The Philosophy, Psychology & Spirituality Of Success

In this series of podcasts, Nasseema Taleb and Arjun Aiyar discuss the philosophy, the psychology & spirituality of success, touching on topics such as overcoming limiting beliefs and doing shadow work. We aim to bring you inspiration to go within and unpack your states in an attempt to expand your consciousness.

Transcript

Arjun,

Good morning.

How are you?

Good.

I'm doing incredibly well.

How are you?

Very good,

Thank you.

We're so,

So pleased to have you on today's podcast and really looking forward to this mini-series that we're going to be running to discuss some really interesting topics.

And the theme of this series,

For those of you who've just joined us,

Is on the psychology,

Philosophy,

And spirituality of success.

Massive topic,

Lots to talk about,

And we are super thrilled to have you as our guest speaker.

I'm delighted.

It's always a treat when great people meet.

So,

Arjun,

You and I met a couple of weeks ago,

I believe.

We did.

And you were kind enough to run an event for a group of us who were basically a group of life coaches.

And you had so much to talk about in terms of heart,

Mind,

Coherence,

Understanding the mind,

Understanding behaviours,

Understanding emotions.

And I left that event feeling on a high,

Because I had so many things buzzing in my mind.

So we are really,

Really,

Really excited for you to share your knowledge with us on these topics.

And we'd love to know a little bit more about you.

So would you be able to introduce yourself?

Sure,

I'd be delighted.

And well,

I guess,

Quoting a leadership guru by the name of John Maxwell,

And he's considered to be the foremost authority in the world on leadership,

Said that the two most important days of your life,

And day number one is the day you were born,

And day number two is the day you know why you were born.

And I had my day number two in February of 1994 in Brisbane,

Australia,

Where I attended a seminar by a gentleman by the name of Tom Peters,

And he was speaking on quality and quality management.

And if you asked me about the content of that programme,

I can barely remember what he said.

But even today,

I remember how I felt.

He,

At that point in time and still is a prolific speaker,

And had the ability to communicate a complex subject in a simple way,

And not just inform his audience,

But inspire his audience.

And I think that was the birth for me.

This was when I was doing my MBA in Australia.

And thereafter I came back to my hometown of Mumbai in India.

I worked as a banker for a couple of years,

But the dream to speak,

To teach,

To educate,

To inspire always stayed within me,

And from that time when it was birthed in me.

And it came into fruition later on in February of 1998 when I was in Johannesburg,

South Africa.

And that's where I met my mentor for the first time,

Basil.

And Basil has guided me through this journey called life.

And yep,

So you know,

Did my MBA in Australia,

Found my dream there,

But gave expression to my dream after I did banking,

Corporate and retail banking.

And I've been on my own now for 23 years as a trainer,

Coach,

Speaker,

And living in Dubai for the last 14.

So that's kind of like a synopsis of,

You know,

My repertoire,

If you want to call it that.

And I've done a lot of spiritual things along the way also,

Which we can talk about as we go along.

So there you go.

Excellent.

That sounds like an amazing journey so far.

And it's interesting that you said,

You know,

That you went to that talk and you remember how you felt,

But not exactly the words.

And so often when we are in a conversation with somebody,

It is how they make us feel or how we feel in that moment that is memorable,

Right?

This is the thing that creates impact,

Which actually brings us to the topic of today,

Which is around emotions.

And so much that can be said around emotions.

And emotions,

Emotional temperature,

How we're feeling.

You know,

So many times I meet people and in the first conversation,

We're talking about emotions,

How they're feeling,

Because we are literally walking every day thinking,

Thinking about how we're feeling,

Right?

We're always concerned about what's going on inside.

So what can you tell us about emotions?

So it's an interesting let me just start broad strokes.

I have been inspired by a gentleman by the name of Tony Robbins.

And when I read his book,

Awaken the Giant Within,

That began quite literally the inner transformation journey.

And,

And Albeat,

I have been influenced by many other thought leaders.

Tony's work on emotional states to me has been very,

Very useful in terms of practical application,

Very,

Very relevant material.

And Tony says,

He says,

We all have a home,

A place where we live.

But the home where we really live is the emotional state which we are in moment to moment to moment to moment.

And the state,

The quality of that particular state determines the quality of our lives.

So the quality of our lives are determined by the quality of our emotional states in any given moment.

And a lot of people think that,

You know,

Life is is determined by the external circumstances,

If you want to call,

You can call that the the universe,

What's on the outside,

But,

But the work that I do is more to do with the innerverse,

The the environment,

Which is on the inside.

