How to Activate Boundless Leadership to Shift from Survival to Flourishing with Joseph Loizzo and Elazar Aslan

Ashish Kothari:

Hi, Joe. Hi, Elazar. It's so lovely to have you with us on our Happiness Squad Podcast. Thank you for joining and sharing insights from your life's work and this beautiful book that you sent me, Boundless Leadership. I have to tell you, I sat in for six hours. I was reading the thing from cover to cover.

I didn't plan to do six hours that morning, but that's where I found myself because I was so taken by your book. So thank you for joining us.

Joseph Loizzo:

Thank you. Thank you for inviting us. It's a pleasure to meet you and to be part of this.

Ashish Kothari:

A question to you: what inspired you both to collaborate and write Boundless Leadership at this moment?

Elazar Aslan:

You know, Ashish, the book is actually based on a program called Balanced Leadership that we created. The genesis of that program was that in my personal business career—this was in the days when everybody still wore suits to go to the office—there were all the machinations that every corporation was having.

For me, it just didn't sit well. The “C word” then was competition. Collaboration was seen as softness. You play hard, you work hard. The idea of balance was for sissies. You work all night on a deck and wear it like a badge of honor the next day.

It was so askew. It wasn't making a lot of sense, and yet, during my vacations, I started looking at meditations and doing silent retreats. That felt really natural. You could feel the connection between people, the sense of collaboration, and how useful it was to be kind. There was nothing weak about compassion.

You could see the two worlds. The idea for me was, we've got to be able to bring this into the corporate world. That was a long journey. Fortunately, I had met Joe at the same time, and he was already doing that kind of work. So when I went to Joe, it was like, we have to bring this into the business world.

I'll let Joe explain his journey into that overlap.

Joseph Loizzo:

Thanks. I've always felt—my father was a doctor and psychiatrist—and I saw how this mentality creeps into all of our professions and lives. Work, work, work. Forget about relationships, forget about connection.

I felt that if I was going to go into medicine, I really wanted to be sure I brought in something that allowed me to stay human and allowed me to give others the space to become more human together.

I also ran into Buddhism. That was what brought us together, actually, in college. That was a long time ago, as you can see.

This was before the mindfulness revolution. But with the science, the dialogues with His Holiness and the research showing that meditative practices are not fluff and they're not just rituals...

Ashish Kothari:

The most powerful rewiring practices for our brains.

Joseph Loizzo:

Exactly. Back then we didn’t know that. I felt it. As that began to happen, the two parts of my career and training came together. That was around the time Elazar and I met. I was developing a Center for Meditation and Healing at Columbia Presbyterian.

Eventually, I developed a nonprofit to train. What I realized is that in order for caregivers to embody this whole different culture or way of being, they really needed in-depth training. I created the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science to provide that training for professionals.

Of course, we had a lot of businesspeople come in—coaches or people in life transition, career transition, trying to figure themselves and their lives out. I totally got it, and I was very relieved and glad Elazar introduced himself and his mission and project because corporations are so important to our lives and our society.

The structure and logic of leadership as usual is really running our lives. So the idea of developing a program that could reeducate and help businesspeople transform to be able to live a different kind of culture—connection, compassion, collaboration, contribution—all those C words, that was really inspiring. That’s the story.

Ashish Kothari:

It's beautiful. It's so needed. I just released a TED Talk three or four weeks ago. It'll come out in a couple of weeks. The talk was about the fact that our workplaces—where we spend over 90,000 hours, a third of our lives, most of our waking hours during the day—have become these massive places of human suffering rather than human flourishing.

We are more prosperous than we've ever been, yet we are creating more strife and suffering in the workplace. It's so important because, as you write about in your book and as I talk about, it comes from a fundamental way we all experience the world. These beliefs we are living into are causing more harm than good.

That's why I couldn’t put this book down. I was reading through all of the different practices of the mind, the heart, and the body that you've put together into what you're calling Boundless Leadership. It allows us to activate a different way of being—a different way of being, showing up, and collaborating to create massive value for all.

t—you wrote the book around: 2021

Elazar Aslan:

We did our first program in: 2009

program pre-pandemic—around: 2019

Ashish Kothari:

So about four or five years already. Reflections on how that work—the three disciplines of mind, heart, and body—are even more needed today in a world where AI is posing an ever-increasing threat to jobs and ways of operating. Why are these three even more important now?

