Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Eric Kaufmann. Eric guides leaders to make better decisions and achieve better results. He’s consulted for hundreds of leaders, including executives and teams at Sony, T-Mobile, Genentech, Alcon Labs, and Teradata. He is the founder and president of Sagatica, Inc. and serves on the board of the San Diego Zen Center. With Sounds True, he’s the author of the book and the audiobook The Four Virtues of a Leader: Navigating the Hero’s Journey Through Risk to Results.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Eric and I spoke about the hero’s journey of leadership as a spiraling movement in his own life, beginning with leaving the familiar and going after a great prize, then encountering challenges and risks that demand personal sacrifices—and then finally sharing the hard-earned prize with one’s community. We talked about the impact of his Zen practice on his work with leaders and the year that he spent in solitary retreat—what he discovered and how he emerged as a different person. Finally, we talked about the four virtues he discusses in his new book, The Four Virtues of a Leader—focus, courage, grit, and faith—and how we must develop each one of these virtues in order to be effective. Here’s my conversation on The Four Virtues of a Leader with Eric Kaufmann:
To begin, Eric, I would love it if you would tell our listeners a bit about your background and how you came to be leading a consulting company that works with Fortune 1000 executives and other leaders.
Eric Kaufmann: Thanks, Tami. My background is eclectic to be sure. I grew up in Israel, and I moved from Israel to South Africa. From South Africa, I came to the United States and came here to finish my college and university work. I enrolled in a university and in pretty short order I got kicked out of college because I was learning all kinds of stuff, but none of them were academic values.
So, I realized that I had to sort of figure out my life. So, I got involved from a young age—I was 20 or so—I got involved in meditation and meditation practices. I continued doing that through college. So, I did get back into college. I finished my degree in business. I studied psych at the master’s level, then went to work with the Fortune 100. I went to work for 3M, then I worked at Corning. But, I realized that my love and passion was for not just driving results of the business, but developing people—cultivating the capacity for people to connect their head and heart, and make meaningful, satisfying outcomes.
So, at a certain point, I realized I didn’t want to just do that as part of my job, I wanted that to be my full-time job.
So, in—what—1999, I started my firm and have been consulting and coaching ever since.
TS: Tell me a little bit about how your background with Zen meditation has informed your approach to working with leaders.
EK: Yes. So, it’s very central to the way I show up and engage, and how I work with clients. I’m not out there to create converts for any kind of Zen practice. But, how it informs it is: first of all, it informs it in being grounded in the twin wings of wisdom and compassion.
So I’m working with clients and in my own practice as a human being, it’s working around, “How do I help these individuals and teams—?” because there’s no such thing as an organization learning. There’s only people. So, it’s working with people to help them get clear—that’s the wisdom part—[with] better thinking, better decisions, better and broader perspectives—but also more connected at the heart level. That’s the compassion side: compassion for self, which is remarkably lacking in the corporate space, and compassion for others.
Then there’s a whole host of other things that are informed by the practices. There’s a lot of embodied practices. How do you actually reside in your body rather than get lost in fantasy? There’s a lot of aspects of how to bring centeredness and calmness into spaces that are constantly changing and uncertain, [as well as] how to deal with anxiety so that they can make good decisions.
So, those are some of these examples of how the practices play in. I have on a regular basis clients [and] executives that get turned on to the idea and want to start their own meditation practices, which is great for the company because there’s a ripple effect when you have an executive getting more connected to their heart, their head, and their center.
TS: Now, your new book is called The Four Virtues of a Leader. You start the book off with this curious opening, Eric, that I want to talk to you about. You start the book off by writing, “I have no intention of adding to the mythology of leaders as special creatures.” That’s very curious to me in a leadership book. So, is your view that everyone’s a leader, but we’re just leaders in different kinds of ways? Or, are in fact organizational leaders [and] political leaders—are they special creatures [of] some kind?
EK: Yes, I wrote that because I deeply believe that there is a mythology, and it’s [a] sort of very Americanized, implicit sense of hierarchy in the culture of leaders as having some kind of special dispensation. I think that, at the most essential level, leadership is an attitude. It’s a way that we engage in the world. It’s a way of taking responsibility. It’s a way of orienting towards empowerment and the capacity to make things happen. It’s a way of orienting towards care and nurturing of other beings.
So, I rather think the mythology of leaders as some sort of special creature is limiting because it limits those that want to be leaders because they think they have to be something that they aren’t, and it limits the people who are being led because they’re expecting something that they can never get—which is nothing more than another human being trying to do the right thing in difficult circumstance.
So, yes, it is a pervasive and I think unfortunate mythology that serves nobody.
TS: Well, let’s go into it a little bit more. Is everybody a leader, but in a different way? Would you say, “Yes!” or, “No, some people aren’t. They don’t take risks. They don’t step out. Nobody’s following them. Everybody’s not a leader.”
EK: If we contextualize “leader”—if a leader inherently requires someone to follow him—because if you’re walking down the street and nobody’s following you, you’re not a leader; you’re just out for a stroll. So, there’s got to be some dynamic relationship between the leader and the led. So, if you don’t want people to follow you or people don’t want to follow you, then there’s not a leadership role that’s being played out. Right?
