Latest / Coaches Rising / 272 - Richard David Hames: Navigating Complexity, Collapse & Change

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272 - Richard David Hames: Navigating Complexity, Collapse & Change · Coaches Rising

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[UNKNOWN]: Thank you for watching.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to the Coaches Rising podcast.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I am delighted today to have a guest Richard David Haymes, described by Forbes Asia as one of the smartest people on the planet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Richard is a thought leader, a philosopher, activist and author.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's a mentor to high-profile organizations and leaders around the planet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Richard is making sense of the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His views on, you know, this commonly talked about theme even on this podcast that things are collapsing, what are some of the big themes he sees, how is he making sense of it?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What are the challenges he has to that narrative?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we'll
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[SPEAKER_01]: and his challenge to the way we view leadership and we'll talk about indigenous wisdom, we'll talk about the role of the feminine, we'll talk about AI, Richard has got some very important views on AI, he's deeply connected to the Asian AI community and has some challenges to some of the current narratives we have around AI.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I think this is a very rich
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[SPEAKER_01]: making sense of our times and the invitations being made to us as practitioners.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As I shared Richard is a highly prolific author and thought leader is the author of 12 books, including the Management Myth, Five Literacies of Global Leadership.
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[SPEAKER_01]: open heart, open mind, and man made 50 failings of our own making, and he is a sort after speaker speaking at events around the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we're in good hands, and let's dive in here's the podcast with Richard David Haynes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So Richard, it's good to be with you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We take two, we had a little tech issue there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm really honored to have you on the podcast.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a while coming.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you have someone that's dear to me, who's been playing a kind of supporting mentoring role in my life, helping me make sense of the world and who I am in the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm really grateful to actually be able to share you with our audience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, thank you, Joe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's been, yes, it's been a while that you've been threatening this, but I've been looking forward to it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's good just to have you say a few words about who you are in a sense of, like, give the listeners a sense of, what do you up to?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What's the work you're bringing into the world?
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not an easy question to answer who are you and my life, particularly, it's not a linear at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's been very secure to us and I haven't had a career as such.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've done lots of different things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was brought up in the British public school system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I got a good education.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And at that stage, there was a huge map on the wall, and I could see all the pink bits of the British Empire.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I knew that I was part of the,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the enterprise that ruled everybody else, quite clearly, the sun never sat on this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was, it all became unaheimaged at the age of 13, just before my 13th birthday.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When I realised it was all a lie, including, you know, almost everything I've been taught.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because it didn't contain an expression of who I was, it didn't involve me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: my education and involved just filling up my head with facts and all the problems of the world have been solved, you know, everything was concrete and precise and that was a difficulty but my life ever since has been exploratory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I've been very opportunistic, it's gone from music to medicine and back again, into management and to mentoring, into investing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've done a whole range of things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm doing a lot of writing, I do a lot of public speaking, writing in terms of books, I'm just finished my 12th book, which will be published by Triarchy Press, I think in January, which is called Teaching Silicon How to Feel, and it's all about the ethics of, a, I'm not the large language models that exist today, which have,
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[SPEAKER_00]: almost maxed out on what they can do, but the next generation of AI, which I call world models.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's all about the ethics of world models.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I've been, I've invented a lot of tools and technologies for organizations, including a beautiful one called Systemic Acupuncture, which is the interrogation of a complex system to find the most benign intervention point
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[SPEAKER_00]: a very precise, but that can be done with a nudge and change the energy and the entire system through that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So Joel, I've done lots of different things you can't put me in a box.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's something I appreciate about you and, you know, I know that you're working with high profile organizations and clients around the world as well, helping them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: in a sense, navigate these times.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I can feel my curiosity about the AI comment you made.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't make a couple of notes about some of the things you shared.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm going to resist to go there immediately.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, I'd love to just
