 Well, the other thing people ask me all the time is I don't see how you get to the ideas you get to it's like I couldn't see that how can you see that I said I use a different mind than you do not then you have or could use but you have to learn to think through a different paradigm and I've spent my whole life doing that so when I listen to people talk I can hear that they're thinking through an old paradigm usually with good intentions or not bad actors in the world but their way of thinking doesn't let them see whether this is the effect really is. Carol Sanford is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Carol is an award-winning business educator, summit producer, podcaster and author. Her books are required business school reading at Stanford and Harvard. For 40 years she collaborated with clients to develop people to realize their inherent capabilities. Carol's clients include Fortune 500 companies like Colgate, DuPont, 7th Generation, Google's Innovation Lab uses her responsible business framework. You can learn more about all her business works and her books and that at her websites and those will be listed in the show description. She is a senior fellow of social innovation at Babson College, CEO of the Regenerative Paradigm Institute, educator and social change designer for people and change agent roles, organizational leaders who aspire to making a difference, business and organizational teams pursuing meeting, work and business effectiveness. She is the author of five bestselling books including The Regenerative Life, which is the last one that I have right here in front of me. I'm holding it up. Wonderful read and that's really the main reason I contacted Carol today. Another one I have her from is The Regenerative Business and that was, I believe, her third book that she wrote. There are Regenerative Life transform any organization, our society, your destiny, no more feedback. The Regenerative Business who Michael Backer of Google who is the vice president at Google wrote the forward 22 gold awards thus far for these books, for these five books. All five books are built around case stories of specific transformation in people, business, community and regions. I'm so excited to have Carol here on the show. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Mark, great kind of you to let people know about my work. I appreciate that. You're most welcome. It's very, you're very well spoken and I've seen you on stage a few times and you excite your audiences and your writing is absolutely amazing. I would have to say these books are and you probably would say so as well. I guess that's probably the first question. They like a series. Do they all belong together? Do they kind of build upon each other or support each other? Well, they all come out of my life and my experience. So they're all of a whole. I wrote them by being asked in almost every case. My first book, the Responsible Business, which my publisher would not let me call the Regenerative Business that thought that was a strange word, right, too long ago. It came because many of my clients who I would say, would you talk to this vice president or president or something about this work? And eventually they said, why don't you write a book and we will testify to our work in the book. So I wrote the first one. Then the then people said to me, wonderful book, but it feels like it's for big companies. All your stories are big. They weren't quite, but I can see how that's what they thought. They said, I'm an entrepreneur. I've got a startup kind of mind. So I wrote the second one, the Responsible Entrepreneur, partly to give people an idea of what could be done, even in a very, very small business. And then people said, well, I need to know how to do more of this. So I wrote the Regenerative Business, which is, I mean, it's not really quite a how to book, but it gives you an overarching picture of the transition businesses go through. And then in the Regenerative Business, I wrote one chapter, chapter five, I think it is called the 30 Toxic Practices, because it didn't matter of adding on to what you currently do, 90% of what I'm doing is creating product substitutions for the way people currently work. And they stop many things and instead redesign a very different way. Those 30, I now will see how my plan is to write a book about each era. And no more feedback, which you mentioned, I think is the most base destructive toxic practice in that most people can't see it. They are still convinced because it's familiar. They can't see themselves. And they have to have somebody else. People always say, no, it turns out you don't. And if you get feedback from other people, it will undermine increasing your ability. And then finally, well, not finally, because as you know, I have one more book coming. But the fifth book came about because I had individuals saying, what if I'm not the head of the corporation? What if I'm not the head of the business unit? Can I do anything? I thought, shoot, yeah, you can. So I wrote a book called The Regenerities of Life, which I think we're going to talk about a bit more. And it's really for individuals to be able to change their life. So it's all of a whole. But it's kind of targeted in different aspects of that. I love that. And so you tickled on the sixth book that's coming out or hopefully will come out soon. It's kind of this epistemology. Can you tell us, tease us a little bit more of what to expect there? Well, the other thing people ask me all the time is, I don't see how you get to the ideas you get to. It's like, I couldn't see that. How can you see that? I said, I use a different mind than you do. Not that you have or could use, but you have to learn to think through a different paradigm. And I've spent my whole life doing that. So when I listen to people talk, I can hear that they're thinking through an old paradigm usually with good intentions or not bad actors in the world. But their way of thinking doesn't let them see whether the effect really is. And so this book is called Indirect Work. Because the primary problem we have is, as Einstein said, we're using the old mind that created the problem trying to do the new one. So we don't know how to get out of a billion ball model and change. Let me say what that means, because it's a fun way. But Einstein was a pretty smart guy, as we all know. And when people ask him what he meant by that, don't use the old paradigm or old mind, he said, well, we're currently here in the early 20th century, which is where he was, working from a Newtonian mind. And that means a billion ball mind, where we think, ah, there's a pocket on the billion table. That's what people should be. All those balls on the table are the people. And we're the cue stick. And if we hit that cue stick or move that cue stick, us to move the person that's on the table into the pocket we have chosen, that's how we think change work. We have to do it directly. The quantum idea is understanding that everything is moved in a field. It's not direct. If you advocate, if you advise, if you coach, mentor, if you try and create restructuring, all those are directly trying to bring a change. They will bring about more restraint and more resistance. And it will cause what you're doing to go completely awry. You have to learn to think with the mind that sees the whole work, that to get working, not its pockets and so forth. So this new book is about that, which underlies all of my writing, not just my book I've written, I don't know, a hundred and something papers which are published around. If you wanna know how to think about it from a quantum mindset, that's what this book is about. That's amazing. I'm excited for that and I'm so glad that you could tease us a little bit about it and that you've obviously been working on it for a while. I really wanna jump back a little bit to the most important question. And that is how have you been? How are you doing it? And I wanna frame that first. We've been in two years almost of absolute craziness, lockdown, pandemics, black lives matters, Asian racism, crazy inauguration and all sorts of other things going on around the world, climate change and things happening. I wanna know if all these years of work, you've been writing these books, you've been writing other papers, you've been coaching people, you've been coaching businesses and... I don't coach, I don't coach. I'm not gonna coach. Yeah. Yeah, educate, I'm an educator. Educate, you're an absolute educator. You're not a coach, I'm sorry for that and I appreciate you correcting me. I won't, basically helping people to get to educating