something. Whereas at this kind of level we're talking about, there's actually a genuine intrinsic motivation for actually I care about you. Like, what is your need? What is your desire? Let's exchange equally to do that, as we've been talking about, there's some kind of initiation that happens, and we talked about this earlier with indigenous societies. Mazen, can you tell me a little bit about initiations and what it is to go through an initiation? What's the importance of initiations? How do we get from one develop in that sense, one developmental set point to another, like teenage years?
Dr. Mazen Harb: Yeah, I would, for whatever reason, the word initiation, when you say it for me, I always put them together, initiations and ceremonies, okay? And I'm not talking in a sense of ceremonies like I'm talking. I'll go very, very simple. I might be doing this on a weekly basis on a. So when I'm aware and they really allow myself to go through something, and I realize I give it space, I give it beginning and an end, and I congratulate myself through going through that change that's through a ceremonial way. Again, very simple. Nothing. No fun for nothing. I will start to be aware with the changing of time, of season, of event. And then I'll ride the train of change. This is one of the most important train, so to speak, to ride and the only way to help it if we have some concept around it and then some ritual. So when we talk about initiation and ceremonies, if we start to understand it very early on, one of those things that support subconsciously that will really help us as an adult, as adults in our own personal, in our relationship and even in our companies, that we understand that change is a must. When we know how to welcome it as change. Through initiations and then through ceremonies of that change, we will be one with the world because we will be one with ourselves, will be one with that absolute truth which is changed. So you have to see from indigenous cultures, they were aware of all of that. See, that's a bit philosophical. If they heard me now, they'll be like, yeah, yeah, but that's not what exactly we have to explain about. But it's very embedded. When a very toddler starts to growing up and then reach puberty and there is initiation, it gives respect to the power of nature, the nature of the body, that it's going through something very important. And there was before and after. Again, those initiations happened once the ego structure, once the mind, when the perception is very crystallized, once the identity is crystallized to a certain degree. So it doesn't happen when a kid is two or three, is not aware it happen when a kid is born. Yes, there is initiation, there's ceremony, there's changing from a state that a woman is not a mother yet, and then she's a mother and this welcoming, and then it moves on. So imagine you live in such culture, you're aware that change is a fact. So you start to question yourself way less. So imagine in the culture we live in, change happens, but we don't speak about it. Oh, yeah, puberty, that thing, it's not welcome. It's not seen with respect. It's not given a beginning and an end. It's not giving an education, it's not given an understanding. We go through teenagerhood and you're like, yeah, teenager would fight and rejecting. Yes, because the phase they entered into was not respected, was not initiated, there was no ceremony around, it was not considered. Instead of like, yeah, I have two teenagers at home, you know. You know, teenagers, you know those sayings that we constantly hear. So. And then teenagers were revolt because they start to disrespect the adults. They, you know, this is where most revolution. Revolution comes from those age group, right? 15 to 20. Most people who went to wars are 15 to 20. Most people who are drafted are 15 to 20. Everything that happened on this planet that had with the military power, with the revolutionary power, with everything that has to change the mind of those. It's indoctrinate the minds of those people. It's 15 to 20. Because something was disrespected. And this we need to take responsibility as a society. It was disrespected. Nature was disrespected. Our own nature was disrespected. And those kids are revolting against the adults. And then it happened. Then we direct them to revolt against another ideology, another group or another country. So like now I went a bit far to show how dangerous it is. And then there's this stage where teenagers are still at home. And then they want to leave home. 18 1920. Some people don't, but we don't have to speak about everything now. We just need. So this is another very important initiation. And something will be respected. That there's the sadness, you know, and it's like, oh, don't leave a lot with the mother and the child, the child, the teenager, the young adult. But things is like more puffed up or whatever. It's. We're spoiled or we, in a sense, or we try to avoid. And then, you know, the lots of control. Change is happening to the parents. We have to know. Those parents cared for 18 years. Everything was around the kid. And the kid now is leaving. It's super sad. Are there any space where those parents can speak? Are parents considered that as an initiation for them? Are they creating certain ceremony to accept what happened, to give it a beginning and an end? So it's not really complain or like living in that. And I know so many parents who after the child, like the teenager left until 25. Yeah, my kid is not calling me this. Nothing. The initiation didn't happen. A ceremony of celebrating. Because we're really afraid of change. And why we're afraid of change because we're really denying death exceed its very connected change and death. So we killed initiations and ceremonies in order to live in that denial of death.