And talking about environment,

There is the environment,

Which is external,

But there's also the environment,

Which is internal,

The atmosphere,

Which is outside,

But then we have the emosphere,

Which is inside,

Which is why you and me know and know of millionaires and maybe even billionaires who are depressed and those who perhaps have just enough to get by or maybe not even that much,

But they're constantly in a state of happiness and delight.

And I'm not saying that you have to give up money and riches and material wealth in order to be happy,

You can actually have both.

But what I am saying is that you and me and we have greater control over our emotional states than we proclaim to have.

And that has been the foundation of a lot of the work that I do.

So that's,

That's what emotions are.

That's what,

You know,

Another word for emotions is feelings.

Another word for feelings is states,

Or feeling states or emotional states.

So,

So yeah,

That's kind of like a broad strokes of what emotions are,

Where they come from.

And yeah,

So yeah,

Excellent.

So I have a question because I was having a conversation with somebody a few days ago and they were saying,

I've changed,

I've,

You know,

From the last year or couple of years,

I've changed my circumstances so that I can feel better.

And they have,

They've done outer things,

Outer,

They've taken decisions which impacts their outer environment.

But my question in my head,

I didn't ask that at the time,

But my question in my head is,

Us changing our outer behaviors and our outer environment,

Does that really impact our emotional states or is there more inner work that needs to be done?

And where do we start?

Well let's look at it this way.

When we look at our external environment,

Our outside environment,

It consists of situations.

So for example,

You have a job situation,

That's your external environment.

You have a family situation,

That's still your external environment because those are your kids,

Your spouse,

Your siblings and so forth.

You have,

In a way,

Even your health situation,

You have the elements like the weather,

The temperature outside,

The pollution in the air,

All of those things are bearing down upon us as the external circumstances.

One of the things that my teacher Basil taught me many years ago was the difference between ABC,

ABC and AUC,

AUC.

So ABC is areas beyond control and AUC is areas under control.

And when you look at externals,

Particularly other people in your externals,

These people are largely ABCs,

Areas beyond control because they are having their own life experiences which is going to cause them to think thoughts,

Say words,

Feel feelings and take decisions and take actions.

And when their actions or inactions now affect you,

You're essentially giving the remote control of your life over to them.

Perhaps your boss gives you a hard time on the phone for no other reason other than maybe his son or daughter is unwell and in hospital and therefore he or she happens to be in a bad mood and you happen to be at the receiving end of that.

Now you don't control his circumstances or his state of mind,

But his or her behavior at that point in time now tends to have a direct effect upon your emotions.

Now,

So this is all about externals.

The AUCs,

Which is the areas under your control at any given point in time,

Is your response to those externals.

So we don't control what happens to us,

That is the ABCs,

But we always control what happens in us,

Which is the AUCs.

And our work is not so much to try and change what's on the outside,

But rather to change what's on the inside.

Gandhi so famously said,

He said,

Be the change you want to see in others.

And when people like Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela have been asked about their vision,

Their mission to change the world,

They've always spoken about them changing themselves and by example inspiring others to change in the process.

So it's an inside out approach.

When you expect it to be an outside in approach,

That now is a recipe for frustration,

Irritation,

Sadness,

Anger,

Depression,

Guilt,

Regret,

And so on and so forth,

You want to take the remote control back into your hands and you want to be pushing your buttons and deciding which buttons you want to push and when.

Thank you for your comments.

This actually reminds me of,

You know,

One of the things that we learned when we were doing our,

When I was doing my transformation coaching is that when we are able to watch our thoughts,

Because thoughts themselves which lead to emotions and states are neutral,

Right?

When we are able to watch them without jumping into them and soaking into them,

We are then able to take more of a detached approach.

Because the alternative is we get so ingrained into them,

Our habitual patterns of thought kicks in,

We associate that thought with that emotion or the thought triggers the emotion and we become victims of our conditioning,

Right?

Whereas it's different when you actually are aware that the thought is coming up and you also realize that you have a choice here.

You either have a choice to be the result of that thought or be the cause,

You know,

You can understand that actually whatever happens next,

You would have co-created that emotional state.

So my question to you is how do we start becoming more aware of what's coming up?

At which point do we,

You know,

How do we train ourselves to take that step back and watch before we get soaked into it?

Yeah,

That's a great question.

You know,

Dr.

Joe Dispenza has done some cutting edge work in an area that he calls metacognition.

And the term metacognition,

Quite simply put means think about what you're thinking about.

So we have thoughts all the time,

Even when you're sleeping,

You have thoughts and those thoughts are dreams.

And as long as we're alive,

We're thinking.

It's almost impossible.

I probably don't know anybody who's been able to switch off their thoughts.

Maybe we can slow it down.

Maybe we lessen the noise.

But the process of living is the process of thinking.

And we're constantly thinking.

Now it comes down to the quality or the kind of thoughts that we think.