them and get them to a different place. And it's almost a transformation or a process obviously that can take sometimes a lot of time in your books. You also, you talk, you give a lot of people no pads, diaries, so to say, to take, to catalog or write down their journey or what they're going through and kind of because it's such a process. But what I'm asking is one, I wanna honestly know how did you weather all this craziness and this weird time but all that work that you did before has proven to be a better model for life and business to weather hard times to kind of be more resilient to get you through craziness that's going on in the world because you have a better model, not only for life, but for your business to get through those and maybe in your personal life but maybe also receive some feedback from those people that you've worked with over the years that says, boy, Carol, thanks for all your help. That's really helped us weather this hard time. We were prepared. That's a lot. Let's see. The work I use is ancient. It's not new. It has been generated in indigenous communities which you know as having read the regenerative life that I have heritage through Mohawk, part Mohawk grandfather who did get the blessings and the generosity of his family to learn the indigenous ways and he was probably the primary source of my staying sane as I was growing up because I was in a household with a mentally ill mother and a cruel, very destructive father. That's probably an answer to your question in some way if you can get through that kind of stuff you know you're working with something that matters. My work also comes from ancient lineage teachings. I have submitted my own being to a few different traditions, a few from kind of an academic study but others from living inside of them for years like looking and living inside of Mahayana Buddhism. It's in a bit but more Mahayana Tibetan Buddhism some out of India and special branches of Hinduism through Sri Aurobindo and the mother through Socrates and Pythagoras which both had a spiritual aspect to them. They were working on consciousness and not just how to make your life better in the world. All of those things are passed through my life, through my living and they're infused in everything that I introduced to people. In that process I do what I call transliterated. I take it out of the ancient terminology and I put it into a quantum terminology not into modern popular psychology terminology. And many people think that I'm using words that ought to change and make them so everybody would understand them. But if I did that, I would be putting, giving you words that don't represent what you need to think now. They need to be, the words themselves are very precise. The phrasing is very precise also based on those ancient kind of ways of thinking and organizing of thinking. If we can come forward, move ourselves and just saying, well, why would she use that word? And by the way, most of them are not my words. They're real words. Well, I made up the word life shift. I don't think that exists. I may have made up a few of these words but in the most part their words, it really exists. But you have to be willing to walk into for them to meet the criteria you were talking about in troubled times. You have to be willing to move you. Now, I wanna offer something to your listeners if you're interested, but you have to listen carefully and understand how to get to it. And we can put this in your show notes if you want. During the early part of the pandemic, created something called the morning meetings. And I ran them, I think 20 days in a row, right at the beginning, right through weekends, everything else. And they were all about how to take the work I've been offering and generating more even during that period and use it in what I called uncertain times. How do you work with disruption? So I took another level and I went very public. I did it for anyone who was on my newsletter. I offer three things to them ever so often. So it was on the newsletter or they can invite someone if they want my newsletter. They came for 30 minutes, fairly early in the morning because I had people all over the world. I had people in Australia, New Zealand, Japan getting up in the middle of the night to do these morning meetings. Now, the way your listeners can get to it is you go to Facebook and you search for the regenerative life community. And you ask to join and do not go away. I never ever go look at it. I don't go prove people, I've set it up. So then it asks you three questions immediately. If you answer those three questions you get in. If you don't answer them you wonder why I never let you in. So that whole idea was to respond to your question mark that you just asked is I use that material. I as a part of my meditative practice as a part of my research, as a part of my writing. I don't write to tell you what I know. I write to tell you what I'm trying to figure out. And I make myself work through some more or let's call it deeper way to come to an answer. And at the end I have a book that's educated me about what I've discovered for now. As I said to you earlier, I often send it off to the publisher and go shoot. I wish I'd asked that part and done that kind of thing. And I feel like I'm already behind. And now I've got another book I've got to write or a paper. So the answer is the wisdom about how to deal with up and down times I call them is universal. It's learnable. Most of us do not grow up in a world where we learn how to see ourselves, see our reactivity or ego. Or if we do go off somewhere like in a retreat we don't learn how to do it in daily life which is what my work is about. The karma yoga, someone called it, it's you're understanding the life you're living and you knew yoga while you go to work while you have a family. And those kind of processes, have you not only be okay in the ups and downs but to grow your being, your soul and to be a more involved being? That was a long answer. I hope you got to be with me. I'm absolutely so glad that you gave me the long answer because we're about, we really want to be about the depth or substance and you've put a lot of time into all of this and to all of your work and I thank you for sharing the Facebook tools. You're also the executive producer of the regenerative business summit which is coming up I believe in November. We want to tease and you also have, I mean, if we're going to list this all in the show note description, all your links, all your social media, all the places they can find and get in touch with you and with your tools but no matter what you do, you're continually offering these rebies and tools and places and downloads and you can get this and so you're really an educator who's also really wants to share a lot of this and so we'll put all those links there. You kind of tickled upon this with the title of your books in your direction, it really, did you kind of want them all to be kind of part of this regenerative series in some respect but you receive pushback from your publishers and say, no, we don't want to call that regenerative business, responsible business because better, is that kind of the direction that they were all going and more in this regeneration? So when I was thinking about books, I wasn't thinking about, I've got to write a whole bunch of books. I thought I was gonna write one book and that's because I don't believe I give people much of anything except for curiosity. Many people say to me, I've been looking for you forever and they don't mean me, they've been saying a way to engage things the way you do and even the words you gave me helped me and so I knew that if people were close to me, they were working and I do all my work in membership community. So that people say for my entire life or at least the next big chunk of it, I want to be in this process and learn how to do the life I live, the work I do in a very different way. So if I really am seeking with books to give people a path to a process or a path to a community, because I also don't, the other reason I don't think books do much except let us find a door is that they don't give us a community to work in and you can't, I don't care how good a meditator you are all by yourself in the morning and evening or how good a student you are by going and getting your masters of PhD and reading and writing and doing a dissertation, none of that will change you. Reading books is knowledge acquisition. Real change comes from moving from knowledge to understanding where an understanding happens when we pass it through our being and our life, we go take a work idea, kind