Appreciating Spirituality In Business With Today’s Leading Experts

When your business is solely dedicated to earning a strong income and puts proper team building aside, you are setting yourself up to fail. By putting spirituality in business, you cultivate a workplace environment of trust, collaboration, and connection, resulting in much better results. Andy McDowell explores this concept even deeper in a panel discussion with today’s leading experts: Dr. Larry Farwell, Reina Bach, Amy Wong, Aileda Lindal, and Greg Zlevor. Together, they discuss the importance of understanding the why of your business in order to bring humanness and openness into your processes. They also share their own practical ways of integrating spirituality into the business world, making every task fulfilling and rewarding to accomplish.

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Appreciating Spirituality In Business With Today’s Leading Experts

Welcome to the show. I am your host, Andy McDowell. I can’t thank you for tuning into this special episode that I’ve put together. I had a dream and a goal for this particular season to put some panel discussions together on particular topics. Earlier this season, I had a great conversation with Greg Zlevor of Westwood International about spirituality and business and you guys liked it so much.

I got such tremendous feedback from it that I decided to put together to check that gold box of mine for the show. I put a panel of experts together to talk about this notion of spirituality and business and answer questions like what it is, why this would be so popular, and how it shows up in business that you would recognize it and point your finger at it if you saw it from that perspective.

In the interest of time, we want to get as much of this conversation in as we can while I have these five wonderful people. I’m going to do a short introduction with them and then see where this goes. It’s going to be a great time. I love these people. I know by the end of this episode, you’re going to love these people as well. If it truly does what we collectively six hope it does, hopefully, this will facilitate even more conversations out there in the business world about the dynamic that spirituality can bring to business.

Without further ado, let me do some introductions. I’m going to first start with Dr. Larry Farwell. He comes to us from Seattle, Washington. He’s the research guy, if you will, on the panel. He’s done a lot of work. He has a great book that helps us to understand the connectivity between the brain, mind, body, and spirits. Dr. Larry, welcome to the panel.

It’s great to be here, Andy.

The next is Reina Bach. Full disclosure, Reina Bach holds a little piece of my heart because she was my executive coach at Boeing. She comes to us from Denver, Colorado, the land of the Rockies. She’s an executive coach. Reina, welcome to the panel.

Thank you, Andy. It’s so great to be here with you and these amazing humans.

The next around the table is Aileda Lindal. She comes to us from the great city of Charleston, South Carolina. She is another executive coach out there in the ranks who works with a lot of corporate executives. Aileda, thanks for coming to the panel.

Thanks for having me.

We went East Coast. Now, we’re going full West Coast. Amy Wong comes to us from the Bay Area of San Francisco Bay. She’s another executive coach. She followed me in the engineering technical math route when it came to college education and so forth. She does a lot of work with technical companies out there in the San Francisco area. Amy, welcome to the panel.

Thanks, Andy. It’s good to be here.

Last but not least, this is the guy that started this whole thing. We save the best for last, so to speak. He is Greg Zlevor. I encourage you to go back and check out his episode earlier this season. He comes to us from the great state of Vermont. Although, he is not there at the moment so don’t go looking for him there. He is the Founder and President of Westwood International. He does consulting, executive coaching, and those types of things. Greg, thanks for that ripple effect that we’re riding the wave in with this discussion.

My pleasure. It’s great to be a good ripple.

Defining Spirituality

We got a ripple effect from Greg and I’s discussion because there’s a lot of concern out there about the direction that technology is moving. All these 1s and 0s and bits and bytes are starting to be able to do tasks that over the years human beings have done. It begs the question of if we’re going to keep growing or for society to keep growing GDP and other things that help to put food on the table and rise over people’s heads and we’re taking away task-oriented jobs and more technology as we go down the road, how is it that we’re going to sustain this economy for human beings?

That’s my take on it. I want to throw that out as a context for our conversation. We need to start with a question to get your opinion on what you feel is the definition of spirituality and how it differs from religion. I don’t think we’re here around the table to talk about religion. We’re here to talk about spirituality. I’d love to get some of your flavors, opinions, and thoughts on what the definition of spirituality is to set the table for our conversation. Who wants to chime in?

I’ll chime in.

Dr. Larry.

Being a scientist, I do research in neuroscience and also in quantum physics. I’d like to take a little bit of a scientific approach to that question which will be complimentary to what some other people here have to say. Bear with me for a minute. I want to geek out on the physical structure of the universe and the role of human beings in it. This will all become relevant in a minute.

I have a table here. I can knock on it. It looks solid and brown to me, but if you look more scientifically, it’s not solid at all. If you look closer, it’s mostly empty space with molecules moving around very quickly. If you look within the OCC atoms and look within the OCC quarks, or see elementary particles, protons, neutrons, and electrons and look within those OCC quarks, you go down to the string theory level and simply hear vibrating strings. What looks to me like a solid table is a pattern of vibrations. This can become relevant in a minute.

What is vibrating? Einstein coined the term unified field to describe that field of infinite potential that vibrates into the particle-wave phenomena that make up the physical universe. The essential constituent of the physical universe is the same as our own essential constituent. The ultimate reality of the physical universe is the same as the ultimate reality within ourselves, the self, the I, or our consciousness.