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[SPEAKER_01]: If I used to wax lyrical about how you're making sense of the world, maybe have you just add something, you know, of course we've talked a lot on this podcast about the times we find ourselves in, it's very obvious to people now, things are in a rapid pace of change, breaking down, perhaps.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so one of the themes on the podcast has been, what is it to coach in these times?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's clear we're moving out of modernity and some of the kind of deep beliefs that modernity was built upon.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so therefore, you know, is it just coach?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it doesn't make sense to me to just coach within that worldview.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It seems that coaches need to have one foot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: in what's emerging too.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe even you disagree with some of the things I've said they're around mid-earned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no, I don't.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean the difficulty for coaching and mentoring and those are two very different things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But for both of them, the difficulty is you have to be living past, present and possible at the same time in what I call the expanded now of consciousness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not legitimate anymore, and in fact it's negligent to coach within the paradigm that's breaking down and that we're going to have to leave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the sense making of what's happening today is very important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But our capacity to make sense of what's happening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I believe as flatline, I believe we're having great difficulty really comprehending what's going on at a deep level.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, unless you can make sense of the present,
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[SPEAKER_00]: even trying to think about what's possible becomes, you come up against a reward, I mean it really is very, very difficult.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think there are several reasons why it's so difficult to make sense of what's happening today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The first and most obvious is that everything in the mainstream and social media is propaganda of one kind or another.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It sets us into a trap in which it's easy just to follow the group or the people we most associate with.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that of course is a difficulty as well because we've
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[SPEAKER_00]: thinking critically about the situation of the economy, governance, education, health, you name it, and politics, particularly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's a whole jumble of things that are preventing us fully makes sense of what's happening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the issue for me that I find when I'm working with groups is the conversation exists at a surface level.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So if you imagine an iceberg, all the conversation and talk is around what you see about the surface of the water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And of course the bulk of the sensing of what's actually happening is under the water.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and the morphological layers are important, because if you can sense patterns, that's helpful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then if you connect those patterns together in Gregory Bateson's language, the pattern that connects the patterns, then you get to a deeper level.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You keep going down, and you get to three fundamental structures, architectures.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the mindset, the individual and the individual community or group you're in, the mindset or the mental models you used to make sense of the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they're all in flux at the moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The reason they're in flux is because we're trying to make sense of the world's system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In manual, Wallerstein's description of the world system as the palpable, or tangible real world that we deal with every day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing that we sense is changing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the real change is coming from the world view, which is the fundamental belief system, the shared belief system, that gives rise to the world system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the world view is invisible, it's hidden, it's secret.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And our world view in the West is very different from our world view in the eastern China, for example.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So let me just explain that because I think that's fundamental to why we can look at what's happening in the world system, like the trade differences between the US and China, for example, the war that's the
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[SPEAKER_00]: The problems in the Middle East with Israel, which has become an incredible enigma that the victims of the worst possible mass killings of the 20th century have now become the perpetrators of a new kind of genocide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So let me go to the world of you and the Western world view, first of all, the Western world view is very easy evangelical.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It believes that is supreme, that it knows best and therefore the rest of the world deserves to know about the Western world view and should be embracing it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but it's based, and the rest of the world sees that it's based on colonialism, extractionism, objectivism.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or which were given new meaning during the 18th century European Enlightenment, where you get the reinforcement from scientific realism, and particularly Cartesian logic, where we tend to say it's either or it's black or white, left and right of politics, red and blue, whatever you like.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So that,
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[SPEAKER_00]: accidental world view is the world view that's in crisis at the moment because we're seeing that is internal contradictions do matter and it's those internal contradictions that I know that that are forcing
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[SPEAKER_00]: change.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you just take the economy, for example, the economy that came out of the Industrial Revolution, which I call Industrial Economism, which we will now call capitalism, has become toxic, has become predatory, its extraction is still, and it's doing enormous damage to our sons of the planet, and we're beginning to see that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's an existential crisis.