of a sole work idea and we go apply it when we go to work the next day and the next day and the next day and then went to our family and then to our change agent worked in the world. That process is what really brings about change. Books are basically nothing although they can have a long life and they can go places like if somebody says to me who reads your book, I have no idea unless people like you say, I read your book and then I'm delighted. So they have that opportunity. I was working with the idea of regeneration going back to a big part of your question 50 years ago. So although that right up on my biography said 40 years I'm 10 years past when that was written. I was thinking as I heard it. And I call things by various names usually to be disruptive. The problem with regeneration right now although it's one of four types of work in one of my books I talk more about why it is, well, why it's generally so important but the problem is ideas become popularized and people jump on the bandwagon and they try and put their stamp on it. So they're not from the sacred lineage of what regeneration means. My grandfather taught me and he knew the word regeneration and he knew a version of it in Mohawk but he taught me to understand that regeneration was more about revelation. And I mean that in two ways. One is that you can reveal something that can't be seen in kind of like a detective using your mind in a different way but you also can reveal something in you that you didn't know. So the word reveal is closer but people have translated regeneration now in the popular press and their work to mean restore, renew. They're taking everything that was already popular biomemically circular sustainability and they're renaming it that. I call it the beat to fit and paint to match. So you beat what you're doing into so it crams into and you're saying I'm doing regeneration and you're not because if you were in a direct mode we talked about my new book earlier where you're doing things in a community or a field or a family and you're doing it to move that thing those people into a pocket you think they should be in you're not doing regeneration you're doing something else. And so I have had the same set of ideas since I was probably 12 or 13 years old when my grandfather rescued me from the household I was living in but I didn't understand it all until I passed through Berkeley I was studying with Thomas Kuhn for the couple of years he was a lecturing he wrote the structure and scientific revolution. It's in the real version of that library somewhere behind you, right? That book. I have it on my shelf right here. That's a wonderful book. It's a wonderful book and Thomas Kuhn is a great man. He didn't actually know how to tell people how to go find paradigms he just knew they exist and when I studied with him it was such a powerful experience because it should loose everything I'd believed about well what I was starting my church and by my family is truth and I'm never to question in fact I got a little trouble questioning it sometime but if you study and you internalize it so I started with my grandfather then Thomas Kuhn then I studied Socrates and the whole pre-Socratic philosophers and their sacred teachings translated into daily life as I did all that I came to first it profoundly changed me if I look at who I was as the small child that I start the regenerative life with and the college stuff I went through and then the various spiritual traditions that's what I'm trying to write about not something called regeneration and but now you'll find me doing a lot because people are undermining either co-opting and banalizing and greenwashing the idea of regeneration and missing the sacred nature of living systems and the idea that my grandfather said it's about revealing revealing the essence of something revealing the soul and doing the work to build a mind that can do that again, a long answer but yes, great questions. That's perfectly fine I like I said I have Thomas Kuhn here on my bookshelf and it's a fabulous book. Do you know that? I don't know if you know this or not but John Elkington said that was one of his influential reads and people that really changed his whole thinking. You hit the nail on the head right away and I'm so glad you did on this there is not only a movement but almost the buzzword or kind of the trendiness of regenerative regeneration right now. Matter of fact, just in another I think it's another six days Paul Hawkins book Regeneration comes out from Penguin I believe it is comes out and there are some things in there about meditation there's also John Elkington's in the book Jane Goodall and things there's another book here that I have it's called regenerative leadership it's not that old I would say it's about two years old from Gilles Hutchins and Laura Storm is a wonderful book as well. So, but I believe exactly what you're talking about with kind of not only ancient wisdom indigenous wisdoms and the way you talk about regeneration and revelation or how you reveal something is very spot on. I think there's a lot of different perms and a lot of people kind of using it as the buzzword. I do a lot of regenerative agriculture and so I've gotten just since this movement has come about I've gotten a lot of people asking me to speak about regenerative models, regeneration and when I go to speak they think I'm gonna talk about regenerative agriculture I don't talk about that I talk about connecting us to the earth to the soil to one another to this ancient indigenous wisdom and how we can get that real ancient wisdom that connection back that we've lost we've become numb we've disconnected ourselves from one another and many things and in your book, regenerative life a couple of times you kind of I don't know if it's advice or you stop people and say you need to connect first you need to find out yourself and then you need to understand your employees, your life those around you and listen and make that connection in some respects and I really like the way you did that because it even threw me off in many respects of how much we've just got to reconnect with and understand and listen and with each other and that it's a process that just doesn't happen like that that's why I guess everyone receives a notebook or has some kind of a journal that kind of it's something that happens over many days where they kind of write down the experience or the process that they're taking to get those aha moments or to get to were they really thinking about the steps and so that being said I love how you hit the nail on the head but I want to go even further I want to ask and then I want to come back to your family I want to ask about people like Paul Hawkin or John Elkington and these wisdoms who are coming out with new books and talking about regeneration I hope in a very good way how they really connect to your books and your way of writing and what you offer as education to people if they're in alignment or if you even maybe work with those people as well and what is your my feeling and I would like to know your feeling of connecting people to back to the earth and to indigenous wisdoms and ways of doing things doesn't mean always going back to the roots there's a modern way we can do it and still be connected to ancient wisdom but how do you see that? Do you see that it has something to do with regenerative agriculture? It has something to do with these old indigenous ways of way we used to see the world and be connected more with our earth or is it totally different? So you had so many questions in there yeah where to start I know I don't know the people you mentioned personally I know that some of them Paul for sure has worked with some of the people who work closely with me I've not read his new book I have in most work I'm not gonna comment I haven't read their new work so I can't comment but in the most people still use an old mind to talk about regeneration is one of the reasons I took the seven first principles of living systems which is what it was called that my grandfather offered and said, judge yourself whether or not you're actually working from a living systems view versus you're taking a bunch of stuff so you can interview various people everyone from the Dalai Lama to indigenous peoples and even Jane Goodall for example who's lived in the wild with amazing creatures but if you don't have a mind that knows how to work from those seven first principles of living systems you usually end up with a fragmented presentation of the work and all the work I've seen in the past from people who are using regeneration and the whole idea of