My wife is a leader in the household. My daughters are leaders in their class. In those contexts, there are people who are being influenced by them.
So, I think everyone has the capacity. There’s no special dispensation. Everyone has the capacity. But, I think in your point, there has to be some dynamic exchange of energy and of effort and of willingness.
So, can everyone be a leader? I totally believe that. Is everyone a leader? No, absolutely not. Some people are happy to just comply or disengage or just contribute. They don’t necessarily want to lead.
TS: Now, in your book The Four Virtues of a Leader, you use the narrative template of the hero’s journey to talk about leadership. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about that and how this idea of the hero’s journey relates to leadership.
EK: Yes. The hero’s journey is near and dear to my heart. I think of it [as it has] three components that make up a hero’s journey. And then there’s a lot of writing about it, but there are the three elemental features of a hero’s journey.
One: that it’s a departure. You’re leaving the comfort zone. You’re leaving the familiar. You’re leaving the known world—particularly in order to discover or attain something significant. It doesn’t have to be, “Save the world,” or, “Save the damsel,” or, “Beat the dragon.” But, there’s some—element number one is, “I’m leaving my known world and I’m off to discover or attain something significant.” That’s one.
The second component of the hero’s journey is that, as I go through, there’s risk, there’s sacrifice, there’s danger, there’s challenge. So, what I’m seeking to either discover or attain is not easy to get. It’s physically challenging, it’s emotionally challenging, it’s relationally challenging.
The third component of the hero’s journey is that there’s a return back to the village. There’s a return back to the known world—but now I’ve been changed by the journey. I’ve attained something or I’ve discovered something. Then I turn around and share that.
So, there’s departure; there’s pursuit of something significant; there’s risk, challenge, and danger; and there’s contribution. I think that those few things would describe a lot of my life [and] probably your life—the life of anyone I know who is striving for consciousness, which might be the greatest prize of all. But, it’s also what leaders have to do. They have to engage change and leave the known world. They have to make sacrifices and they have to ultimately make sure that the gain is greater than their own. Otherwise, they will lose credibility and followership.
So, I really see it as—it’s a journey of leadership, but it’s also a journey of life. Life is a hero’s journey, and certainly [so is] leadership.
TS: When I think of this arc of the hero’s journey as applied to leadership, what occurs to me is that we’ve seen in our culture over the last decade or so people who have risen to positions of leadership who—maybe they departed from the known, maybe they encountered challenges and made sacrifices and made their way through—but there’s a sense that when they accomplished their task, it was for personal gain. It was for self-serving interests, not this “return to the village” as you described, with sharing the results with everyone.
What do you think of that? Somehow, people have risen to the top of corporations who seem pretty self-serving.
EK: Well, I mean: corporations, churches, nations, communities. It’s not just limited to corporations. I think it’s in every dimension of human experience, right? Are we lacking examples of spiritual leaders who have really become incredibly self-[inaudible] focused?
TS: I’m with you.
EK: Yes. You know—Elizabeth Hamilton, who is one of the teachers at the San Diego Zen Center, wrote a book called [Untrain Your Parrot], which is a lovely book on applied Zen practice. One of the things she talks about a lot is—she talks about the “many mes”—like many different aspects of self. I’m not trying to promote some kind of an idea of a flawless, virtuous human being that doesn’t care for themselves, because I don’t know what that’s like. I think that being self-serving at some level is one of the “mes.” I also want to gain. There are certain things I want. Fundamentally, I want to gain something and I want to avoid something. Craving and aversion are the two basic drivers.
So, I’m not denying that some level of personal gain is appropriate, because I think it is appropriate. It’s motivating, it’s exciting, it’s interesting. There are many reasons why someone would want to gain something for themselves.
I think the leaders who just become, “It’s all about me,” in the worst possible cartoonish way that we can see on a national stage—that kind of profound self-absorption—is being demonstrated, and I think that is a cartoon existence of reality. I’m not going to necessarily coin that term this week. We’re more dimensional than that. People who are all about themselves are eventually only able to maintain around them people who are all about themselves too.
But, I hope that makes sense. [I’ll] maybe expand for a second.
A leader who is really just about personal gain will ultimately surround themselves with people who can eat from the same dish. So, they’re going to be in it just for their personal gain too—which is to say that loyalty is not going to be there. Genuine care is not going to be there. The capacity to withstand great challenges and remain intact as human beings is not going to be there. What’s going to be there is a tribe of people who are self-centered and will check out just as soon as they don’t get what they want.
So, it’s expensive to be that kind of leader. It’s visible, it’s common, but it’s super-expensive—“expensive” meaning it takes real tons of energy and continuous seduction to hold that role. It robs that leader’s capacity from a full life. So, they become slaves to their own success, as it were.
Does that make sense?
TS: It does. It does. I’m curious to know more about the hero’s journey in your own life. You told me a little bit about how you came to be doing the work you’re doing as a coach and consultant and leading a consulting company. But, if you were to describe your life for a moment here in terms of that arc of the hero’s journey, what’s that like for you?
EK: Yes. I think the hero’s journey is an arc only when you look at it up close and it’s a spiral when you step back. I think that there are phases and stages.
