Episode 116 – Dr. SriKumar Rao on The Trap of Positive Thinking, becoming Resilient and Success

and how to get out of it is simple I did say it’s easy I said it’s simple and that is to recognize that you right now are a full and complete human being regardless of your external circumstances and I remember thinking that all of this was useful only if you were sitting quietly thinking peaceful thoughts but not when you came to the hurly-burly then it was actually pretty useless but somehow I knew that wasn’t true I knew that this is very useful

maybe even the only thing that was useful I just hadn’t figured out how to make use of it you want something you think if this happens I will be happy you get it and you’re thrilled for a day a week and then it simply becomes part of the background of your life and you move on and now you want something else it’s the experience but we never learn from it that’s the problem suffering begins the moment you label that event this is bad this is terrible

I cannot bear it and the moment you stick that label on it at that instant suffering begins initially when I did that I felt like a fraud because you know how can I teach all of this well I hadn’t figured out how to make use of it but I kinda thought let’s begin and we will kind of muddle away through and learn together and that’s exactly what happened we’re in the human predicament Xavier as long as we’re in the human predicament

stuff will happen there will be serious illness and death there will be relationship problems there will be business reverses there will be financial setbacks all that is part of being in the human condition as these things come about you will deal with them as appropriate but you will be anchored in a very deep sense of well-being that’s what I mean by an ideal life what’s up folks Xavier katana here our episode today’s with dr. shreek Umar Rao

is a quote happiness teacher he is an advisor to senior positions ecute Avene executive at Warner Communications and the publishing company mcgraw-hill he created a popular MBA course creativity and personal mastery he’s written a number of books on this idea of pursuing happiness and how our variations and thinking change the perspective that we take on life we covered many aspects of his work in this conversation I really enjoyed it I

think you guys will enjoy it as well if you like this show get to our patreon page you can support us there get to our Twitter account where we post some of the best content and all that that’s the human XP at the end of those respective websites here is my guest dr. shreek Amaro hopefully you guys enjoy this conversation as much as I did thank you so much for listening

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the human experiences in session my guest for today is dr. Street Kumar Rao dr. Rao thank you so much for being here I’m fascinated by your work tell us a little bit about yourself how you got into this Thank You Savior it’s my pleasure to be on the show I enjoyed meeting you at the mind valley reunion alright how did I get started on this actually it began as a personal quest I came to America as a student I got a PhD in business from Columbia Business

School I worked in corporate America and was hugely successful in my early days and then I got went out by corporate politics I went into a khadeem thinking that there would be no politics in a khadeem boy was I wrong I was dead wrong and I found after some years that I was feeling very sorry for myself Pierce my colleagues had gone far ahead of me financially and in other ways because they remained in the corporate world and I was stagnating and all my life I’d

been doing a lot of reading spiritual biography mystical autobiography they would take me to a very nice place then I came back to the real world and I was stuck and sorry for myself and I remember thinking that all of this was useful only if he was sitting quietly thinking peaceful thoughts but not when you came to the hurly-burly then it was actually pretty useless but somehow I knew that wasn’t true I knew that this is very useful maybe even the only thing

that was useful I just hadn’t figured out how to make use of it so one day I got my idea which is why don’t I take the teachings of the world’s great masters strip them of religious cultural and other connotations and adapt them so that they’re acceptable to intelligent people in a post-industrial society and the thought of doing something like that made me come alive so I created that course and it did well I modified it and offered it again it did better I moved

it to Columbia Business School in 1919 and it exploded it was the only horse at Columbia which is a university wide draw had students from business Law School of International Affairs Graduate School of Arts and Sciences journalism Teachers College all over the place and it got written up you know the New York Times The Wall Street Journal the Financial Times Time magazine fortune Forbes Businessweek and then they just exploded

him took over my life so that’s how it came to be so in your life there was a personal struggle with you know corporate politics and you decided to take these teachings from great masters people that you found were great masters and sort of repackage that into your own work yes initially when I did that I felt like a fraud because you know how can I teach all of this when I hadn’t figured out how to make use of it but I kind of thought let’s begin and we’ll