regenerative leadership and design all of them end up with lists of things or chapter headings which are trying to cover a set of stuff but they aren't working from nested holes they don't start with holes they start with concepts and they start with the pieces and parts and then they try and put them back together again so they like you use the word earlier connect I don't believe that's the answer I don't believe it's about connection a connection is when you've got parts and are been separated and you're trying to put it back together so when I'm reading books people put out or listening I listened through these seven first principles which I did a pretty good job of articulating in the regenerative life my newest book indirect work they're foundational to we have to switch so we start not with ideas and with problems and with issues and causes and all those things that fragment us we have to start with holes and holes nested so a child is nested in a family in a community in a region in a nation on a planet and each of those are specific a specific child in a specific family and if we can't learn to see holes and I'm not saying wholeness wholeness is like aspiring to doing all putting all of me in there the good the bad I'm not talking about that and I do see that as a definition of regeneration and reconnecting us so every time I hear somebody write or speak or try and present the idea that's talking about connectedness and relatedness I know they're not working from an indigenous wisdom or from a lineage tradition their own ego is taking all the things they know and writing it and I have to watch me I grew up in this culture right so I was indoctrinated to think about it's reconnecting it's re-linking it's relating yep no so I can't comment on each of the specific people but I would see at first I think people want to learn to assess themselves that's why the seven first principles I put out so and gave people a way to use them to say whether you're really in a more spiritualized whole systemic understanding not connected not related but systemic working of a whole and they should listen to other people to see if they are I just did a keynote two openings for the Sustainable Brands Conference and another one for a group that's today I pre-recorded in Turkey and what I said was pick something you're trying to work on right now project and endeavor and check yourself but also listen to every buddy also gets on a platform every book you read and see if they're operating from the mind that can see these indigenous seven first principles and are they checking themselves and can you ask questions that wake them up to that so I haven't seen any good books that are doing that to tell you the truth and there are so many with not a regeneration of people say what do you think of this book I give them what I just gave you and said I'm not going to comment on the book and the author right what I want is people learning to be discerning and rigorous and disciplined about reading people's ideas and their own because that's the only way we get to the revelation process to the finding the essence of something not some other big name writing a book putting the name of the generation nine and taking over and seizing that's what I mean co-opting an idea to their own path with good intentions I don't think these are anybody's writing about evil I agree just not being rigorous enough can say their own ego is invested in their career and name pub usually yeah absolutely and you know I've spoken for sustainable brands all over the world as well and I'm a good friends with co-and you know co-and you've had her on one of your podcasts and so I've seen your I've seen your work for sustainable brands and I also how you how you speak as well and I understand that and what really needs to be clear I guess or needs to come out is what you're saying and I'd like you because you say it and still more eloquently than I do a lot of it's about the words we choose about the way we communicate about you know the it's not a healthcare system it's a sick care system type of a thing you know you have to be sick to get into the system and so a lot of it's on how we communicate and understand and you seem pretty precise about some of those things you mean and I would just like to you know those words we choose the structure and the principles we choose are also very important and how else do you feel about how how we communicate about them is that a big problem that we've had that we're not understanding it right we're using it for greenwashing and for other purposes the problem with all languages which are either I mean the Western languages anything it's alphabetic an alphabetical language is problematic because in the words themselves are the fragmentation so if you think about how to describe a tree or a forest people will divide up the tree into roots, leaves this is a David Bohm story that I'm borrowing who wrote Holiness in the Implicant Order he's a physicist who was a a colleague but also a student of Einstein's and he said we think about trees as made up of their leaves, their twigs, their roots, their bark and we can't actually see that a tree is a hole in fact he challenges us he said or maybe this is me that figured out I walk over to it and I say show me where the twig stops and the leaf begins and then show me where the twig stops and the branch begin you can't there's no it's a working hole and that's the key our language doesn't help us see things working it's I mean that's the first thing it shows them it's divided it also shows them it's static and parts and pieces so all language that is alphabetic is problematic and you and I and 90% of the people if not 100 on your call are raised in alphabetic languages and that that we have to come back that's a huge, huge problem because it will we have a subject verb object the world doesn't work that way so Bob always said you know we have to create a new language and of course that's not very easy to do but we have to learn to describe what we mean and try and be more precise about what we're seeing so I said to you earlier I made up a word and I'm thinking about a few others I've done too but I kept watching people talk about watersheds and then I'd go into the next room and they were talking about airsheds and then I'd go to the group and they were talking about foodsheds boy this is really anthropocentric and we're calling that because that's where our water our food, our air and you know there are probably at least a dozen other things we impose and project onto it I said if we could see that as a life ship where life exists not for us in fact we are one of the system that if we don't become more mindful we diminish the life shed for all of us but that word has spread quite a bit and I hear people using it and most people don't know where it came from and ultimately I don't really care but if you think about what life shed does for your mind compared to watersheds and how it gets rid of the fragmentation and the parting out things and the worst thing is then we come up with generic solutions all watersheds or you can say it's one of four types of watersheds and we can't see that every watershed life shed is unique and distinctive and you as a farmer right involved in agriculture no field first it doesn't have those lines on it when we draw lines and the roads we drive on to get into the hedge grows yeah the hedge grows right burl fences we put up what we're doing is fragmenting a life shed and it's really fun to ask people and I grew up with my grandfather for me and my father ranching so I knew something about how that happened but I'm the love asking people do you know the work of this aspect of land that you're involved in in the life shed do you know what it's work is do you know what it's playing with in terms of on a rainy day what role is this and it's fun to do with kids in the school your school ground sits on a you know coordinator life do you understand how it works in the life shed do you know the name of life shed you're in well the watershed it would be called that process of learning to unfragment our mind is partly a language one and we have to and one of the ways I love working with people my membership my groups in my membership community I can hear the word I mean I've been doing this for decades right so the minute you say the word connection I hear you right and I'm gonna call you out on it right it's insufficient to what we're talking about when you say tools like you said my tools I have no tools I have instruments their tools if what we do is we use them same way all the time like a hammer always