Mino Vlachos: And what the research has shown, psychologically speaking, is that there's kind of two broad elements we need to go through initiation. There is challenge and demand. And on the other hand is support and resources. And we need both. So if you just have one or the other, it's not going to work. So if you just condemn and put pressure and grow up, grow up, grow up. That doesn't give the bridge into a new way of being. If there's just a bunch of resources around, but there's no impetus to actually go through some kind of change. Then you won't like, there's no reason for the brain to evolve if everything is great and there's no reason to go to a higher order. So we need a bit of both. We need a little bit of challenge and a little bit of resources. And one thing that I find interesting that I'm going to now bring into it is earlier I talked about the general population and looking at adults. I said adults that operate at that self orientated, more narcissistic kind of level. There was 36% of adults in the general population. But if you look at adults that come from higher resources, families, places, they have education, from 36, that drops to 5%. And so what I personally have seen again and again is like, there is a lot of demand, there's a lot of challenge. The world is difficult. Like, people are always putting demands on people. What we, I think, are desiring is more support, more bridges into a new way of being, more initiations, more elders, more mentors, like, things that will help us to actually bridge the gap between all the challenge we face in life and our potential. And so just by increasing resources, we go from 36% to 5%. And so that's a pretty big difference. And so now we're going to move into that different order of operating, which is mutualism and some of the strengths and hindrances of that level. And this is the level where we start to understand reciprocity, and we start to really get into wanting to maintain a sense of belonging. And this is where I believe a sense of. Of culture starts to emerge. And culture, if we really get down to it, is another word for religion. It is how we do things here. And I am now a priest or a priestess of maintaining the order of how we operate here. So every family, nuclear family has a culture. Every organization has a culture. Every country has a culture. It's a set of beliefs, rituals, standards, attitudes, emotions that we say is what defines us. This is what makes the in group here. And if you don't have this, then you're somewhere out there. So, for instance, in my family, we eat together, dinner every day at the table with each other. And then I have other friends where they don't eat dinner with each other at all. The food is just ready. Everyone takes it when they want, and they go and do their own thing. That's a culture, right? So in my family, eating at the table together is our culture. And that could also be informed by my culture of being greek. But that is something that is essentially a little bit, you could say, the religion of our family. It's the rules, the operating rules. When I'm at a self orientated place, I'm going to sit at the table because I don't want to get in trouble. You know, like I do it because my parents told me to. And I know if I don't, my dad will yell at me or whatever, my mom will yell at me. So I sit at the table whether I want to or not. But then by the time I get to this next level, I actually want to sit at the table. It's my own desire. It's intrinsic because it maintains us, maintains the way that we do things. And it's important to me the way we do things. What's beautiful about this is you have this emergence of kind of more rapport, empathy, mutualism. On the flip side, what we see with the research is that this is where things like guilt, like an unhealthy guilt, start to emerge. Where it's all about this bonded and mesh thing. And it's very hard to get out of culture. Because if we step out, we might be reprimanded. And we've taken the rules from outside. It's something that someone else might condemn me. And I've put them inside me. Now I'm the one ruling over myself. But the rules are internalized. So if I do something wrong, I condemn myself. I don't need an authority figure. I've put the authority figure inside me. And that love hate relationship is now inside me. So I'm going to start by talking a little bit with mazen. What is the benefit, if I put it this way, of religion and culture? And what are some of the ways that religion and culture does not serve us as people?
Dr. Mazen Harb: The first and most obvious is belonging, belonging necessarily safe. It's in that we have a guidance. We create a sense of a meaning and a purpose. Because we are with the others. Yeah, a group mentality. I belong, I feel safe, so I don't have to challenge. And the opposite is individualization. If I say no to the culture, no to religion, it's really. This is where emancipation happened. And it's like. But it's too much sometimes I don't feel like to deal with all those challenges, to step out and be on my own. Nobody wants to be on their own. Because the base of every interaction. I'll say it like this, the base of every interaction in a human relationship is I want to be loved. I want to be loved. Because if I'm loved, then I feel safe and I self I can be joyous and I can live happily. It starts to happen, you know, as kids with the parents. And then when we grow up with the teacher, you know, with everyone. So the other way is like more. Another way is like, show me validation. Then I, you know, I want to be validated. And so how can I let go of that? By going against it. It's like too much. Because then who will love me then? So this is where the challenges, the hindrance culture and religion is the question. Who are you? Some people come to this life and feel like, you know what? In this life, I don't want to ask this question. So my great grandfather, my grandfather, great grandparents, grandparents, parents, they always did this. They married between 20 and 25. They have certain amount of kids, they work that from nine to five. They really dedicated to their family and they reached retirement and then they got their pension and then they, you know, understood the point and that's it. Life was over. So there is respect of order, of culture, of ancestors, of religion. And they said, this is a religion, there's no criticism, see? So it's not good or bad. See, again here in that perspective, there is no hindrance. If you don't question who am I? Where do who am I is I belong to that family, to that religion and that culture, and I'm satisfied with it. In that case, there is no hindrance. Life will be challenging. That's something else, because life always will cash in question who you are, you know, anyhow. But when you want to really know who you are and start to, you have to venture, you have to go out, you have to check, is that really what represent me? Is that what give me really purpose? Is that the meaning of life for me? So it's when we start to look out and this where the guilt, what you spoke about, like which. But in a way the healthy guilt starts to happen. This is where it is, because the culture, to maintain itself, it needs and the religion, it needs every member to be proactive. And then, so whenever you want to emancipate, it's really dangerous for the culture because if suddenly more than 50% of a culture emancipated and start question and they start forming other things, this culture has to go separate and then go into and divide. And that's not healthy in a sense, in a more of a survival sense. So there's, you know, in ground like there's principle and rules govern those things that we cannot leave it that easily, because it's also endangering the culture and the religion itself. So all this is really embedded in our psyche through gay guilt and shame. But actually the story is about individualization. And I will give it a more of a bigger circle of life is one doesn't have to leave culture and religion for good, but where someone will become a very active part of the culture or the religion in such a proactive way, in a really healthy way, and they will, at certain point themselves, will be mentors and bring that culture to a progressive way of moving forward. If that person, at certain point emancipated, ask, who am I? Left the group for a while, went into a journey of self discovery, like the hero journey. Understand itself and with all of that, brought back that richness and came back to the family, came back to the culture and came back to the religion, but with eyes of itself, with perception of itself, with understanding of the world. This is very interesting. So I'm not asking people, go and leave your culture, leave your religion, but to get out, understand your individualization. Once individualization understood, when. When it comes back, it's more benefiting the society, and it will steer toward more progressive and healthy.