kind of muddle away through and learn together and that’s exactly what happened you know in your book are you ready to succeed you talk about an ideal life when we talk about an ideal life what kind of factors are we considering and reconsidering happiness success fame money and what are we talking about when we talk about an ideal life all of that Xavier and that’s where the trap is most persons when you talk about an ideal life tend to use outside parameters to

describe that you know how big a house they have what kind of relationship they have with their partner what kind of relationship they have with their children how much power they have what’s their position in an organizational hierarchy how much influence they have and all kinds of things like that I used to be like that too I discovered that that’s flat-out wrong the ideal life actually is if you wake up every morning and you have deep meaning and purpose

you feel deep down that you are exactly where you were supposed to be if you feel deep down a very very very strong sense of I am okay a feeling of contentment not a minor contentment which is like you don’t wish for anything difference but a really deep rooted sense of well-being and this sense of well-being never leaves you we’re in the human predicament Xavier as long as we’re in the human predicament stuff will happen there will be serious

illness and death there will be relationship problems there will be business reverses there will be financial setbacks all that is part of being in the human condition as these things come about you will deal with them as appropriate but you will be anchored in a very deep sense of well-being that’s what I mean by an ideal life there was a TED talk that you did called plug into your hardwired happiness you you talk about how happiness is part of our innate nature

how is it that happiness is hardwired into our DNA well why do you think this is so oh well it’s not I think this is so it’s I know this is so and actually I’ve got a very simple method by which you can discover that for yourself and anybody who’s listening have you ever been in a situation where you were struck by some scene of tremendous beauty maybe a snow-covered mountain maybe a rainbow maybe the storm-tossed portion something like that and it’s

Truckee is so spectacularly beautiful that he took you outside of yourself to a place of great calm in serenity virtually all of us can remember some such instance what happened at that instant is that somehow we were able to accept the universe exactly as it was we didn’t wish for more snow on the mountain we didn’t wish for the rainbow to be 200 yards away from where it is and the moment we accepted the universe exactly as it was and we didn’t place a

demand on it that it has to be different then we didn’t have to do anything to experience the joy that’s an innate part of us it kind of rose up in enveloped us we have that capacity right now because our life right now with all of the problems that we have all of the problems we think we have but we are resisting and in that resistance we are trying to control the universe and we get into what I call the if-then model which is if this happens then I

will be happy and the if-then model is flawed that’s how we learn to be unhappy and because we have learned to be unhappy we don’t experience the happiness which is an innate part of us it’s a great segue there also in this TED talk you talk about mental models you know and this is affecting the happiness or the mood structure of everyone anyone who’s holding these models can you define what these different models are please well there’s

a whole pile of models each one of us has dozens possibly hundreds of models we’ve got a model for everything we’ve got a model for how do I get a job how do I get ahead in my job how do I build my career how do I find a person to marry how do I bring up my children how do I pick a movie that I’m going to see bigger dozens of models and these models may or may not be in conflict with each other the problem is not that we have mortals the problem is that we

don’t recognize that these are models we think that this is the way the world is but this is not the way the world is this is our model of the way the world is and the more we believe in that model the more evidence we seem to get that this in fact is the way the world is and we construct a silo into which we lock ourselves we do it to ourselves but we think it happened to us one of the most powerful models is what I call the if-then model and if-then model

basically says if something happens then I will be happy and that’s not true okay but we believe that it’s true and we keep getting stuck in that that’s how we learn to be unhappy so what I’m hearing is that our innate nature is just happiness just you know we’ll end it we are in this lap but in the sense that we understand it because in the West we tend to talk about happiness in a very trivial terms you know I had a great ice cream so I’m

happy you had a wonderful dinner so I’m happy and that’s not what I’m talking about I’m not talking about the momentary flashes of pleasure or the momentary flashes when you’re not actively unhappy I’m talking about as I mentioned earlier a deep sense of well-being a knowledge that you are okay and this is a you know comes from deep within your gut and spills out and occupies every part of you that’s what I’m talking about that is a very late nature so I thought

