186. Raj Sisodia: The Inner Work Behind Better Leadership

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Extend with Dr. Darshan Shah
Episode: 186 – Raj Sisodia: The Inner Work Behind Better Leadership
Date: July 30, 2026
Guest: Raj Sisodia, Co-founder of Conscious Capitalism, scholar, and author

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Episode Overview

This episode offers a rich and heart-centered discussion between Dr. Darshan Shah and Raj Sisodia on the essential inner work leaders must undertake for authentic, effective leadership. Together, they explore the concepts of Conscious Capitalism, healing in leadership, and how elevating personal and organizational consciousness can transform businesses, promote health, and create flourishing for all stakeholders. Raj shares frameworks, personal stories, and actionable advice that apply to anyone seeking a more meaningful, healing path at work and in life—leaders and non-leaders alike.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Raj Sisodia’s Personal Journey (03:23–10:56)

• Raj describes his diverse upbringing, being an immigrant in three countries, and the profound impact this had on his perspectives—especially about “outsider” status and objectivity.
• His early discomfort with business education in the 1980s, which emphasized profit and numbers over humanity:
  • "Six years of business education...all about the head and the wallet...it completely bypassed the human in between." (06:18)
• Disillusionment with traditional marketing tactics and the moral costs embedded in business-as-usual.
• The pivotal question shaping his career: Is there a better way to do business?
• Discovery that stakeholder-centric, purpose-driven companies (e.g., Whole Foods, Costco) cultivate not just profit, but love—delivering better results for all, including investors.
• Emotional moment realizing his calling:
  • "I found myself suddenly in tears...I think I know what I want to do for the rest of my life: I want to tell this story of business." (10:55)

2. The Principles of Conscious Capitalism (09:00–15:06)

• Higher Purpose: Every company and person should be guided by a purpose beyond profit.
• Stakeholder Orientation: Creating value for all stakeholders—employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and the environment.
• Conscious Leadership: Leaders who care about people and the company’s purpose.
• Caring Cultures: Workplaces where people find meaning, health, and community.

Notable Quote:

"Profit is essential. We need to make money as a business. That should not be the purpose. It’s like saying, I need red blood cells to live, but should I accumulate as many as possible? No, I use that to live my life..." (09:55)

• Companies embodying these values (e.g., Firms of Endearment) far outperform their peers financially—e.g., a 9:1 return over a decade (11:16–11:32).

3. The Human Cost of “Unconscious” Capitalism in Medicine (15:06–18:41)

• Dr. Shah connects Raj’s ideas to the medical industry, noting its slide into profit-over-people practices.
• Raj reflects on the “corruption” of noble professions—including medicine and law—due to misplaced priorities.
• The pitfalls of private equity in healthcare, siphoning value without regard for patients or professionals (16:48).
• The need to acknowledge and address all effects of business actions—not just “side effects.”

Notable Quote:

“There’s nothing on this planet called a side effect. You do things and there are effects—and you are responsible for all of the effects of your actions.” (18:41)

4. The "WISH" Framework (19:17–20:24)

• Wallet, Intellect, Spirit, Heart: Business and leadership must involve all four.
• Modern education and business focus almost exclusively on intellect and wallet, neglecting heart and spirit.

5. Integrating Masculine & Feminine Energy (21:21–22:08)

• Overemphasis on masculine energy creates aggression, domination, and hyper-competition.
• Healing requires integration of the feminine: empathy, nurturing, and inclusion.
• Encourages embracing emotion for all genders, referencing psychological research (Gabor Mate, John Sarno).

Notable Quote:

“Everything becomes war when you only have masculine energy, including business. War is war...but that’s not how you solve problems. You go to root cause…” (21:52)

6. Actionable Steps for Leaders to Foster Conscious Cultures (22:34–31:36)

• Start with “why” (purpose)—solve real problems profitably.
• Recognize and reduce suffering, bring joy (acronym: HEALING).
• Align work with personal “calling,” ensuring authentic fit.
• Leaders must be selfless (“SELFLESS” leadership).
• Happiness, caring, and accountability are necessary for a thriving culture—not gimmicks or superficial perks.

Notable Quote (on motivation):

“If you only do it because you anticipate the financial performance, it probably will not work. You have to want to do this for the right reasons.” (31:36)

7. Noteworthy Examples of Conscious Companies (33:12–36:58)

• Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, Costco, Trader Joe’s, Patagonia, Canva, Nvidia, Anthropics, and especially the transformation of Microsoft under Satya Nadella.
• The importance of leadership continuity—companies can regress quickly under new, less-conscious leadership.

Notable Quote:

"Leadership matters, and consciousness matters. When we unlock the energy inside human beings, it manifests into the world in dramatic ways…" (36:45)

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The Inner Work: The Seven Steps to Healing Leadership (39:05–60:17)

Raj shares a step-by-step framework from his new book, “Healing Leaders,” applicable to everyone:

The Seven Steps:

1. Know Yourself (42:56)

   • Dig past your surface identity to your essence.
   • Self-inquiry is lifelong.

2. Love Yourself (46:38)

   • Self-compassion is foundational. Without self-love, self-care and receiving love from others are blocked.
   • Referencing Bruce Lipton: “80–90% of people don’t love themselves.” (46:55)

3. Be Yourself (47:36)

   • Remove the masks; strive for consistency and authenticity.

4. Choose Yourself (and Your Story) (49:00)

   • Own and find meaning in your past, express gratitude in the present, and actively shape your future.
   • “Choosing your past releases you from victimhood.”

5. Express Yourself (Find Your Purpose) (51:43)

   • “The two most important days… the day you’re born, and the day you finally figure out why…” (51:45)

6. Complete Yourself (52:45)

   • Integrate both masculine/feminine and elder/child energies for wholeness:
     “Be your own unique version of a wise fool of tough love.” (53:13)

7. Heal Yourself (“Reveal it, feel it, heal it”) (54:07–59:08)

   • Acknowledge and process your traumas—everyone has “PTSI.”
   • “Your trauma is not your fault, but healing it is your responsibility.” (56:09)
   • Healing one’s trauma creates the possibility of “post-traumatic growth” and becoming a wounded healer for others.
   • “You are stronger because you had a trauma and healed it, than someone who never had one in the first place.” (59:09)

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Raj’s "LIST" for Healing (62:29–67:31)

An acronym received during Ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon rainforest, summarizing the ingredients for healing for individuals, companies, and societies:

• Love: Source all actions from love.
• Innocence: Choose to return to integrity and refuse to cause unnecessary harm.
• Simplicity: Focus on what truly matters and don’t get mired in complexity.
• Truth: Radical commitment to truth and reconciliation, essential for personal and collective peace.
  • “You cannot heal the past unless you acknowledge it... With truth, there can be no peace.” (64:18)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "Business can be beautiful, noble, heroic." (06:18)
• "Anything can be beautiful if you do it with consciousness and with love. Any industry, any business, any company." (14:36)
• "No wisdom tradition...teaches anything remotely like shareholder value...Except for the prosperity gospel—which is the ultimate corruption." (32:59)
• "Reveal it and feel it in order to heal it." (57:49)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:23 – Raj’s childhood, immigrant experiences
• 06:18 – Disillusionment with business education’s lack of humanity
• 09:00 – Discovery of stakeholder-centric businesses; the rise of conscious capitalism
• 11:16 – Data: Outperforming the S&P 500
• 15:06 – The crisis of unconsciously run health systems
• 19:17 – WISH framework introduced
• 22:34 – Action steps for leaders; HEALING as a purpose framework
• 31:36 – True motivation for conscious leadership
• 33:12 – Companies “doing it right”
• 39:05 – The inner work: Seven-step framework overview
• 54:07 – Healing trauma, “reveal it and feel it”
• 59:09 – Post-traumatic growth concept
• 62:29 – LIST framework for healing (Love, Innocence, Simplicity, Truth)

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Tone and Style

• The conversation is thoughtful, heartfelt, and vulnerable. Raj and Dr. Shah use personal stories and precise metaphors to make complex ideas accessible and actionable.
• The mood is optimistic, practical, and grounded in universal human wisdom.