found something but their instruments if we're able to actually put them to work learning to listen to that kind of thing is a part of the education of the mind to learn to see things that work which is fundamentally what we have to learn to do because when it's at work you can't fragment it you can't genericize it you can't decide that there is something a human should do to get something for us so language I read quite a few papers on language my son owns the language the company speaks the four languages pretty completely and a couple more he can understand and as a kid he I watched him he learned Japanese really young because there were a lot of Japanese gardeners in our neighborhood he then ended studying linguistics and my grandson even now in addition to computer science which is full of language he decided to get I don't think he finally did this but he studied a lot of linguistics classes and both of them said to me over time all right grandma or mom we understand why there's you're always making us pick a word and know what we meant to say and does it do it we need that kind of process or else we're a mess absolutely and I love that you're giving us this deep dive you're really taking us into that because it's so vital I'm gonna take some steps forward and then in a moment I wanna come back on and discuss the connection which you tickle upon in your books about your broken family but I really wanted so we talked about Thomas Kuhn here's his book but in your book you talk about Joseph Campbell I'm a big student of Joseph Campbell I used to run Joseph Campbell Circle so this is part of the combination of the Joseph Campbell his big library of mythology works and things and then I have a whole library full of other structures of Joseph Campbell but he wrote something that really touched you that you said he wrote something on child rearing and I don't know if it was in one of these mythology books or another but you really said that it was interesting that that's what touched you through this child rearing and that kind of ties a little bit not only to your broken family but also what you apply to your own life and also comes out in the books do you remember a little bit more about that? Well, what I was probably talking about is he and I were both teaching at San Jose State University at the time and so I would go sit in his classes because they came right after mine it's like I taught at six and he taught at seven and I'd watched already was watching some of his programs on television and the thing I think I was always a little surprised by I mean, I loved everything Campbell did because he gave the images of how it worked but he never really gave you enough to understand how people became the way they were raised you'd see a lot about the adults and I remember that I don't remember what I was talking about in the book but it made me constantly reflect on my own upbringing which was wonderful and horrible I had the best of the words that you can have and it honed me in some ways and I kept thinking that would get you to what Campbell was talking about where you had uncles working with kids and aunties and he talked about that young people have children in most cultures but older people raise them that fascinated me and I thought about my own grandfather compared to my father who was young and not his father, this was my mother's father so I did reflect on what he had and they used a lot of it and I was in my 30s, early 30s when I was teaching and he was in probably his 50s or 60s but I used to examine my own life and it changed how I raised my children because I could not follow the path that I had been raised by and I don't want to tell it for you or recant your story because no one does it better than you but you truly came from a broken family and kind of a tumultuous area of the world and not only was your father a racist a part of the grand dragons of the Ku Klux Klan of Texas and a lot of people say, hey, Mark you sound like a hillbilly the way you talk with your drawl and that you also have a beautiful accent and a lot of it but that's all part of our upbringing and things and so for that journey and there's many other things I'm sure you can tell but that journey that not only shaped you and then your grandfather being a Mohawk native Indian who really gave you kind of this indigenous wisdom this ancient wisdom and taught you many different ways you also discuss in the book can you kind of give us a little bit more that how that shaped you what that did to you how it's obviously in my opinion of influenced your writings and it's been a big part but I'd like to hear a little bit more about that because in today's day and age matter of fact these two years we've been dealing with a lot of racism Black Lives Matters, Asian racism and so you have a unique way of looking at that and I guess dealing with it as well I actually worry about how we're working on overcoming all of these problems it literally keeps me awake at night sometimes because the more we try and tell people to not be racist and I'd learned this really well for my father he was trying to tell me to be racist and he and maybe I should say a little bit about how he did that he owned farms and drinking companies and so he hired a lot of Mexican workers who had many of them had made it in without the right papers and so he could hold that over their head but he and I would play with the kids of those immigrants so let's call them who were trying to immigrate into the country he was determined to get me to see they were less than human I mean he used very dehumanizing terms and when he would try and get me to say it back and I wouldn't he would lock me in a closet I mean literally our front entry closet and the home had a key until I would come out and say the words his intention was to get me to say it and what it did to me besides making me claustrophobic and I'm having a terrible time wearing masks because it does get internalized in your body and I've done therapy, I've done everything and I'm still claustrophobic but what it did for me is it gave me time to think and I was four and five and six years old when he was doing this so he wouldn't think I would have thinking but I was conscious thinking but I was going back and forth to my grandfather's house and he would be taking care of my grandfather who was also a farmer who was an advisor for the farm bureau and had been during the death toll also raised pigs and we would go and he would have the experience being in a living system with pigs who would follow us down to the creek, the creek, right? And it was always amazing to me he treated me like a part of our family we would go sit by the water and mama pig or pregnant mama pig would come and lay down next to you like a dog does and lean against you, right? And he would pet them and he would talk about how life works together and how he had as a kid been off with his father and grandfather and his great-grandfather was full Mohawk and broke at that level so but he was very proud of the as he called the mixed blood he had he was very, very proud of that. Having those two things where I went back and forth gave me a contrast because when I went back to the closet sometime in the same day I thought about what my grandfather had said and my grandfather as I got older would teach me to love my father through all of that and that wasn't an easy task because my grandfather had a lot of trouble with him too but he would constantly talk about how my grandfather was trying to fix something he thought was broken and the problem is he had learned how to see the system itself that was broken. So being in that closet with later that day or the next day or the day before my grandfather's wisdom about living systems eventually helped me understand that my father was broken by his family and he was trying to figure out how to live and it gave me maybe not a lot I could do about it because my mother eventually in spite of her illness took him away because she was afraid he was escalating and I was going to be injured or worse that has that combination of having at that time which my grandfather was teaching me empathy and compassion and how to understand go inside and reveal to myself that's a regenerative part right reveal to myself what was going on inside my father and his terrible fears and his escalating fears that he had gotten from his mother it was the real problem knowing all of that when I finally became an adult I ended up I think I tell some stories in this book but I can never remember which one in which book I worked in South Africa and South Eastern Africa Kenya