the human condition was suffering you know I thought the human condition is to like to air is to be human kind of thing so you’re saying that this idea of we want the next thing with its it’s like if I’m if I make this much money a year then I will be happy but then you make that much money a year and it doesn’t it doesn’t change your level of happiness exactly correct in fact in my programs I have an exercise I don’t do it very

often but I’ve done it many times in the past where I have people actually go back ten years right now you’re a bundle of if I have this if this happens I will be happy and ten years ago you were a bundle of if this happens I will be happy so go back and reconstruct your life ten years ago consult your old Diaries talk to people who knew at that time speak to your parents and reconstruct whatever what were the things that you were hung up on ten

years ago also pretty good that today you have most of them or many of them and it doesn’t make any difference to your level of well-being you simply want different things now so this is a classic example of you want something you think if this happens I’ll be happy you get it and you’re thrilled for a day a week and then it simply becomes part of the background of your life and you move on and now you want something else it’s the own experience but we never

learned from it that’s the problem you know do you think that our society is built on this sort of if-then principle of course it is we have this tremendous industry the advertising industry that is constantly telling us that if we want to be fulfilled we need to get X whatever X is you know whether it’s cosmetics whether it’s alcohol whether it’s a drug that will combat your erectile dysfunction or what whatever it is we’re always bombarded by

stuff and the implicit promise and all of that is if you get this then you will be happy as fascinating I really find it interesting and you talk about how ambition is is bad for you know I find myself to be very ambitious and why is this bad for you all right actually we need to be a little more nuanced about that so I’m not saying that ambition is bad for you I am saying that ambition has to be harnessed properly otherwise it can be bad to you

okay by definition ambition means that I am unhappy with where I am or if I am not unhappy with where I am I believe that I will be happier someplace else and therefore I’m going to go to that someplace else whether whatever the ambition is for whether it’s the accumulation of wealth of power of Fame you know I have to do that in order for me to be happy and ambition in that sense is designed to make you unhappy where you are and this is simply buying

into the if-then mortal the way to use ambition is different and then it stops being ambition which is I am perfectly content and fulfilled where I am but I have a vision of this is the way the world should be and I’m going to strive to make that vision happen and I’m going to strive to make that vision happen not because if that vision happens I will be happier but because you know I’ve got to do something and this is my purpose in life

and I will try to make that happen if it does wonderful if it doesn’t wonderful it does not in any way affect my well-being and if that is the attitude by which with which you start then hate your gold it’s a very zen sort of way of being you know I mean it we are so stuck in this sort of carrot you know in front of us and we’re on this treadmill the carrot stays this sort of the same distance you know so I mean what is a solution to this how do we solve this

issue is it part of our mental conditioning it is definitely part of our conditioning we have been conditioned from a very young age by everybody our parents teachers coaches friends media they all work together to deliver the same message and how to get out of it is simple I didn’t say it’s easy I said it’s simple and that is to recognize that you right now are a full and complete human being regardless of your external circumstances

and you act out of that fullness and when you do that you will find that life slips into place in marvellous fashions but understanding intellectually that you’re a full and complete human being and experiencing that for yourself are two very very very different things so I mean are we talking about outcome independence here we’re talking about it’s being detached from yes the results of something and and just sort of being in the now we are talking about outcome

independence I am going to try to do something I want to be CEO my company and I’m going to try my level best and do what it takes to be CEO and if I succeed wonderful if I don’t succeed wonderful see the mistake most of us make Savior is we live our lives the following way I set a goal for myself I reach my goal life the blast or I set a goal to myself and I failed life sucks so we live on a sinusoidal curve oscillating between

elation and despair and we spend far more time at the despair end of the spectrum that’s a lousy way to live life the way out of that is to invest in the process do not invest in the outcome its outcome independent if I succeed wonderful if I don’t succeed wonderful the mistake we make is the following we think that the value of goals is achieving the goal but in reality the value of the goal is that it’s sex direction and will you try