So, when my family left Israel, my life was over as far as I could tell back then, because I had a whole future and a vision of who I was going to be. Abandoning that left me sort of without meaning or purpose. I think living in South Africa was an expression of that. Coming to the States was my effort to leave the known world. I came to America—which I’m literally like millions of immigrants, right? I came to America to make a better life. I came here alone. I didn’t know anyone. My family wasn’t here. But, I literally was drawn to America to come to a place where I could make a life for myself.
What life did I want to make? I didn’t really know. But, that was the prize.
I think getting lost in my early days of college was one of the great—you know, every hero’s journey has temptations and foes and allies and enemies. Finding my spiritual teacher, getting involved in my spiritual community—I ended up moving into a spiritual commune where I then lived from when I was 20 to the time I was 31.
So, that was a long journey of spiritual training along with finishing college [and] going to work. I might have shared with you one of the other elements.
Then another sort of departure was realizing that I no longer wanted to be in this kind of bifurcated life of corporate life and spiritual life. I just wanted to be wholly committed to my spiritual practices.
So, I quit my job, I shaved my hair, [and] gave away my possessions. I went up to New Mexico and built a cabin in the mountains, which we actually just visited two weekends ago. I brought my kids there for the first time. It was kind of fun. They were disappointed that there’s no Wi-Fi up there because they’re teenagers and that’s what they’re focused on.
But, that was part of the hero’s journey—again, leaving the known world. I said, “I’m done with the world.” So, I went up in the mountains and ended up spending a year in a retreat up there in this cabin I built.
Again, what ended that year was this revelation that I was in fact going the wrong way—that spirituality and human evolution for me required family and service of community, not seclusion and isolation. Again, that was kind of another departure. So, the journey started again.
So, now it’s 1998 and it says, “OK. Different direction. The prize now . . .” Really, the prize I was going after was—my spiritual practices at the time were really about clarity and focus and wisdom and mental strength, as it were. Spending all that time in seclusion—I describe it sometimes as my mind became so focused that my heart opened up and flowed through my mind. I suddenly had this revelation that compassion and love and selflessness and tender nurturing of other people is a spiritual path too—not just the samurai’s version of the blade’s edge.
So, that journey, that arc then became about, “OK, I’m going to remake myself [with a] wife and children and mortgage and business and all those wonderful things.” So, the journey continues. But, I see it not as an arc, but as a spiral that can be seen as a series of arcs.
TS: Yes. That makes good sense. Yes.
EK: And the journey continues. The journey is not even close to being done, right? It continues.
TS: I just want to underscore one thing: You spent a year by yourself in a cabin that you built in your early thirties. I think for most people they’d be like, “What?! What did he do all day? What do you mean he was by himself? Where did he get his food? Why was he doing that?”
EK: Yes. Yes, yes. It was pretty intense. It took me three months to build it because I was an office worker, not a construction guy. But, I figured out how to build it and I built it. Like I said, we just went back a couple weekends ago 20 years later [and] it’s still solid. So, I’m proud of that structure.
It was on the property of one of the satellites of our spiritual community, so there were people there who would bring food once a week to a designated spot that we’d put in the forest. They would also make sure I was picking up the food. If I wasn’t they’d be coming to check on me.
It was self-sustaining in terms of electricity. I had to catch water in a 500-gallon tank, and I had a compositing toilet I built in there so there was no black water. It was very off the grid.
What I did was I practiced deepening techniques. I had no TV, radio, or telephone. I meditated on average eight, sometimes nine, ten, eleven hours a day. I exercised. I ate and slept. That was pretty much it.
About three months into it—I have a journal entry that is so profoundly disturbing. About three months into it, I was on the verge of suicide. I thought I would go into it and be like [chorale noise]—you know, angels singing, lights flashing. All these wonderful, cool things. But, I didn’t really expect to go into it and have—after 10 or 11 years of really intensive practice, I was like, “Yes, I’m all clean.” Not so much.
So, there was some really super-dark, super-challenging, incredibly suicidal times that I think were perhaps the most powerful aspect of that whole journey. Because I was trained in sitting, and to sit when all I want to do is kill myself was really, really—I don’t even know what to say. Interesting? No. Healing. Healing.
I’ll tell you one thing, Tami, that’s kind of surprising to me: So, I left the cabin in 1997, ‘98. So, going on 20 years now. You know, what didn’t come out of the cabin with me was self-criticism. It stopped.
I still get bummed. I get disappointed. I get frustrated. I doubt myself. But, I do not have the inner voice that critiques me anymore—not for 20 years.
TS: OK, let’s break this down a little bit, Eric, because I think you’re saying a lot here and I want to make sure I really understand it. So, first of all, here you in this cabin and you’re surprised that you feel like killing yourself. What was happening that you felt like killing yourself? What was going on inside your mind? How did you come to this place of despair?
EK: I sat there and what started happening was there was—whatever inner chatter that I had—one way I’ve thought about it is, as I meditated for 10 or 11 years leading up to it—and I lived in a spiritual community. We meditated every day and we did regular sesshins—you know, retreats. So, we did the whole thing. It’s not like I was a novice.
But, all of life goes on—relationships, work, school, the typical anxieties of day-to-day stuff. What occurred to me later was that as I sat there without any kind of mitigating forces, any of the small sort of self-critical, self-loathing voices—any of the sort of cut-off parts of the soul that had been shoved into the corners of consciousness came into the foreground rather than just being so far in the background as to be invisible or inaudible. Does that make sense?