Before we talk about what we must do to kind of,

You know,

Observe the thoughts and make amendments and the kind of thoughts that we want to think about,

Let's understand the flow.

So let's say,

Step one,

You think a thought.

All right,

So now step one leads to step two,

When you think a thought,

You feel an emotion.

So it's thought and emotion.

Now when you feel an emotion,

You take an action.

That's step three.

So step one,

Think a thought,

Step two,

Feel an emotion,

Step three,

Take an action.

And step four is reap a result.

And reap a result is the place where most of us try and make changes.

We're constantly saying,

Hey,

I want to change my results.

I want to change my outcomes.

I want to change the end product of what's going on.

And when we try and make changes in that area,

We're essentially addressing symptoms and not the cause because it's far down the chain,

Which I've just described to you in those four steps.

All right,

So remember those results happen as a result of actions.

Let me try and change those actions.

And then we realize that we're not able to sustain or maintain consistency in those actions.

And then we go one step further back and we look at emotions and you're observing various emotional states that you have.

And broadly speaking,

We have the emotional states of inspiration.

And we have the emotional states of desperation.

Yes,

I mean,

If you want to kind of put them into two broad buckets,

But where those emotions come from,

The other place that the other categorization that I have of emotions are resourceful emotional states and unresourceful emotional states or empowering emotional states and disempowering emotional states,

Any which ways you want to look at preferred emotional states and unpreferred emotional states,

Wholesome emotional states and unwholesome emotional states.

And for the large part with the caveat being shadow work,

And we can talk about shadow work in another podcast as well,

But let's just talk,

Let me just assume that you'd like to have wholesome preferred empowering resourceful emotions,

Because you may be limited when it comes to resources,

Which is time,

Money and people,

But we are all unlimited when it comes to resourcefulness.

And our greatest resourcefulness is the feeling states that we feel at any given point in time.

And the reason we feel certain feeling states of excitement,

Happiness,

Joy,

Appreciation,

Delight,

Etc.

Is because of the thoughts that we think habitually.

Not the thoughts that we occasionally think,

But our habitual thoughts.

And the term that defines habitual thoughts,

That term is called beliefs,

Or belief systems,

Or definitions,

Or memes.

And these are programs that we think over and over and over and over again.

Joe Dispenza says that,

Dr.

Joe Dispenza says we think 60 to 70,

000 thoughts a day.

And 90% of those thoughts are the thoughts that we thought yesterday.

Let me say that again,

60 to 70,

000 thoughts a day is what we as human beings on average think in a 24 hour period.

And 90% of those thoughts are the thoughts that we thought the previous day,

Which essentially means we're living in the past.

And when you're living in the past,

You're recreating a script and that isn't change,

That is stagnancy.

And when you bring in that kind of a process into a world,

A milieu,

An environment which is radically dynamic and transforming at an increasingly rapid pace,

This now causes us to come unequipped to deal with life's challenges.

So the area for us to work on,

To evolve,

To change,

To develop,

To ameliorate,

To improve is our beliefs or our belief systems.

And the observation of our beliefs,

And it's pretty easy to discern that too and live out as your life software or program,

Which is now causing you to feel those habitual or predictable emotions,

Therefore leading to predictable actions,

Therefore leading to predictable results.

So at the root,

When we start identifying your beliefs,

Our beliefs,

And also discerning which of those beliefs are serving us,

Serving you,

Serving me,

And which of those beliefs are not serving you,

Now you have a place to begin the change process.

And then we start with the change process,

But before we start the change process,

We've got to very clearly know where it is we're starting to do that change or make that change.

So now we're looking at the tapestry of the beliefs,

Which is our root system,

The content in there,

Where it comes from,

And at a very logical level,

Identifying the means that we have subscribed to and the now gradually begin to experiment with alternative beliefs.

And sometimes it can be a trial and error until you kind of zero in on a powerful empowering belief,

Which you can continue to evolve on.

But that starts the domino.

That's the first domino that we need to knock,

Just the belief systems.

And once we work on that,

Every tool that we use is to alter our beliefs.

A workout in the morning is to help you to now work on your beliefs.

The breathing exercises you do,

The books that you read,

The personal growth journey that you embark upon must be intended towards polishing and improving your belief system,

So that from that place we begin to have a ripple effect onwards into the results of your life.

This is really,

Really,

Really powerful stuff indeed.

You know,

Very often I think about whenever I'm trying to change a behaviour or change a belief,

Sometimes I feel like I'm climbing on a mountain of sand,

Right?

You're climbing,

Climbing,

Climbing,

And you're going up,

You're going up,

You're going up,

But at some point you start sinking back again.

And it's really,

Really so important to understand that changing the external environment only is.