Joseph Loizzo:

Do you want me to start with that, El?

Elazar Aslan:

Yeah, Joe, why don't you.

Joseph Loizzo:

I think our whole modern culture—so-called civilization—is a move away from centering humanity. Science doesn't want the subjective element; it feels it's unreliable. Increasingly, our sense of the future has moved toward technology and material wealth, assuming that if we had enough power and wealth, then we would be healthy, happy humans.

Of course, what we've found is quite the opposite. We have the wealth and power, but we're even more unhappy than many traditional people in many traditional societies. Science has taught us that the core values fostering flourishing—connection, belonging, contribution, presence—really require us to turn attention inward.

In my view, AI is the ultimate example of this. We're going to eliminate humans; we don't even need them. The machine is as smart as a human. Of course, it isn't—maybe eventually it will be—but if it's not a smart human programming it, I'm not sure that's going to be much better.

Everything that happens in our culture is done by humans. If the caliber of our human potential and capacity isn't higher, improved, or liberated—if it's just neglected, oppressed, and eroded—then what we're doing may seem to work well, but it isn't going to work toward flourishing, as you pointed out.

Ashish Kothari:

Elazar, what do you think?

Elazar Aslan:

Yeah. I'm sure you believe this as well. AI is an issue, but it's just another manifestation of the core problem, which is, if we're having changes that we can't control, we usually handle that with stress.

It just increases the stress we already have and may turn our stress into overwhelm. We can address stress either by hiding, running away, or just doing more and more, trying to get ahead of that stress.

But if you look at the totality of the human and break it into simple things—there's the mind of the human, the heart of the human, what we feel and how we experience, and the body of the human, the energy that we carry in our bodies.

If that's one way to break down the human, and you optimize each of these disciplines—the mind, the heart, and the body—now, to your point, we're showing up in the world at our best. Whatever the stimuli for that stress or overwhelm might be, we're better prepared for it than ever before because our body parts, if you will, what makes us whole, are already at their best.

So we are at our best. When that stress is really reduced and we enter into the stage of flourishing, it feeds our sense of wellness and our sense of being in purpose. It just becomes this positive root.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. I'm just curious about your reflections. I've thought about it. We actually had Rasmus Hougaard, who runs Potential Project, on our podcast about six or seven episodes ago. He wrote a book called More Human, and they've been doing work around bringing mindfulness practices into corporate life for a long while.

It made me reflect. There were two things that really stood out when it comes to technology. We humans have been amazing at inventing technology, but not necessarily using it to further the human race.

Starting all the way from splitting the atom and starting the biggest Cold War, we've produced more nuclear weapons to destroy the earth hundreds, if not thousands of times over, rather than creating an unbelievable source of energy. The same story with social media. The same story now with AI.

That’s where I think there is both an opportunity. This technology can truly do 25, 30, 40 percent of what people do, which means it can free up capacity. It can either help us give people back a day so we can keep doing what we're doing but in four days, reduce the level of busyness, and allow people to go from human doings to human beings.

Or we can fire them and just drive more profits. Or we can say, “In the end, we started this business to make an impact in the world. If I can do 30 percent more impact, why don’t I drive more impact in the world?”

All those three are roads we can go down. We can fire people, we can give people time back, or we can actually use people and that capacity to do even more positive impact in the world. All of those are choices we can make.

But today, the majority of companies seem to be choosing choice number one. “Let me fire people because I don’t need them. I can have most programming done by AI, I can have a lot of marketing done by AI, etc.”

That’s where I think the work you all are doing, and the work we are doing, is so powerful. Because with the right level of consciousness, with the right level of perspective, I feel there's an opportunity to use AI to become more human rather than replace more humans.

Joseph Loizzo:

I very much agree with you, Ashish. I think the potential of not feeling like we're just repositories of information and skill would free our minds, time, and hands to learn how to be more of what we can be.