your level best to reach the goal the benefit to you is not whether you reach the goal or not because that is something that is outside your control the benefit to you is the learning and growth that happen in you as you try your level best to achieve the goal so you cannot lose if you succeed super that’s a bonus if you don’t succeed you still have the learning in growth so you win you cannot lose so this is an idea of the construct being built in our mind

that if said event happens then I’ve you know quote one if this doesn’t happen then I’ve lost and then we sort of act out based on that mental model exactly correct interesting so you know you talk about having a grand vision to work towards can you give us more information about this grand vision idea yeah see what happens is we tend to live in a very be centered will Xavier and by that I mean no matter what happens we very quickly

bring it down to what’s the impact on me in big things and small things for example your spouse says gee you know I’m going to be very late so I will night let’s assume it’s just pauses to him to make dinner and your sports calls and says hey you know I’m going to be very late sorry I can’t make dinner and you remediate thought well what am I going to do am I going to eat out or do I take left or are there any leftovers at the refrigerator or what do I do

and your thought goes there immediately or your partner says gets a great job offer and you immediately think in terms of how is this going to affect our relationship you possibly use the company and you immediately think about who’s the next person going to be and what’s my relationship going to be with that person so no matter what happens we bring it down to what’s the impact on me so when we live in a me central universe we are going to live an essentially

mediocre existence punctuated with flashes of pleasure but by-and-large meaningless that’s just the way it is so if you want to get to the vision I laid off and laid out earlier about an ideal life you’ve got to find a cause which is bigger than you are a cause which brings a greater good to a greater community and you have tremendous flexibility in defining both the greater good and the greater community and unless you can find something like that such that you

can subsume if not your whole life at least a big chunk of it you’re not going to reach the vision I laid out that is the vision I have so I have a favorite story there and this story consists of mele Valley it’s set in medieval England where an architect is going to the site of construction of a great Cathedral and it comes across three people each of whom is doing the exact same thing they a block of stone and putting it on a

bigger block of stone and beating it with a hammer till it breaks and he has the first one what he’s doing in his this canal golly see I’m breaking rocks and the second one says I’m helping build a wall behind me and the third one says I’m helping build a grand Cathedral and when it’s over people are going to come from all over the world and they will be inspired and I will have had a small role to play in that the third one was the only one who understood or

recognized the architect and he said truth be told I don’t like doing it it’s back-breaking labor and I can get better wages for lesser effort I’m only doing it because I want to learn will you teach me to build a cathedral and 20 years from that date the guy who was breaking rocks was dead you know he no longer had the strength to swing a hammer and he died the guy who was helping build the wall behind him was living a life of desperate poverty but

the guy who was helping build the cathedral was on his way to building his first Cathedral and that’s pretty much what happens in our lives every day when we get up we have a choice that we can break rocks or we can build a cathedral and what I’m saying is you have to identify the Cathedral that you’re going to build and you’re the only person who can do that I can’t do that for you I can point out however that is very important that you learn and define the

cathedral that you are building and when you do that every day becomes a blast and if you don’t succeed in doing that you know you’re subject to mood swings and you go up and down and by and large you live a mediocre existence now one Cathedral is something that all of us are building whether we know it or not and that is the Cathedral of our life where we are fulfilled and find deep meaning that’s a cathedral and every single one

of us Inc is engaged in building it whether or not we know it and if you are consciously building it it becomes a so much easier and you so much more effective at doing so if I make sense yeah it does I mean I I follow you I want to play devil’s advocate a little bit and let’s say you’re in a hypothetical situation where you go to the doctor because of pain somewhere and you are diagnosed with cancer how would that be a positive

situation how is that something that you would regard as a positive thing depends on how you experience it let me give you a couple of examples when Viktor Frankl was in the concentration camp he met this girl with whom he had a long conversation and she told him that she was kind of glad that what happened to her did because she was quite a spoiled brat and she recognized and acknowledged that and said if this hadn’t happened to me a spiritual

dimension that I am now aware of might never have come my way and it was that an incidents like that that let Viktor Frankl to his lifelong quest which is why is it that under conditions of conditions of extreme adversity some people flourish and thrive and others fall apart and Christopher Reeve in an interview that he gave shortly before he died said that there was far more meaning in his life after the writing accident than when he was Superman