Spirituality is contact with spirit, with ourselves, and with our consciousness. Click To Tweet

All of the great spiritual traditions have said t hat the inner field of pure consciousness is the same as a ground of being from which creation arises or what we call the conscious unified field. We can describe in mathematical terms how the particle-wave phenomenon makes up the physical creation that arises from there. Spirituality, to me, is contact with spirit. It’s contact with ourselves or our consciousness. A couple of questions that immediately come up is, is that real? Is it practical? Everybody knows that spirituality is really wonderful, but is it real? Is it some imaginary thing? Also, is it practical in the world of business?

The way we create our lives, and all the great spiritual and other teachers have said this, is like we create a resonance. It’s like we have a guitar. If you pluck a guitar string, it vibrates at a particular resonant frequency. Other instruments in the environment pick up that resonance, and then you have a symphony. That’s how we create our lives.

You read the latest book that came out about how to be successful or scriptures from thousands of years ago. They all say the same thing. We create a resonance on the level of our consciousness that moves nature, and we create that in our lives. That is what my dad and I, he did the physics and I did in the neuroscience, tested in the scientific laboratory. We could create events in the physical world using consciousness alone. I won’t get into the details of that, but we used alpha particle emission by plutonium since we understand the probability of distribution of that.

We found we could create highly improbable events. Miracles used to be thought to be impossible events that somehow happened. In quantum mechanics, anything is possible. What we showed is that we can create miracles. Human beings functioning through the level of consciousness can move nature or move the conscious unified field and create physical events. That’s how we drive our brains. That’s how we create our lives. This comes with no surprise to all of you here because that’s what you’ve been doing. You’ve been creating miracles in your lives and others.

What happened that was new with my dad and I is that we tested that in the scientific laboratory. We published it in physics journals. What is spirituality in business? It’s contacting that inner spiritual level of life or the level of consciousness, creating a resonance from that level, and then manifesting that result in our world. It’s not only real or scientifically proven, but it’s also the most practical thing we can do. It’s not doing a bunch of stuff. It’s having the consciousness to create what we desire in our lives. That’s what spirituality in business means.

Generate Your Value | Spirituality In Business — Spirituality In Business: Spirituality in business is contacting the inner spiritual level of life and the level of consciousness, creating a resonance that manifests results in our world.

Truly living the why of our life out loud by being connected to the spirit.

The why comes from the levels of our spiritual or the levels of consciousness.

Who else would like to chime in? What are your thoughts on spirituality?

My mind is much smaller than Dr. Larry so I put it in simple discussion terms, which is about the extent of my knowledge. To me, spirituality is more about living in the questions. It is questions that move me forward and that have me being more directed to something bigger than myself. If I did understand what Dr. Larry was saying, it’s that there is a frequency, a resonance, or a place that is more energy than matter that if I start to live in that spot where I’m serving and connected, I can be more connected and things can be more connected to me and we can move something to a better place. To me, that’s spirituality. Religion gets so caught up in what people believe and do not believe whereas spirituality is more about questions, being, and being connected. To me, that’s spiritual.

Would you say, Greg, connected to yourself as well as connected to others when you say connected?

Absolutely. Reina and I were working with a group of executives. In part, the more people understand their awareness than their feelings and their thoughts, which, to me, is a way of observing and being engaged in the world which is different than doing and trying to manipulate or change the world, the more they’re in that spot, they tend to be more spiritual because they see more of the connection. They can engage more of what’s happening, and they can find ways to serve themselves in the world. In our process, it was, “How can we do that as lightly as possible?” That then keeps us from creating any damage by trying to do what we want to do or what we think is best.

There are a couple of points there I want to hold onto in my head for later questions. I appreciate you, Greg, for your thoughts. Anybody else?

I’ll piggyback on what Greg said. When I think of spirituality, there is a unification because, from that perspective, t here’s that connection, the oneness. We tap into that. Practicing spirituality in the workplace, not religion because religion can separate us, is going within to connect. For me, having that spirituality starts right here.

We say give ourselves permission, but it’s coming home to ourselves. It’s settling in, being mindful, setting the intention for that connection rate, and also paying attention. For me, it’s in mindfulness and how we show up for ourselves in our thoughts and our behaviors and how we show up with and for other people as well. There’s a practice of spirituality, and it doesn’t take work. It takes attention. We can still do everything we have to do in this realm to make things happen, or so we think. It’s the permission and attention to connect with the self.

I’d love to piggyback off that if that’s okay.

Go ahead, Amy.

Reina, that was so beautifully said. A huge part of spirituality is having this mindset of trust. There’s more going on than what we can measure with our five senses. Everything that has been said here, it’s bringing this idea that there is something going on and I can trust that. There’s so much peace. You could say faith, but not in that religious-based sense.

When I think about the difference between spirituality and business or not, if we do business for business’ sake, we’re dealing with the data and working with what is. When we’ve got spirituality and business, there’s this overlay of trust that it’s working out and there are things that are happening. We have agency and we’re connected. Energy is important. Resonance is important. That, to me, is a big differentiator.