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[SPEAKER_00]: for the Western world view, not just individuals within that Western world view, but the Western world view, it's sense.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In contrast to this, bear in mind that I'm sitting in Bangkok in Thailand, and there are, this is not a perfect situation by any means.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, the morning, some Thai jets attack the border with Cambodia, and we've got real problems in our regions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the worldview that's largely dominant in this part of the world has a different kind of energy entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not based on the cult of the individual, it's based on family and communitarianism, and the importance of the group.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's based on the Confucian ethos of an Buddhism, particularly, and let's go further west and then you come into Hinduism, but the same kind of energy in terms of sharing and collectivism.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the ability to connect more easily, I think, here, sitting here in time and the energy is probably different to the energy, I sense when I go to Europe or the US, and actually the US, I won't travel to look at the moment because the energy is so negative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I've got so many friends in the US that it's
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[SPEAKER_00]: it's painful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's a little bit of what's going on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Does that help?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Does that, or is that as that confused matters?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, so it's helpful, you share.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so, one of the things we've shared, we've explored on the podcast is, you know, this kind of hyper-individualistic
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[SPEAKER_01]: Cartesian kind of linear mechanistic worldview that you could say, and this is where I defer to people who are really immersed in the theory, but has brought scientific advancement on one level, but on another level has led to a sense of
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[SPEAKER_01]: isolation and niching and a world of separate parts which is fixed and there's consequences which you're speaking to the other way we live together and how we view the planet and
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[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe a good question here is, do you, you know, when we talk about what is your sense of like the journey we're going through, really?
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[SPEAKER_01]: How would you articulate that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some people talk about collapse.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some people are quite pessimistic, you know, with the confluence of,
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[SPEAKER_01]: These large events like, even named AI, there's also climate, there's also capitalism as even named which seems to be privileging the fewer and the more and more people are feeling the impact of that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What is your sense of the journey we're going through and where we're at in that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is it hard to kind of call it one journey in a way?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Are you saying that's actually multiple journeys with different views baked inside of it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Collapse in complex systems, parlance is necessary for rebirth and renewal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You can't stay in one complex system if there's a tipping towards change and it goes past a certain point.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then you have to embrace that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and design what's coming out the other end, so if there is collapse, it's not necessarily negative, it depends how you look at it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you're one of the people that are so vested in the St. Disclosure, then collapse is alarming because you get the sense of loss of not being able to do what you have done to be as successful as you have been.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Over here it's rather different and in any complex system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Once you're past certain tipping points and we're reaching those fast in terms of the climate, for example.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then it's a question of embracing that letting go of the old in order to embrace the new and designing that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we are in transition between two kinds of society because of the fragmentation that's been going on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So the fragmentation here is not as painful as it is in the West because of the West's monolithic understanding of itself, whereas here there's much less of that even in the country,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the kind of monolith that, um, for example, Europe sees itself as, um, when you see a monolith and you just say what you mean by that, monolithic as it as in terms of generalizing, uh, generalizing the state of collapse as it's all going.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, which is not true, um, hey,
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[SPEAKER_00]: And collapsed doesn't mean everything collapses, some things will continue.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The things we cherish and want to continue will, they'll be redesigned, but we'll get through that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, in the foresight community, I'm known as a Cassandra, which is not good because it's all doom and gloom from that point of view.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But as a systems thinker,
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm an optimist because if we can engage the gear of design,
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[SPEAKER_00]: then consciously.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then we can create a world that is better and flourishing for our well-being.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It won't be the kind of world that exists now because that world is the world we're experiencing
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[SPEAKER_00]: not sustainable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we talk about where we, I'm very careful about the language I use, as you know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And for me, we're very sloppy in our use of language.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the terms I squirm all the time when I hear about it, is here it, is the term sustainable development.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The two can't go together, it's just a conflict that's impossible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: methods, the current practices, the current world as it is, the systems that exist today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, the most life-critical systems need to be reinvented almost totally from the ground up from first principles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like
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[SPEAKER_01]: And again, so what you said in the beginning was interesting, you said by actually if you go and try and make sense online, there's a lot of propaganda and so yeah, it's not necessarily a great place to go if you, I mean if you watch the news, social media etc, but you know it's it seems like
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[SPEAKER_01]: we're not really making these changes, and this is a conversation I have amongst friends and people and me, what level of pain will we need to go through in order to relinquish certain things that feel like they're ready to be let go of?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And where is the leadership?