that's an regenerative business okay and I think this is some of it no more feedback I went there and I always felt like I was gonna be able to do something to make up for my father and it was deep in me and what I learned was and what I keep wanting people to work on when we work on racism is not trying to stop racism directly right head on educate them show them what they're doing give them the words to instead engage people and working what I was able I figured this out in South Africa and it was life changing for me because I won so much to overcome and I still have racism in me my father was very successful but the good news was I can see it and my grandfather who you know being a part of the experience racism too all of them helped me begin to see that what made us whole with the world human was doing some important work together my grandfather would say the dust bowl was a gift to us becoming more integrated country what the world is he talking about well although there were you know shortages of food a terrible problem for the most part be by the band together and do work once they came to know each other know the essence of one another things change so when I went into Colgate in South Africa and I had that three years just as Mandela was coming into office I knew we were dealing with eight tribes plus we had the Africans in the English we were at a company divided up by your race in terms of what jobs you could have and so I could have gone in brought someone who was black side-by-side we educate people instead I created something called promises beyond ableness and that was where it first come to me where everyone did something to serve the evolution of the country because everyone loved where they live and they were working together to make that happen using Colgate's resources and in support of growing Colgate we were able to accomplish something Mandela gave Colgate an award for which was move black Africans from being and not well there was one person in the top of the hierarchy to making the hierarchy at the top which we eventually changed some of that too but made it representative or let's say reflective of the population so we have 97% black Africans and then another couple percent Africans and a bit of English we were required by the new constitution to have that match what the population was in terms of the hierarchy we were given five years to do that we did in six months and we didn't lay off anybody we had one guy who left an Africana but what it did when the day Mandela gave the group the award very publicly to say to people don't say you can't do this look here where Colgate did the day he did that he said you have proven this can be done and the Africana who was there that day the black folks who were receiving this beautiful statue handed to him and he was shortly he said why and this was after the meeting why are you handing this to us and he said because you had the most work to do and he said I would have never thought that I could have believed that people who weren't educated couldn't be running this company at such a short period of time that in itself watching that be close to you has made me ashamed and I feel like I have so much to undo and several of the other Africana's and one English guy said similar things that working on something else together not working on their racism but working on something else together made a difference so I've since done that every company give them something to do or they give themselves and I teach them how to do it and it's big and it's hard they have to work together and we never talk about race but slowly all of that dissolves because I know you Mark right you're next to me we have to pull we each have a promise we're made to do something for our country and even for our company but often for our townships where we live that process is what I learned back to your question of this crazy childhood that I had at least that's one thread that I can bring you have many of them you really have many of them I've heard your talks before and in your other books and you really you bring them out so nicely and there's a couple there's two more things that kind of almost comments kind of question so you use images a lot so in the regenerative business it's very circular like a maze and this is in the regenerative life and so it's not only images that and it's not the word connecting us but it's how the principles, the pillars how we're circular how we're all kind of in this together and in the beginning of our conversation you really said I'm not a coach I'm an educator and that's absolutely so true and that's why I've been drawn to ask you for this podcast and I'm having this discussion and I've gone to school I've been to many universities, colleges I still study them reading every book that I can get my hands on but the education that I've received is in a much different way I didn't get very much of it in school and similar to you I think a lot of yours comes from your grandfather and your family situation and other situations like Thomas Kuhn for me it's also similar I've been to many schools and universities but I really feel that I was failed with a good education from school I missed out on big history I missed out on the true learnings and so what I've done is when I read your book I'm getting that education I'm kind of educating myself through your readings and your writings and pulling that out and now that I have you live on the podcast and you're telling me these stories I feel even more of this connection and this that not only you're educating me but you're educating my listeners as well on some different ways and some models that you've gone through of regenerative business regenerative life and how do we break some of these cycles or do things in a more revealing matter or more revelation and so I wanted to make that comment because Sir Ken Robinson he passed away August 20, 21st, 2020 last year and he also was saying we've been failed by our education system we need some other ways and some of us has found ways to do that or found ways that work for us to move forward but many have it many are still not readers many are still not going back to school they're stuck in a life in systems where they're working for a living they're just trying to squeak by day by day and so I appreciate the way you've just even though you're thinking you're recanting these stories of your life and what's happened in Colgate in Africa and those beautiful stories but in many respects you're educating me and so when I said one communication is important and you also said I'm not a coach I'm an educator I want you to know that's vital for me that's how I'm learning this is how I'm getting the education on regeneration and things that I need to but I also would like to you kind of touch upon that in your books as well on I wouldn't say what your process is is what you do you write these books for yourself because you've asked yourself the question but it comes out as an education so I don't know if you have something to say to that it's not quite the question but it's really I thank you for that I mean I thank you for doing it this way because that's what I need and a lot of my listeners need because I'm sure a lot of them don't know about these things yeah well I have two reflections that I wrote a note to me here one is I'm not drawing I do have pictures but I'm using frameworks the reason the shark cathedral labyrinth is on the cover of the regenerative business is that was another event I had in my 40s where I write that's a labyrinth right and it's not about well I walked the cathedral which is part of what burned last year tragically and I keep wondering I've never been able to find what the labyrinth was damaged it taught me something about the frameworks compared to models so you've been using them interchangeably I want to advise you here to consider looking at the models are programmatic prescriptions of how you do something build a model airplane build a car you create a pattern and everybody follows it and that's what the world is filled with and they become mental models where we've got this way of thinking and I've forgotten the God's name who in the early part of the last century created the term mental models but I know Peter Senge picked it up for a while that is something we have to overcome it's where our language is held and all the they're all fragmented by nature you can't make a non-fragmented model so I work with what the sacred teachers Pythagoras Socrates Shreya Avento they all use something called frameworks which didn't have answers on them like the model does they