If we just do business for business' sake, we just deal with data. If we do business with spirituality, we create an overlay of trust. Click To Tweet

Aileda, I’m not going to leave you out. Everybody else has chimed in. Do you want to put your voice to this?

I agree with all that. I will add and say that for me, spirituality is the conscious awareness. Conscious awareness for me is open-heart energy. When we’re talking about energy, it’s open-heart energy working in unison with the logical mind and those two cohesively come into play. It’s oftentimes represented in many different ways. Many different terms are used for it. We’ve heard self-awareness. We hear conscious awareness. We hear enlightenment. We hear, from an athlete’s point of view, in the zone. There are many different ways to reference it, but we’re all talking about the same thing.

Spirituality In Leadership

At the beginning of our episode, I threw out my thoughts and ideas as not only why we’re doing this panel discussion, but why this panel discussion is timely in the discussion. I’d like to hear some thoughts from a couple of you on why you think this conversation about spirituality is timely. What is it that you’re seeing in your discussions with leadership in business, business in general, or in your own life or so forth that you think this is a time that we need to start having these conversations on a widespread basis?

It’s interesting. A couple of things for me on that. In dealing with the corporate world, and I spend a lot of my time helping design and run leadership programs for corporations, it struck me that there are several leaders who are asking, “What’s the ROI of that?” They’re not even using the word spirituality. It’s more about helping people develop, helping people be more connected, and having more of a cause, which are all elements of spirituality. They’re asking, “What’s the ROI on that? What’s the return on investment of bringing that in?”

To me, they’re about 15 to 20 years behind because that equation is completely flipped. This generation coming in is asking, “What’s the ROI for me to give my effort and energy to you to help you build whatever you’re building?” The challenge from spirituality, and we could call it something else, caring more, being more concerned, being more connected, seeing the whole, whatever that is, or being empathetic, all of those play into it.

Large companies, corporations, groups, and teams need to be there because they’re going to miss a lot of very talented people who will not give their energy, spirit, and time to the outside endeavor unless there’s a connection to something bigger and themselves, and not just for a paycheck, but to their soul. That’s going to be really important from that perspective.

Thanks, Greg. Anybody else?

In my experience, the people I work with and their colleagues are searching for deeper meaning. It really tags onto what Greg was saying. They have reached a certain level of success in their careers, whether they have their own business or they are senior level in corporate or even federal government, and they’re saying, “Is this it?” I went for all the accolades. I got the job. I got the big multiple houses and all the accouterments of success, but there’s something hollow inside.” It’s not touching their spirit or their soul.

There are more questions and more conversations for people to go deeper. Generally, in my experience, it’s more in those one-on-one conversations where people may not feel quite safe yet to talk about spirituality or deeper meaning, purpose, and connection, this oneness that we all are starting to feel. There’s an ask being made of people in organizations is my experience.

Do you think leaders who are asking themselves of that, do they have any kind of sense of, “If I am asking that about myself, what about the people that work for me? Am I standing alone here as the leader feeling that way?” Maybe they’re scratching their head going, “Maybe everybody else feels that way too.”

It depends on where the particular leader is at. If he or she is new to this, like a new revelation, maybe not asking it. First, looking at the self within. If they’re a little further down that path of questioning and getting some answers, they are starting to look around. That’s my experience. They start wondering, “What is this? What’s really happening?”

It’s a craving for meaning. It’s a craving for meaning beyond the material stuff that we’ve all been conditioned to chase, follow, and achieve. When you get to that point, you’re like, “I’ve had enough, I can’t fill that hole.” That’s why I wrote my book, Living on Purpose to solve it. It’s exactly this challenge. Everyone hits this point where they’re like, “What’s it all for?”

At this point in time, there’s so much division in the world. There is so much separation and isolation. Everyone feels this deep sense of longing for purpose and meaning. That’s where this topic of spirituality really comes in. It’s all about connection. It’s a connection to a bigger purpose, to ourselves, and to humanity. It’s answering that question, “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” and being so in love with the answer.

Knowing The Why

You hit on what I was going to add, Amy. In my coaching, I try to really profess to people that if you want true engagement with your team, you’ve got to answer the question why in everything that you do. You’re like, “We’re rolling out a new strategy.” Why? You’re like, “We’re changing direction in our sales technique.” Why?

It is one of my favorite words in the English language because of that. It’s seeking new meaning. It’s going after that why. People want to know the why. They’re like, “Why am I here? Why does this business exist? Why is it that it’s this group of people that are working together?” If you can, as a leader, start answering that question, you’re going to get the connectivity, the meaning, the mission, and the purpose that you’re truly looking for.

Picking up on that piece of why, Andy, when everyone’s looking for the material and we chase the money in the material, the question would be why. In part, it is because people are looking for security. What is it about security? What can spirituality teach us about security that’s different beyond the material? It’s to begin to follow that path and not to overcome the ego but to understand that the amygdala and thalamus, those emotional parts of the brain, are there to try to keep us safe. They push us to look for threats mostly on the surface level. When we overcome those threats and we think getting material or money is a way to overcome that, and then all of a sudden we do, if we’re fortunate enough to get to that point, we realize like Amy and others have said, “That’s not it yet. There’s a whole nother space.”