Mino Vlachos: You went way too far. But I appreciate it. You've jumped ahead. But we're staying with our. We're gonna get to individualization and autonomy next, but we're gonna stick with the kind of. We're enmeshed in the mutualism for a bit before we go to that next thing. So, like, we're imagining someone, because I don't want to get too confused between. Because it's very conceptual, right? So we're staying at this level of. I am really embedded in a culture. I am the culture. That's really what's important to me. It's what's my operating kind of manual. My operating software is like, I am the thing that I'm swimming in it, and I'm really this cultural, religious. I don't know what word we want to use, but I am this operating of. It's really important to me that I'm liked, that my reputation is good, that I'm earnestly giving, receiving in equal amounts. It's all about this, like, level of operating that it's operating in that relational field. Like, I'm in the relational field. I cannot see the relational field. I am the relational field. Krisana, I know you work with a lot. A lot of people that, I mean, are across the board. But one of the things that I have impression is you work with a lot of people that are in this mode, right? Like, they're in this. Like, I'm part of the tribe, like, I cannot separate. I really care what people think about me. I really care what my parents think about me. My boss thinks about you. My friends think about me. I want to make sure, intrinsically, I want to make sure that I'm giving and receiving. And there's this whole thing of, like, I want to be a part of something. What are some of the things that you observe with people at this kind of level of operating? Like, what are some of the challenges they might face in their life?
Krisana Locke: Some of the challenges they will face is I want to be good instead of. Because then I will be loved. We come back again. So I will give up everything, my own sense of what I feel, what my longings, my inner depth of myself, because it's all about my belief. I've taken on from society and family that it's better to be good and accepted, and then I'll get love. That is a very locked in way to be living. So for someone needs to understand that trying to fit in and be good and be mutually respectful and to give and receive in the right way, it's all a sense of I want to be good and haven't really looked at what's underneath all that unlived, repressed emotions and repressed needs and longings. And the heart is just not alive. And also the sense of something deeper, of their own wildness or their sensuality is not alive. So they give all that up just to fit into the desire. Desire to, I need to belong to this. I need to belong to this set of beliefs I've taken on. So with our work, is getting to really to find what is the self connection, really with oneself, the authentic self, not the idea of how I should be the idealistic self.
Mino Vlachos: Yes. And this is where we see morality operating at this level, as you mentioned, it's about being good. So there's good and bad. So whereas at the level before, we were talking about which is more self orientated, it's about what do I want and how do I not get in trouble? And now there's an internalization of good, bad, right, wrong. So morality starts to appear. And so again, I'm going to give just some numbers based on studies that have been done. So we said general population self orientated. 36% of adults kind of operate at that point. 43% of adults in the general population operate at this level of mutualism. Mutualism and morality, let's call it as you can see if we add those up, that is 79%. So almost 80% of adults are somewhere between one of these two in the general population if we look at it with high resources. So we said self orientated is 5% and mutualism and morality is 48%. It's actually almost not that. It's not very changed. So a huge percentage, almost half of adults, whether it's from general population or higher resource, higher support backgrounds, are operating in this kind of moralistic mutualistic space, which has some benefits and has some hindrances. So now we're going to talk about leadership, because again, these humans operate in leadership positions, they operate in organizations. We talked about how a more self orientated leader can get a ton done. They can move stuff, they're change agents, but it's very much hard to have them change or have them take feedback or for them to really care for the other. Like they'll move projects. But it's very difficult for them to actually change themselves unless they go through this initiation and they want to go on a transformation journey and all that is possible. But in the workplace, that's not what the workplace is built for. So that's personal development. So if we talk about now this kind of mutualistic moral leader and we think about leadership, and I have my own opinions, but let's say a lot of leaders we interact with with three peak coaching and solutions are actually operating at this level. What are some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses or hindrances of operating in this mindset, in this perception, in a kind of company setting? So I'll begin with mazen. What do you see as some of the strengths and downsides to an organization of a leader that's operating in that more mutualistic but moralistic capacity?