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Learn More & Further Resources

• Raj Sisodia’s website: rajsisodia.com
• Books by Raj Sisodia: Conscious Capitalism, Healing Leaders, Firms of Endearment, and others
• Podcast: The Conscious Capitalists

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Summary Takeaway

Leaders—and all people—can only create healing organizations and a healthier world by first undertaking the inner journey: knowing, loving, being, choosing, expressing, completing, and healing the self. Businesses rooted in higher purpose, stakeholder orientation, and genuine care are not only more just, but also the most successful. The path to flourishing, in life and work, starts within.

Transcript

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Before we get started with this episode, I'd like to invite all of you to the first ever next Health Longevity Summit happening in Nashville, Tennessee at the Conrad Hotel on Saturday, September 12, 2026. This is an all day summit where you're going to be hearing from some of the best speakers in longevity medicine, including Dr. Vonda Wright, Dr. Luisa Nicola, many of the podcast guests that you've heard here on the Extend podcast. And of course I'm going to be there curating the entire day. We also have incredible vendors coming so that you can try the latest technologies in health, wellness and longevity. Go to next health.com summit and buy your ticket today. We only have 400 spots and they're going quickly. That's next health.com summit. I look forward to seeing you all there. Welcome to Xtend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah. A podcast dedicated to cutting edge science research, tools and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21 and trained and board certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results. When it comes to your health span, we are living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world renowned experts who are offering you a step by step guide to proactively avoid disease and most importantly, extend your health span. Welcome to xtend, the podcast dedicated to helping you live a longer, healthier and more fulfilling life. Today I have a true visionary leader joining us. A man who has fundamentally reshaped how we think about the role of business in society. Our guest is Raj Sisodia, a distinguished scholar and co founder of Conscious Capitalism Incorporated. Raj is renowned for his pioneering work on Conscious capitalism, a movement that champions businesses operating with a higher purpose beyond just profit. His insights have inspired countless organizations to prioritize all stakeholders, from employees to communities, proving that doing good can also lead to exceptional business success. Get ready to explore how purpose driven leadership can not only transform companies, but contribute to a healthier and more conscious world. Raj, really appreciate you coming on the podcast with me. Thank you so much for being here today.

[Raj Sisodia]

It's my pleasure. It's great to meet you and great to be on your on your wonderful podcast.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah. So this is an amazing treat for us because we don't normally get to Speak with massive business leaders like yourself. Usually it's health and wellness professionals. And I love the pivot. And maybe not a full pivot, but all the things that you've learned in the last few years. And you've written so many books, a lot on business, but now more on healing. Right. And so I'm so excited to have this conversation with you about that pivot, about your journey and your thought processes around Healing Leaders, which is your latest book. And also, I want to talk about Conscious capitalism, because I also think that's a big topic that we've never approached on this podcast, but it is part of healing yourself as a leader as well, I feel. So, Raj, tell us your story. Tell us about the 16 books and your businesses and everything.

[Raj Sisodia]

Well, my story is, I guess, unusual, but all of our stories are different and unique. But I was born in India, lived there until I was seven. And my father went away to Canada to get his Ph.D. when I was 2 in Agriculture Science. So he came back when I was seven years old. So I didn't really know my father until I was seven. And then he got a job in Barbados working on sugarcane research. So we moved to Barbados. So I was literally a kid growing up in a little village in India without electricity or running water, and suddenly I'm on an airplane and we're traveling across the world and into a whole other world. You know, in the 60s, India was very different from the rest of the world. And two years in Barbados and then two years in California, in Salinas, south of San Francisco, and one year in Canada, and then we went back to India when I was 12. So I had an interesting experience of being sort of an outsider at the age of seven. I say I'm an immigrant three times over because I was an immigrant first at age 7. Then I was an immigrant back to India at age 12. I kind of had to relearn the culture, the language, the mores and everything. And I observed it with somewhat objective eyes. I had an outsider lens because now I was looking at it almost like an American kid would look at it. And then I came back to this country at 23 for my PhD at Columbia University in New York. So again, I was an outsider with some grounding here, but still coming out, that growing up in India and seeing again what was happening here in the world of business and what I was learning and how it made sense to me. And I found over time that a lot of it did not make sense to me. That the way, you know, this was the 80s, 1981 was the beginning of what came to be known as the Decade of Greed. So it's Reagan in the White House, it's Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, who became the poster child for the new approach to management and leadership, which is all about shareholder value. There was that movie Wall street that came out which was about greed is good, celebrating the idea of greed as being the foundation of free markets and capitalism. So I found that greed can never be a virtue. Self interest is okay. Selfishness is not. And greed, we cannot base a whole system on greed because we're not appealing to the better angels of our human nature when we simply make business only about profit maximization. Because then it becomes about extraction, it becomes about using people, it becomes about treating people as a cost to be minimized as customers, as somebody to be exploited and get as much out of them as you can. Suppliers, you squeeze them as much as you can and you externalize burdens onto society and the environment. And you made your money and you maximized your profit. But I said, that's not a real profit. That's a false prophet. Doesn't take into account the impact that you had on the health and well being of your employees. The statistics are startling. That heart attacks are 20% higher on Monday mornings than the rest of the week. 33% higher in Sweden, 20% here and in the UK. That 120,000Americans die from stress connected to work every year. That 600,000 Chinese die from too much work.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

They had to invent a new word called guao laozi. In Japanese and Chinese, that means death from overwork. So I found that the human cost of business was simply unacceptable. We should not have to be hurting people to make money. If we are, then that is morally reprehensible and not acceptable. And so for a long time I was struggling and frustrated with the story of business that I was being taught in my MBA and in my PhD. So six years of business education, it was all about the head and the wallet. Everything was about the numbers and the theories and the economic foundations of all of this. And everything has to go to the bottom line. And what I realized looking back, is that it completely bypassed the human in between. Your heart, your soul, your spirit. I was never inspired a single day in those six years of my business education to see that, wow, business can be beautiful, business can be noble, business can be heroic. I never learned that it was all business was. A mercenary institution designed to extract as much as we can. And I was never emotionally moved in those six years now all that changed. I started asking the question, is there a better way to think about business? And I was a professor of marketing and I was a very idealistic person, idealistic kid. And I get planted into one of the most cynical professions there is, marketing. What does that have to do with the truth? And so I almost had a sense of shame. I almost wrote a book called the Shame of Marketing.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

Because we were spending $1 trillion a year on ads and coupons and junk mail in 2004. That was more than the GDP of India. A billion people were living on less than what we were spending here. And I said, what are customers and companies and society getting for that? That much money? It's more than 88% of the world's population lives on. And we spend it here on ads and coupons and junk mail.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's crazy.

[Raj Sisodia]

And I found that actually we are not creating value for customers. Most customers don't trust marketing. If it's marketing, that means it's not true. It's just marketing. Society is not benefiting. We're getting obesity crisis and anxiety and depression and all kinds of health issues. When 65% of our calories are processed foods heavily marketed, aggressively marketed foods. When we use women's bodies to sell products, when we get kids addicted to junky cereals and all kinds of stuff. We are just preying on people, it seems like to me. So I asked the question, is there a better way? And that's a very important question. You asked that about health. And the answer is always yes. There's always a better way because there's no perfection and human beings can always improve things. And so that quest led me ultimately to a journey of exploring, is there an alternative way of thinking about this? Are there companies that people simply love and they're not trying to buy love by ads and coupons? Because you cannot buy love. You have to earn it.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right?

[Raj Sisodia]

So I wanted to look for companies that don't spend all this money on marketing. And customers love them. And I found Whole Foods and I found a bunch of other companies. But I found that there was a bigger and deeper story there. Employees love them too.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

They love working there.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

Suppliers were loyal partners of theirs for long term relationships. Communities welcomed and embraced them. And they were good for the environment. Right. And all of these kinds of things. So they were embedded in a system of caring for all of their stakeholders, not just thinking about the investors. And what made that happen were the principles that became conscious capitalism. A higher purpose, like Next Health has a higher purpose. You're trying to improve health span and give people their health and vitality. So there must be a higher purpose to anything that we do. Just like we have our purpose in our own personal lives.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

Everything we create should have its own purpose. Profit is essential. We need to make money as a business. That should not be the purpose. It's like saying, I need red blood cells to live.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

But should I therefore accumulate as many red blood cells as possible and put them in storage tanks and you know, just have be the biggest red blood cell person? No, I use that to live my life and do what this life I'm meant to do. You know, we act like money is the only game in town, but there are many games in town, many things that make life important. So a higher purpose, a stakeholder orientation, conscious leaders who care about the people and the purpose, and a caring culture where people actually, they don't say, oh God, it's Monday and thank God it's Friday, I'm out of here. People love going to work and they love what they do. And they have a sense of joy and meaning in their lives through that. And their health actually gets better. Not only do heart attacks not go up on Mondays, but actually they are healthier because of that. So that became a turning point in my life. And that book was called Firms of Endearment. Firms of Endearment instead of Terms of India.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes, I love it.