I had this moment, and when I say moment, it was probably 15 to 22 seconds, in a silent retreat where all of a sudden, I saw something that was vast, open, and safe and that I didn’t have any hand in creating or perpetuating. I almost didn’t even have any hand in getting there. The whole thing felt like a gift, like, “This has existed before me. Was this after me?” Yet, I’m a part of it. That experience of awareness, that little moment that happened for me, is in part what a lot of us continue to search for. We’re like, “How can I live from a place of comfort and security and be connected to all and serve all?”

Always search for your place of comfort and security where you can be connected to all. Click To Tweet

Go ahead, Aileda.

Go ahead, Dr. Farwell.

What Greg described is the fundamental human experience of who we are. We are deep within that unlimited, unbounded consciousness that’s beyond time and space. When I got started in all of this stuff, I was thirteen years old. I had a near-death experience. I was drowning. I experienced myself as this unbounded infinite being. I realized, “This is what my life is about.” That’s a point at which I became a seeker to find out how to get there and how to bring that into the scientific realm.

Also, with respect to the self, the I, the subject, the consciousness, or our experience of life being more timely and spirituality being more timely, many years ago, we started an industrial revolution where a lot of the physical things that got done can be done by machines. We’re entering an AI revolution where intellectual things can be done by machines.

What machines don’t have is they don’t have the consciousness. They don’t have a soul. They don’t have judgment. They don’t have the experience of what life feels like. That’s the unique talent that humans bring to any situation, including the business. It’s the inner vision and the experience we can create for ourselves and others. Everything else, we can offload to unfeeling machinery.

Machines don’t have consciousness or a soul. They cannot judge and don’t have experience of what life feels like. Click To Tweet

Certainly being a scientist, I like intellectual stuff. The intellect shouts, the emotions scream, and the intuition whispers. Where we really get to know life, get to know ourselves, and get to know other people is on that quiet whisper level of intuition. That’s the unique highest skill that human beings bring and that we can elicit in each other.

Impact Of Artificial Intelligence

Andy, this begs a question for me if you don’t mind me asking a question.

Not at all.

Dr. Larry, you’re onto something there. That’s right. Here’s one of my fears, and I’m curious to see if any of you see if this fear that I extrapolate has any legs to it. With AI, AI gives us the ability to think less because we can plug questions, challenges, and issues into AI and it can give us an answer. I see the brain is being wired to help us avoid pain, energy, and threats.

If AI can help us think less and have less pain and we take that bait and run with it as far as we can, what are we going to miss from a spiritual perspective when I see that a lot of our spirituality requires some kind of struggle, challenge, or pain? That’s a fear I have. What are we going to become as a society if we lean on AI for the wrong things or too much?

I have a somewhat different perspective on what AI does with respect to offloading tasks. That is it offloads a lot of the intellectual tasks, but it doesn’t offload at all the spiritual quest. In fact, it gives us more time. We have more time that we don’t have to be out plowing the fields. With more of the intellectual work being taken over by AI, it gives us more time, more space, and more potential awareness to devote to who we are, to go within, and to develop that spiritual sense in the experience you described.

Everybody here has been talking about that’s what we’re really here on earth for and that’s what we’re in business for. It could be an opportunity rather than a trap if we treat it that way or if we take advantage of it to take the awareness within to pursue higher levels of consciousness. I’d be interested in what other people say too.

Spirituality And Creativity

That leads to my next question. What do you feel like is the connection between spirituality and creativity? If we talk about Dr. Larry creating this white space for us to be human much more instead of mind intellectual base, what do we see as the connectivity between spirituality and creativity?

Go ahead, Amy.

Reina, do you want to take it?

No. Go right ahead. I’m sure we all have things to bring.

I love this question. There’s a tremendous connection between creativity and spirituality. There’s so much intelligence out there. In the spiritual realms, you can say infinite divine intelligence. For a human, an ego, and an intellect to be able to be creative, for me, if I’m looking within the self right here, I’m calling upon my experiences, memories, history, fears, desires, inputs, and context. From all of that, I can create. If I open to this field that Dr. Larry is referring to and I get into resonance with what’s out there, I can tap into intelligence that exists beyond my physical self, and then I have access to inspiration.

In inspiration, there’s that experience of that. I’m sure we’ve all had that when you go, “Oh.” It’s like when you get the breath knocked into you where it’s like, “Oh.” All of a sudden there are these brilliant ideas. It feels like a download or a hit of something. It could maybe be coming from my singular self, but some of the most incredible innovations, ideas, and problem-solving abilities come from tapping into and accessing information beyond ourselves. That can only happen if you align with this idea that we are bigger than ourselves here and there is a field that we’re all connected to. We’re all one, but we’re all ourselves. To tap into that creativity, you have to decide, “This might be possible. This might be real.”

It’s staying open to that. If you think about some ideas that you’ve had in the past that you didn’t take action on and within a short period of time, and I don’t know if it’s a year or even a couple of years, you see the same idea that floated your way that you didn’t act on is out there. Somebody’s doing it. Somebody wrote that book. Somebody did this or that that came to you.