Dr. Mazen Harb: It's really, it really goes collectively. It considers the collective good of the society, of the product, of the people, and then it moves forward with it. Now, when it's a little bit moralistic, that mean you can place each one of those leader in different company world, sorry, in different countries and each country has different idea of good and bad. So if I place someone, imagine in India, in Iran, in whatever, in South Africa, in Chile, I'm throwing up names and in Alaska. And then this will, it's not because they are really beneficial and then mutual leaders and they, they have different set of morality that mean actually I don't know what's the effect of it because what's good in such, in a culture, it would be not good and healthy in the other culture. So it is said that the work for probably certain people, but not necessarily, cannot be generalized. Even within one country, there's different cultures. So there is the risk of really following one's own morality of the culture where we come from. It probably is not fitting someone else. I'll give a just brief example. Imagine in a culture where I am, imagine where nuclear power is okay and accepted, and it's really, we cannot have any other source. But actually moralistic, there's no question about it. And then our neighbors country, they struggle from it because something, an accident happened. So again, it really creates separation and the others, and then communication is very different, difficult. So when we see someone who's really leading in a maturistic way, but moralistic, it does not mean they're better from those who really, what we mentioned before, they're really servicing themselves and then moving it forward, because the ones who are servicing themselves are not moralistic in that sense. They really want to see what's really beneficial to succeed that company, regardless of where it is and the morality around it. So here. Yeah, I made it a gray zone. All of it is. There's no good or bad. That's my answer, sir.
Mino Vlachos: It's a, it's a perfect, I think, bridge into what you sparked in me is like the individual. At the individualistic level, my needs always trump yours. So we're always in kind of competition at this mutualistic level. It's all, it's the vast, vast majority of cases you're eventually going to go into, I'm our collective is right and your collective is wrong. So in the other one, you might have, I'm right, you're wrong in an individual level. But that's how fights happen at mutualism, is how wars happen. Because now we've gotten a collective to think I'm right and you're wrong. And so, again, I do think it's, generally speaking, a progression to say, yeah, I have empathy for you. I take you into consideration. But the way we form our bonds and in this kind of tribal way can start to actually create way larger scale problems for us than the one who's almost just acting individually, dualistically, selfishly. Although, of course, we know that individuals with power can also, that that's the, always the fun is when those two meet a very narcissistic leader with followership. That's very mutualistic. And that's how you get cults, because you have a very strong leader on top. That's selfish. And people that are in a religious, cultural, cultish collective, and when they come together. That is where the biggest kind of dark in society happens, is when those two actually meet, and both of them have to happen for it to occur. So it's easy to just blame the narcissistic leader or the sociopathic psychopathic leader, Machiavellian. But they need followers. And these followers are actually almost always operating at a very strong mutualistic level. So if I just be very blunt, like, we talk about, like, Germany, like, if you talk about Hitler, if Hitler happened to be selfish or whatever, fascistic. But the german people, a lot of them were operating under this. I have to go with the group. I don't want to. I don't want to be guilty. I don't want to have a bad reputation. I want my neighbors to think well of me. So they were actually operating in mutualism. They had empathy. So, weirdly, I would say most of german people probably were doing world war two with empathy, some level towards each other, at least some level of collectivism. If they were all purely selfish people, they couldn't collectively organize together. So there's where the religiosity can get hijacked and can lead to mass atrocities. So it's easy again, because someone in this operating will, well, my culture is better than yours, so I would never do that. I'm like, just wait until your culture gets hijacked by a narcissistic leader. If you're operating in that moment, then you will go with the group, because it's all, you know how to do. And so you can't sit there and just, I'm safe. Or my group is good because we just happen to have a morality that hasn't been tested in that way yet. Just wait and see if you want to operate at that level. What happens? Just wait for one leader to come and commandeer it. And now we're going to start to slowly shift to, I think, one of our favorite topics, which Mazat already teased for us, which is going to the next initiation, which is stepping away from this kind of collectivism into a healthy individualism, into a healthy autonomy. And I will say just my personal story anecdote is I also had the beautiful experience of having this in the personal development work I did with the two of you. And I remember so clearly the moment, the time and place I was when this happened. It was like a. I snapped out of my reality, like I snapped out of the matrix for the first time. And so, so when I first worked with you, I probably was in a more kind of machiavellian, selfish place. And then I did a lot of workshops, and I learned how to open up my heart, learn how other people have feelings and emotions, as basic as that sounds, and they have needs, and my needs are not more important than them, and take them into consideration. And I found myself going into religion. So at that time, it was very much that, like, health and wellness spiritual thing. So I was like, all right, what's the right way to be a spiritual person? What's the wrong way to be a spiritual person? And do I need the crystals and the tarot cards and the horoscopes and, like, what's the right way to do this? And I don't want to be seen as different. And then I remember we started a mentorship program, and it was me and five other guys under the mentorship of Krisano Mazen here. And our first retreat we did as mentees. I remember we were in this small, kind of house like workshop area in the Brandenburg area of Germany, and I remember we started to talk about these concepts of autonomy, consciousness, clarity of making decisions for yourself, of asking, who am I? And it was like, I can't. It was like being struck by lightning. That's the only way I can describe it. It was like this. Why? I say it's a total revolution of the self when you start to see that there's these different ways of operating, because I. All of a sudden, I realized, whoa, whoa, whoa. Every way I put my reality together, every story, every belief system, the way I see the world, it got blown up, and I have to put it back together again. I have to reorientate everything about me, and it's like I'm awake and seeing the world through new eyes for the first time. It really is a moment of, like, exiting the matrix, and it was under the guidance of you two. And so I want to start with Krissana. And when we talk about going from this more enmeshed field of collectivism into autonomy, what are some of the bridges in that initiation, in that transition that support people to make that revolution of the self?