so yes it’s not nice to have cancer and obviously if you could go around and change it you would but the fact that you have cancer does not mean you cannot have a meaningful life and it is your challenge to work that cancer diagnosis into it do not let it may make you dysfunctional but instead use it to accelerate your group and when you approach it from that perspective it happens how do we start to switch this perspective how do we start to be more

in the moment be more in the now well in my book are you ready to succeed there is a whole bond there are a whole bunch of exercises and cumulatively those exercises engineer a mind shift and I simply mention my book because I organized those exercises in a progression but there are lots of different things that you can do which will essentially have the same impact you have to learn to think differently you have to learn to identify the mental

models which are not serving you well and replace them with newer ones which take you in the direction that I have indicated and if you are gently persistent in doing this you will find that a switch does occur you will see the world differently and as multiple mortals of yours are replaced with better models you become a different person why is this so difficult for most people why do you think we’re trapped I mean other than the influence of society

our friends peer pressure and our own sort of internal thinking why do you think this is so difficult for people to do I don’t think it’s very difficult for people to do Savior it’s simply that people are not aware that there is this proven methodology that they can adopt and they haven’t tried it just pejorative people who take my programs find that they have major breakthroughs and quite a number of them feel that their entire lives have been transformed

it’s a proven process you just have to follow it and the problem is not that it’s difficult the problem is people are not aware that this can be done and they’re not aware that there are proven methodologies for doing this so it’s an education problem not a it’s a very difficult thing problem how do we change the rules of the game where you know we’re winning is not mandatory that is a very good question and the short answer to that is for people to

check here is something to think about let me present to you two situations one situation is where you’re feeling extremely good because you’ve won something you’ve been promoted to see you you’ve won a major Telus stool demand and they’re all these people applauding and say hey this is absolutely wonderful you did it and in other words you’re feeling very good about yourself because there is some victory and this victory is good because there are people all

around you applauding and saying yes yes more power to you and the other is think of a time when you were sitting quietly by yourself and watching a beautiful rainbow or you were having a beer with a very good friend of yours and the conversation was running deep and you weren’t trying to one-up him he was right to one-up you you were simply relaxing in conversation with a good friend so imagine those two sequences and say which one do I really care more about

which one feeds the soul and if you do that you will find that what really feeds your soul is when you have that internal sense of fulfillment and that internal sense of fulfillment is not dependent upon somebody else applauding you and when you recognize that then you start moving towards more of that and less of the other but we live in a society which is stacked against this realization so it absolutely is not easy when we started this conversation you

said that you know you weren’t happy with your place in corporate America you know why do I not just adopt one of these models that you yourself teach and you know be okay an independent of the outcome of the corporate politics that you face if I’d been aware of these models at that time that’s exactly what I would have done okay fair enough um I want to understand you know creativity the idea of passion and you know how that links into this

because you you talk about you know finding your passion do what you love this is what we hear a lot what do you advise people in this sort of feedback loop this is not gonna sit well with a lot of people who listen to you who are listening to this podcast as a view but I think that this business of finding your passion is something that is seriously seriously misleading and it gets a lot of people hung up and I think does damage to many many people you’ve

got to understand that passion does not exist outside you you don’t find your passion by you know searching for a passion does not exist in the job it exists inside you and if you don’t succeed in finding a way to ignite it within you right where you are you’re never gonna find it outside so your job is to ignite the passion that is inside you and not go out in a search for passion but when you succeed in igniting the passion within you you’ll be

surprised at how quickly it takes over your life and it will rearrange the world outside you know you talk about positive thinking and how positive thinking and I love this is how positive thinking can be bad for you and now we’ve almost stat established this sort of Church of you know positive thinking we have to be positive all the time what do you think this relates to and how do we get past this positive thinking actually Xavier is a variation of the

if-then thinking in our heads we need to think positive because something happened which is negative and because something happened which is negative we have to counteract it by thinking positive it’s a little bit like you’re on a teeter-totter and you’re putting all the weight on one side of the teeter-totter which is the positive side very difficult to do and it doesn’t work far better than positive thinking is to simply label things as they are you know