For me, that’s information energy that came in through the field, through this one being right here, and to be able to tap into that. It’s overcoming and letting go of the control. To think we have to control everything, we’re better off if we don’t. We have to manage the day-to-day. Aileda, it’s the head and the heart. It’s that blend of the mind and the heart. It’s allowing that information to come in and acknowledging that it does exist.

I would challenge anyone reading this to allow yourself to sit for a few minutes. Quiet your mind. Have a pause even five minutes without your mind going all over the place. See what comes. Information will come. There may be a solution. A lot of people will get solutions in their dreams to problems they’re working on, or they’ll get information in the shower when they’re not thinking about it. It comes in. I would challenge anybody to give that a try.

That’s brilliant when you talk about how we put ourselves in a place to be inspired versus productive. It is a completely different space. Thank you for making that distinction. It’s a great one.

With respect to spirituality and creativity, the title of my book is The Science of Creating Miracles: Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, and Living the Life of Your Dreams. The whole point there and what we researched in the laboratory is that contact with a conscious, unified field or contact with our own being or our own field of unbounded consciousness that everybody here has talked about.

It’s such a delight to be in a group where everybody gets that. Contact with that and then expressing that in our lives is what creativity is. It’s like we pluck a guitar string on the level of our consciousness. It sets up a resonance that other instruments in the environment move in a similar resonance, and then we have a whole symphony.

Amy was talking about this a-ha experience. This is one of the things I’ve studied a lot in neuroscience. When you have this a-ha experience, it opens your brain up for reprogramming. There’s a brain response that I discovered and have done a lot of research on called a Memory and Encoding Related Multifaceted Electroencephalographic Response or MERMER. Those a-ha experiences are how the brain learns and how we open up to something greater. We’re all talking about the same experience. It has everything to do with spirituality and creativity. It’s so much fun with you folks here. You get life at such a deep level. I love you.

That’s why I brought this group together because I knew that each one of you had those characteristics. That’s why I consider you guys to be experts in this area. Go ahead, Aileda.

I wanted to add quickly and come full circle to a lot of the things that have been discussed. One of it is I. Greg, you brought that up and how individuals need to be seen, especially in a corporate and a company culture. I agree with that completely. They need to be seen, heard, and felt. That’s what everybody wants. The one thing about spirituality that I will say I’ve found in my experience of working with clients throughout the years is that everybody is afraid of being judged. That’s the biggest and greatest fear. That is the biggest doom and gloom that’s hanging over us.

When people are willing to get vulnerable, which they do with people, Amy, that they trust, which you drove home so brilliantly, that opening and that trust is when you hear things. People will come to you and all of a sudden, there’s a floodgate of stories that they’re sharing. This is when the coaching and the consulting projects get really good.

We talked about art. I went to school for art, but then I grew up in Corporate America. I excelled and climbed the ladder, and then I became a consultant and have been for thirteen years. The thing about the process that I went through to get to that place, the trust gets established and the people open up. When they do, then you can truly build a team.

The thing about the trust factor is that that’s when the stories come where they’ll share with you the stuff like, “You’re never going to believe this.” If we all start to share, “You will not believe what I came through,” those things that we all think we wouldn’t believe, everybody’s had them happen. They’re not talking about it. They’re not opening up to it. The creativity opening to that brings solutions. Without the creativity, there can be no solutions. The solutions have to happen, and they have to come so that we can continue to build and design in a way that’s evolutionary.

Without creativity, there can be no solutions, and solutions have to happen so that you can continue to build. Click To Tweet

When we talked about the brain, the AI, and the functions, and Greg, your fear that you talked about with that, and Dr. Larry, you can say yes or no on this, it’s inevitable it’s going to change how we function from a brain perspective. I say that because I was on with a person who does conscious development for the Marines. He did that for several years and had a very specific pattern program. We were talking, because I have a conscious leadership training program myself that I have designed.

He was saying there are certain maneuvered patterns like when you write, you retain information in your brain. If we’re suddenly not doing that and we’re doing it all via computer, it’s inevitable that there’s going to be some functions that will change for us moving forward evolutionary in the future. I will equate that to an ADHD diagnosis. We didn’t start having those until we got to a place where we weren’t studying via encyclopedias anymore and started functioning on computers. Brains started thinking faster. It is what it is. We’re coming into a place where evolution is required on the human factor. We need to ante up as humans and need to take ownership of our operating systems so that we can start to be consciously aware of our creations moving forward.

Spirituality From A Practical Perspective

I want to come down from the aviation world from the 100,000-foot level down to about the 50,000-foot level and get a little more practical with you guys from the standpoint of spirituality. How would somebody recognize spirituality when it was in their midst in their life or their business world? We’ve heard terms like mindfulness, getting quiet, stepping away from the computer, and stepping away from the book. We’re stuck somewhere, decompressing and allowing things to flow into us with ideas or notions by stepping away from things. What might be some other examples from a practical perspective to say, “This is what we mean by spirituality.”

A little earlier I said the intellect shouts, the emotions scream, and the intuition whispers. There’s not a concrete formula. We can say, “Spirituality looks like this. Check these boxes.” There are some boxes that match up reasonably well. The way that we really tune into the spiritual sense of people, situations, and organizations is on the intuitive level, the very quiet level.