[Raj Sisodia]

I'm very derivative. I just copy things change a word here and there. And it came out in 2007, completely changed my life because I said, wow, there's another way of being in business. These are businesses built on purpose and love.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

Not purely on self interest. They're not trying to maximize profit. They're trying to serve their people and serve their purpose. And shockingly, at the end of that research, when we identified 28 companies that fit that profile, and we did the financial analysis at the end, and I found that these companies had outperformed the market, the S&P 500, by 9 to 1 over 10 years.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

I didn't expect that. I said, these companies are paying their people well. Like Costco is one of those companies paying their people double of Walmart. They're treating their customers well, paying their suppliers well, investing in the community and the environment. And so I thought maybe there's less leftover for investors at the end of the day, but actually you're creating so much more value.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

It's more value when you have employees

[Raj Sisodia]

who are passionate customers who are loyal. You're not wasting Money on a bunch of ads. You have very low employee turnover. Costco was 7% a year. Walmart was 70%. So imagine Walmart had to hire 2 million people to replace those who left. So I came alive in that process. For the first time, I felt I was doing something meaningful. My heart was opened up. So I was sitting in a writing retreat in the Poconos. This was June 12th of 2005. I remember that day as a turning point. And I was writing some of the stories of these companies, and I found myself suddenly in tears. And I said to my co author who was with me on that writing, I said, david, I don't know what's happening. I hadn't cried for 20 years, and suddenly I'm crying about some story about what a company did for some employee, et cetera. And I said, I think I know what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to tell this story of business. I want to learn about it and deepen it and do something to change the narrative out there. So that was the beginning of my purpose. Before that, I had no purpose. I was just a frustrated, unhappy, uninspired marketing professor. Marketing professor who was ashamed of his own profession. I was not doing something. My father got a Ph.D. in Agriculture Science. His dream was literally to cure world hunger because in the 60s, people in India were dying of starvation. Literally, there was not enough food. So he had a noble purpose. And I get a PhD in marketing. I'm just out there selling more junk to people who don't need it and can't afford it.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

And so finally something awakened. And as I said, that was the beginning of the next phase of my life. And that led me to meet the Whole Foods CEO at the time, John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. He read the book and loved it and asked me to spend a day with him in Austin. And at the end of that, I shared my vision for what I was calling the Institute for New Capitalism, or ink. I make an acronym out of everything. And he looked at it. He said, that's exactly my vision. But I like the phrase conscious capitalism. Oh, wow. So we decided to start the movement. A few months later, we had a retreat at his ranch.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Incredible.

[Raj Sisodia]

And, yeah. So movement started in 2008 and 18 years now. And we have chapters in many countries and many cities. We have a nice chapter here in la, for example. And it's become part of the conversation that business massively.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

Anything in life can be done with different levels of consciousness.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

So when you do business With a low level, like a surgeon uses a scalpel to save a life, somebody else can use a scalpel to end a life. People can use business to create suffering and give people heart attacks. And, you know, they made a bunch of money for themselves and what's the point of it?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

And what are you going to do with that money when you die? You don't take it with you, or you do it with higher consciousness.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

And then it becomes something beautiful. I had the experience. I teach an MBA class on conscious capitalism. And I was teaching a case on. On a bank, a Dutch bank named Triodos. And the subtitle of the case was Conscious Money in Action. It's the most conscious bank in the world. Deep sense of values and a clear higher purpose to make society better, ultimately. And I had two students in my class, as I'm teaching the case, I see that they have two guys, tears streaming down their face. I said, what happened? They said, we have worked in banking for many years. We didn't know banking could be so beautiful.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Oh, wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

And I said, anything can be beautiful if you do it with consciousness and with love, Anything can be beautiful. Any industry, any business, any company can be beautiful. So that's kind of what we are trying to bring about is business, not as a mercenary institution, but as a missionary institution, As a way to elevate life, as a way to promote not only human flourishing, but planetary flourishing and flourishing of all life. That we put life at the center and not profit at the center. And profit has to serve life.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah. You know, what's such a enigma to me is that the entire business of medicine seems to have gone down the path of unconscious capitalism. And profits are being put over the health of patients, the health of the professionals. Practicing in healthcare institutions like hospitals and clinics, doctors are forced to see 50 to 100 patients a day just to pay their bills. Patients can't afford their prescriptions. What's happened there?

[Raj Sisodia]

It is a tragic story, really. I mean, this is the most noble of professions. What's more important than maintaining and restoring people to full health and vitality? And yet, like I said, any profession can be beautiful, but likewise, any profession can get corrupted. And once you lose sight of your real higher purpose and the purpose becomes profit and profit maximization, it all goes downhill from there. So if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, it used to be the number one or two most admired industry in this country. Companies like Johnson and Johnson and Merck and many others were held up in great esteem because they genuinely did put patient welfare at the top and everything else followed. But over time they became increasingly mercenary. Johnson and Johnson has this beautiful credo literally carved in stone at their headquarters, about how they put the patient first and then the doctors and ultimately the shareholders at the end of that. Now they have become even more rapacious in that sense about profit than other industries. They paid, I think the biggest fine ever levied by the government for unethical marketing of a drug called Risperdal. And the guy who ran that program, they paid a multi billion dollar fine, later on, was promoted to CEO of

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

the company, oh my gosh.

[Raj Sisodia]

Because they made $19 billion of selling that drug unethically. And many people were hurt as a result of that. So I think when it becomes only about money, anything, lawyers, the legal profession is a noble profession. It's about justice and fairness. But it becomes only about money. It's about billable hours and it's about extracting unfair advantages. Forget about fairness. It's about how can I make it unfair on your behalf. So I think that is what has happened. And now you look at hospitals and others that are being acquired by private equity, you know, that's kind of the beginning of the end because they are, you know, that's an animal designed to be only about, only about profits, strip out everything else. They have a short term thing, they want to flip it, sell it, exit strategy. What are we going to do? Fix it up, you know. And now schools, like I was in Mexico speaking at a private school, the American school there, and all those schools are being bought up by private equity. So all of these noble professions, whether it's about health, whether it's about education, knowledge, wisdom, et cetera, are being corrupted in a way by the market forces interpreted with the lower consciousness. The market forces can do beautiful things. Capitalism has done more for humanity by far than any other idea we've ever had. It's lifted us out of the dirt in the last two centuries. Per capita incomes, life expectancy, literacy, longevity, all of these things have dramatically increased because of the fruits of capitalism, which has unleashed human potential, human creativity, human ingenuity, our ability to cooperate with each other through the mechanism of companies and do incredible things. But when you do it with low consciousness, then you get all the so called side effects. The externalities, economists call them externalities.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Externalities.

[Raj Sisodia]

We don't want to worry about the environment or the community, et cetera. And those come to dominate. What I say to my students and executives there, there's nothing on this planet called a side effect. You do things and There are effects.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes, you.

[Raj Sisodia]

And you're responsible for all of the effects of your actions. That's the spiritual principle, really. And can we do business with a spectrum of positive effects having positive externalities on everybody? So I think there's a lot of challenges, which is why our movement exists. This is a great noble institution that really needs to be elevated. And when you apply it with that elevated consciousness, it can do incredible things. The unrealized potential of capitalism when we bring our heart and our soul, not just our head and our wallet. So my latest acronym is called Wish.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Tell us about Wish.

[Raj Sisodia]

Wish is the wallet. It's the intellect, but then it's the spirit and the heart. As I said, business school is all about the wallet and the head. Analytical intelligence and financial intelligence. We need the other two. Anything that human beings do must involve the heart and must involve the spirit. We need to be inspired every day by what we're doing.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

And we need to be emotionally moved by it. Our heart has wisdom that our head doesn't. Our heart knows before our head does. What really matters. When I was crying in the Poconos, that was my heart telling me, this really matters to you?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

And it probably matters to a lot of people in this world. My brain would not have picked up that figured that out. Right. And we get educated in our education system. We heavily develop our left brain. Some of us end up becoming engineers. So we become even more analytical and everything is analyzed to the nth degree. But we lose touch with our own spirit, our own soul, our own intuition, and our heart. Especially men. We build a wall around our heart. We don't allow ourselves to express emotion. Little boys, when they show emotion. Now, it turns out young boys are more sensitive and more emotional than young girls.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Really?