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[SPEAKER_01]: to do that coming from, you know, and so I guess, is it, do you think, how do you see this change occurring and where do you see this leadership coming from?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is it already there?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is it already changing?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is it just that we're not aware of it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay, so there's a lot to unpack there and there are two things we get to leadership in a minute.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, if we come back to what's happening and the sense that more should be happening and change should be faster and more radical, then in the West what we question then is government.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is government doing on our behalf to change things faster?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we criticize government when that's not happening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in this part of the world and in parts of Africa too, you get tiny little long claims, villages, start-ups, small rapid experiments happening where the kinds of changes that are required
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[SPEAKER_00]: are being tested and things are being tried out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a totally different response mechanism to the feeling, it's sensation that we need to change and we need to respond to reality by adapting to the new set of conditions facing us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's one thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing in terms of leadership, leadership, which I explored in 10 years of research leading up to my third book, which was called the Five Ditchesses of Global Leadership.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When I was working with just extraordinary people around the world, I mean names, I want, I want, I want, listen, but names that would be on everyone's lips in terms of leaders.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's an illusion, leadership, as we understand it, is an illusion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It has nothing to do with an individual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It has nothing to do with charisma.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It has absolutely nothing to do with contingency.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, that's the business model that we accept around leadership, it is rubbish.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't work, and it never has worked, because leading and leadership is an emergent phenomenon of a collective group.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's shared.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There will be people who have visions of what can be possible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Others who will analyse that and make changes to operations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There will be people within any group that hold different roles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There will be storytellers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There will be navigators.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There will be people who have different roles to play within the group.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we must grow up and
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[SPEAKER_00]: and move away from the notion that leadership is an individual phenomenon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I love that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It reminds me a little bit of some of the challenges Dave Snowden has brought as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We've atomized leadership as if it's some fixed set of competencies that
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if we could only take those on, then everything, you know, we're change, and you know, in the coaching industry, I think we fall prey to this a lot.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you would, because the models started out of the business schools.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, after the Second World War,
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[SPEAKER_00]: this whole notion of the people defining what leadership was, came out they were academics, they came out of the business schools, and this was another way of making money, and it's been taking on by the consultant organising, the large consulting organisations who love this, it's just another way of generating revenue.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, let's follow this track a little bit before we maybe move back to some of the
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[SPEAKER_01]: You talk, so if leadership isn't in an individual, then that presumes, as you've named already, these projects that are taking place in communities where presumably there's a kind of leadership and more emerging in the collective there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So could you say more about,
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[SPEAKER_01]: how the culture and consciousness for this kind of change can break through, what are the conditions that support that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And also, therefore, what is our role as an individual?
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is a question I've sat with a lot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, if leadership is in the relationships and it's emergent and it can move between people,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then therefore, you know, what is the role of a coach?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What is the role of my inner journey in all of this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because people talk a lot about, we need a consciousness shift.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, at those of your clients and audience who know about spiral dynamics or what became spiral dynamics, it was from the Gravesian theory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and it sprouted on amics by Dombeck and it's difficult because it's been kind of misinterpreted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But certainly clear grave himself, you go back to the source material, clear graves himself was talking about a giant leap of consciousness from the level of subsistence to a
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[SPEAKER_00]: individually, collectively, and back to the notion of world view and world system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think we'll be able to design the kind of world system.
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[SPEAKER_00]: we need, obviously, I'd stand in again with the same thinking that caused the problems of today, so we need a different thinking but at a different essence of who we are, what is our identity as a species, what does it mean to be human today, especially in the age we're moving into with
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[SPEAKER_00]: so called artificial intelligence, perhaps even competing with humans in the future.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it comes back to impulse, the people I've mentored who have been in senior positions in their organisations like Chief Executives, Chairman Awards, entrepreneurs who are leading
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[SPEAKER_00]: in the process of mentoring there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You bring out the humanity that's locked inside.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And until that humanity is released, I can't think of a better term for it, then you can't create the fundamental condition for collaborative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: any kind of collaborative or shared phenomenon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You have to unlock the humanity within.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's ethical, it's compassionate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's all about relationship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's about love, fundamentally.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's about love.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the actually the one thing that has been left out of the industrial,
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[SPEAKER_00]: industrial paradigm, love, love drives everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not money.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting you bring that up because that's becoming more of a theme in our conversations on this podcast.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People bringing love back into business into leadership.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I'm seeing it in physics and
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[SPEAKER_01]: biology and I can't remember the writer but there's an amazing biologist writing about how you know, love is driving the evolution of everything and how, you know, we kind of took that out the equation basically when we were working with the sciences.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So,
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[SPEAKER_01]: So let me, when you say bringing humanity and love back in, can I ask to share a bit more about that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, my, my take on that would be that, you know, it's complex, we're biological, but we've been patented by the cultures, we brought up in the world views,
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[SPEAKER_01]: and the family systems and, you know, there's ways that we can become traumatized.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's a very common notion, although I know it's being challenged in other ways.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But so all of this in a way patterns the way we see who we are
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[SPEAKER_01]: what it means to be human and to live in this planet.
31:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the role of approach can be to help someone become aware of that and an integrative process where one opens out of a more sort of isolated separate sense of self that's oriented around safety and belonging without making any of that wrong.
32:04
[SPEAKER_01]: but people become more loving and more interconnected.
32:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we mentioned correctly trauma, and we normally associate trauma in a psychological sense of
32:24
[SPEAKER_00]: being shocked in a certain way and suffering from that.
32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I think one of the things that we haven't yet realized is that all of us carry trauma of some kind with us through life.
32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I know my first shock of that kind was the loss of my father at the age of eight years old.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: When that happened, I didn't speak.
32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Literally, I didn't utter a word for over a month that the shock was that deep.
32:59
[SPEAKER_00]: But the love I held for him
33:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I have felt every day, it's been carried through every day.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you a story about one of my clients, actually.
33:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The, you mentioned right at the beginning, I've worked with some very large and successful enterprises.
33:20
[SPEAKER_00]: One of these was one of the largest banks in the world.
33:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was mentoring asked to mentor the chief executive
33:34
[SPEAKER_00]: which I did.
33:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It was difficult actually to start because he actually resisted it.
33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He found always there was an excuse had to go to a meeting, I had this, so it was actually difficult to start and I had to find a way in in order for even to get into a conversation with him.
34:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing about mentoring, and it's the same probably I think with coaching today, not conventional coaching, which is around skills, but the whole of life coaching that is required today, is very often comes down to the kinds of question you ask and asking the more profound questions at the right time.
34:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And with this gentleman, it was my second session with him.
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It was
34:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And I arrived before he was and his secretary let me in to his room and I've been waiting for him.
34:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And he came in with a huge smile and everything seemed to be right.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a good day.
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We started conversing in terms of where we'd left off in the previous conversation.
34:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And as usual, I allow people just to settle in to the session.
35:03
[SPEAKER_00]: You've experienced that.
35:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was happy and I thought, OK, well, question, can I ask now, a profound question?
35:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I can't recall what the question was.
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But it stopped him in his tracks.
35:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And he thought about it.
35:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And he, the first reaction was, mmmm, I'm not sure how to answer that.
35:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was another pause, and then to my horror, and complete surprise, he started crying.
35:46
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a strong man, a matcho individual, see him at press every day.
35:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And here he was crying, a sobbing, and it was due to the question, whatever question I'd asked.
36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But when he stopped crying, I said to you, okay, it's, can we carry on?
36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And he turned to me, and for the first time looked me straight in my eyes and said, between
36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm under so much pressure.
36:25
[SPEAKER_00]: My marriage is collapsing.
36:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got to see the market analyst today.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got to declare the quarterly results.
36:31
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not particularly good.
36:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've not got a life.
36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, I haven't a life anymore.
36:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And it, it dawned on me that it doesn't matter who you are.
36:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't matter what position you hold.
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: especially if you're in public life, the pressure on you is enormous, but just with every day living.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The anxiety hanging in the ether over us all is immense.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It's palpable.
37:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You can almost smell it.
37:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And that pressure is leading to having to deal with the trauma we all carry with us for whatever in their all different reasons throughout life.
37:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the huge crunch that coaches and mentors are having to deal with.
37:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we are not fit as individuals to deal with that crunch, then that plays back into our own susceptibilities and fragilities and vulnerabilities.
37:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, touched by that story and it actually tunes me into one of the main invitations in my life in these times, which has been to meet myself in this way that you're talking about too.
37:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And through the work that I've done with others, you know, like yourself and to to kind of had to be met by others to be witnessed, to be seen in a way that allows me to touch myself and that that.