I think the key thing that drives the engine of current business as usual is that our whole culture—our modern culture—is driven by stress and trauma. It’s driven by a sense of scarcity, a sense of being uncomfortable in my skin, a sense of fear of others. It brings out all of these destructive forces inside of us.

Now, this isn't just metaphorical. We have all the science that shows this is true. On the other hand, it’s almost as if we've never seriously entertained or discovered there's a whole other side to our potential.

It may not be the default side because, given negativity bias, we tend toward worst-case and self-protection. But with training, with support and encouragement, we can learn to really shift out of stress as a way of being.

That’s the antithesis of the social Darwinist philosophy that’s been running this—only a few people are going to make it, only a few countries, only a few civilizations are going to make it to the top, and whatever gets us there is the good thing.

We've seen that just keeps us all caught in this struggle to survive instead of asking us to switch channels: “Enough. We've survived. How about thriving?”

Of course, the challenge there is, as you're suggesting, is that thriving requires training. Human beings don’t just thrive.

Ashish Kothari:

Our brains are wired for fear and safety, not for happiness and thriving.

Joseph Loizzo:

Right. It’s in there as a potential, but it has to be activated, chosen, and explicitly cultivated.

Elazar Aslan:

You know, it's funny. I think one of the core dilemmas here is we're wired for the negative for survival, but we're built for the positive. We're built for connection. We're built for flourishing. That’s how we're built.

It's just that our socialization, plus some of the hardwiring, means we're following a program that is so outdated for who we are and what we are actually built for. I think that's both the issue and the opportunity—when humans start seeing, “Oh, the other way is actually more me.”

Even though my whole life has been about performance—“I am my performance”—and hence the stress and the overwhelm, once I realize I am not that, I am much more than that, the excitement about flipping it is what drives everything.

Ashish Kothari:

 Absolutely. So let's go into the three red pills rather than the blue pills, borrowing from the Matrix analogy. There's a mind pill, a heart pill, and a body pill. They, of course, are all related—they're integrated, we all know that.

But let's start with some of the practices you talk about on mind—self-awareness and clarity. What are some of the practices within that that can start to help us move from surviving to thriving?

Elazar Aslan:

I think it’s big enough that we’ll both have an angle on it. As you know, this core issue is self-awareness. I think it's part of the center of your model as well, because that's how we keep improving. Without that self-awareness, we're as blind as we act.

One of the things that is both the opportunity and the challenge in self-awareness is understanding that all of us live with biases. Some are hardwired, like the negativity bias, and some are learned. I believe there's someone who documented 186 of these biases.

If you don't have the self-awareness and you’re bombarded by these biases in your life, without even being aware that you have them, how are you ever going to get to clarity and see things as they are?

Self-awareness is the key. In our approach in Balanced Leadership, each of the disciplines has a trait that you build over time—in this case, self-awareness for the mind—and a competency that supports it. Below the competency are actually qualities you develop over time through meditation and other practices, which then allows one to feed the other.

That’s the setup, and Joe’s really the engineer of matching these practices to the actual results that we want, so I’ll let him describe some of the particulars.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah. Joe, talk a little bit about what those competencies and practices are. What are some ways you help people become more self-aware?

Joseph Loizzo:

As Elazar is suggesting, we’re trying to break the big challenge of developing a whole new trait and install it into little bite-sized pieces. How do we develop those capacities that support clarity and self-awareness?

The way we've done that is to look at practices and align practices with qualities. The practices at the level of the mind are basically the four major applications or training in the mindfulness tradition. With the current mindfulness revolution, we're basically limited to one—that is, body awareness or present moment awareness. Of course, that's just the beginning.

We start with developing a sense of presence through practicing and paying attention to our breath and body and what they're doing. But we then want to be able to maintain equanimity or balance when things get difficult or overstimulating. That's where we work on what we call mindful sensitivity—most people call it mindfulness of feeling.

Finally, as Elazar was saying, we don't even stop there. We don't just want presence and balance or equanimity—we want openness of mind. We want freedom of mind. We want to be able to detect and unlearn the biases that limit our capacity for clarity. That's where we practice open awareness.