[Raj Sisodia]

That's what Gabor Mate, the Dr. Gabor Mate, told us.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

I love Gabor Mate.

[Raj Sisodia]

We were in Costa Rica with him.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Oh, wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

And then what do we do to young boys when they express emotion?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Tell them to stop it.

[Raj Sisodia]

Yeah, stop it. Don't be a girl. Stop crying. Be a man. Right. And so that's incredibly unhealthy because we're not giving them permission to be human. And emotions, and Neha may have talked about this, are energy in motion. They need to move through you. And if you don't allow that to happen, it gets embedded inside you. You swallow it. It then metastasizes, shows up as chronic pain in your body. All the back pain epidemic we have in this country and 80, 90% of that is psychological. According to Dr. John Sarno and his work on back pain. And so we have to be able to express emotions as human beings, regardless of gender. You know, one of my books is called Shakti Leadership. It's about the integration of the masculine and the feminine. That we all come from a mother and a father. And yet that mother energy is suppressed.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

And we're not, you know, we don't express it in our. Especially men. But even women very often suppress the feminine side. And our world is entirely built on masculine energy, which can be positive. Strength, courage, focus, resilience, structure. But in the absence of the feminine, it becomes domination, aggression, hyper competition. Everything becomes a damn war when you only have masculine energy, including business becomes war, sports becomes war. War is war. And what do we do in this country? We have a problem, we declare war on it.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

War on cancer, war on drugs, war on. On poverty, war on terror, war on whatever. Right. It's the American way. Right. Doesn't work. That's not how you solve problems by declaring war on them. You go to root cause, which you're doing.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

I agree.

[Raj Sisodia]

Right. And so I think we have a lot to learn. We have done a lot, but we have a lot to learn.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure. So if you're a leader, you're starting a company, or you're involved at a high level with the company and you can. You have the opportunity to make decisions, to lean more towards conscious capitalism and making it a company that does contribute to the health of your employees, the health of your clients, the health of the leadership. What are some of the steps that you can take to transform the company culture?

[Raj Sisodia]

Yeah. So you have to start really with why. You know, Simon Sinek has a well known book. Right. Start with why. And so really is the beginning why? Why am I doing this? Why does the world need another company, another store, another bank, another what. What am I going to do that is actually going to solve problems? So as we say, the purpose of business is not to make a profit. The purpose of business is to find profitable solutions to the problems of people on the plan. And they have to be profitable. Otherwise a business cannot do it. It's not viable. But we still need to solve those problems. That's where governments come in and that's where nonprofits.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

There's no purpose without profits. Yes, you need the profits to fuel the.

[Raj Sisodia]

And likewise, in the long term, we really don't have sustainable profits without a purpose. Those are false prophets you're extracting. You're not creating value, really. So those two things go together. So starting that question with the higher purpose, what is it? Why are we here? Don't be mercenary. It's not like we go from mercenary. We have businesses that are basically just saying, there's an opportunity here. We need to make some money. That's a mercenary mindset as opposed to missionary. There's a problem here that needs to be solved. And I think of it beyond that. I say there's suffering in our world. We've made a lot of progress in the last two centuries. We've lifted people up dramatically. And that doesn't mean we have eradicated suffering. There's incredible amount of suffering.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

There's 3 billion people living on less than $5.50 a day.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

There are tens of thousands of people in this city living on the streets. There are a billion people who don't have access to clean water. There are tens of thousands of children dying every day from preventable causes. There are tens of billions of animals that are suffering in factory farms, and they are caged and they are tortured. Right. And ultimately to feed our appetites. So there's a lot of suffering in the world, and the only human response to suffering is healing. We have to be part of the healing, and we have to consciously be part of the healing. If you're not consciously part of the healing, you are part of the hurting. Without even realizing it, you are an instrument of that system that is creating all of that suffering in the world. And so it starts there. You have to try to reduce. So the acronym. I have acronyms, as I told you, for everything. So for purpose, I say healing is the acronym, Right? Every great purpose needs to be a healing purpose. It needs to reduce suffering and bring joy into the world. And then healing stands for the quality. It should be heroic. It evolves. It aligns all your stakeholders together. It's loving. It's rooted in love. Everything in conscious capitalism comes from love. Every single thing we do in this life should come from love. Every decision we make, every action we take, every statement we utter should be coming from love. Not anger, not greed, not fear, not jealousy, not guilt, not shame. Too often we're acting out of those places. In business, very often we are coming from fear and greed. Fear of competition, going out of business, and greed for more, more, more. I just need to grow compulsively, not consciously. And so that's purpose. And then you start thinking about, okay, who are my stakeholders?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

And how can I create more value for them and with them, deeper and deeper value. So for employees, for example, it's not just a job. It's a career and a calling that everybody who comes to this company, who comes to Whole Foods, should be a foodie who cares about health. Right. I love food. And if you go to Patagonia, you're passionate about the outdoors, your work becomes an extension of who you are. It's not an unnatural act for you to be doing that work. Now, you could take a Patagonia employee and put them at Whole Foods. They probably wouldn't thrive as much. They wouldn't love it. And likewise. Right. So we have to align the personal motivations and drives of people with the work that they do. So it becomes a calling. The test that I say to my students is that your job should be such that if you win the lottery on Friday, you still come back to work on Monday.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Beautiful.

[Raj Sisodia]

Because the job has meaning beyond the paycheck. You're doing it for something more than the money.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

So that should be true of all work. Unfortunately, I would say 90% of people on this planet don't have that kind of work. Work is drudgery. Work is suffering. Work is. It's almost like a prison. You're stuck here from these hours to these hours. You have no say in anything. You don't get treated with respect and care. Your health deteriorates. You can't wait to get out of there. Thank God it's Friday. And can I get drunk now and forget my horrible week? And then again on Saturday and then you come back Sunday night and Monday morning, here we are again. And the heart attack is. Heart rate is elevated. So think about all of your stakeholders and creating value for them and with them, employees, customers, suppliers, et cetera, and then recognize they're all connected. You can't have happy employees or happy customers without happy employees.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's true.

[Raj Sisodia]

And likewise. So when you have happy employees, happy customers, then you're going to have happy investors, ultimately. So why did. You're doing all the other things that a business needs, all the processes and so forth? So it's all a virtuous cycle. It works together as a living organism. The organization is a living entity. And all of these are these component parts. But don't treat it like a machine. They all connect to each other just like the human body. We can, and medical education often does kind of break it down into parts and specialties. And you're only focused on this part of the body. You don't really understand the whole because you're focused on the parts. You have to understand the whole. And then you have to work on yourself as a Leader. What does it mean for me to be a leader? It's not knowing everything and giving people orders. It's enabling people to be at their best and to be able to express themselves and create something incredible together, serving the purpose of the organization and the people. So conscious leadership, and my acronym there is selfless. You cannot be a selfish human being and call yourself a leader, because if you're a selfish human being and you become a leader, you're going to look at all the people you lead and say, wow, I can use all these people to fulfill my own goals. Which for a selfish person are about ego and power and money. And that's not a leader. That's a tyrant. The definition of a tyrant. They use other people and inflict suffering on other people to fill their own ego. A true leader has transcended the narrow self. They are about the collective self. They're about all of us going to a better place at the end of life. That is what results in a sense of fulfillment and contentment. As Naya says, she has sat by the bedsides of thousands of people as they were dying in. They didn't say, oh, God, I wish I had made a little more shareholder return. It's all about love and it's all about relationships and the impact and the legacy that we're leaving behind here. We can become immortal through our work. We create something that lives on after us. Right. And that's the opportunity that we have. So conscious leaders, and then a caring culture. We can build a culture where people really, as I said, look forward to going to work and they thrive. And there's respect and there's trust and there's caring and there's accountability. You can't just have caring, but no accountability. Just like in a family, you love your children, but that doesn't mean you say yes to everything and you don't hold them to standards. Right. You have to do that. So in many ways, it becomes like a family. It's not a family business, but it's a business family.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

Every business should be a business family where we genuinely care about the people. And one of my favorite quotes on leadership is from Senator Raphael Warnock, who is also the. He's the pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King used to be the pastor and now he's the senator from Georgia. He said, you cannot lead the people unless you love the people.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

I love that quote. That's beautiful.