Krisana Locke: Breathing, coming into the body, healthy, safe processes where you get alive into your body, into your senses, into your feelings, you get out of your head, you get out of locked up belief structures in your body and mind. So a lot of the processes we did was first coming back into yourself, into your body, into your breathing, into. Yeah. With all this and meditations and insight to reflections, that was the way, because we can go into a lot of concept about it, but it was through experiencing. So it was a very experiential journey as well as a reflective journey as also as well as taking actionable steps, understanding behavior that was unconscious and then understanding when it was and then returning it around to have actionable, conscious steps of behavior and behavior of the way you are in the world. So that was the whole journey. That's all I'm gonna say.
Mino Vlachos: Mazen, how would you describe that journey into autonomy?
Dr. Mazen Harb: To drop the game of I'm small, I need to be rescued, I need to be saved. I'm a victim. I'm a victim of my parents, I'm a victim of my teachers, I'm a victim of society. To dub this self imposed hypnosis, I'm small. And then this fear of being see ourselves as great, just create in a sense of a living being that is capable of being interdependent and really going to a stage of autonomous where start self empowerment stuff to happen. It's like, for. It's like in a sense, ah, please help me. I'm not, I cannot do it. So the word for me that comes a lot is in all those things is to reach out the word I am capable. That's it. I am capable. Everything what we want to speak about is before it, ah, I'm not capable. Ah, because, because, because, because, because, because, because, because. But actually, when we emancipate and send that, I am capable, I'm capable of asking for guidance. I don't know everything. I start to know myself how much I know, how much I don't know. But it's really from I'm capable because lots of people can go to mentoring and end up the mentoring by saying, but actually I'm not capable. It's then, okay, it didn't work. Then they go all their life not capable because they really believe they're not capable. So I'm capable. Understanding that to become autonomous, that means start to understand to be self empowered, but in the same time to be interdependent, that means easily able to reach out for support. Easily able to give support and not playing this very old trans generation passed on victim savor paradox, victim savor syndrome complex.
Mino Vlachos: And so in the progression of things, what we've seen is in self orientated, the rules are outside me, and I'm here to break them and get away with it as much as I can. In the moralistic phase, I internalize them and they become a shoulder and it's right or wrong. And now we're emerging into a phase of autonomy. Autonomy in Greek means the law of self, means we pick up the pen and write our own rules for ourselves, but not in a way where it's a condemnation. It is an intention. My rule is something that I try to hold myself to, to create integrity. And so we emerge into a different form of leadership. But in my humble opinion, this is where we emerge into what I would call more true leadership. Because you can be a leader at, you can hold a position of leadership at the other two levels we've talked about. But this stage in our adult development is where we learn how to be in integrity with ourselves, truly. And we operate not from instinct or impulse or desire, poor guilt. We operate based on values. What are really my values? What. This is where the who am I? And like, why am I here? Start to emerge. Like, what do I want to do in this life? What's my life about? And my values start to crystallize, and I start to organize my behavior and action behind those values in an authentic way, again, without a pushing or condemnation or shame. It's just like, yeah, this is who I want to be. And in my experience and everyone I've seen around me who's like, either attempting to go into this or has gone into this stage, this is where real honesty starts to emerge, because honesty has to happen to the self to be in integrity with my own behaviors, but honesty to others starts to emerge as well. The game drops, as Mazen mentioned, and I can really just be honest and clear about what's going on with me. And so this kind of operating level is, if I kind of go back to the statistics, in the full population, 21% of adults operate at this level. When it was studied amongst high resource, high support backgrounds, this goes to 47%. Actually, almost half of adults who have some sort of secondary education, access to mentoring, mental health support, again, over time, it's not automatic. But. But if you have these, and again, I'm not just talking about wealth. It's not actually about wealth. It's wealth is not the correlation here. It's about having enriching experiences, supportive experiences, mentorship, elders. Of those individuals, 47%, almost half of adults reach this operating level, which is really understanding. Yeah. What is it about me that I want to fulfill in this lifetime? And let me be true to that. Let me be true to that. Mazen, what's your perspective when you see someone who's emerging into autonomy? Like they really have more of this ability to set their own values, to be an integrity, to be really honest, to drop the game, what's the benefit to the company?