38:16
[SPEAKER_01]: not only can be a very challenging process, but actually is the doorway through to a greater sense of a live-ness and capacity coming online, even a sense of deep love for the word, in a way like it's a love-making endeavor.
38:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that I would love you share this because,
38:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of people listening will just feel like you've just zoomed in on one of the main kind of ontological moods of our times, you know, that it's like there's just this sense of anxiety or doom, disease permeating our experience, and it's not necessarily
39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not capable of putting in words, I think, but it is felt and it's felt deeply.
39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, getting back to the inner work just for a minute in this context, that's a difficulty too, because in the old Western paradigm, you seek psychological help.
39:28
[SPEAKER_00]: to deal with these things.
39:32
[SPEAKER_00]: In this part of the world you don't interact in the country like Tireland.
39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There are very few psychologists.
39:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The usual route, if you feel any kind of trauma or sadness or depression or loneliness, is the village Sharman first.
39:50
[SPEAKER_00]: That's usually the first port of cool.
39:52
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're in the city, it's very often the temple, the what, the monks, usually and then perhaps friends, but the hospital or the department's psychology is usually the last port of cool.
40:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the default mechanism, so that's very different.
40:21
[SPEAKER_00]: My journey was always because I started in medicine.
40:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I was very aware of the flaws in Western medicine.
40:31
[SPEAKER_00]: flaws which have become really obvious today in terms of the medical profession, really being captured by a big farmer and of his patents like that.
40:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But at that stage, when I was at Med School, I was fascinated by Chinese medicine, herbal treatments, natural therapies.
41:00
[SPEAKER_00]: not just not helpful, but the reverse of that, an obstruction to really doing the inner work I needed to do.
41:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I found a way of doing that for me, that was through Buddhism and into being and back to love.
41:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And for me, that's also because I'd love a lot.
41:28
[SPEAKER_00]: um as an eight-year-old man, you know, the whole of life behind me, a life's journey, and a life's experience, I do love a lot, at a sense, at a sunset or at a piece of music, sighting a poem.
41:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I can start crying for no reason at all.
41:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember, for a few years ago now, I was giving the, in keynote to a conference in Brisbane in Australia,
41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And to about 1,500 people, I can't remember the content, at the theme of the content.
42:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The conference was about 1,500 people there, and I was giving the opening keynote, and I looked out at the origins.
42:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And just felt this immense love, I can't call it anything else for humanity.
42:15
[SPEAKER_00]: not, you know, this block, this species, this collection of humanity that I had before me.
42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And I choked, I had to wait a few seconds to gather my senses.
42:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I think the inner work is important, but the normal channels of doing that in a work are not necessarily the best
42:44
[SPEAKER_00]: but the inner world needs doing.
42:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, how come they're not the best, yeah?
42:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, because I think a lot of what we've constructed is in that Western paradigm.
42:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's restrictive.
42:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It's certain of its convictions about everything.
43:02
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no room for perhaps, or I'm not sure, that the medical profession is absolutely certain.
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really confused, a lot of medics these days where a patient turns up and says, starts the conversation by saying, well I've googled my condition and now I need to discuss with you this and this and this.
43:26
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really a stake in the heart of the medical profession because we're not used to that, the doctor, in my time, what's God?
43:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't, you didn't argue.
43:36
[SPEAKER_00]: whatever was the proposis or the treatment, was the proposis and the treatment?
43:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it that there is, because you know, just building on what you shared and what you said earlier about trauma, that's why I think coaches are being invited to reimagine what it means to be a practitioner.
43:57
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and there's no one way, but I think being able to meet the whole human being in front of us is something that I'm feeling is really important and that includes holding space for their ways they feel hurt.
44:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And that means, you know, also knowing one's limits and boundaries,
44:26
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's as if like, this is why I think this is important, these conversations are important for coaches.
44:31
[SPEAKER_01]: If we see coaching, solely as a way to become more successful, to become better, more bigger, and a way like, you know, function even as a more effective cog in the machine.
44:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, cope better with being in these toxic work environments.
44:53
[SPEAKER_01]: We're perpetuating a certain notion of what it means to be human.
44:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe even perpetuating that we're, you know, an individual isolated individual.
45:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And so therefore,
45:06
[SPEAKER_01]: or even that we're only our psychology, you know.
