 And welcome to the heart of downtown Honolulu and the beautiful pioneer plaza here in the center of the Pacific. And we have a very interesting guest for our Art of Thinking Smart series this morning. And her name is Elizabeth Rieveli. And she works with a group that uses the word radical in its name. So as you know, Elizabeth, radical comes from the Latin word for root, right? You chose this word and this implication very deliberately. What do you mean by radical? I did, Michael, and there are several reasons. One is for the shock value, because it does get people to think. And a lot of this, of what we're talking about, both in business and our personal lives, is about thinking, about thinking for ourselves, and it's about being more aware. So there's that part, but there is also that root part. So at the very bottom of who we are and what we came here to do, you know, when we think clearly, when we think through our lives and how that applies to business and families and the planet, it does come back to that root of who we are. And that's like in here, it's in our dantien, it's in our hearts. Who are? Who? Let's get radical. Yeah, so who we are is ever-changing. And we are the essence of the divine. We are probably, that's enough right there, we're the essence of the divine. We have bodies to manifest the divine on the planet. And how does that express itself in our business lives? Because part of ourselves is earning, and creating, and building, and sustaining, and supporting, and how does that all come into who we are? I love that question because it allows me to say how important it is to bring all of those parts together. And if there's any one thing that we take away from this time together, it's all those pieces, even those shards, that have been split apart with trauma and upset over lifetimes, and even in this lifetime, maybe the real question is how do we bring those together so that we can become very present in every moment today, whether it's with our kids, after a really long day and maybe hassles at work, how do we go home and be present with our families? How do we then stay up with a sick child all night and come to work being absolutely present? So how do we do that? You know, a lot of people say, well, I have my business life, I have my personal life, I keep them separate. So you have couples, right, where the man is working all day and he comes home and his wife doesn't know what he's been doing. She's out all day. She's working. When they come home, there's little connection. You even have your kids who have their social life out in school and their hobbies and so on, and they come home and there's minimal intersection. And that's regarded by some people as a healthy model, so that you have your outside world and then you come home and you're supposed to have your family and your nest, your relationships, which is not disturbed by all that external, is that something that you understand, that you advocate, that you think we need to do differently? What's your take on that? Well, there's a keyword that you dropped in there, which is supposed to. And so I'm wondering, by the way you phrase the question, if that's like an image or a fantasy of what we think might happen because I don't honestly know anyone that that happens for. So I can't speak to them personally. Well, it's a classic American sort of, it's a father knows best kind of style, right? No, because the mother wasn't out though. See, that's not the father knows best, exactly. Mother knows best. We're updating it a little bit. Yeah, but it's really different. So that's part of it, is there was no one at home to gather that family energy. I mean, there is not now, but if you want to go back to Beaver and those guys, the mother was home and she was collecting, she was the fierce love that held the family together, which is if you go back for generations and generations, there was the mother energy and there is the mother of our earth. So this fierce love of the mother is essential in animals and in humans. I think we could say that maybe we've lost some of that in a way or it's been kind of dispersed and changed. Well, how is that for the professional woman today? You're a professional woman, you're successful, you're out and about, and you have your own personal and family life. So it definitely is different. For the majority of American women in the 21st century, they have a significant life outside the home. It's very often professional and sometimes, you know, they run for president and they run for senator and they run for, you know, there are business leaders, they're presidents of our banks and so on. How does that work for the family with a professional woman at the heart of it? You know, I would actually like to do, to get a lot of professional women together on this question and see how it works because I'm thinking that it probably doesn't work very well. Now, I feel like I was really special case in a certain way that allowed me to develop this because I was able, as a single mother, able to bring my child into, and so my life and my business, because it is about self-care, it opened the doors for me to create this understanding or develop this understanding and be inclusive. So one thing I have noticed, though, with certainly myself and I think a lot of people, is when we go into overwhelm, we lose our capacities to, for a lot of things, but to think clearly to hold, so there is this way, we need to be able to hold energy. We need to be hold a lot of different thoughts without judging. We need to be hold many kinds of energies and allow others to come in. So we still are the mother, right? And we're holding the space for many people to come in and share and process. So I've always been a process-oriented person without having to be comparing and judging. Well, let's talk for a little bit about yourself, because you're invited here because you are you and because you have accomplished some significant things in your life business-wise. And the theme of the show is the art of thinking smart. So when you break that down, there is an art. This is not a science. This is not techniques that you can list. It's a practice, right? And thinking smart means thinking effectively. Instead of thinking a lot, thinking big, thinking many things at the same time, thinking smart so that you get to the objective in an effective way, right, in business terms. So maybe you can share with us what's the first thing that comes to your mind when you count what is the key to your success as a person? Well, one thing is being responsible for myself. So I think I really got that from my dad to not expect that someone else is going to fix it or do it or any of that. And there's this way of being responsible that allows us to be able to go out and be of service. So I was also raised a lot with community service. Again, my family. So the one thing, though, is that it has to all work together in my mind. So my work and my service and my family were always intertwined. There was no separation. So I feel really privileged, as I look around, that the idea of separation is not part of my consciousness. I mean, I can see it. But it's not how I was raised and it's not how I raised my daughter or how I live. So you use the word service. Now that's a really key concept in American business evolving today more and more towards a service economy. I work with a lot of companies helping them to develop their identity, develop their sense of purpose, and develop quality customer service for their people. So a big part of the success of a business like that is having centered people at the center of it, who know who they are, who are able to give that service, give that be responsive when a problem comes up to take responsibility to use your word for solving a problem and for actually to take a problem and turn it into an opportunity. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, because I know you work with companies too as a mentor and a coach, and you help companies to develop that sense of central purpose. So I think there's also several ways to look at service. So one is when the school that I had, we actually, I think, very effectively use service as a marketing strategy. So rather than pay for ads, which I have not found to be very successful here, we did huge community service. And I embedded it into the curriculum so that every student who would go out into the world would see that as a part of their contribution to the planet. Do you mean an example of that service? So we did massage therapy. You name it, we've been there. The Forgiveness Project, you can remember. We developed a whole forgiveness massage. But at a lot of the balls that are fundraising, Chinatown for first Friday for any business who wanted us, we would do massage. And massage therapy as a seated massage, and even just massaging someone's hand, is huge. So that's service as marketing. Service as marketing. And it's low cost. It's low cost. But high impact. High impact, low cost. But it also trains the student or the employee in a business milieu that we're hoping to extend in the planet. Maybe something that viewers can take to heart from this is that look at the aspects of your business that allow you to express that spirit of service and find a time and a place where you can go and do it. And extend. Extend ourselves into the community. If you were Google, for example, and you want people to understand the power of search, then you would find, let's say, a graduating school of high schoolers. And go to a science fair and have a booth and have a Google expert showing all of the great tricks that are possible with Google and all of the things that you can discover. And that would be possibly a more effective way of marketing Google than a lot of social media or TV commercials. Or it could be a component of, a new component of that type of identity, that type of branding. And part of it is too being just curious and innovative. So I love going out into businesses and always making it different. Because everything is different depending on the person with whom you're speaking or the business with whom you're consulting. But so, for example, about thinking smart or working smart would go into a business that does deliveries and just put a little sign on their rear view mirror, work smart. And then the teaching was behind that. But then they would be in their van carrying boxes and remembering from that one little sticker that they need to bend their knees, keep their back straight, and really take care of themselves. So when we take care of our bodies and our minds and our spirits as one, then we are better human beings. So we're serving ourselves and that enables us to serve others and the planet. So when we think in this way, then we are going to act differently. We're going to value differently, value other people and value the planet and value our resources. So it all comes back to how we value ourselves. And would you say that a business that has those ethics and those purposes built into it is more likely to succeed than one that doesn't? Absolutely. And we've seen that. There's studies and studies and studies on that now. We're going to take a break for a moment. OK. Thank you. Great. OK, this is Think Tech Hawaii. And it's Wednesday. Every Wednesday is Energy Wednesday here in Hawaii, the state of clean energy. 4 to 5 PM every Wednesday. Come and listen to us. And just to show you what I mean, I'm going to ask Sharon to tell us more. Come and see us every Wednesday, as Jay said. And we have people like Jim Auerst from HECO here and co-host Ray Starley here every Wednesday. We not only go on O'lello and OC-16, but also stream live. So please, come visit us, hear about the latest in clean energy. OK, Jim, you've been here. You got any comment on all this? As important as energy is in all of our lives today, this is a great forum and a great format to vet those issues. So I encourage everybody to listen in and participate. OK, Ray, what do you think for a close? Well, I think this is the greatest show in the energy world here in Hawaii. You can come here every week, one hour, and catch the latest on what's happening. And hear from the people who really know what's going on, like Jim Elberts. We appreciate your coming today. Thank you. Ray Starley, Sharon Moriwaki, Jim Elberts, and Jay Fiedel here in Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Four to 5 PM Wednesday. Aloha. Aloha. Hello, and welcome back. I'm Michael North. We're on Think Tech Hawaii. And we're here today with Elizabeth Riebeli, talking about radical things. And Elizabeth, you shared with us a quotation before we started. And I want to break this down a little bit. I want to unpack it as one of my favorite terms. I know I like that, too. So let's just take it as a whole thing by itself first and listen to it as poetry. It's from Victor Frankel, who's a well-known psychologist philosopher. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. What is he telling us? I think unpacking it, that that space, is that space is internal. It's who we are. It's the breath. And it's also offering us the opportunity to always choose how we want to show up. So we're choosing presence. And I like presence, as a word. So it offers the opportunity to breathe well. And that sort of part of my foundational thought is when we're breathing, we're taking in from the external. We're processing it through our physical body and our brain. And we're constantly in flow. So once we get stuck, then energy stops, disease forms. So as we want to be healthy and happy, taking radical care of ourselves, it's incumbent upon us to constantly find ways to be in flow. So breath is a really good one. We're always breathing. So we have a choice of how to breathe. We can breathe absentmindedly. We can barely breathe, so we're barely alive. Well, we breathe as part of our autonomic nervous system. Everybody breathes. And I would venture to say that most people rarely take a conscious breath. Unless it's a sigh or something. But there is a conscious