TS: Yes.
EK: When they came to the foreground, they came to the foreground without any mitigating force. There was nothing to screen it.
So, in short order, all the material that I had successfully hidden [from] in my meditation practices for a decade—it was like the soot on the chimney. You’ve cleaned it well, but you don’t know there’s still a layer of tar and soot just clinging to the chimney. In that sort of cleansing process of long sitting without any distraction, that soot started breaking off. That tar of consciousness—the darkest aspects of my unwelcomed, unhealed, undesirable self—which is just what it means to be human. It’s not like I have an especially bad childhood or a particularly messed-up soul. It’s just humanity. Living as a human being is suffering, as some would say. That’s the first Noble Truth—life is suffering. It’s un-satisfaction.
It all just came and occupied the foreground. I sat in a tarry, dark, clingy sense of hate for that stuff. Hate. I hated myself. That’s all I could be in touch with. It came to the point, Tami, where—this was the most terrifying part of it. Sitting in that hate was one thing, but when the choir of self-negating voices switched on me and started being rational—and the rational context was this: “The best gift I could give the family, the best thing I could do for humanity, is to remove myself from the planet.” That surprised the hell out of me.
TS: And yet, you emerged nine months or so later and this voice of self-criticism was gone—hasn’t appeared in the same kind of way with that same kind of, “You need to kill yourself,” message. So, what happened? How did that change?
EK: I was trained in sitting. My meditation training says, “Be present to the experience and let it arise and pass.” I clung with great faith to the practice of arising and passing, arising and passing. Sure enough, it arose slowly and painfully and passed slowly and painfully. The compelling nature of that limiting and outdated belief began to crumble under the sheer, dispassionate observation of its emptiness.
So, I don’t know that I won’t have really, terribly self-critical thoughts because I don’t know what will happen in the future.
TS: Sure, sure.
EK: But, I know that that—in my ego structure, it does not scream at me, “You idiot, you fool. What were you thinking?” You know: those voices that are so common and I spent 30-some-odd years with—it just doesn’t come up.
TS: Part of what I’m imagining, Eric, is someone who’s listening who says, “Look, I’m not going to take a year off and go live in a cabin. It’s just not going to happen.”
[Eric laughs.]
TS: “Not going to do it.” And yet—
EK: Pretty much what my book says!
TS: Yes. And yet, the other thing that many people might say listening to this conversation is, “I would love for the voice of self-criticism to go away in my life. How can Eric help me with that?” How do you help leaders with that?
EK: So, this is what spiritual practices are all about, right? It’s not like I’m inventing something that hasn’t already been established for thousands of years. What it takes is it takes—I’m going to get a little circular here, but I think the book that I wrote and what I’m focused on is to provide that very concept. What does it take? It takes a great amount of self-awareness.
So, there has to be this sense of focus on the inner domain—self-awareness. With self-awareness comes things like the observer self and learning to turn on a sort of objective aspect of self. One of the great challenges and one of the great ways we continue to hold ourselves as smaller than who we are is by buying into this very subjective relationship with ourselves.
So, having some distance and objectivity—which is one of the fundamental lessons of mindfulness and meditation in general—that’s one. I think there’s a huge element of courage—a willingness to—I think the people who want to be healed but aren’t willing to be courageous to step into the pain and the discomfort and the frustration of it . . . I don’t know how you do this without courage.
The third virtue I talk about is grit. It just takes time. It takes perseverance and consistency.
Then there’s an element of faith. There’s a surrender. At some point, we got to be willing to open our hand and let slip what we cling onto with great passion. Often, we cling onto our identity with a kind of strength that holds us back.
In a way, I’m writing in my book what served me and what I learned, and how I [can] teach it further.
TS: Your book, The Four Virtues of a Leader, goes into these virtues that you just described. We’re going to talk more about each one. Tell me why you decided to call them “virtues.” That’s a word I think that a lot of people associate with some kind of dusty religious text. “Virtues.”
EK: I think that dusty old religious texts have a point. There’s all this conversation about distinguishing religion from spirituality. I’m totally down for that. I also think that there’s a danger of—what’s the expression?—throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The religions were established as a way—like, the word “religion” in English is from a Latin word, religare, “to connect or reunite.” It’s the same word as “yoga,” meaning union—the yoke, the connection.
I think that there is something that I’m going after that has that sort of ancient spirituality to it—that deep wisdom of the religious traditions, it’s virtues. These are these things that are inherent in people and can be cultivated. They’re not competencies. That’s a very corporate word. “What are the competencies?” Or the skills that can be developed.
But, this is more than skill. These are ways of being. These are ways of living.
So, I don’t really have an issue with it being sort of thought as dusty old religious texts, because I’m inviting people to return to that—the alternative is not looking entirely great, right? The kind of self-aggrandizing, small minds that some of our commercial lives are promoting. Those are not the paths to people’s sense of satisfaction, contentment, love, connection.
So, yes. The virtues are inherent qualities that people can cultivate, but require effort.