Dr. Mazen Harb: Trust. Trust. Trust is everything. It's word. Actually, I wrote it down like an hour ago. We. We missed it along like in those initiations and then teenagerhood. The capacity, first of all, the parents. When parents give trust to their kids, this is one of the most beautiful thing that helps full emancipation to find themselves. But now imagine that goes on. But just when you have someone that leading a company. Trust. Trust is the most sacred, valued asset that you can ever, ever, ever, ever have in any kind and form of existence. Private, professional, spiritual, everything you have set a person full trust. It does not mean things don't happen. But at least, yes, this is where we're aiming at the society. Actually, that's the goal of the society when it comes privately and profession.
Mino Vlachos: And so along this journey, and we're going to touch just briefly on one last stage. But for all intents and purposes, we really, most people, it's a process of getting to here, to this place of self, kind of integrity, of autonomy. If we can get, I think, more leaders to operate at this juncture, then we would be in a really good place as a society. Because we would have a lot of maturity and wisdom in how we lead. There is one level above, but we'll save that for in a few seconds, and we won't spend too much time on it. But if we can get people really to operate here, what we're asking people is to take responsibility. That is how we get to this juncture. At every moment, at every transition, at every initiation, we're asking people to take more and more responsibility. And what we're also asking simultaneously is less and less identification. The I am decreases and the I have increase proportionately. So where we started with, I am my impulse. I have to just be a baby and I freak out. All of a sudden a ten year old has their impulse. They're not subjected to their impulse. They're not a slave to their impulse. They can separate themselves out. So all of a sudden they have an impulse. What do I do with that? Then I hold it. And what do I do with it? Then I have a then I am my desire. When I'm in a self oriented I am. I have to get my desire. So I move from I am my desire to I have a desire and I can hold it out here and actually balance it with the desire of the other. So I'm taking responsibility for I have desires. Then, as I move into the kind of more mutualistic phase, I am my community, I am my tribe, I am my moral code, I am all of these things. I am the culture and then we disidentify with it again. So the I am gets smaller and smaller. And now all of a sudden I have these things. I hold them in front of me and I say, which of these do I pick and choose? Which of these are the right thing for me? But it's my conscious choice what I pick and choose. As Mazen mentioned, you go on the journey and you learn some things, and then you come back to your culture, you come back to your religion, and from there you see what, what is really the thing for us with the situation at hand, with what's happening in the world around us, what's needed in this moment. So I have, I have, I have gets bigger, bigger, bigger. And what I am actually gets smaller, smaller and smaller. And this is the process of becoming a mature leader, is to. So they take responsibility. Take responsibility. It's not to say I take on more burden. It's not to say I take on more heaviness. It's to take responsibility for the things inside me, these kind of emotional, psychological things that are happening inside me, and to just hold them outside of myself so I can have awareness and to view them from outside. And then I choose what to do with them. So that's the process of bringing awareness to my impulses, my desires, my emotions, my loyalties. That's what we're talking about in the last phase. And I'll caveat this by saying when this model was created by doctor Robert Keegan from Harvard University, and he also worked a lot with a woman named Lisa Leahy. Actually, I really think they've done really brilliant research. When they did the numbers I've been looking at what they found at the time of doing the study is there's one more stage, one more level. And that at the time they were able to find 0% of the population consistently operates at that level, both general population and both in the more resource supported part of the population, which is why we won't spend too much time on it. Because I think really, I really believe this is the journey we're all on. And there's something beautiful about attaining this next stage, but it's not where we're starting. So there's no point in almost. It's just something to know, is there? But there's no point in spending too much time about how to get there, because we're not there yet as a society. But at that final stage, we become self transforming. We drop all the I's, all the I ams, and even our value system, we see even that as a subjective half truth. And we start to really embrace non duality. And we lead from non duality. And that is like, to be there consistently across all facets of our life, in all moments, is a challenge or whatever, a responsibility or an opportunity. I don't think we've done en masse so far in our culture. And so I'm going to ask each of you a little bit, as much energy as you have to tell us about non duality and some of its. Yeah, okay, Mazen. And maybe some of its effects on leadership. But let's just start with Mazen. Can you tell us a little bit about non dualism?