breath that is a choice of a breath that you can make. Can you describe, or maybe even show us, what is a conscious breath that you're talking about? Sure, because that will allow everyone to start to work on this. Let's all take a conscious breath. So let's think about it as four to five seconds. Five would be best, because that will naturally put as good for those of us with ADD. Five seconds, all right. Right, so you have five seconds, right? So that will naturally take us into a parasympathetic response. Take us out of sympathetic, which is overdrive pretty much unconscious, and put us into a parasympathetic, more calm, more relaxed energy. So we have breath. So one thing a lot of people don't understand is our lungs actually come all the way up to here. So when we breathe, we want to fill the capacity of our lungs from down to our ribs to way up here. So first and first, we're going to breathe out. Because if you're still full, you can't take more. You think you're full. So just breathe out. Get all that old, stale air out. And then breathe in through your belly. And you can kind of feel a wave coming up. Hold a second, and then hold a second, and breathe in. And breathe out. So can you already feel a shift in energy? Sure. I feel a leveling. I actually feel, and I feel like a little kind of energy, like some little fluffy tingling. Tingling. Yeah, like energy's moving. Yeah. If I was John Stuart on the air, I'd probably pass out. Yeah, all right. Too deep of a breath. Yeah, and if you feel dizzy, that's because you're not used to having that much oxygen in your brain. Exactly. So that's sort of one way to create space. And it's our job to create that space for ourselves. I think that's partly what Victor Frankel is saying. We're responsible for creating the space that we need to be well, to show up as we would have ourselves show up to be healthy. No one out there is going to fix any health stuff and to be happy. And it's really hard to be happy when we're not feeling well, when we're in overdrive and we're just ADD or chaotic. And let's translate happy to successful for a business, because that's a group of people who are providing a service that's valuable together. That's what a business is, who choose. And here's another thing, that word choice comes back again and again. The successful businesses that I know are ones that make and enforce deliberate choices together. The ones who are less successful are controlled by outside forces. They're controlled by costs, by competition, by foreign trade, by all kinds of factors that they say they have no control over. So when you find a business that's having difficulty, usually they have a sense that they're kind of victim, that they're being controlled by. And they would like to fight back against those external forces. When you find a successful business, it's one where it doesn't matter what the external forces are. They're making internal choices deliberately, consciously. Maybe you can give us an example of maybe a company or a group that you know of that exemplifies that. Well, I will hold out my students, actually, as in they're all entrepreneurs. And some of them work at fancy hotels and spas around the world. But I think it is knowing who you are as an individual, as a group of individuals collaborating to create a business. And we're back down to being solid. And there's that foundation that we originally kind of brushed over. But that foundation is critical to the success, whether it's individual or collective, or our country. And now we're back to capacity. So within that ability to hold differences and still collaborate is also really important. So that's what we were training our students and our children to go out with knowing who we are, knowing clearly what my skills are, knowing what's beyond my skill level, and functioning clearly with joy. I think joy can still be a business word. To share that which we know we're good at. To share who we are, because I'm different than anyone else. And when I try to be like someone else, or when I try to make my business model as someone else's business model, it's not possible to be successful. Because who I am is the brilliance and who I create. And that's why my businesses have been successful, I think, because they've been built around the brilliance of our collective enterprise. We were talking earlier about how we have many personae. And there may be past personae. There may be future personae that we give energy to. There may be relationships. There may be business. There may be family, personae, relationships with children. And we tend, many of us, to have fractionalized our person so that it's difficult for us to bring all those pieces together in one entity, which is Elizabeth Rivoli. Can you talk about how those personae can be unified? They are all unified always. So there's no struggle. There's no change that's required. But how do we get there? I think that we get there in a variety of ways. And everyone has to find for themselves again. But one is to know that we're in training as marathoners. This is a long term, right? We're here for our lifetime. So however long that may be, it's still not short. We're not training for just this chat. The training that you've done and that I've done in business and in our lives and in our service to the community are coming together in this short chat. So all this training that we've done for years and lifetimes is coming together in this moment so we can be present together right now. So that's one thing. So think about it as training. So some people, everyone needs to notice whether they recover by going out and being with people or if they recover by going in to be by themselves. So a lot of times people think that I'm a big extrovert, but actually I'm an introvert. But I love being out and I love talking to people. I love this kind of thing and sharing. But I go home and I have time for myself. So my recovering is internal. It's going into nature. It's going to walk at the beach. It's going for a walk downtown even. But there's this knowing that I'm going in myself to build my foundation and to build by Dantian to go to Chinese medicine. Now other people who go out need to organize their lives so that they can go out and maybe lots of people go out after work together. So that's kind of a recovery. To round it all up, let's all in our business lives find ways to bring these values, these approaches, these ideas, these techniques that you've shared into our business world and share them with other people and organize our businesses around that kind of practice. Of course we all have to practice our daily discipline. We have our jobs to do. We have our deadlines. We have our clients. We have our standards we have to meet. But let's find a way to bring these living principles into that process. Because all those deadlines and things you mentioned that long list, they will all become part of that which we are. So rather than separate, it's like bring it all back to who I am, that's where to start.