Ultimately, we don't just want to be open-minded and notice where we're stuck. We want to know how to unwire that and rewire ourselves. So mindful insight is the last step. Open awareness allows us to develop unbiased awareness, and mindful insight allows us to develop discernment—to see things clearly, with the biases removed, with all the turbulence of feeling comfortable or uncomfortable settled, and without the antsiness of a wild animal because our nervous system isn’t settled.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. It brings me back to my Vipassana training where we talked about Shaath and Ana being the same—that one can lead to the other. Yet, most people stop at what we started with as a base Vipassana practice by day three of just present moment awareness and awareness of feelings. You can actually go much deeper over the next seven days with an embodied feel.

Joseph Loizzo:

Yeah. We often say mindfulness isn't just about being mindful. We talk about the power of now, but what about the power of then? We really need to understand we don't just want to be aware of how uncomfortable and miserable we are, or how stressed out we are. We want to be able to find ways of accessing our potential to be a different human. A different part of our humanity. And that requires all of this progressive training of attention. And that's the logic.

Ashish Kothari:

So let's talk a little about that, Joe. What has been your experience with—look, we can train people in these things, we can give them the tools—but as you and I both know, knowing is not the same as doing. Only practice rewires our brains and brings a level of stillness and a way of seeing the world and a path of equanimity.

What are some ways you've been able to help people stay in practice after you've dropped them into stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four? How have you been able to do that?

Joseph Loizzo:

Thank you for that question. That’s really the key, right? How do we actually do it? The problem is even compounded when you're talking about introducing mindfulness as a leadership training or as a workplace training.

Because the mindset with which we're trying to do this is the stress mindset: if I don’t do this, I’ll fall behind; my rivals don’t do this.

Ashish Kothari:

Or “I don’t have the time for it.”

Joseph Loizzo:

Yeah. Part of how the tradition—and how we learned to create the environment—is to create an experience for people where they feel free and allowed to feel a quality of well-being in the moment with others.

Part of that has to do with the magic of community and allowing oneself to feel safer in community than in most environments. Part of it has to do with exposing and dismantling the performance mind. Jon Kabat-Zinn called this the judgment mind, but it isn't really just about judgment. It’s a certain quality of urgency or grasping.

This is where we pivot into the discipline of the heart. What we need in order to have a sustainable relationship with learning is an ability to accept where we are—without the grasping energy of “I need to be better,” without the aversion of “Oh, I'm so bad,” and without spacing out.

Equanimity, or acceptance, is the magic ingredient in that sense. Many people, like our dear friend Sharon Salzberg, say mindfulness isn’t just about being mindful; there’s also kindness and compassion.

There has to be an ingredient of kindness and compassion for oneself, and the practice has to come from “This is good for me, and I care about myself.” Otherwise, it’s very hard to sustain.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. I want to go to that because with mindful practices, as we rewire and unwind the conditioning—both evolutionary over millions of years and conditioning from childhood to adulthood that becomes more pronounced and keeps us stuck—that compassion and connection, being able to do it with kindness and compassion for ourselves and others, is so important.

This is where your heart practices come in. I wanted to ask you, Elazar, let’s go there next and bring to life for our listeners: what are some of those heart practices you invite leaders to consider, to make a core part of their way of operating in order to operate less from fear, scarcity, and survival, and more from thriving?

Elazar Aslan:

Great question—and a very practical one. Theories are nice, but how does it really affect me in the office? Let me come at that with a story. I was coaching a new CEO who was just hired and was having a presentation with the board, or just the comp committee of the board.

I went through the presentation with him and said, “You know your stuff. It’s good. It’s articulate, it flows, you make a good point, but your energy’s not there. I’m not feeling what you’re saying. What’s really going on?”

It took us a little bit—not that long—to get to it. He was angry. He was angry because the person he was presenting to was the only person on the board who didn’t want to hire him. He was presenting to her for the first time as head of the comp committee.

Once we got to that awareness, we were able to put some practices in place. His first reaction was, “I have a right to be angry,” because of what she had done—or not done—and he stayed stuck in that energy. That was coming through in his presentation.