Dr. Mazen Harb: What comes up first is like, good and bad, positive and negative, and it's, again, it goes back to morality. We have to learn duality. We have to learn duality. Funnily enough, it's in it, because when you learn duality, you can learn non duality. When you come as a kid, you're non dual. When you come as a kid, you are in this oneness. You don't know yet what is not love. You don't know yet what is not trust, until you start to feel it through others. And then you're like, oh, something got missed. Missed. So the nuance of something that we slowly start losing or having less of make us be aware of that word. It's only in the, you know, in the awakening of something happened as a kid, and then you lost something, as, you know, mistrust happened. You learned the word trust and then love. You are in it. You don't name it yet until something opposite of it happens. So we start to learning only in the occurrence of opposite of it, of duality, that everything who we are and. And then this is where the separation starts to happen. That, okay, then I am for myself. When we start leading from a place of non duality is I am in service to the collective mission of myself. My team, my company, my family, my partner, my dogs. I am also for my. I am one with them and not separate in that sense. So there is dropping of the illusion of separation and in it, that's why it's very difficult to attain in it. And now I'm gonna speak about the word of perception. It's the. The only way to do it and be it is when you start to perceive reality as it is. To perceive reality as it is. You always have your senses. That doesn't change. But we remember at the beginning of the podcast, we said perception is senses, memory, which is conditioning, learning, and then emotional conditioning and emotional state. When you see reality as it is, that means you see reality with your perception. That's general to everyone, with some nuances. But then you do not connect it to your own learning, to your own memory. You disconnected. You uncouple it, and then you don't connect it. What you feel at this moment, you just look at it. And actually, this is, in a sense, to attain non duality is to change the mindset. Remember we said about the mindset is to change perception, to make it from instead from a subjective perception to an objective perception. So we start to have perspective of what reality is. And then from there, knowing that everything that I will do will be against me. If I start only to benefit myself. Hence, I start to understand illusion, like separation is an illusion. The only way to serve myself is through serving others. Because actually, that's the way how nature goes. So you start to go full into all the laws of nature. Actually, you're not doing something beyond nature. You're being nature itself. But going through a journey of, first of all, oneness with the mother. And then enmeshment and being one. Then understanding nuances, understanding duality because it has a real purpose. And then changing perception and then getting out of it, letting go of all identification that they supported in the past, but not now. They're just hindering you. And then fully becoming in service of life. Because it's always serving everything that's around it. From that perspective of non duality.
Mino Vlachos: Perfect. Beautiful answer from my perception of yours. And the research has found that to go from, let's say, this autonomous, value driven self to the non dual self, there's one bridge there. When it comes to support, there's different bridges that help us along the way. The bridge there. The only thing that we found that works is transformational, transcendent experiences. And I know one person who is beyond any human on this planet earth I have ever met. The absolute master of creating transformational, transcendent experience. It is. Krisana, is there anything you would like to tell us, any inspiration about the process of transformation and transcendence?
Krisana Locke: I would like to say when you, as Mazen said about non duality, and you have to go through duality, and then when you go beyond non duality, beyond that. So even saying, I'm non duality, it's still a separation, but beyond it, there is a transformation. So it's like you have one one like this one the other. And you want to say, is this good or is this bad? Which one is right or wrong? But if you just look at both together, and you respect both, and you love both. You're beyond, beyond duality. And this is how you do it. It needs to be looked and seen and experienced like this, and then you're not looking. Will I transform? It happens.
Mino Vlachos: And so I'm going to start to summarize what we've talked about today. It's a big, big, huge topic, and each component of it could really be its own thing, because we went by super fast, in my opinion, even though it's a long podcast, each topic itself went by super fast. And then I'm going to ask each one of us some final thoughts. But to summarize, some of what we've been talking about is we each have our own unique perception. It's individual to us. It's very subjective. It's reliant on cognitive processes, on our senses, on our emotions. So there is a mind body connection, and this perception can evolve over time. And if we take a framework, which is a crude way of oversimplifying the human experience, there are different stages that we reach throughout our development that start as a. When we're born, all the way through, when we die, adults continue to develop cognitively and emotionally throughout their whole lives, even if the physical body doesn't go through these growth spurts the way it did as a teenager. As we move from a child kind of perception of the world, where we're really impulsive and freewheeling, it's just all about, like, I feel, I do, I feel, I do. Instinct, instinct, instinct. We emerge into, let's say, ten years old, 710 years, seven to twelve years old, where we really start to understand. Like, actually, I can't just act fully on impulse. I've either gone through some conditioning, so it's a social thing, or I've learned it myself. Like, I need to hang back for a second and not just act purely on instinct, because to get what I want, I might need to be a little bit more strategic, let's call it. So, strategies start to emerge. The mind turns on, separation starts to happen. Duality, like, things that we need to learn that are very important for, I think, our experience and our cognition, we learn all of this stuff. And then if we're given a bridge, and that bridge of support looks like cooperating with people. So it's being in school projects, being in sports, doing projects, like it's with other people, with other people. Having friends as teenagers is really, really important. So that when we learn from each other and we