The intellect shouts, the emotions scream, and the intuition whispers. Click To Tweet

You can have a sense, “This person, these people, this path forward, or this way of interaction resonates deeply with me.” As Aileda was saying and several of us have touched on this, it requires using the brain in a different way. It requires using our awareness in a subtler, more profound way. That is where mankind is going. For some years, I thought there was an uprising of consciousness taking place in the world. I saw a billboard. It was a recruiting billboard for the US Marines. It says, “Battles are won within.” If even the Marines are getting to the inner is the cause of the outer, we’re headed in the right direction.

You may think scientists use their intellect to figure the world out, but that’s not the way we work. Even Einstein talked about this. The way you discover how nature works is intuitively sensing the energetic dynamics of nature on an intuitive level. You then use the intellect as a tool to explain that. The way that we know spirituality and the way that we guide ourselves through the maze of the world with the people, organizations, and series of actions is by tuning on the intuitive level. Everybody here has said it. Allow the mind to settle to a quieter level and tune into that subtle whisper of intuition.

Dr. Larry, the phrase being receptive is a shift in the being. We’re so used to projecting our energy out onto the world to make things happen, but the whisper of intuition happens when we allow ourselves to be receptive to the awareness.

This is so beautiful, so thank you to you both. In order to do this really well, I believe that one of the first fundamental steps we can take is to come home to ourselves. The relationship we have with ourselves determines everything. Whoever is reading might be thinking, “How does that have to do with spirituality?” The reality is when you come back home to yourself. What do I mean by that? It’s truly doing the work to come to know that you are unconditionally whole and complete and that you are worthy, deserving, or enough. That is the definition of unconditional self-love.

When you do that work, and I honestly think that’s a lifelong practice, then what you see out there changes because the fundamental lens that you look through changes. The relationship you have with yourself determines the lens you look throughout the world. When you look out to others, you see them as yourself. There’s safety. There’s trust. There’s a connection in that.

Through that, we have the ability to sit with ourselves to trust the intuition that’s coming through. I find a lot of folks without that step of trusting themselves will get intuition, but they don’t know how to trust it. They won’t follow the inspiration or they won’t heed the advice of their instincts. That inner work or the connection with self is fundamental.

Go ahead, Aileda.

You go and I’ll follow.

Some people who I work with say, “This intuition thing sounds really great, but how do I start connecting with it?” My answer is to start small. If you’re looking for a parking space and your intuition or something inside you says, “Turn right,” try it. It is paying attention to those little decisions and little choices even down to which restaurant to go to.

Practice building the muscle. We were all born with a muscle of intuition. It’s giving ourselves permission. I tell my clients, “Don’t start with the big ones. If you’re looking at spending $100 million and where to invest, maybe you don’t start with that. You start with the smaller choices that you can look for in business. If you’ve got a gut sense about this person would be a great hire, maybe that person would be.”

Then, celebrate it. You have to reinforce that positive feedback. When the data comes back that there’s something here and you feel the synchronicity, you got to celebrate that. I kid you not. That’s such a powerful way to strengthen.

Especially when it has to do with tuning into other people because we’re really good at tuning into other people on the intuitive level.

Go ahead, Aileda.

I always love it when people say, “I’m a realist. How can I possibly do these things?” I’m like, “Wow,” because there’s so much stuff out there that fortifies, proves, and validates these things. More importantly, I tell people, “I’m a realist too.” W hen we watch our broadcasting systems and see all of this doom and gloom, do we not stop for two seconds and understand how many superheroes are in the world running around and saving the world and how many miracles are happening every single day? It’s not because you’re not being shown that it means it’s not happening in reality. Get consciously aware and in tune with what is reality. That’s a game-changer.

Also, I’m a realist. As a scientist, we have to follow the data. We can’t come up with an idea and hope it works. I have proven this phenomenon we’ve been talking about in the scientific laboratory. You can access a conscious unified field and create measurable differences. I’m not going to go into the alpha particle emission by plutonium, but if you can create a shift in that probability distribution, you can create a shift in any probability distribution. That’s the whole universe. We’re not talking woo-woo here. We’re talking about what we’ve proven in the laboratory. We’ve proven the neuroscience behind it as well. Andy, you had something to ask us.

Spirituality And ROI

We’ll wrap up the discussion with this question. We’ve pointed out in this discussion that there’s an ROI for paying attention to this aspect from what the younger generations are bringing up to what technology is bringing up to the connection between spirituality and creativity and truly being human. There’s some element of evolution for us humans, if you will, wrapped up in this.

If a leader, a CEO, a business owner, or whatever is reading this conversation and says, “I want to bring spirituality more into our realm in the business,” what might be some practical ideas? Maybe we feed off of Reina’s comment about starting small. If we’re going to start small within the business and build upon it with spirituality in the business to get the ROIs that we’ve talked around the table with, what might be some ideas or areas that could focus on to start that effort?