TS: So, in the book The Four Virtues of a Leader, you begin by talking about the virtue of focus. As you were describing it here in this conversation, you were talking about self-awareness and being able to take an observer perspective on ourself. You have people focus on this question, “What am creating?” So, help us understand this emphasis on the virtue of focus.
EK: Yes. I think that you sort of pulled out the essential question: What am I creating? So, you had asked me about the cabin and leadership and all those things, and I think in all those various arcs of my journey and as I work with people—and I’ve been working with people for 17 years in a coaching and consulting capacity—the sense of personal responsibility is really huge because it’s the birthplace of discipline, of good choices, of a sense of empowerment.
So, “What I’m creating?” is essentially that question. Are you tuned into the fact that what you’re focusing on with your beliefs, with your values, and with your expectations, that those things you focus on—that if I believe that the world is inherently dangerous, then I have an expectation that people are threatening and menacing. I will orient myself in such a way as to be protective and safe and relate to people in such a way that makes them feel threatened. I’m perpetuating the cycle.
So, my beliefs feed my expectations and my expectations ultimately dictate my behavior. My behavior drives results in the world, which often reinforces my beliefs.
So, that cycle’s familiar. I don’t think I’m breaking new ground here. But, there are a lot of people who don’t grasp that. So, they’re not clued in to this essential experience that we are active participants in the shaping force of the reality that we’re experiencing.
That, to me, is what focus is all about. What am I creating? Inherently there’s a sense of personal responsibility in that and it requires self-awareness. It requires a level of objectivity about the self. it requires an honesty about who I am, what I believe, and how I am a quantum force in my environment actually shaping it.
TS: Now, the second virtue that you talk about in The Four Virtues of a Leader you’ve already mentioned, which is courage. In the book, you direct readers to ask this question: “What am I avoiding?” That seems like a very powerful question. Talk some about that.
EK: Yes. So, I have a very simple definition for courage. I define it as, “Walking towards what you’d rather run away from.” So, the things that I avoid in my life are never the fun, exciting, energizing things. The things that I avoid in life are somehow dreaded things. So, difficult conversations, uncertainty in projects, new plans, new relationships or changing old relationships. These are the things that we avoid.
I don’t know if I’m [talking about] spiders or jumping out of airplanes or bungee jumping. That’s thrilling. That’s not the same thing. We’re talking about the day-to-day defensive mechanisms that we have that protect our sense of identity.
I think in the absence of courage, life is an incredibly muted experience. From a leadership perspective, I don’t even see how we can have a conversation about affecting any kind of influence or change or results without taking some risks. Therefore, we come back to courage.
So, it’s not about being fearless, Tami. I hear people talk about, “Well, you could be fearless. You go to this seminar and you’ll be fearless. If you do this, you’ll be fearless.” I think that’s just inconsistent with the human experience. Fear is biological. It’s wired into our—look: if my great ancestors from thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago had no fear, I wouldn’t exist. I am the genetic offspring of beings that understood fear and were able to stay safe and perpetuate. It’s a biological thing.
But, it’s about challenging the boundary of what we think is safe. Often that boundary is really just an ego protection.
TS: I’d be curious to know, Eric, in your own life if there’s a way that you were courageous—where you walked towards something you would rather have run away from—in the last few years. “Oh, this really required courage.”
EK: Yes, I mean it happens daily. If not daily, certainly weekly. I can think of in the last few years, publishing a book.
TS: Yes.
EK: That’s the beginning of this conversation, right? For 10 years, I worked on a book and didn’t publish it. If you asked me why I didn’t publish it, it was because—well, I came up with all these really cool reasons not to publish it. One was really noble. “But, if I publish a book,” Tami, I swear to God I said this to my friends, “if I publish the book and three or four years from now, I disagree with what I wrote—because inevitably as I grow and mature, I’ll have different [views]—then I’m now entrenched and people will think this is what I believe. And I don’t want to be perceived as limited in that way.”
It sounds noble, right? It sounds like I’m really committed to this sense of honesty and integrity. Yes—baloney. What was really going on was that I was afraid if I published it and it’s going to tank, people will think I’m an idiot and I’m going to be publicly humiliated. Really, that’s what was going on.
It was partly an act of courage to get to the point and the commitment of putting the book out in the public domain. That’s one recent example.
TS: Thanks [for the] good example. Here we are, having this conversation right as your book, The Four Virtues of a Leader, is being published. Does it take courage to work with, “There’ll be criticism. Somebody’s not going to like the book and write a negative review,” and how do you work with that, Eric?
EK: There’s a lot of breathing. [Laughs.] That’s my whole point, right? It’s very easy for me—I have a very well-developed capacity for being a mystic, a recluse. That’s not my life at the moment. My life is very extroverted, very public. Even the pursuit of the mythic recluse is both an aspirational pursuit [and] an ego pursuit. In that realm, I can avoid criticism and any kind of questions about my competence or my intelligence.
So, how I work with this is how I work with everything. I breathe, I observe, I label it, I note it, and I embrace what’s going on with all the discomfort of it as long as it takes. It might take a minute. It might take a week.
TS: I imagine someone listening who says, “There’s this thing that I know I’m avoiding, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m going to tell you the truth here, listening to this conversation—I’m just afraid to do it. Eric sounds like he’s done all this meditation practice. Good on him. I don’t know exactly how to work with this discomfort that I feel. And yet, I also would like to be more courageous.” How would you address that person?