Awareness is part one—having presence. Once you see it, you have an option to decide what to do. We went to compassion practice and understood that she was just another human being. He connected to her humanity—not what she had done to him—saw her in her fear mode, understood her confusion about who she is, how hard it was for her to want the best hire, and whatever views she had. We reset who she really was and what she meant to him.

Then we went into a loving-kindness meditation. You actually open up your heart to those you love—that’s easy to do. Then to neutral people—that’s not too hard—and sometimes to difficult people.

When he was able to open his heart to her as another human being, rather than walking into that meeting facing the enemy who didn’t want him in, it created a complete shift in his presentation.

When he walked out, we connected again. I asked, “How did it go?” He said, “She’s great. I think she might be my biggest ally in the company.”

That would have never happened if he walked in with the energy of anger—never. If I walk in angry, what do you think the other person’s going to do? They’re going to defend. “Why is this person angry? They must be wrong because I’m not.”

Now we’re into this subliminal tug-of-war, and there’s no way we’re becoming allies. It all happened before the meeting—through simple practice, awareness, and a shift of energy that changed the trajectory of the meeting.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. The loving-kindness meditation has become a core part of my morning routine. I have three practices I usually do in the morning.

I start with Anapana, just bringing awareness to the breath and using that to still my mind. Then I shift to the Isha Kriya—“I am not my mind, I am not my body”—as a way to ground myself in something more than what’s present.

I always end my practice from that place of deeper connection with loving-kindness. It’s been transformative for me—being able to hold space for myself and others leaves me so energized.

I can imagine how powerful it must have been for that person to shift from anger, which is constraining, closed, and wanting to pound the other person down. We all know our bodies and our energy speak more than our words.

I can just imagine the effect that had on that relationship and the meeting.

Elazar Aslan:

Ashish, that goes back to your previous question—how do you sustain the practice?

Part of it is the positive experiences. You go, “I want more of that.” In the beginning, it’s “trust me now, believe me later.” The science helps, but the real thing is having the experience.

That’s what we really create the conditions for. I also want to echo what you're saying about your practice.

Sometimes I give my clients this experiment because it came upon me through personal experience. I had a job once where it was a 20-minute walk. It took me years, but I would walk to work thinking about my meeting, thinking about the guy in front of me, why the cab driver was annoying me. My mind was full by the time I got to work—I was already tired and stressed.

I decided to change it. For those 20 minutes on my walk, I just gave compassion to everybody I saw. This was in New York City. It was easy. You could look people in the eye—they never look back—they’re just going. You could actually connect with them as human beings.

By the time I would get to work, my heart was so open. It became, “What a beautiful opportunity we have today. What are we going to do? What are we going to accomplish today?” It was a very different way of being.

When clients have that experience themselves—because I ask them to do the same experiment—they want more. They go deeper.

Ashish Kothari:

I like it—this notion of how you have people experience it. In our programs, we always use this phrase: how do you get people to taste the chocolate? Once you taste it, you’ll want more. I can’t describe it for you, but if you taste it, even just one bite—not even a whole square—you’ll want more.

There’s a natural inclination to get there. Yet so many people don’t, and I think that’s where the body and embodiment come in. From knowing to doing to being, where it becomes a core part.

I want to go to you, Joe. You all have amazing embodiment practices as part of the body section of your program. Talk to me about why somatics and getting in tune with our bodies and making those shifts are so foundational.

Just thinking about compassion and thinking about the mind is not going to solve it. We’ve actually got to involve the body. Talk to us a little bit about the science behind it and some practices that are foundational for you.

Joseph Loizzo:

Thank you, yes, absolutely.

We think we’re in our heads. This is how our culture trains us—our culture wants us to be in our heads because we’re not supposed to feel things. That’s irrational. Our bodies are just supposed to be machines that help us perform.

But our bodies are living, sensitive, and social beings. If we’re not attuned to what our bodies are doing, they powerfully influence the state of our hearts and our minds. These things constantly interact.

If we live a stressful life and grow up in a society where we have to fight or be in fear mode, our bodies are in stress mode. Chemically and autonomically—meaning through the fight, flight, or freeze network—we’re often tied up in knots without even knowing it.