One of the things that come to mind, and it may not be convenient for everybody and it may have to happen separately, is getting out and away from your desk and getting out into nature. If you’re having a call with your team and it is virtual, maybe everybody’s out on a walk. It is breaking the momentum or construction of sitting behind your desk to try and problem-solve. That would be one thing that comes to mind. Shift up the environment. If you can do it together, even better.

Anybody else?

Another thing with respect to a practical application of spiritual principles is I mentioned earlier the a-ha experience or the MERMER moments. When something comes along and really gets to you, often what people will do is react. They’re like, “Shoot the messenger. Punish the messenger. Make sure that doesn’t happen again.” Maybe they take it internally like, “Maybe I’m a really horrible person.” However, neither of those is a spiritual response and neither of those is very useful.

When something comes along that triggers you or gets to you, a more productive thing to do is to tune into your inner being. Tune into yourself. Tune into that level of life where you’re 100% safe, 100% valuable, or 100% powerful. It appears to be a threat to my value, safety, or power, but almost always, it’s really not. You’re not being chased by a saber-toothed tiger.

Rather than reacting, take the awareness inward for a moment. Take a breath and tune into that sense of yourself. Amy talked about coming home to herself. All of us have talked about it. Tune into what it really feels like to be you, what your inner resonance is like, and how that resonates in that situation. From that basis of an inner resonance of harmony and inner resonance of knowing yourself and being attuned to yourself, then respond to the situation.

Rather than reacting from a sense of defending your value, safety, and power, go to that inner field where you’re 100% safe, 100% valuable, and 100% powerful. From that platform, take action. I love doing this with you folks. It’s such a joy because we’re all getting the same experience. Life is an experience and we’re all getting the same experience. I love it. I love you.

What about the one-on-one time between a supervisor and an employee or a leader and somebody who’s working for the leader? What about in that dynamic could we, starting small, do something from a spiritual perspective?

I’ll jump in on that. Another word that feels very real in the realm of spirituality and business is love. We have so many misconceptions about love, but love is really truly the creative force in the universe. What can be powerful is our presence, there’s so much here. If you have an intention to open your heart and in your moments, you open your heart to this person, this moment, and the situation, that’s all the instruction is. Open your heart in this moment. If you’re reading this, try that. If you’re like, “I’m going to open my heart to this,” there’s a shift that happens. In that, things can be transmitted and transformation can be facilitated. That right there is a simple practice. Open your heart to this person, this moment, or this conversation for evolution to happen.

Open your heart to another person. This moment allows evolution to happen. Click To Tweet

I love that.

I had a client executive who was heading into another meeting. She had a contentious relationship with this other person historically. I said, “Let’s give this a try. First off, a few minutes before you go into the meeting, why don’t you start thinking of all the positive qualities of this person? Also, if you can do it, and it’s not woo-woo so give it a try, exude love.” It changed. She emailed me after the meeting. She said, “You’re not going to believe how he responded.” To your point, Amy, yeah.

I’m curious how you’re going to wrap this all up, Andy. You asked a specific question about practically what this means for business. There are some very practical things businesses can do in this regard. One, more transparency. If they’re more transparent, it creates more trust and sheds more light in the corners that don’t get the light. Second, it reduces politics. The more they can reduce politics, then the more they can be. The more they can work together in partnership to create what needs to be created. Those elements are important.

From a spiritual perspective, one thing I look at in my own life is how I am handling things that are being done to me. How am I handling things that are happening outside of me? My reaction or my response to that is a better indication of how I’m doing spiritually than anything I can create on the inside of it. If a collective can do that and a collective can begin to create relationships, a network, or an entity that doesn’t collude, they can be extremely powerful. Yet, it’s so difficult. In a lot of ways, it requires the spirit we’ve been talking about. You don’t even have to use that word because it shows up when people start practicing trust, openness, consistency, transparency, etc.

Agreed. Before we drop off here, I want to give you a little tip. Everybody from a technology standpoint can use their own technology. You can look at your own newsfeeds. Our algorithms are mirrors reflecting back to us. Pay attention. Is the majority of the information that comes through to you negative or is it positive? If it’s negative, my encouragement would be to select one new positive educational piece of information every day.

Slowly, over time, gradually, you’re going to change your own inner and outer look at the world because as you choose positive educational things, your newsfeed will start to bubble more of those up to you. That’s how technology works and how it mirrors back, so use it to your advantage to do one new educational thing a day.

When it comes to businesses and ROI, from my years of experience, if I’m having a conversation with an executive or a CEO of an organization, I will say this to you. When it comes to improved retention due to improved conscious awareness and conscious leaders, when it comes to the ability to come up with creative solutions across all spectrums for your organization, when it comes to improved resilience and your company culture sticking with you with extreme loyalty and respect, and when it improves emotional intelligence of how people respond to each other, I can step back and say, “Maybe it’s that person’s own internal perception. I don’t know what’s happening in their world right now. I don’t know if they’re suffering a divorce. I don’t know if they have a loved one in the hospital. I don’t know.”

We can put compassion forward and respond with compassion and love as you guys have brought to the forefront. Even if you can’t muster love, you can muster compassion. When the guy steers his car in front of you and you have that fear reaction, instead of having that, we can as easily be like, “I hope that they’re okay. I’m so glad I’m okay.” That’s ROI. How do you deny that?