.

.

It works temporarily,

It works,

Right?

But really the change is all inside out.

So it's almost as if you have to go,

You know,

Rumi says that the answers lie within,

Right?

So the only place to go is in silence within to understand how our own minds work.

And this leads me to another question because when we,

As an NLP practitioner myself,

I know that we are programmed with language,

Thoughts,

Habits,

Behaviours,

And what we're discussing here is how do we change that programming to get us to a state where our programming works in our favour and doesn't work against us,

Right?

So I have two questions here.

One of my questions is,

Changing the programming into something that works for our favour is still programming.

How does that then link to the real stuff?

And I'm going to take us a layer down.

The real stuff is where the heart resides.

Spirit,

Right?

When we are programming,

We can program A,

B,

C,

Or D.

Some works for us,

Some doesn't work for us,

But it's still at the layer of programming,

Still sitting at the layer of thoughts of the mind.

How do we align this to the heart and create a sort of coherence so we,

You know,

We want to feel joy and happiness and gratitude,

But these emotions don't just sit at the mind level.

They go way,

Way,

Way,

Way,

Way down deep.

How do we create that coherence?

Where do we start?

Yeah,

True.

So we've got to understand where these beliefs come from,

Yeah,

Since we were at that root of the beliefs.

And remember,

The memes,

The programs that we have either deliberately or inadvertently subscribed to come from two places and two places only.

And the first place is nature.

And nature is your DNA.

Now science is proving beyond doubt that we actually genetically inherit traits.

They call it behavioral traits,

And now they're calling it even belief paradigms from our forefathers.

And I have met people who never met their grandfather or their father,

But behave in manners that are very similar to their ancestors,

Which is interesting because we actually carry paradigms in our DNA.

And this science is now showing this pretty much beyond doubt.

So that's nature.

The second place it comes from is nurture.

And nurture is the environment in which you are brought up.

For example,

The home environment that you were brought up in.

The language patterns that you heard spoken out loud as a child.

For example,

I remember situations where a gentleman once told me that his grandmother would often say that money doesn't grow on trees and rich people get rich and because rich people get rich,

We middle class folks do not have enough.

So he was brought up with that paradigm.

Now you keep repeating that to a two year old,

Three year old,

Five year old.

By the time the person is 30 and 40 years old,

He is still living his life on that program.

And that is the program of scarcity.

That is the program of a hostile universe.

That is the program that,

You know,

As a middle class person,

I am not meant to get enough and or rich people are crooks or so on and so forth.

Just paradigms,

Just belief systems,

None of which is true,

None of which is absolutely true.

But the person has bought into that pattern as a result of the language that he has heard in his environment.

Now,

Let's say he or she wishes to make a change and we have nothing but our minds to begin the process of change.

Eventually you can get into deep meditative states and connect with the universal mind and feel omnipresence and omnipotence and omniscience.

Yes,

That's great.

That's where we want to get to.

But the pathway,

The road,

The route to get there is to now use your thoughts or to rather to start using your thoughts in a better way than you were using before.

And one of the great questions that I encourage my coachees to ask and I ask myself this question also in the moment,

What am I thinking of right now?

What words am I using in my thinking?

What statements am I making?

What questions am I making?

All right,

So what am I thinking about?

What meaning am I giving to the things that I'm thinking about?

And what actions am I thinking about taking in my current state?

An astute observation of the thoughts that I am thinking at any given point in time is the starting point.

And I've done exercises and I know you,

Nasima,

Do journaling also as a great tool which is nothing but taking your thoughts and putting it down onto paper.

And when you,

You know,

We think about six times faster than we talk and we write three times slower than we talk,

Than we speak.

So six times three,

That's a factor of 18.

So when you're writing down your thoughts,

You're actually endeavoring to slow down your thinking by 18 times,

Which in and of itself is a great way to now become the observer rather than the participant in the thinking.

And you've done this with exercises and journaling and I have too and I tell people,

Even if you are thinking dire diabolical thoughts,

Write it down verbatim just as it is.

There is no judgment.

At least we uncover,

Unearth,

Reveal to yourself,

If not anybody else,

The kind of thoughts you're thinking.

So that now becomes a starting point to reframe,

But more particularly,

To rephrase your sentences,

Let's say they are in the English language,

So that we can have a better quality of thinking.

So yeah,

Does that help?

Great stuff.

Great stuff,

Arjun.

It's such a fascinating topic.

I think,

I mean,

You know,

You've given us a lot of food for thought.

Thank you so much.

Let's dig deeper into this topic in our second podcast.

Thank you so much and looking forward to having you again.

Awesome to be here.

Reviews

:)

Really great talk. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us! I look forward to more. 🙏🏾🌸🙏