Just walking out the door and thinking about our to-do list ties us up. That’s because our culture teaches us to get out of our bodies, as if our bodies are something inconvenient we should leave behind—something lower, animalistic, primitive, unintelligent.

Our bodies are incredibly intelligent. The biggest difference they sense is whether they’re safely connected to another body or not.

When our nervous systems feel safely connected to others—especially in groups and organizations—they are in thriving mode. They support the full opening of our heart and the full activation of our minds. When they are in survival mode, they are shut down and draining a huge percentage of our heart and cognitive capacity.

Not teaching people how to have a healthy dialogue with their bodies is a major downfall—not just for flourishing, but even for basic productivity.

Ashish Kothari:

It’s crazy but true. So many times, people are asked, “What are you feeling?” and they say, “Nothing.” And I say, “That’s numbness. You’re numb.” We've gotten so out of touch with everything below the head.

Joseph Loizzo:

Absolutely. It’s a whole different kind of culture. Modern culture, Cartesian culture, teaches us this is the thinking part—the intelligent part—and the rest is just a machine. In fact, it’s a very living, intelligent system.

We constantly broadcast to each other. Ninety percent of communication is non-verbal. What we’re picking up on is tone of voice and body language. Body language and tone of voice are determined by how safe, comfortable, connected, and happy our bodies are.

In the Tibetan tradition, where I came into meditation practice, when you greet someone, you don’t just say, “How are you?” You ask, “Kusangpo,” which literally means, “Is your body happy today?”

We need to move toward a culture like that—one that understands the connection between body, mind, and heart.

Our trait at this level is the trait of embodied flow. Under certain circumstances, our bodies and nervous systems can be very settled, very happy to be in, very pleasant, and supportive of incredible focus and enthusiasm. But that usually only happens by accident. What if we learned how to train that, so it became our default state?

Not only would we have this incredible capacity fully accessible, but we’d also be saving all the energy we usually waste in stress—what we call dirty energy.

We do that in two ways: first, by talking from our minds and hearts down to our bodies; second, by helping our bodies talk up to our hearts and minds.

Practices like positive visualization give the body a message: “I’m okay. I’m strong. I’m capable. I’m confident. I have vision.”

Expressions with a calming, soothing tone of voice—like a fairytale or lullaby—send the message: “We’re safely connected. All is well.” Those calm the nervous system.

Deep breathing practices powerfully modify the autonomics, so that we move from the stress system into the relaxation and well-being system. So do messages we give our nervous system through gentle movement, self-massage, and other bottom-up practices.

This is real. There are many practices we can use to create a dialogue between our mind and body, creating a virtuous cycle that shifts our nervous system out of survival and into thrive mode.

Ashish Kothari:

I particularly liked, Joe, in your body section, the idea of stance. The fact that we can take different stances. We can take stances of openness, stances towards action.

As much as using visualization and tone of voice to tell the body “you’re okay,” we can also move the body and position it in certain ways to send messages back to the brain. This activates different ways of being, different unique ways to observe the world. Again, something that is not accessible to so many people because they’re simply not taught.

Elazar Aslan:

In fact, we’re almost taught the opposite. I want to highlight what Joe was saying—the mind-body dialogue. Despite my education and intelligence, for decades I only knew about the monologue—how I felt affected my body.

If I was anxious, I’d feel it in my stomach. I didn’t realize it’s actually a dialogue, and the body tells the mind how it’s going too.

To your point about posture: when we smile, we’re telling our mind we’re happy. The hormones and emotions are connected. But even if we’re not happy, if we put a pencil in our mouth and stretch our lips as if we’re smiling, our body will start telling our mind, “We’re okay, things are okay, we’re in a happy state.” It shifts our body chemistry.

The fact that it’s a two-way dialogue is one of the reasons it’s so powerful.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. I mean, with all the research now around gut health and the fact that 70% of serotonin is actually produced in our gut—not in our brain—and what the microbiome is doing is directly related to stress, anxiety, and so many other things, we have all the science to back this up.

If we want to flourish and thrive, we can’t ignore this. It can’t just be cognitive work or emotional meditation work. We also have to involve the body. I love that you integrate all of these into your programs.