EK: Actually, I had this conversation on a call before our call. I was talking with a client of mine who’s a senior vice president in a Fortune 1000 company. He had just gotten this new promotion and has been working out of fear in this new role. Over the last three or four months, he’s in fact demonstrated a lot more courage—without going away for a year in the woods or meditating for 30 years.
It comes down to as what I think of as these three steps. The first thing that he learned to do—even without years of meditation—is to shift his attention from a cognitive perspective to an embodied perspective. So, anyone can learn how to begin to discern the sensations of fear in their body. Upset stomach, butterflies in the gut, tightness in the solar plexus, pressure in the chest, sweaty palms—whatever it is.
When he learned how to make it physical—make it embodied—he’s already beginning to practice courage. I described courage as walking towards what you’d rather run away from. By embodying the experience, you’re not running. You’re being present. So, that’s step one.
Step two is then to face it and actually name what it is. His base fear was failure. When he looked more deeply, it was really fear of rejection. If he’s going to fail, people are going to think less of him and they’re not going to be around him. So, if you name it—there’s tremendous research on the power of labeling, the power of naming.
So, first is you feel in your body and you make it more present. That’s already a practice of courage. Second is you name it. And then the third part is to embrace it. What are rational, reasonable things that you can do to move 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent closer to your destination rather than just being frozen or backing out?
So, again, this is not about eliminating or destroying or removing or transforming. It’s about a narrative approach. It starts with the body, then it goes to the labeling in the mind, and then it goes to action.
TS: Very good. The third virtue that you talk about in Four Virtues of a Leader is grit. This is a word that we’re hearing a lot about with the publication of Angela Duckworth’s book On Grit. Tell me what you mean by “grit,” and why it’s one of the four virtues that you’ve identified.
EK: I don’t know how much experience you have with the I Ching. I’m sure you’re familiar with it.
TS: Yes.
EK: The Chinese [method] of divination. I remember I was using the I Ching—in the mid-’80s, one of my teachers was really big into the I Ching. So, we were doing a lot of the I Ching readings as a way to cultivate our intuition and just grow in wisdom. One of the prevailing lines in the I Ching—I think it was Wilhelm’s translation, which was the one we were using—was it would be like, “Earth over water, blah blah blah blah blah.” At the end, it would say, “Perseverance furthers.”
I really got interested in that and recognized that. Anything that was meaningful that I accomplished—and my friends around it—whether there was a relationship that was working or physical health or spiritual practices or financial discipline or career transformation or career growth or a skill—juggling, bicycle riding, whatever—anything that we accomplished that was meaningful took longer than we ever expected, required more energy, and involved way more mistakes and failures than we thought it would. That’s life.
I think that the hero’s journey—yes, there’s a focus [on], “Who are you and where are you going? And what are you becoming?” That’s fine. Then there’s courage, which says—again—that we need to walk to the edge and not back away from it. At the end of it, there’s just the blue-collar work required to make anything work.
There’s people I know who are incredibly aware and wonderfully courageous, but just lack the capacity to push something over time, to transform matter and energy into something different. That matter and energy can be myself or it can be the environment around me.
To me, it’s really a discussion about self-discipline. Adhitthana, one of the Buddha’s ten virtues—adhitthana, strong determination. The meditation practices that I was trained to do doesn’t really matter if I feel like it. It doesn’t matter if I’m moved. It doesn’t matter if the spirit wants it. It just matters that you show up, sit down on a cushion, and do the best you can in 20, 30 minutes or an hour or whatever it is.
So, there’s something really blue collar about our personal evolution—about spiritual business, relational accomplishments. I think it’s terribly downplayed in our current culture.
TS: You have a quote from the book—you say, “Grit more than any other factor reliably predicts achievement.” That’s a very strong statement.
EK: It’s one that’s based in tremendous research. Not just my own, but great scholars are researching what other things help people achieve significant—“significant” meaning “meaningful outcomes for themselves.” You don’t need the research. If you reflect on your life, grit is the blue-collar component of accomplishment. You just got to stick with it.
Here’s the thing: [Again,] we’ve sort of hypnotized ourselves into this notion that we have to be turned on, excited, passionate all the time. That’s just not my experience. There’s times when passion runs out. I’ve been married for almost 18 years. Not every day of our marriage has been like, “Oh my God! I love you! You’re the best!” I’ll tell you: there have been days where I’m like, “I wish I was back in the cabin for a little while. I need a break.”
But, the marriage [and] the love is nurtured by the daily practices. Whether I feel like it or I don’t, the business I’ve developed has nurtured the ongoing practice. The spiritual practices are just that—they’re practices. I don’t know how else to say it, but [they are] the sort of the blue-collar component of the journey. You just got to show up. When you’re disheartened, when you’re burned out, when you’re disappointed, when you don’t feel like it, you just show up.
Was it Woody Allen who said, “Ninety percent of success is showing up?” I think that’s who said it.
TS: Yes. It’s interesting—in the section of the book on grit, you talk some about sacrifice and how leaders are called to sacrifice. I notice this is a word kind of like virtue, that you don’t hear that often talk about in a positive light. Tell me what you mean by “sacrifice,” and I’d like to know how you relate to the idea of sacrifice.