[Raj Sisodia]

And you cannot love the people unless you know the people. And you cannot know the people. Unless you walk among the people. I think that's the whole philosophy of leadership. And so, yeah, I think every leader, what it takes is I tell leaders because sometimes they read the books and they read the financial analysis of these companies doing well. And so, okay, let's do it. And I said, well, if you only do it because you anticipate the financial performance, it probably will not work. You have to want to do this for the right reasons. It has to come from here, not just from here. You have to believe in these things, that these are not tactics, these are tenets, the tenets of conscious capitalism. A tenet is a pillar of fundamental belief that you believe that purpose matters in a human life, that you believe that the well being of everybody is inherently important, not just what can they do. For me, for example, some years ago there was a cover story on Harvard Business Review and they had that, you know that yellow smiley faces you used to see everywhere and it said the economics of happiness.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah, I remember that. I remember that one exactly.

[Raj Sisodia]

And it showed that happiness is profitable. Yes, happy employees are more productive and you know, all the you can imagine. So a lot of CEOs suddenly said, oh my God, we need happiness around here. What do we need? Do we need beer on Fridays? Do we need baseball tables?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah, exactly.

[Raj Sisodia]

So, but it's instrumental. They want people to be happy because it's going to make them more money. Now people can tell when you care about them versus you just want to use them in a more efficient way, right? So the analogy I use is like asking somebody to marry you. And she says, why do you want to marry me? I said, well, I read that married men live five years longer and they make 30% more income in their lifetime. So there's a great business case to get married, right?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's so true.

[Raj Sisodia]

We should marry for love and we should do these things from love. So I asked leaders search in your own heart, are you really ready to do this? Because otherwise all you're going to do is create more cynicism in your people. People are already burned and they've been flavor of the month. All kinds of business things come and go. If you genuinely believe in this and if you have the courageous patience to stick with it because it takes time and there's some investment involved up front, but over time then you start to see the dramatic impact and it sustains itself. But you have to do the right things for the right reasons. And that's where this wears into spirituality as well. This is really an expression of your spiritual being. At work.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's true.

[Raj Sisodia]

And I've recently written a white paper called the Sacred Roots of Conscious Capitalism. And I looked at all the major religious traditions of the world. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, et cetera, Christianity. And the teachings of all of these wisdom traditions are completely aligned with the principles of conscious capitalism and also indigenous wisdom around the world. There's no wisdom tradition in the world that teaches anything remotely like shareholder value. Profit maximization is the purpose of your work. Except there's something called the prosperity gospel in the U.S. you know, if you see all these televangelists on TV, Joel Osteen and others, they celebrate money. And if you're not making money, that means you're not a good.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Interesting. Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

You know, they've corrupted. This is the ultimate corruption.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

They've taken something holy and sacred and made it all mercenary. And they said, give me more money so I can buy another jet.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

I know.

[Raj Sisodia]

You know, lifestyle, you know, right on stage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a little nuts.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

It's nuts. Yeah. You know, what are some of the companies that are doing it right right now that you see out there that are practicing conscious capitalism?

[Raj Sisodia]

Whole Foods has been a good example.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's a great one. Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

It did get acquired by Amazon for other reasons. That's the structural issue in our financial markets with activist investors. But they really were the poster child in many ways. Southwest Airlines, for a very long time was that, I think, under the current leader, what happens with conscious companies just side with human beings. It's one thing to awaken, it's another thing to stay awake. Right. Because you can slide back into the patterns, or as a company, you get another CEO and suddenly they are beholden to Wall street or they were educated at Chicago, and all they care about is the bottom line, shareholder value, et cetera. So the wrong kind of leader who doesn't have the moral courage or the personal power to stick with the principles that define this company and make it unique and give it a soul, you can very quickly slide back. Costco is a very good company of example of a company that has sustained it so far. They have very, very strong principles about what they do for their employees, for their customers, for their suppliers, et cetera. And everybody loves them. Trader Joe is another company that everybody loves. From here, actually. Right. It originated around here. Patagonia and San Diego is an incredible company. We're starting to see some of the newer companies, like, I think anthropic among the AI companies with the brother, sister, founders of the company. I think they have values, they have principles, they have a moral compass about what they're doing. A sense of purpose. I think in many ways Nvidia and Jensen Huang, very mission driven company and Mission is the boss, as he says. Canva is another company I think that is pretty conscious now. I'm talking about some of the newer companies. Microsoft is an interesting example of a company that was very ruthless, very aggressive, almost a monopolist and trying to be even more of a monopolist under Gates. And then Bama and a very aggressive culture and people yelling at each other and screaming at each other and zero emotional intelligence to be found. And then Satya Nadella comes along and becomes CEO and he's completely a different kind of a leader. And he brought his own being into this leadership and created this culture of empathy. He had a special needs son like I do and that taught him a lot of empathy and started to be able and bring that into the culture of the organization. Have empathy with each other and with our customers. How are we gonna solve people's problems if we don't actually feel them right? And so a growth mindset, a culture of empathy, a culture of caring, a new purpose. Bill Gates had that vision for a computer on every desk. But that got realized in the early 2000s. So what do you do now? You know they say, what will the preacher do when the devil is converted? You're out of a job.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Exactly. I love it.

[Raj Sisodia]

So they had to. But Bahmer for 14 years was CEO after Gates and he never thought of it. He's a Stanford MBA guy, right? All he cared about was bottom line profit. And the culture really, I mean the company really deteriorated in those years. And Satya brought in a fresh sense of purpose and that company just took off. I mean, everybody thought Microsoft was yesterday's news. And they dramatically went from 300 billion to 3 trillion in market value in a decade. So leadership matters and consciousness matters and you unlock value. Where does value come from? It comes from inside human beings, what they do. It's like when we first figured out how to unlock the energy inside an atom. It literally blew us away.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

When we unlock the energy inside human beings, it manifests into the world in dramatic ways. Not just in market capitalization, but all other ways as well. The well being of people and the flourishing of life.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah, it's beautifully said, beautifully said. Dr. Shah here and I want to take a quick moment to talk to you about metabolism. So you probably already heard. Unfortunately, 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and it's not because of what they're eating. It's actually a lot about what's living in your gut. I'm talking about your microbiome. This is the community of bacteria that controls everything from how you process sugar to your energy levels to your mood. There's actually one specific strain in your microbiome called Akkermansia mucinophilia that's absolutely critical for metabolic health. This is a bacteria that strengthens your gut lining. It helps you metabolize carbs more efficiently and it increases GLP1 production naturally. The problem is almost everybody is completely deficient in it. And until recently, there was no way to get this. But that's why I'm really excited about joining Pendulum. They're the first company in the US to bring live Akkermansia to the market. The company was founded by PhD scientists and doctors with the Mayo Clinic as their first investor. The Metabolic Daily formula that I take every single day doesn't just contain Akkermansia. It's formulated with multiple next generation strains. And these all work together to optimize your metabolism from the inside and out. So you can track every macro and calorie if you want. But if your gut microbiome is out of balance, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle. Pendulum is going to give you the tools that you need to fix your gut at its source. Try Pendulum today. Head to my link below and use a discount code. You're going to feel the difference a healthy gut microbiome can make. You know, I love the movement that you were instrumental in starting conscious capitalism and now you're speaking a lot about leaders and how to heal yourself as a leader. Right. And so we have your next book here about the recovery of self, and you have a seven step program here. What are leaders healing from?

[Raj Sisodia]

Yeah, there's many ways in which we need healing. We are kind of fragmented beings. We're not connected to all of our inner energies. You know, the masculine, feminine side. As I mentioned earlier, there are many other things. So this book really came out of my realization in 2018. So I was writing a book called Healing Organization that.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Oh, okay.