Joseph Loizzo:

It’s almost as if we need to learn all over again how to be human. Unfortunately, wellness often gets packaged as a fad, a quick fix—“just do this.” But they don’t really address the question: who are you as you do this? They don’t address the whole human in a holistic, multidimensional way.

That’s really what we’re trying to get at—the whole enchilada. You really can be a different version of yourself.

Ashish Kothari:

I’m curious. I love this work, you love this work, you’ve dedicated your lives to it. But to leaders, 90% of people still don’t get it. They think about driving profits, revenue, growth. They might address attrition or absenteeism, but here we are talking about meditation, journaling, self-awareness, posture.

To some it feels like mumbo jumbo—“I don’t have time for this, I need to drive profits.” What’s the message you give leaders to build the case for why this is needed today more than ever and why they should invest in this as a priority?

Elazar Aslan:

 The promise of Boundless Leadership, the promise of this work, is that you can have a trajectory of your future based on the limitations of your past, or you can have a trajectory of your future based on your potential.

Under a world of stress and a confused approach to who we are and what we need, you’re going to stay limited in what you can deliver.

If you want performance, results, impact, and your people at their best—not living through the limitations of their past—you have to invest in their potential.

Think about it: if I said, “I have a machine that could speed up your production and reduce your costs,” you’d calculate the ROI. You’d invest a million dollars if it paid back in five years.

We’re saying the same thing—it’s just not a physical machine. But it will improve productivity, engagement, innovation, creativity, and wellness. Forget the costs of sick people—just the positivity alone is worth it.

What are you willing to invest? No matter how little you invest, you’ll get a payback, and from that payback you can invest more.

Don’t take it all on. You don’t have to do everything. Start where you are. If meditation is too much, no problem. Start with awareness of your biases. Make a list of the three top biases you think you have. Watch for them for a week.

“Oh wow, I really do that.” That’s an investment. It’s a hell of a beginning. It’s good enough. You’ll want more—because you tasted the chocolate. You’re going to want more.

Joseph Loizzo:

I would also add—specifically to your point, Ashish—the science is there that we can make a case for any of the needs that a CEO might have. Engagement, teamwork, productivity, we can make a very specific case how this specific part of Boundless Leadership will help, and that would be a place we can start.

Then you've got a taste of the chocolate, you want more. The larger issue of the research on flourishing and how directly related it is to overall productivity, teamwork, and everything else, it's really quite—the evidence is mounting.

So we try to point it out to people: consider this as another alternative.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, no, it's true. The science behind—I use this, I actually opened with a board. I asked them this question, which—they looked at me as if I had, like, who's this weirdo?

If it hadn't been for my McKinsey background, they probably would've thrown me out of that meeting by that first question. But luckily they didn't.

I asked them, do you think the Earth is round? People first looked at each other, then looked at me, and they said yes. I said, well, that's great. One percent of the US still believes Earth is not round. There are flat Earth conventions.

Five hundred years ago, fifty percent of you would've raised your hand and said, I'm not sure Earth is round, because all those people were afraid to sail off and were afraid of falling off the plate.

Today science shows us that Earth is round. The science around the connection between flourishing and productivity and shareholder returns is as clear today as the science that is clear around the Earth being round.

The question is, do you want to still live under your biases and preconditions of the only way to happiness is through success? The only way to do more is to achieve more, is to do more?

Or are you willing to allow yourself a different pathway, recognizing that bias, to try and take a small move, to notice how stillness and space can actually create and open up something that allows you to get what you want with less effort, with more creativity, with more pathways?

Then that is the path to it. I loved, Elazar, what you said—start where you are, start with what you're doing, make it small, try that, and from the payback, invest more into it.

Look, thank you both for spending this time. We'll put the book and your program in the show notes. It's really, really well done. I loved the integration of it. I loved how you tied it also around one of the things that is on top of mind for so many people, which is this whole notion of remote work, not remote work—how does all of that tie into it?

Thank you both for the beautiful work you're doing in the world. We'll definitely follow up and connect on ways in which we can collaborate. But meanwhile, thank you, be well.

Elazar Aslan:

 Thank you for all your work.

Joseph Loizzo:

Thanks so much, Ashish.