EK: So, we just came back from—my two daughters and my wife—came back from eight days in Cancun. It’s a beautiful spot. One of the trips we took [was] we rented a car and drove out to Tulum. Tulum is one of the ruins of the Mayan culture in the Yucatan Peninsula. In the middle of Tulum—literally in the middle of these ruins—there’s what looks like an ancient basketball court all made of stone with these stone hoops.
It turns out that—and you might know about this; I’m pretty sure you do—the Mayans had this game that was sort of an ancient ancestor of basketball where these two teams would play. One team would win and one team would lose. That’s inevitably how the game goes.
You know which of the team was sacrificed? Ritually sacrificed to the gods?
TS: No.
EK: The winning team! The winners were the ones who were then sacrificed to the gods.
My daughters were like, “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. That makes no sense. I would never want to play this game!”
TS: I’m with your daughters.
EK: Right? Why would you want to play a game when you know at the end they slit your throat and pull out your heart and burn it in offering to the gods? Because what they knew in their culture was that winning the game was an opportunity for them to give themselves in the most complete way to the well-being of the whole community. They were willing to exchange—sacrifice is an exchange—something really valuable for something even more valuable. I’m not sure how much more valuable something can be than my very life.
That’s not what we’re asking for in sacrifice in our modern world. But, the notion of sacrifice is not that you’re losing something. The notion of sacrifice is that a certain level of certainty that you are going to give something of value—of great value—in order to secure something of even greater value on the other side of it.
I think that is part of grit. What do we sacrifice? Hopefully, none of us have to give up our lives for anything. But, we sacrifice our comfort. That’s the biggest sacrifice. We sacrifice energy, we sacrifice time, we sacrifice our own sense of—I’m a father of two children, of two teenage girls. I constantly go through this process of knowing that I am going to give up my own priorities because I have a higher priority of transmitting something to my children.
So, I may not spend the money the way I want to spend it on my own leisure. I may not go on the trip that I want to. This is the silliest example, Tami, but I don’t like Chinese food.
TS: It’s a good example.
EK: I dislike Chinese food. My kids love Chinese food! We go to Chinese food fairly regularly, and I do it because—you know what?—they love it.
So, it’s not like I’m going to die from eating Chinese food. I just happen to not like it. But, they like it, and it’s a tiny little sacrifice. I’m giving up something that’s important to me—my own satisfaction in what I eat—but there’s something greater I’m getting on the other side, which is being of service to my children in that capacity.
I hope that make sense, because it doesn’t have to be so huge.
TS: It does make sense, but at the same time at the beginning of our conversation we talked about how there are the “many mes,” and one of the mes is self-interested. So, how do you balance self-interest and sacrifice?
EK: I don’t think it’s balanced. I think this notion of sacrifice is exactly that—sacrifice is when self-interest is not fulfilled. It’s not a balance. It’s not what sacrifice is.
The sacrifice is giving up something of value. What we value is our ego-driven sense of how things should be. So, I should be able to satisfy my own taste buds because, darn it, I’m the one paying for it—blah, blah, blah. But, I can just let that go and sort of deal with the momentary discomfort of that. It’s a tiny little sacrifice, but I don’t think balance is the issue. I think if you’re not balancing it, you’re not sacrificing. Any sacrifice, by definition, [is] by some degree not balanced. It’s a surrender. It’s a giving-up.
TS: Fair enough.
EK: Yes. And if you’re not giving up something that’s important to you, you’re not sacrificing. It needs to be something that somehow I’m attached to for me to feel the sacrifice of letting it go.
TS: Yes. I guess what I’m saying is that if I sacrificed all the time, I could become a martyr and that has its own negative baggage with it. So, I don’t think you’re talking about all-out martyrdom. So, that’s what I’m trying to get at.
EK: No. I’m glad you said that, because I think martyrdom is just another form of defensive ego behavior. Some people can be bullies, some people can be martyrs; some people can be the likeable one; some people can be the perfectionist. The Enneagram alone has nine different ways that you can manifest your personality type and personality patterns. “Martyr” is an extreme way.
I’m not talking about martyrdom. I’m talking about deliberate, intentional, conscious, occasional practices.
TS: OK, Eric. I want to talk about the fourth virtue that you cover in The Four Virtues of a Leader, which is faith. You have readers ask this question: “What am I yielding?” I thought that was so intriguing—the question that you associate with faith. Can you explain that? “What am I yielding?”
EK: Yes, I think this question of sacrifice has sort of walked into that territory. I’m talking about letting go—not yielding as in “a yield in the stock market,” but yielding as in surrendering and letting go.
Faith, to me—again, it’s not necessarily about your religion as faith. It’s not about Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism. But, it’s the leap of faith. It’s the ability to commit myself to something even in the absence of proof or evidence. In order for me to take a leap of faith, I have to step away from the known. I have to step away from the familiar. I have to step away from the secure and yield something—let something go. I have to open up my fist and let it slide out. That’s surrender. That’s belief. That’s faith.
TS: I’m curious, Eric, if you could make this all very real for us in an illustration—which is: is there a leader that you’ve worked with that, to some degree, you would say embodies all four of these virtues? You don’t have to name the person, but if you could describe them to us—like, how does it actually look on the ground when this leader is in action? Someone that you know from your own personal experience.