have a place for questions they show you how things relate to one another so the enneagram I put on my cover is another idea that's been banalized terribly on their regenerative life people make the personality types it would be the opposite and the Assyrians who created or the earliest known version we have of labyrinths said that it was a way transformation happens in a whole incomplete way right but you'll see people saying oh I love that you have the enneagram what are you a seven I'm an eight what do you and I go you're missing it yeah they're people and they miss the whole idea of how it works as a system so first I wanted to say that that my books are filled with frameworks and those frameworks are an invitation for you to form questions for yourselves the words that are on there do not have pattern generating material like you're supposed well they have pattern generating material for you to generate they're not imposing given patterns like models give you and when people in my membership communities we did a lot of work so you learn to see the mental models you've got and how you can bring forward a framework and like you said we're all circular well there's nothing in living systems that's circular there are cycles where something begins the ends moves over time connects with other cycles I'm very worried with the concept of circular because that's a and people are talking about closed systems there actually are no closed systems in living systems we did a lot of work things for a charcoal I think this is in my first book with how it was you close what should be closed but not trying close what is living and so frameworks are designed to help us see the working of something alive moving changing nested and feel creating so that's I think what is the pictures and the words and those are the two things that came to me as you were speaking and I think that's perfect is that absolutely perfect because it leads into what I wanted to speak to you about naturally anyway because you ended with nested systems throughout this whole time you've you've mentioned systemic systemic thinking or systems as well so I'm I'm a graduate of Gritzhoff Capricourses the systems view of life and and this whole systems way of thinking I obviously through through our podcast and even though I've read the books and I'm familiar with those I need to work on my communications so you're giving me personally a lot of help on how to structure those frameworks and and and to to work on those because I'll say okay we need a better operating system or framework or model for life and so sometimes I use those terms or those words to to laxadaisical or too easily and and what what I really precisely the imprecise say what I really mean is what you've you've alluded to is the the current civilization framework frameworks that we have in our world honestly for me personally they're not working anymore and I feel a dis ease around the world with those people I talk to or speak with or or friends that I have and all over all over the world that there's a similar dis ease that these civilization frameworks are also not quite working and it's whether it's a collapse it's just it's not a world that works for everyone and so I need to work on on that communication and work on that wording better but I also feel exactly as you put it these frameworks are and the way we communicate in them and use those words have extreme meaning not only to oneself but also how they're perceived and received by others when we speak about them I see myself as not just a podcast host but also as an educator around sustainability and about resilience and about environmental social governance and things and so I'm all always trying to find the right words to communicate better to do that so I you're a wonderful educator because you're correcting me in the moment helping me to get to that right right view but what I wanted to speak about systems is the systems that not only did I learn about them from Fritzthold Capra but one of my most I guess idolized teachers that I've ever had was Lynn Margolis Dr. Lynn Margolis Carl Sagan's first wife and she wrote the book microcosmos and symbiotic planet and came up with the symbiotic earth and symbiogenesis and it's really that that we live in this this world of not just microorganisms but this symbiosis that we're really connected to many things our earth to indigenous wisdom and and it's how the whole thing started and it has a lot to do with this almost systems thinking or this nested nested systems that we see and you've brought it up several times in our conversation bring it up in the books but I want to now go to the next step what do you truly mean by that and how how do we understand that and how do you think that can help us change our lives by seeing these nested systems or understanding how to communicate about them or how they interact in our lives well okay so I have to go back to where you very first started and then make a suggestion about how people can improve their thinking so because I don't think it is working on your communication and your words that's too late that's after the mind is thinking a particular way so what you and I and everyone needs it's a framework that causes us and no let's say invites us right more precisely to be able to see what we're talking about differently so when you think about the framework's land or a fridge off and used you probably get a picture in your mind and actually I haven't seen them use a lot of frameworks I'm realizing I formed my own frameworks out of what I think they're doing and how things are a whole working on our thinking because it produces what we see and then produces what we say so I think that's first kind of precision now having said that what I think nested systems do they're like one inside of another inside of another it's not accurate completely but it's a way of getting us off a flat land view and I'm sure you've read the book flat land right and flat land says we end up seeing everything as parallel so when you do that sentence you just confess to doing where you say connections frameworks models you're flat landing people's world you're saying these are all the same thing mix and match or when you say sustainability restoration regeneration you're flattening the world and that's when most people see it they can't see I wrote a paper on the five different levels of interpretation systems thinking I'm always working on levels because the world is made up of some things are more encompassing than others if we mess up our planet we got no neighborhoods we have no humans right we are nested in neighborhoods in a life shed in a region that is made up of a number of life sheds is in a condo which does not stop where the water hits it and our ability to see that nest that we live in is a really important first step to the seeing what I said is the work which is learning to see the working of a nested system the reason and we're not educated not only are you not educated big history which is sad or neither but we're not we're not educated in ecological well ecology is part of a living system or not part shame on me embedded in other system just changing those words instead of saying we're a part of something nope we're embedded in something and that means I have to go say well how for embedded if I'm embedded in the Puget Sound northwest part of the United States what does that mean how does my life have to work in order to be doing my role in that nested system of the Puget Sound region and if I can come to see that every act I'm taking is creating an effect and I don't actually like the lens term of synergistic or symbiotic right because and it's not that's not a good word but I think it's still too flat so symbiotic sees the bird on the back of the critter in eating its bugs right so it becomes too flat the idea and I didn't come up with the idea of nested systems it's ancient my grandfather used it or some version so you could see the working of something with one life form a whole embedded in another life form a whole embedded in another life form and if you can do that now you have a door I mean it's it's not completely accurate to say the way I'm doing it but it makes the mind move from flatland all things are the same and therefore humans have a right to get what they want from water shed and from the trees and whatever we're all the same level we have as much right as they do to understanding we're both embedded trees forest nature humans other animals are embedded in a larger system that's why I say and throw off hand to be all the time so people ask me about nested system it's an