we have a habit of saying some things are good and some things are bad and understand that whenever an event occurs it doesn’t cause suffering suffering begins the moment you label that event this is bad this is terrible I cannot bear it and the moment you stick that label on it at that instant suffering begins so for example you lose your job okay you’ve got a lot of free time now but if you lose your job and say oh my god you know how am I going to

make my mortgage payments my kids college tuition is you this is terrible and the moment you say this is terrible it’s at that instant that suffering begins so can you imagine any situation can you remember any situation in your life that at the time it happened you thought was terrible but you can now look back upon it and say hey this is actually pretty good most people can so something happened in the past then at the time it happened you thought was

terrible but now you can look back and say it was pretty good why are you in a hurry to label this bad whatever is happening to you can you envisage some scenario by which in X years it could actually turn out to be pretty good and if they want said that is yes why are you in a hurry to label it bad and if you take the next stage and say is there anything that I can do to actually make it good and all of a sudden you moved from the realm of despair to the realm

of possibility this is something that is in every single one of us it’s it’s something that we can all do and when you do that you get out of the positive thinking route because you don’t have to think positive because nothing negative happens something happens you don’t call it negative and if you don’t call it negative you don’t need to invoke positive thinking it’s amazing I mean it makes sense it fits you know and let me go a little

further of course of course imagine a child walking so typically this happens when an infant is somewhere between 12 and 16 months old and 10 and 16 months old and it gets up and or tries to get up and take a step in fall style and you know she cries and mommy or daddy runs up and say so what happened sweetheart and kisses supported makes it well and then she gets up again and falls again in Christ again after this happens three or four times mommy

and daddy stop rushing to pick her up and she stops crying and she puts one unsteady foot in front of another unsteady foot and in bits and pieces eventually learns to walk now what happens in each time an infant falls down you say oh my god she failed she failed yet again this is terrible what kind of impact will it have on her let’s get a psychiatrist to counsel her he imagined that scenario ridiculous isn’t it it’s exactly the same thing going

through life stuff is gonna happen when stuff happens just label it stuff happened and move on and when you do that you don’t need positive thinking oh please continue I mean you know because I think it’s important to really understand this and understand why positive thinking can have a detrimental effect and why our culture is so based on this idea of being positive or no just just thinking positive all the time first of all is very difficult if

something happens and you want to think positive you’re somehow taking something that you have labeled bad and trying to spin it into something good and sometimes it just doesn’t work things remain that the way they are but if instead of labeling it bad you simply label it as this happened so I got cancer I have 20 days to live I could go oh my god this is so absolutely terrible only at 20 days to live there so many dreams I have and all

of the things I want to accomplish and so on this is terrible and all of a sudden I’m spiraling down to despair and probably taking a lot of my friends relatives and people close to me on that downward spiral but if instead I simply say okay you know yes I didn’t want to die in 20 days but at 20 days is what I have 20 days is what I have this is this situation I’m faced with is there anything I can do in terms of experimental medical treatments or

whatever to push that 20 days outward and am I willing to explore it and if not well I have 20 days how best am I going to make use of those 20 days and if I do that then all of a sudden it’s not a tragedy this happened we always have the capacity to think of things not as this is terrible but this happened this is something that we have to actively cultivate and the way you cultivate that is to be thinking about it all the time so if anybody is

listening to this podcast and there is something going on in your life and you’re about it classified as a tragedy Israel labeling it a tragedy simply label it as this happened okay I will grant you the nude rather that still happen but it did happen so this happened what are you now going to do about it and when you do that you move to a completely different emotional domain now this might be a little bit off-topic but you know I want to ask you

about the idea of you know destiny or fate and you know do you subscribe to these sort of narratives that our life is an architectural design that is outside of us and that we are sort of following this path where free will is you know kind of a not so much not so clear all right these Xavier are all stories that we tell ourselves I have complete free will to determine what I am going to do that’s a model I am bound by my destiny