learn with each other, then we grow into our next kind of stage of evolution where we started to internalize those rules. We become our own authority, but with the rules of someone else, which is society. So we become the perfect disciple of society. We get into this kind of culture, into this mutualism. We become moral beings. And there's a more of a give and take that occurs, but we're very much inside that scope of, like, I can't step out of the group because it's dangerous. And then another bridge appears to us. And in that bridge we learn how to set our own kind of codes of conduct. In my experience, that was with mentorship and with a lot of meditation and a lot of, as Krisana mentioned, breathing and movement and getting in touch with myself, all these kind of physical, somatic, emotional and cognitive tools that supported me to say, hey, wait a minute, who am I? And how do I want to orientate my life? And I set the code of myself. I started to write my own code, and then over time, to realize that even as a leader, even that can evolve into something else, or realize actually even that has its limitations, because I'm still seeing it through the lens of myself and my conditioning and my culture. Even if it is my own code, it's because of my own experiences. I got to this answer, and there's actually a point beyond this where I love and respect everything and anything, and I decouple my identity and I start to really see things for what they are. And the whole reason we're having this podcast, because as a CEO, as a leader, more and more the challenge and the demands are asking us to get to the level of either autonomy or even beyond it, to non dualism. And so a lot of times when we work with people and we talk to them, they say, like, why are you challenging us so much? I say, I'm not challenging you. Life is challenging you. I'm the support. I'm the bridge. I've come to support you in this. We need both. We need challenge and support to move through initiations, to move through thresholds of being. And so this is where we arrive. This is a bit of the map. The caveat, as always, is at any given moment where, especially if we think from a more non dualistic sense, where all of this, all of this is us at any given moment in time, we can operate anywhere. Just because you've learned how to be autonomous doesn't mean there's a moment where you won't be selfish or act like a child. Just because you've reached autonomy doesn't mean there's moments where you don't still have some shoulds that operate within you, you different areas of your life will operate at different levels, whether it's like your work might be different than your home life, or your health, or your hobbies or your friends. So the question is not what am I, it's how am I? And when? That is a more constructive. So don't use this as like an archetype or like now I am this. No, ask when and how am I being all of these. And so with that, we start to bring it to a close. I'm going to ask each one of us, just offer some final thoughts. I begin with Krisana. What would you like to leave us with here today.
Krisana Locke: For the listeners and people watching this is to take this in, don't think too much about it, and then have some stillness and rest and digest it. It's been a beautiful podcast, but it's also good to go into some stillness and digest it all. And me too.
Dr. Mazen Harb: I wanted to say something similar that's good. It allowed me to find more what I really, what's there to end my minding words? Yeah, like really not far from Krissana, it's like, yeah, it's good to hear all of that. But now it's time of action, it's not time of following, it's not time of finding another guru, it's not time of following another amazing teacher. It's not time of projecting of the fathers we wish them to, you know, have, or the mother we wish to have. Just really try to understand. All of it is to find your own inner teacher, inner psychologist, inner healer, inner supporter, inner leader there. Yeah, it's a journey toward yourself, it's a journey toward your own guidance. Reach out not to follow, reach out to get knowledge, information, so you can make sense of it, so you start to understand more yourself.
Mino Vlachos: And my motivation, I mean, one of my motivations really for recording this episode is when I was going through my own personal journey and I was really struggling with myself, and I went through so much personal development for six, seven years. I was flying from New York to Germany to do workshop, workshop, workshop, workshop. And I could tell that something inside me was changing and shifting, but I couldn't tell what the hell was happening to me. And it wasn't until like almost at the end of our mentorship, where I stumbled upon this framework and the books and the research. And it was the first time I understood. Wow. So this is a bit of what's happening. And it just gave me a roadmap you know, I love my maps, so it gave me a roadmap to figure out, like, shit. So this is what we're kind of doing. Even though we didn't call it this and no one sat down to say, we're gonna now go to step three or step four. It doesn't exist. It's not how the human brain or the body works. So to your point, you can just forget all of this, but it might just give people not only one, some indication of, like, what their journey could look like potentially. It also, to me, it gives a little bit of, hey, if you're in a position of responsibility or authority, I should say, and you have responsibilities and you're struggling, likely you're struggling, and things feel like the forces are acting upon you because you have not been able to define your own code yet. You haven't stepped fully into your autonomy. The more we're acting either selfishly or beholden to the people around us, the more there's pressure on us. So the moment you feel pressure, it means that that's life asking you to evolve. And so we offer this as a map. And in our workshops and our coaching, we then offer you the bridge, the support to help you to move. But we're not doing it for you because you must do it yourself. That's the whole thing in all of this, is finding your own inner leader. But we can offer a support, a bridge for you to be able to go on that journey. And on the other side of it, there is a whole lot less pressure because you're actually not beholden to the forces. You become the master of the forces. You become the creator of your life. And that's when things get really fun. So all of this was a kind of a heady topic, maybe more serious, but on the other end of it is fun and joy and ease, and it feels pretty damn nice, I have to say. So I invite everyone and anyone who's more interested to reach out to us because there's a lot more that we can support with. And thank you so much for listening to this podcast.