45:10
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what some of the best conversations I've had on the podcast are where people have said we have to stop reducing coaching to the psychological realm and include that but include many others.
45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Or yes absolutely.
45:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's because, yeah, really, the traditional channels, if you just replicate those channels, they congeal, they then harm, and they really become quite solid, and there's no way out of that.
45:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You actually need the opposite of that.
45:42
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to loosen my conflict of the word at the moment, but this is why the little tools that I
45:50
[SPEAKER_00]: invented or authored with a behavioral modler by the name of Marvinoca who's an absolutely credible guy to work with.
45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: which we call systemic acupuncture, which was based on story, tell me the story of who you are, what are the main features of that story?
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the gaps in the story?
46:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are those gaps there?
46:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Explain that.
46:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, story is a way into understanding someone and questions, of course, which I already covered.
46:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, you know, whereas the pain, I think that's very, very useful, because especially with the whole idea of systemic agriculture is you find that intervention point, which is the most benign intervention point to start with, that nevertheless changes the energy
46:57
[SPEAKER_00]: in quite subtle ways.
46:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think if you're a person whose profession is the relating to relating to people, understanding them and liberating what's within them rather than imposing yourself on them.
47:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I think story and systemic acupuncture and tools like that become very, very useful.
47:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe this is a good segue to kind of...
47:32
[SPEAKER_01]: we even the systemic and the, you know, the world picture again.
47:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the invitations I'm feeling is we actually stop seeing ourselves as at, you know, at separate from the systems we're in.
47:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you say something about
47:54
[SPEAKER_01]: the invitation being made to us in terms of individuals and our culture and that may be that it's
48:05
[SPEAKER_01]: different depending on the regions of the world.
48:09
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's talk about a little bit more about and by the way, like as you speak, I think I even start to tune in Richard to maybe this is a Western view, you know, like that things should change faster.
48:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we're not okay where we are.
48:28
[SPEAKER_01]: This collapsed as bad and we need to move more quickly to the regeneration.
48:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I'm aware of getting caught.
48:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So, what is the, what's needed?
48:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, okay, so the feminine.
48:42
[SPEAKER_00]: is, first of all, is needed.
48:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember that in the West particularly, but it happens here as well.
48:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's a holistic world view.
48:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The world that we've designed has been designed by men, for men.
49:03
[SPEAKER_00]: We are the default male is the default mode.
49:07
[SPEAKER_00]: We badly need the feminine.
49:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the feminine that comes into the male world and is forced to behave like men in order to
49:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But the feminine of indigenous thinking, the matriarchy that has a very different set of skills and role within society, we need that really badly.
49:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And we need to invite that in, not in the sense of affirmative action and all those silly things, but really because of
49:53
[SPEAKER_00]: of otherwise leaving 50% of the world's population out of consideration and deliberation in terms of what can be.
50:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's fundamental.
50:06
[SPEAKER_01]: But before I ask you a bit more about this, which is beautiful, you say this, one of the things I see is
50:18
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you look, and I don't want to take this conversation into too much political terrain, but, you know, I think one of the stories I hear is why Trump gained powers because lots of young men in the U.S.
50:33
[SPEAKER_01]: fell left behind by the left, they felt that they were told they're the problem, you know, men are the issue, toxic masculinity.
50:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there is, it's just an amplified a sense of polarization.
50:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, if you look at some of the statistics that young men, boys are getting left behind by women, what Warren Farrell has these amazing
50:59
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, who was a huge advocate for women's rights, but when he started to say, hey, hang on a minute, there are these young men who are really struggling, he got ostracized from that community.
51:15
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we bring in the feminine, and even within men, the feminine qualities with balance, that doesn't polarize, create further polarization, doesn't, you know, some people are saying that the school system is feminized, or a very feminine and doesn't honor young boys,
51:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So, how do we do this in a way that doesn't create more of the same problems that happen when the masculine and patriarchy kind of designed all the systems and create more division
52:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a caveat here, and the caveat is, I don't really know, but let's move past that and get back to story again, because the story is retail about the difference in roles and character and gender and
52:23
[SPEAKER_00]: All the stories we tell around that compartmentalizes, put us into a box and decide for us who we should be.
52:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we need different stories.
52:36
[SPEAKER_00]: We need a totally different narrative.
52:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, I go back.
52:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess because it's easy, but there's another world of you, other than the occidental and the sionic, which are the only two we've spoken about.
52:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But another major world of you is the Ubuntu World View in Africa, which essentially paraphrased is I am because we are, it's a relationship, World View.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I just think we need to design a world view that looks at Indigenous and First Nations communities to see how they did things so successfully for thousands of years and try and learn from that.
53:28
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is again that we label things, language is so important.
53:33
[SPEAKER_00]: As soon as we label something as primitive, we don't go near it because we think we've got nothing to learn from that.
53:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas the societies that existed thousands of years ago in many tribal and indigenous societies.
53:52
[SPEAKER_00]: had already solved the problems that we've recreated for ourselves today.
53:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They have wisdom that we should be accessing, and it's all about, in that context certainly, with the caveat, I really don't know in terms of how we do this, because that's such a profound question.
54:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Narrative has to be when new narratives has to be a part of redesigning a world system
54:22
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you weave AI into this?
54:25
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, on the one hand, we're talking about indigenous wisdom, you know, thousands of years of cultural wisdom, human wisdom that we could tap into.
54:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, on your hand, you have AI and
54:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we haven't even talked about the whistleblowers around UFOs and stuff which has blown my mind, opening myself to the views of these US commanders and other army commanders.
55:01
[SPEAKER_01]: But the, yeah, you're actually mentioned in the earlier in our conversation that you think
55:09
[SPEAKER_01]: large language models of maxed out, which is also interesting because that's not the common narrative you think about people like Tristan Harris who was just on the director of a CEO podcast and you know the kind of message she was bringing was like we've got two years to alter the system before AI will kind of take over and you know you hear all these stories about how that could
55:40
[SPEAKER_01]: What would you say about AI and how that relates to the kind of wisdom that might come through?
55:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we can't go back to like, can we to living how we lived in these indigenous cultures with AI coming inside?
55:56
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you people that together?
55:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't suggest that we go back and live in caves, but I'm not sure.
56:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of what you hear about what?
56:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The ordinary people, men and women in the street here about AI, is the AI story as told by technocrats, it's that the elite take democracy with all the hype that they're used to coming out of places I Silicon Valley.
56:25
[SPEAKER_00]: that you hear, and we're so gullible, look, we're thinking, all right, okay, we need to be fearful or we need to be there, so we need to be that.
56:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The reality of AI, as it exists at the moment, it isn't intelligent.
56:40
[SPEAKER_00]: If you really take the most advanced L&M's at the moment, often they simply can't count the number of words you bring.
56:48
[SPEAKER_00]: They really are sorting machines more than anything.
56:52
[SPEAKER_00]: They can only work with what currently exists.
56:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They can't create anything new.
56:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the opportunity that is beginning to be spoken about in terms of singularity would need, like, radar that cuts files, notions of singularity, where artificial or machine intelligence is more intelligent
57:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I'm not talking about individuals.
57:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking about a scale.
57:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you're talking about a different proposition entirely.
57:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And we really don't have to do that at the moment.
57:32
[SPEAKER_00]: We will probably discover the research that's going on into that.
57:37
[SPEAKER_00]: We will probably discover within the next five to ten years how to make sentient artificial sentience work
57:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But then it's a question of what you code and design into the development of that species as to how it interacts with humanity.
58:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a great optimist because I see what it can do at the moment in areas like healthcare, for example.
58:14
[SPEAKER_00]: and automated surgery and things like that, robotics generally.
58:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very hopeful that our coding will be sensible and wise and it will lead to a partnership a relationship that accommodates the best of humanity with the best of the machine world.
58:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
58:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Cool.
58:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, thanks Richard.
58:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I just really appreciate you being willing to, you know, traverse all these different topics and that's one of the things I I love about you the way you can think so expansively.
58:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Here we are.
58:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We're at the end of the podcast.
58:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Just a heads up again.
58:59
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coaches rising dot com.
59:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Put your name in the sign up box there.
59:08
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll also find some of our other offerings online trainings for coaches there.
59:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And just want to end by wishing you well.
59:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll see you again next time.