and fate and there is nothing that I can do to change my fate that is a model whichever model you hold if you look for evidence you will find plenty of evidence that supports that this in fact is the way the world is so my solution and this is what I advocate to anybody listening to this podcast is recognize that either of these is just a model if it is a model that works for you by all means adopted if it’s a model that doesn’t work t work for you there are

alternate models and you can pick up any one of those so don’t waste a whole lot of time thinking about you know are you constrained or do you have free will exercise free will that you think you have and if it is constrained by destiny then you may or may not recognize the constraint but just move as if you had free will and if you get the outcome you wanted wonderful if you don’t get the outcome you want it’s still wonderful

you still have the learning in growth from the effort that you put in and that is something that every one of us can do how important is in a surrender to this process surrender is very important but most people misunderstand surrender they think surrender means and I’m gonna lie back and not do anything and basically become a vegetable or complacent that’s not what true surrender is true surrender is complete acceptance of the

fact that outcomes are outside your control and they have always been outside your control and they will always be outside your control that is the nature of the universe we reign but because the outcome is outside our control does not mean that we do not try our level best to achieve an outcome we are in the human predicament and as long as we’re in the human predicament we have a vision of this is the way this is the way the world should be as long as

we have a vision of this is the way the world should be we will try our level best to achieve that vision that is incumbent upon us surrender means that we accept that we may or may not reach our vision but that does not absolve us of the responsibility you try our level best to achieve that and when we try our level best to achieve that our benefit the gain that we have is the growth that is enjoined it that is engendered in us

by the effort that we put in and when we recognize that and work in that manner we find that every day is a blast so that is what I mean by surrender surrender is acknowledging that they counter that the outcome is something over which we do not have any control we never had any control and we never will have any control but we act as if we have control while accepting that we don’t have control this is something that’s very important we embrace the

paradox and I find it intriguing and you know when when I heard your your lecture at the conference I I really wanted to bring you on to this program for that reason and something else that you talk about is this search for meaning you know you brought up Victor Frank – Frankel earlier the banns quest for meaning you know why is this necessary why do we build this construct of creating meaning for our lives like you’re taking me deeper and deeper

Xavier’s right out and contradict myself we as human beings are stuck in our minds and we have this thing called logic and we are constantly trying to use logic to solve all problems and we have this insatiable quest which says why did this happen what is the meaning of this why is there so much sorrow and suffering in the world why did God make the world and did a whole bunch of things and logic of course always takes us into paradox you know we have

invented a god and this God is all-powerful well if God is all-powerful can he construct a wall that’s so high that he cannot jump over it and we always run into these conundrums of logic and behind all of that is the insistence that there has to be a meaning there has to be a purpose what if there isn’t because ultimately what happens there here is that there is this great unity which has been called different things in different

generations but it’s an underlying substratum it’s like the ocean and each one of us is a wave on that ocean the wave comes out of the ocean it exists in time and space and it sinks back into the ocean so the wave comes from the ocean goes back into the ocean and is the ocean so if you identify with the ocean then there is no problem there is no sorrow there is no suffering the ocean has been always will be so that is the substratum that we’re all

a part of and the problem is that we don’t identify with the ocean we identify with the and the wave is in time in space and it will disappear so it’s from the wave that we say why did this happen what is the meaning what is the purpose and maybe there is no purpose you know there is this ocean it always was it always will be is playing around endlessly in innumerable permutations and combinations and that’s just the way it is

it’s it’s gonna happen what is the meaning and what is the purpose of all of this that’s an intellectual trap in which you could find yourself stuck forever yeah like you said you know it’s it’s simple but it doesn’t make it easy I think that’s an important distinction I did say it was simple I never said it was easy you talk about this whole process in in your courses in your books and is there something that you’ve learned through

the years that people do or repeat often that you see many people making the mistake of that you you think is common one very common mistake that people make and I make it myself is that we believe the world is real but you know there is this thing and it happened to me and I didn’t have anything to do with it the world is real but it is not the reality it is a reality and we constructed that a reality with our mental chatter and