EK: Sure. I can call this leader “Brad” because that’s his name. It’s very convenient. I really think [Brad] is a great example of somebody who ties these features together.
So, he regularly practices these self-awareness components. He is questioning—from a focused perspective—his motivations and his beliefs as he sets out on various projects and endeavors for the company. So, he’s practicing focus because he’s really asking, “Who am I and who’s driving this and why am I asking people to do this? Why am I putting people’s time, effort, and energy at play in this way?” So, there’s an awareness component to the practice.
Then Brad has really cultivated his courage in particular because he became aware through the work that we did together that he had this very strong need to please people, which came from a need to please his father. So, while he would be self-aware, he would also—historically, he wasn’t practicing courage. He was avoiding certain demands of people and requests of people because he wanted to please them. So, now he practices courage by recognizing that while he wants to please people and he wants them to like him, he has a bigger responsibility at play for the livelihoods of many people. So, he is courageously being present to his discomfort.
He’s also been really great about applying more regular discipline and structure to the way he operates. It doesn’t take away from his spontaneity or creativity. But, he’s become very, very committed to daily practices that are required to effectuate his leadership. His surrender has been most demonstrable by him really being willing to change the way he develops his people. So, he let go of an identity of him as the source of all knowledge who has to control everything and really embrace a different identity as the leader as facilitator—which was a real leap of faith for him.
So, that’s an example of someone who’s practicing these four pieces in a practical way.
TS: I just have one final question for you, Eric. This is a question that I think is up in our culture right now. For people who don’t necessarily identify as a leader in a certain situation—whether it’s the organization they work in; they work for a manager or a boss; or as citizens—how do we hold our leaders accountable? How do we do that?
EK: I’m not sure. That’s a huge question. That’s a huge question.
Growing up in Israel—[it’s] a much smaller country. So, dynamics of the culture there are different. There are seven million people living in the whole country. So, there’s a more intimate experience between the sort of raw population and the leaders because when there’s only seven million of you, somebody knows somebody. It’s a more intimate experience of society.
I think in this broad society in the US and even globally, holding our leaders accountable is probably—by the time we’re looking at presidential-level elections, it’s too late. For somebody to have arrived at that role they’re playing in the huge, global leadership role, they had to have come up through the ranks. Everybody comes up through the ranks. In a democracy, nobody’s born a king. They rise up.
How we hold people accountable along the way is by residing in our hearts and in our heads in a way that empowers and enables us. So, I need to be empowered and enabled, and you need to be empowered and enabled, and I want all of us to expect the best human expression from myself and from others—and to not turn a blind eye towards the person next to me who is bringing darkness into my environment or into the world.
So, it happens at an incremental level: the teachers who connected with those students when they were young, the friends who were with those people, the other adults around them, you and I. I don’t know that we can hold them accountable by the time they’re running for president or running a global company, but I think we can hold ourselves accountable to bringing forth the highest expression of humanity that we can as a being—to hold that as both model and container for the people around us so that when they’re veering away into darkness or into expressions of evil, ignorance, or greed, we can be present to them in real time and help shift that. I think there comes a point where their trajectory is so well-established that I don’t know that we can hold them accountable.
We can hold the people accountable around us. We can hold ourselves accountable first, and then use that as a moral compass to hold others and help others to be accountable along the way so that, as young people become mature people, their trajectory was shaped by those forces that have helped them bring out the best in themselves.
TS: Thank you. That’s a very honest and—I think—helpful answer. One final question I’m going to sneak in here, which is: do you think that your “coming out,” if you will, as a leader in a new way with your book, The Four Virtues of a Leader—I mean, here you’ve worked with so many executives and company leaders as a coach and a consultant, and of course you run your own [relatively small] consulting company—is this a step out into leadership for your to be the author [of The Four Virtues of a Leader] now?
EK: It is. It is. You asked earlier about my own examples of the arc of the hero’s journey, and I think this is me stepping away from the familiar. I know how to do what I do. I know how to be in the roles that I am. I feel called to both challenging my own notions and also providing more leadership in the greater community. I think that writing a book and publishing a book and doing all the things that come along with that is a bridge out of what was normal for me before [and] into the new experience.
It’s not without some anxiety and uncertainty, but it’s exciting to me. I’m totally thrilled with you guys publishing me, Tami. I love the combination of the opportunity to really speak to leadership—I’m very passionate about leadership and cultivating good leaders and effective leaders. But, my life is also a dedicated spiritual practice. I think at Sounds True there is a wonderful tribe to bring those two together.
Yes, it is a step up for me. I’m adjusting and I’m learning, but I’m totally up for it. Totally up for it.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Eric Kaufmann. Thanks, Eric, for stepping out. Your book, The Four Virtues of a Leader: Navigating the Hero’s Journey Through Risk to Results—it’s a rigorous and challenging book. I know when I read it, it inspired me to reach further in and out—inward into some deep truth-telling and outward into more leadership in the world. So, thank you Eric. I think it’s going to have a strong impact. It’s a strong book. Thank you.
EK: Thank you, Tami. I really appreciate the opportunity. I really do.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: Many voices, one journey. Thanks for joining us.