I didn’t write Aileda a check in any respect, but that, Greg, is the exclamation point that I was looking for to wrap this up. With what’s going on in the world and so forth, the ROI is starting to become apparent for us, for spirituality to come into business to bring humanness into the business world. It’s not just the brain, the intellect, and fixing problems, but to bring humanists. In doing so, we’re elevating ourselves as humans here on earth. By doing so, it allows us to keep the world going as it is and allow food on the table, a roof over our heads, and everything to keep existing. We’re going to have to evolve in the way that we do things to make that happen.

That’s truly why I wanted to put this panel together to have this discussion. It’s to create this ripple effect in the world and get people to start thinking this way, acting this way, and so forth in hopes that we as a collective six can contribute to that effort and in hopes that other people will read this and make it a point to start thinking about it, and have their own discussions in this that maybe we can run this notion.

Andy, thank you.

Closing Words

I can’t thank you enough, panelists, for taking the important resource of your time, energy, expertise, and thoughts to contribute to this effort. For you, the audience, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time out of your life or that finite resource in your life called time to tune in. I’m going to go back to Dr. Larry on this because he is in the physics world. I said this before in our coordination call. This is potential energy.

This whole conversation and the creation of this conversation is potential energy. It doesn’t become kinetic until you start sharing it with others and they get to read it, the kinetic energy behind it. That’s the way we get the ripple effect. It’s by sharing it and getting action behind the potentiality of this conversation and these ideas. I encourage you to share it on your social media and wherever else so that we can get this ripple effect going.

That being said, this is a special edition of the episode. We are here every Tuesday with an episode with terrific guests like these five beautiful people who bring their expertise, thoughts, life stories, and how it is they use self-leadership to lead their own lives as well as to lead others in an effort to accomplish goals. That being said, have a great week, and have a great day. We’ll see you next time here on the show. Take care.

Important Links

About Reina Bach

Reina brings over 30 years of experience both as a leader and as a leadership development consultant, executive coach, and facilitator. She has worked in the private sector across many industries in the US, Asia, the UK. A few of her clients include: Oracle, CH2M Hill, Merck, AstraZeneca, Avaya, Ball Corporation, Boeing (Jeppesen), Dow and Salomon Brothers.

She has experience in the public sector, having worked with most cabinet-level federal agencies and several municipalities including The State of Colorado, The City of Fort Collins, The City of Englewood, The City of Denver. She was an adjunct professor at The University of Colorado Business School where she taught classes at the graduate level on topics related to talent acquisition, development, and leadership in organizations.

About Amy Eliza Wong

Amy Eliza Wong is the founder of Always On Purpose®. She is an executive leadership coach, author, speaker, and facilitator working with organizations such as Salesforce, Roku, LinkedIn, Lyft, Genentech, and more.

Amy offers transformative leadership development and cutting-edge communication strategies to executives and corporate teams around the world, as well as institutions including Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

She pulls from various disciplines, studies, and practices to find a consilient approach to achieve flow and create profound impact through the three lenses of Self, Relationships, and Results. As a Conversational Intelligence® certified executive coach with expertise in transpersonal psychology, design thinking, public speaking, and interpersonal neurobiology, Amy has catalyzed transformative growth for hundreds of executives and teams.

She has a passion for helping leaders identify blind spots, reclaim precious time, energy and creative bandwidth, and create next level impact. Her new book, Living On Purpose won 2022 Book of the Year by The Magic Pen.

About Aileda Lindal

Aileda Lindal, a maestro of strategy and human potential, weaves her expertise through the tapestry of business and personal triumph. More than just a strategist, she is a visionary sculptor of talent and ambition.

Aileda has not only advised individuals to ascend to new pinnacles of personal and professional success but has also been the architect behind the long-term aspirations of numerous businesses.

Her guidance is a blend of wisdom and innovation, transforming goals into legacies. In Aileda’s realm, every challenge is an opportunity to create a masterpiece of success.

About Greg Zlevor

Greg Zlevor is the President and Founder of Westwood International. He has over 25 years of experience in executive leadership development and education and has served as a coach, consultant, and facilitator for companies across Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Australia. He is an Amazon 7x Best-Selling Author and a TEDx Speaker.

Under Greg’s leadership, Westwood International has made it its mission to give back, supporting not-for-profit organizations that help homeless children and at-risk youth across the United States, Mexico, Thailand, India, and South America.

He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from Lawrence University and a Masters Degree in Spirituality from Boston College.

About Dr. Larry Farwell

Dr. Larry Farwell is a Harvard-educated neuroscientist and the world’s leading expert on the Science of Creating Miracles. His revolutionary scientific research in neuroscience, quantum physics, and the role of consciousness in life and the universe has introduced a new scientific paradigm. He has developed practical techniques to apply the Science of Creating Miracles in life.

Dr. Farwell has worked with individuals, governments, agencies, high-ranking officials including heads of state, leaders, and organizations throughout the world, including the President of the United States, the US Navy, the FBI, the CIA, and their counterparts around the world. He has published his research in the leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has been featured in major news media worldwide.