our mental models and if we don’t like the way the world is then we can deconstruct the parts of it that are not working and reconstruct it and we can do this again and again this is simple I’ve explained explicit to you in 30 seconds or less but this is something that actually would solve a great many problems that a great many people have and they never recognize that there is such a simple answer to their salute such a simple

solution to their problems a lot of this is reinforced by the people around us the people that yes are close to us by you know yeah get that promotion and you know I find many people when they do get that promotion or that raise they’re much of much less you know happy if that’s their goal they’re much less content with their lives well after this idea of some arbitrary accomplishment that they placed in front of them absolutely correct I want to ask you

about you talked about mastery and different masters that you studied was there someone that you gained the most from oh yes I’ll give you a couple what are the people who had very very profound influence of me was an Indian sage called Ramana Maharshi and if I had to pick a single figure who I’d say was a seminal influence on me that would be Ramana Maharshi two other people who had a profound impact to me one is a Jesuit priest his name is father Anthony de

Mello and the other is Baba Ram Dass who wrote the book be here now which is one of the big books to come out of the counterculture revolution of the 60s and he that and the teachings of rambha still have a profound impact on me and there are many others and for the others what I would recommend to your readers is go to my website which is www.hyken.com the manifesto and in there I have is a bibliography and a section of that bibliography is called

life-changing books and that will give you a list of thinkers who have influenced me doctor I found this conversation really fascinating and if there’s someone listening to the show that is focused on that outcome dependence and they’re looking for that that next push for their job their their their career oriented and what do you say to that that type of thinking what do you say to that mental model what I would say is hey listen the important

thing is not whether you get that job or that promotion or whatever it is you’re looking for the important thing is do you have a deep sense of well-being are you anchored in that the knowledge that you’re okay you have always been okay and you always will be okay and that is where you want to get into and getting a job or not getting the job either way is not going to get you there that is something that you have to realize internally focus your attention on

trying to get to that space and the job situation will take care of itself just one last question here you know I want to talk about gratitude when this this to me is very important to you really bring this up and talk about this you mentioned this in your book and in your work you know how important is it for us to be just simply grateful for the things in our lives I think that it’s extremely important for us to be grateful in my book are you ready to

succeed I have a whole section on appreciation and gratitude and I want to go to the question that you just asked me you said how important is it for us to be grateful for the stuff that happens to us or the stuff that we have that’s a very good starting point but it’s only a starting point because whatever you’re grateful for can be stripped from you so you’re grateful for good health and you get hit by a truck and become a quadriplegic you’re grateful because you

have a home to live over and you know there is a tornado or a massive volcanic eruption and your home is gone whatever you’re grateful for can be stripped from you so eventually I would like everyone who’s on this podcast to be grateful period to be grateful not grateful for so this is actually an elaboration and a further step it’s okay to be grateful for something as a baby step is starting point but eventually you want to be

grateful not grateful for I love it doctor I really really appreciate your time today sir where can working people get to your work where can people get to the website and find your work okay the easiest way is for someone to go to my website and that’s WWE raw Institute th e REO Institute com and when they go there there is a button called join our community and if they click on that and put in their email address and other details then they will hear from me on

my website also is my blog and they can you know it goes back a couple of years and there are many many entries so they can actually read my blog there and it will periodically hear from me if they like this podcast or the kind of views that I am talking about I also have programs both online and live programs and details of that or on my website so if they find that this calls to them they have an opportunity you go deeper sure are there in any events

because I know you travel around a bit are there any events that your speaking at coming up there are always events that I’m speaking yet some of them are open some of them are closed and the open events I will I do list on my website if they’re not a mailing list then they will hear about if they go to be join our community button and click it and if they register then they’ll learn about my open events great we will for sure direct people to that doctor

out thank you so much for your time please visit dr. Rao’s site we will make that link available for you below the book is called are you ready to succeed and Xavier you might want to direct them to my other book also it’s called happiness at work and happiness at work has many more exercises as well we will for sure do that dr. out thank you so much again we are going to get out of here thank you so much for listening you will hear from us next week

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