[Raj Sisodia]

That was around the idea that I mentioned earlier that business, as we normally do, it creates suffering. And most people, you know, they say that you will believe it when you see it. Most people don't realize that our people are burned out, that, you know, people are disengaged, that people are getting heart attacks, that all these things are happening. We are affecting not only them, but their children. And the future. So that book was about the idea that business does not have to hurt people or the planet to make money. In fact, the opposite must be and can be true, that you can actually create more successful businesses while creating flourishing for people, for your employees, for your customers, for communities and the world at large. So there was 20 stories of companies in there that are doing just that. And then I had these four women friends, Lynn Twist was one of them, and three others who I had interviewed for that book. And they called me and they said, are you writing a book about healing? What about your own healing? Are you working on your own healing? And I said, well, I don't have time for that. I have a book deadline. I said, no, you have to make time for that. I said, well, I think I'm okay. I don't think I need healing. They said, no, you need healing. Everybody needs healing. And so I delayed that book by five months, and I went on all of these healing experiences.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Did they sense that you needed healing?

[Raj Sisodia]

Yeah, because they know me at a very deep level. We have deep conversations. We are part of the conscious capitalism world. And they knew I was getting burned out. In many ways. I had purpose, but I didn't have inner peace. And I had all this trauma I was carrying around. I had tremendous trauma in my own life, in my family. My parents had trauma, in my lineage, we have trauma, et cetera. And so I took five months, literally. I had never done that before. I took time. I went to the Himalayas. We had a journey, the Shakti spiritual tours my co author, Nilima organizes. I went to the high Himalayas on the border of India and Tibetan, where there's all of this deep Buddhist wisdom.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

All these monasteries. That's where I had my 60th birthday. I went to a silent retreat in upstate New York, and four days of silence. I received incredible downloads from the universe or some higher power. I had 45 pages of notes, including the outline of this book came to me in those four days. I worked with a coach for the first time who had really reframed my whole journey for me as to what it was really about. I was 60 that year. She said, do you realize you spent 45 years trying to impress your father?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Oh, gosh. It's true for many people, I think.

[Raj Sisodia]

And now you spend the last 15 honoring your mother with your work.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

And everything you've done in this world of conscious capitalism and Forms of Endearment and Everybody matters. And all of these things are reflection of her energy. Mother energy, which is missing we have too much father energy out there. It becomes unhealthy. We need that mother. Caring, compassion, empathy, nurturing, inclusion. Those are the more human aspects of what it means to be a human being. And then I went to the Amazon rainforest with a group called the Pachamama Alliance, Lind Twist. And she told me, you're going to learn more in 10 days in the Amazon than you will learn in 5 years of research about healing from the shamans, from being in nature, being in the rainforest, being with the Achuar and the Zapara indigenous people. And actually having an ayahuasca experience was part of that as well. I got incredible insights from all of that. So that was my journey of healing, working on my own healing or starting that journey. And as I said, these steps came to me at that time that if you have. In order to have a healing organization, you have to start with the leaders, because you cannot have a healing organization from a leader who actually hasn't worked on their own being.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right? Absolutely.

[Raj Sisodia]

Because the macrocosm is a reflection of the microcosm. It's an amplification of what's in here, gets manifested out there. So a leader who hasn't worked on themselves will inflict suffering in the world on themselves and others. And so these steps that came to me in the silent retreat were, know yourself. You have to know who you are, not only the surface level identity that you have taken on, right? We can all say, well, I'm. I'm Indian and I'm an engineer and I'm a professor and I'm. I'm liberal or I'm conservative or a man or woman. You know, we have all of those demographic descriptors. So that's not you. Those are identities that you have. I'm Hindu versus Christian, whatever it is, right? Who's the real you? What's your essence, as we say in India, what's your nature, your swabha? What were you? Who were you before you were born? As Father Richard Rohr says, because this being came in here with a unique set of qualities and way of being different from every other 8 billion of us alive today, 109 billion have died already. Human beings, no two are alike. So you have to know who you are at a deep level. Your essence, your nature, what really matters to you. You get past always like the layers of an onion. You have to keep going deeper and deeper. So know yourself deeply. And that's a quest you will continue your whole life because you will keep uncovering new layers of yourself as you encounter different things in life. Love yourself is the next step. It is not automatic that people who know themselves love themselves. A lot of people, the more they know themselves, the more they hate themselves. Okay, that's true. It happened to some degree for me because until I was seven, I had no awareness of who I am and what I'm like. But then my father comes into my life having not known me and my father, we come from the warrior caste in India and we come from a very feudal version of that called the Rajputs, right? And my grandfather was overlord of the village and where, you know, it's like a very sort of dictatorial kind of an environment with the people who work there and within the family, very abusive environment as well. Hyper patriarchal, misogynistic almost. And my father very much was of that. He had that energy and I was much more like my mother. So my father sees me as this very trusting, idealistic, peace loving kid kind of in his head and he said, you can't trust anybody. You should don't trust anybody. You can't be idealistic. You need to be pragmatic. You're too peace loving. You need to be rough and tough and you're in your head and you're smart at school, but that doesn't matter. You need to be street smart. So I came to believe that everything about me was a weakness, was a flaw, that I was defective and that it's. And you know, your father is a larger than life figure. And especially him coming back from Canada, he was welcomed with like a 50 mile parade of cars and there were banners everywhere and bands playing and welcome back, Dr. Sisodia. It was like a giant in the, you know, in my eyes and for many people. And so for me it's like, oh my God.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

My father is saying that's the voice of God, right? And so for a long time in my life, I was denying my own true nature and trying to fit in and be somebody else, be what my father wanted me to be. It's called people pleasing, but to the nth degree become the son that he wished he had instead of what he got. And so it took me decades to really recognize that what I have are not weaknesses. Those are my strengths, that my trusting nature, my idealism. Without idealism, there would be no conscious capitalism.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Absolutely right.

[Raj Sisodia]

And all of those qualities are actually part of what I'm meant to bring to this collective puzzle that we're all part of, right? That, you know, there's a parable that somebody prays to God and said, God, please make me like Abraham. And God says, I already have Abraham. What I need is you to be you. So all of us need to be, but we need to be the most healed version of ourselves. But first we have to start. Once you love yourself, then you can start to evolve yourself.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes, absolutely.

[Raj Sisodia]

So love yourself. If you don't love yourself, then you won't take care of yourself. Why do people eat what they know is bad for them? And we do all kinds of.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

We sabotage ourselves, destructive activities.

[Raj Sisodia]

If you don't love yourself, then you do that. In a way, you're trying to Destroy yourself. And 80 to 90% of people don't love themselves. According to Bruce Lipton.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's true.

[Raj Sisodia]

And also when you don't love yourself, you can't receive the love of somebody else.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

80 to 90%.

[Raj Sisodia]

That's what Bruce Lipton says.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

He's a doctor. And when you don't love yourself, you cannot receive the love of another because you don't feel worthy of love. So if you're not worthy of your own love and somebody else says, I love you, you don't actually know me. Once you know me, all that, you'll get rid of all that.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right? Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

So love yourself is very. And that's practicing self compassion.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

We forgive others. We don't forgive ourselves.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

For things. Right. So much there.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah. Having time for self care. Even if you don't make time for yourself and treat your body well, you're never going to be successful in life. And a lot of people don't make any time for that.

[Raj Sisodia]

Oh, yeah. That's the lowest priority. You are your most important stakeholder. You are responsible for yourself. It's not your children, it's not your spouse, it's you. You're responsible. And then of course, the other part of that not loving yourself is that as Francis Meehan said, men are at war with each other because every man is at war with himself. So when you have that inner conflict and that lack of. If you look at all of the tyrants and dictators and people who inflict violence and suffering in the world, this comes from a deep lack of self love. And that may have come from their parents or whatever it is. Right. Wherever it comes from. So love yourself. Third is be yourself. Once you know who you are and you love yourself, now your full permission, your job is not to act, to take off all those masks. Because all of us are trying to be pretending to be somebody. We are different with our parents and different with our children and different at work and different at home and different with our friends, etc. No, just be the same person at all times. I think Gandhi was the ultimate of this. You know, he's the same person whether he's with King George or whether he's with an untouchable person that he used to go and stay with. You know, he is the same person with everybody. Right? And he's just being who he is, who he has cultivated himself to be. So be yourself. And the fourth one is choose yourself, which is basically choosing your past, your present and your future. Now, what does it mean to choose your past? You cannot change your past. You cannot change your parents. You can't change all the stuff that happened. It's all in the past. But you can choose it. You can say, you know what? If I could, I would choose it again. I would choose to have my special needs son. I would choose to be born into that warrior class family. I would choose to have that distant and domineering father because those were lessons I needed to learn. Like, if I did not grow up in that kind of an environment where the women were suppressed and abused, would I have written a book about the feminine 50 years later? Probably not. Why would I, as a man write a book about the feminine unless I had experienced something? Right. It's what Viktor Frankl calls finding meaning in your suffering, turning that into something. Right. And so choosing your past releases you from victimhood. I would say, why is my father. My father never picked me up, never said I love you, never hugged me. Right. I don't remember that ever as a child or even so I would say, my friends, fathers are so kind and loving. I used to be in that mode of woe is me. Right? And that doesn't serve us to go through life as a victim. So when you choose the metaphor is that silent retreat when it was time to eat. And you know, because nobody could communicate, they just gave you a bunch of food. You know, you could say, I like this. I don't. Don't give me more. No, here's. This is your right. It looks bitter. It tastes bitter. It looks unappetizing. This is your curriculum. You need all of this. You can't choose.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