education process to learn to see the working of some things that have more power powers probably slightly not perfect word but impact or effect let's use effect over others but at the same time me as a small individual also have that that's seeing the working so that one is good explanations I hope to do but it may be a beautiful there's so many nuggets of wisdom I only have four questions left for you before we're done and this first one is actually the hardest one that I have for you I don't think it's at all from our discussion so far it's kind of a vision or you educating us on what does a world that works for everyone look like for you it's one where all we work on is educating us to be able to use the right mind on ourselves with others and then we were created it won't be the same the problem with the world it works for all it's actually assumes a generic answer so the it's hard when you ask it that way because it means I've got some magical answer and I don't believe in visions I think those are anthropocentric projections so all of that then makes sense to me it's a capability for people to connect with place and understand they live within a life shed they live within a family they live within a body that they either chose or depending on how that works cosmologically and if we can build this mind that can see living systems that work and see these seven first principles and indigenous peoples have lived by and spiritual teachers what we'll do is each moment in time each place people will learn to come together to create what it takes for it to work then so there's no I mean in state visions or as a humanistic anthropocentric idea there's every moment every day based on understanding how something works how we can be together in different roles picking up the works that it's ours to do there and then that community of people in that place will determine what works there so I try and get people to stop saying I want to change the world or I want to make the world that works for all because and I say it I have to catch me too right I'm in this culture but learning that visions are human ideas and that there's no life shed that has a vision of what's trying to be it is a working living conversing discovering revealing process that all the bugs the biota all know their role and they're working in that hole and that is what we have to get over the idea that what you asked me was even a good question great great I love that if there was a message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable or regenerative takeaway that really has the power to change their life what would it be kind of your message so it's another very bad question worst thing the last one and you also conflated things and put his things in a flat land sustainable or regeneration they're not the same thing and you diminish discernment when you put them side by side in a flat land view because people already can't see what we're going to lose if we don't get back to understanding what regeneration means and let go of what sustainability means which is a made up idea that has nothing to do with how living systems work so I also don't believe I have any messages there of any use to any human being because that would mean I'm an advisor which is another word I don't use I'm not a coach but I'm also not an advisor my education is not on the content you should hold in your mind but the capability you need to be able to come to your own answer for you because I tell people don't trust me never don't assume anything I say is right because if you do you're working from an epistemology which is upside down from what I believe works which is each individual creates their own understanding out of their lived experience which they reflect on and then they keep educating themselves getting more cable doing what you talked about you do read etc and don't ever ask others for advice don't ask them for feedback that's a behaviorless view of that you only can get it from outside that it's not in you and that's fundamental to this work so I guess if there's advice that don't trust anybody but yourself I love that and I mean that you've kind of added another question for me that you bring up that I do want to well we're going to run out of time because I haven't done the call so we have to be careful I will definitely hurry because we're almost done and that is and I've said this before so I believe that we're truly that all the answers are within us already and I don't want to get esoteric or however you want to look at it yeah we just need to ask ourselves the questions and then somehow pull the answer out of ourselves or answer it ourselves and not look for it somewhere else I think that why religions or network marketing or some of these things work so well or have so many followers is because it's always someone else giving you a guiding frame or a dogma or telling you what to do when to do it instead I think as homo sapiens or as species amongst all the other species of our planet we're already born with some some ways with the answers but we need to ask ourselves the questions and go through that process to pull that answer out and that's just a thought I have what whether it's true but I try I sometimes say you know just ask the question yourself instead of waiting for me to give you the answer or someone else all right there's the hazard in what you just said because I don't actually agree with what you just said but it would sound like I did from what I said a minute ago what I believe is the capacity to find the answer is within you if you're awake because if you ask yourself you will give yourself answers you already know become attached to or identified with we all think we have the answer that's the problem and we have it knowing for us but others but what we want to do is trust ourselves to find it and to be able at this moment to find it and then to evolve it and then let go of what we had as an answer before and that's a capability building and so instead of throughout your life reading for answers which are all out there work on building the capability to be a better discerner a better evolver a better developed human being with a better state of being so I can manage myself and see when I'm using old answers and I have an attachment to it and I'm identified with it as it's me if we're there then there are no answers in us there's only old I'm not even sure what the right word is but they're fixed in us what we have is the capability as a human if we develop ourselves to be able to find evolving answers for a moment in time in a place with a group of people and then it's almost like set fire to it and I have a a ground rule or principle for myself is I'm never able I'm never allowed I don't allow myself to present a PowerPoint that I've ever used before in exactly the same way I don't give a talk people say I'd like to have you do that talk I said too late I already did go listen to the recording you need to challenge yourself to be alive awake and capability building so that you increasingly can do that in the moment with a new group of people a new circumstances for what is needed The last question I have and then we're done is really what have you experienced or learned so far in your your life's journey professional journey that you would have loved to know from the start I don't even understand that question I mean I'm and I nothing absolutely nothing because it's about the journey it's about okay you talked about earlier that there are people who will never they're running through the life whatever they're doing I believe that what fuels consciousness is my work my disturbances my discovery my work on myself in any day I can bring consciousness I'm probably creating more than I need for me right that moment because consciousness is a very powerful thing in the field and I believe it can be shared I believe that you and I can I mean that's the whole idea of dedicate karma that I learned from my head on the teachers if you do your work you're doing enough for you and others can draw on that David Hawkins wrote a book called power vicious force which I saw a popularized version of that so I wouldn't want anything to be any different because every moment I've been able to bring consciousness I'm doing my work as a human being I've got to keep doing that not wishing anything was different that's beautiful thank you so much Carol for letting us inside of your ideas and for educating us you're a wonderful educator I love your books and I appreciate you taking the time to visit with us today and give us your insights thank you very much you're welcome Mark thank you