Life doesn't give you a menu or a buffet. I want this kind of mother, this kind of father, this religion, this country, this time in history, this socioeconomic status. No, you're given a tray full of stuff, and this is what you are supposed to go through in order to become and evolve into the being you're meant to Be and do the work you're supposed to do here. So treat it all as a gift. Everybody here is a teacher. Everybody in your past. Friend or there's no friend, there's no foe. They're all your teachers. And every experience is there to teach you something if you choose to. So choose your past, choose your present, is living with gratitude. And choosing your future is saying yes to the journey of life, to the adventure of life through the hero's journey. You know, Joseph Campbell has a classic framework called the Hero's Journey. And all the big movies like Harry Potter and Star wars and Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings are all based upon that same trajectory. We are the heroes of our own life if we say yes to that call to adventure. Or we can stay in our little cocoon and just live our life without actually ever venturing out and risking anything. We have to choose growth over safety. If we always choose safety, we'll never grow. You might as well be dying. So going on that hero's journey and that takes you to the next step of express yourself. What is your purpose? Why are you here? They say the two most important days of your life, the day you're born and the day you finally figure out why you were born, why are you here? And so what is that purpose that will give meaning and fulfillment and joy, as Viktor Frankl is the great teacher on that man's search for meaning.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

It's a great book, the most important

[Raj Sisodia]

book I've ever read, most impactful for me. So finding that purpose and living is very important. So that's expressing yourself and then completing yourself, which is don't be a fractional human being. We all come from a mother and a father. We have mother energy and father energy. Just because you were born a boy or a girl doesn't mean you limit yourself and say, I'm a boy, therefore I can never be loving or emotional. I'm a girl, therefore I cannot be strong. As Martin Luther King said, we must be tough minded and tender hearted. And we have that, the yin yang symbol. You see, the masculine has feminine inside it. And Carl Jung said, every man has an inner woman. Every woman has an inner man. And so we need to become whole persons so that we integrate both of those sides of our being, regardless of what gender we were born into. And then we go beyond masculine and feminine to also two other energies that we have, which is the elder and the child. We have access to our higher self, to our divine self, to our wise elder in a way that has access to wisdom. And meaning and purpose and transcendence. All of those come from the elder energy. And then we have an inner child, which is the source of joy. Laughter, play, fun, creativity, innovation, all come from child energy, curiosity. And most of us lose connection with that child. Or we have a wounded inner child. And we never healed those childhood wounds. And so if we integrate all four of those, we become what we call the wise fool of tough love.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

The wise fool of tough love.

[Raj Sisodia]

You have the wisdom of the elder. You have the foolishness, playfulness, innocence of a child. You have the toughness of the masculine, and you have the unconditional love of the feminine. And each of us, regardless of gender, can be our own unique versions of a wise fool of tough love. Gandhi. Was that the Dalai Lama? Is that Herb Kelleher who ran Southwest Airlines for many years? Very much that. All the greatest human beings that I've ever met have all four of those qualities. They have the wisdom, but they don't take themselves so seriously. They're able to laugh. The Dalai Lama will give you a beautiful answer to a deep question. And then he giggles and says, otherwise, I don't know. So I think cultivating. How can you become your own version of a wise fool of tough love? And then the last step is heal yourself, which is heal your psychological wounds and traumas. You know, about 13 million Americans have been diagnosed with PTSD.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

But I believe every single human has PTSI. Post traumatic stress injury. Life is hard. Traumas happen to all of us. Every child goes through some version of the trauma where they get pushed out of the sandbox or the playground, and the trauma is, I don't belong. Or you hear your parents express disappointment in you in some fashion. Oh, I wish this kid was whatever. Then the imprint is, I'm not enough. Which is why I wear this bracelet here from Blake Mycowski. It's called Enough. He started a whole movement around the idea that too many, even people who are incredibly successful in life, they go through feeling, I'm not enough, because somewhere they got that programming at an early age. You know, I think NEHA says this, that be careful what you say to your children as a parent, because your outer voice to them becomes their inner voice. The rest of their life.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Your outer voice becomes their inner voice.

[Raj Sisodia]

Your outer voice to them becomes their inner voice. Now, can you make it a positive inner voice? What a gift to give your children to have a positive inner voice. Right? And so we all have trauma. Now what do we do? What do we do? We said, oh, listen, I did not go to Afghanistan. I didn't go to Iraq. I wasn't a first responder. So, yeah, I had. Life is hard. Other people had much. They had real trauma.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

Just because somebody else had a more severe form of trauma doesn't mean that your trauma is irrelevant. The fact is that it is driving you. As Carl Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will run your life and you will call it fate. You have no idea. Why do you react to things, Overreact. When somebody calls you something or some situation happens, you get triggered. You get amygdala hijacks. Where are those triggers? When were those minds planted through life experiences? And if you don't understand that and start to heal it, you're going to go through life in a reactive state. You will inflict suffering on yourself and everybody that you touch. You have a duty. As we say, your trauma is not your fault, but healing it is your responsibility because otherwise. Otherwise you create suffering in the world.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Sure.

[Raj Sisodia]

You cannot be the source of suffering in this world.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

I think people live with their traumas and suppress them for their entire life and don't make any effort towards healing them. And they do. The trauma translates into other people suffering due to their traumas.

[Raj Sisodia]

Right. And they say it's kind of a victim mentality. Right. This happened to me, therefore this is the rest of my life, I'm going to be like this. And I think that's a real. We have the ability as human beings to grow and evolve and change and learn. And so we have to acknowledge, first of all, trauma. So what do most people do with trauma? As you said, they deny it or they minimize it, but then they have to live with themselves. So they numb it. And our society is designed for numbing mechanisms. You can walk down the street and have 20 different numbing experiences, from donuts to marijuana to alcohol to.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Average donor is a. Every other store is a numbing experience.

[Raj Sisodia]

Our whole society is based upon helping us numb and, and kind of, you know, deal with our stress. So. But then you. So, yeah, you have a few hours of, you know, feeling better.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

This was my father. Every day of his life. I mean, he had to have four or five drinks before he would lighten up a little bit. You would see him smile and, you know.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right. And.

[Raj Sisodia]

But then that would wear off. You know, every drink wears off in 15 minutes. Right. You need another one. And then he would need a sleeping pill to go to sleep because he had incredible unacknowledged trauma in his life.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah. Especially living in that environment.

[Raj Sisodia]

Oh, yeah. And there were some horrible things that happened in that village. An honor killing that happened within our family. One of his sisters was killed, you know, because she got pregnant, was raped, actually.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Oh, it's terrible.

[Raj Sisodia]

And so that's kind of the destructive way to deal with trauma. Sure, but the healthier, constructive way. Neha uses the phrase, reveal it and feel it in order to heal it, talk about it. Nothing ever heals in silence. No trauma will ever heal if you don't talk about it to anybody, to a therapist, to a friend, to family members, or you can write a book about it, like I did, you know, but it has to be brought out. Sunlight is what you need in order to heal things. Right. So reveal it and allow yourself to feel it. That's what most people are afraid. I don't want to revisit that episode, that chapter in my life. I don't want to go back there. And nowadays, I think we have modalities, you know, psychedelics being one of them, that are mdma, for example, which are helping people to surface those traumas and actually be present with them and process them and go through them and in a way, release them. But if you're never willing to go there, it's just locked up, then it's never. As I said, the body keeps the score. It'll hold on to that thing. Right. So reveal it and feel it in order to allow yourself to ultimately heal it. And we have many modalities, as you well know.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

We are living in a golden age of trauma therapy.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

We are finally.

[Raj Sisodia]

Gabor Mate's work is incredible in this.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

I love Gabor Mate's work. Yeah.

[Raj Sisodia]

And so that's the process. And then there's a beautiful gift waiting on the other side, which is called post traumatic growth.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Talk about that.

[Raj Sisodia]

You are stronger because you had a trauma and healed it than somebody who never had a trauma in the first place. So the people who go through life and they sail through life and nothing bad ever happens, and they never get challenged and stretched and. But they're not the strongest people. They haven't learned the hard lessons. So the Japanese have a beautiful metaphor. I'm sure you've seen Kintsugi, the art of precious cars. So when a piece of pottery breaks, you don't throw it away. You put it back together, and you use gold dust and glue to put it back together. And now it's a work of art. But now if you drop it, it won't break because you have strengthened it precisely where it was most vulnerable.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Wow.

[Raj Sisodia]

Right. You've created those. Just like when you have bones breaking, very often they heal back stronger than they were before the fracture happened. Right. So that's what can happen to us when we heal our traumas. We become that source of strength. We become that wounded healer, previously wounded healer for others, because we understand what they're going through and we know how to navigate through it. So that's really the process of those seven steps. And I think all human beings need to do that. The book is called Healing Leaders, but it really could have been called for anybody.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right. Healing Humans. Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

But the publisher wanted the world leaders in there for marketing reasons.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

You're marketing again. You know, I was listening to you this whole time, and I didn't want to interrupt you because I feel that the way you explain the introduction to every step in the process, it's so beautiful. And I feel like every step relates back to the previous step and is done in such a way that it's a structure almost. And I think going through this book gives people that structure to heal themselves. Right. And so I didn't want to interrupt you because I wanted everyone on this podcast that's listening to have that and to hear that from you and to. Even if they can't get the book to have that structure, because it's incredibly powerful. Incredibly powerful what you've put together there. So thank you for giving us that.

[Raj Sisodia]

Well, thank you. And, you know, as I said, I don't claim pride of authorship because it came through me, not from me. And I think there's some deeper power that when things come through you, as I said in the Silent Retreat, these were downloads that I received, and I just wrote them down. And so there was power there. And I think all of us are instruments of that which seeks to emerge into the world.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Raj Sisodia]

To our being. Okay. There are ideas and things floating around, and they land on you for whatever reason, you're meant to bring them into the world. So it's just a gift, I think, that came through me. Another one, which I'd love to share is at the Amazon Rainforest Experience in the Ayahuasca.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

Another gift that came through me. So I went there to learn about healing because I was writing that book about healing. So what do I need to know? I learned about, of course, we are part of nature, and we've forgotten that in the Western world. We think we come into this planet, we come out of this planet, we are literally made of soil. Without soil, we're not sitting here. And yet we've separated ourselves and therefore, we are in the process of killing our own mother, this planet, the earth.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right.

[Raj Sisodia]

So recognize you are as much a part of nature as a tree or a bee.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Not separate from it. Absolutely.

[Raj Sisodia]

But the other main vision that I got that night with ayahuasca, I was lying there. It was a lunar eclipse night on the edge banks of an enormous river with a shaman in the headgear and all of that, Very, very sort of a sacred experience. And I got this vision. And as I mentioned, I make acronyms for things.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right?

[Raj Sisodia]

So I got this voice saying to me, here's what the world needs in order to heal. And it came as a word called the list. Here's the list. Here's the list, Right? And this is what individuals and countries and companies need in order to heal. Give us the list and the list. L for love. Everything we do in life should come from love. There are many ways we can hurt each other. There's only one way to heal, and that is through love. So make sure that every single decision you make, just keep reminding yourself, am I coming from love? Right now? Every time you find yourself getting a little agitated or upset, whatever it is, it's a great reminder. I do that constantly. You have to nudge yourself back into

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

that state of mind.

[Raj Sisodia]

I for innocence. We are all born innocent and pristine into this life. And then we get corrupted by the ways of the world, often by our own families. My family in India corrupted me deeply in many ways by the example that said and the way they treated people and the way they lived. Right? Everything is a means to an end. You can lie and cheat and say whatever. We had all these privileges, you know, we could just bribe the police and, you know, whatever, whatever needs to be, do it. We lose our innocence, we get corrupted. Media, everything. We use our intelligence to climb over each other, compete with each other. Sure, come first in class, right? Lie and cheat to get what you want. Now you don't have a choice as a child, you're born innocent and you get corrupted. You're kind of receiving all of that. But as an adult, you do have a choice. Therefore, you must choose. Are you going to remain in that corrupted state for the rest of your life or are you going to return to innocence? What does it mean to return to innocence? It means committing to live in a way that you will not knowingly be the cause of unnecessary harm or suffering on this planet.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's a beautiful definition.

[Raj Sisodia]

And my mother embodied that. Her saying always was, don't cause pain in anybody else's heart. And she lived for 82 years as an innocent soul. Never once raised her voice to any of her children or even to the people who worked in the house, anybody. All she did was love and serve. Incredible example of innocence. And as the I Ching says, at the very core of our being there dwells the divine spirit. And you can never go wrong if you're always guided by that. That's the true you. It's not the you that got created by this father and that grandfather and this. All of that. Right. You got this. Frankenstein was created or this monster was created. So you have to go back to innocence. S. For simplicity. Life, we make it too complicated. We have these incredible brains. We are capable of manufacturing so much complexity, and we get mired in that complexity. But we forget that the essential things in life are simple. The classic book that everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten. So remember what really matters in life. Get to the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Don't be stuck in the mud of complexity. And then the T is for truth. What is our commitment to the truth? Gandhi's autobiography was my experiments with truth. And as he said, truth is even more fundamental than peace, because without truth, there can be no peace. In South Africa, there was the Truth and Reconciliation process at the end of apartheid. Without that, they would have had us. Revenge fueled decades of violence because all the black people who had been oppressed and terribly treated, they would have sought their revenge. But Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu had the wisdom to say, we need to create this process where the people who were the oppressors can actually acknowledge the truth of what their actions resulted in, can actually ask for forgiveness and atone and receive that forgiveness, and then we can move forward. Truth and reconciliation. Without truth, there's no reconciliation, which is why this country struggles. You know, I'm a citizen of this country. I've been here 45 years. But I see that one of our weaknesses, our blind spots, the inability to apologize for things. Therefore, our past is always with us.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Right?

[Raj Sisodia]

We haven't really atoned for slavery or even acknowledged we said, oh, we fought a civil war. What else do you want? Sure, right. Have you ever acknowledged the pain? Have you ever acknowledged what life was like and is like still? What the indigenous population, the Japanese during World War II, the Mexicans. I mean, what. There's a lot.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

There's a lot.

[Raj Sisodia]

You know, I say that being American means never saying you're sorry, you know, to anybody in the world. And I think that's a real problem, because you cannot heal the past unless you acknowledge it. But the beauty is in this moment, in this moment, you can heal the present and you can heal the past. You can put the past to bed and to rest by acknowledging it, honoring it. Right. And then atoning for it, et cetera. So we have to have a deep commitment to the truth. And I think we've lost all connection to truth in our politics. It seems that way right now in politics and business. I mean, what is truth? I mean, we talk about facts and alternative facts and, you know, so, yeah, that's. This is all, I think a return. So that message again came through me. I believe it's a gift. It says, how can we live with the list?

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Yes.

[Raj Sisodia]

Just keep that in our minds. I think that would guide us very well.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Another beautiful framework. Thank you so much for those. I'm so glad things are coming. All this incredible advice is coming through you, and it's coming through you in the form of acronyms, too. Makes it a lot easier.

[Raj Sisodia]

Oh, I got many more.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's fantastic. Well, Rog, this has been an incredible conversation. I've learned so much today. And thank you for speaking from the heart about everything about conscious capitalism, healing yourself. Definitely. The book is more than just healing leaders. It is about. It's for everybody. And so I really encourage people to pick up this book and read it. Seven Steps to the Recovery of Self. How can people learn more from you?

[Raj Sisodia]

Rajsodia.com is my website where you get more than you ever needed to know about me and all my books and my work. Yeah, that's primarily it. We do have a podcast of our own called the Conscious Capitalists.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Oh, great. Okay.

[Raj Sisodia]

And for those who really want to delve into the business side of things, that's a good resource.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

That's beautiful. Thank you so much.

[Raj Sisodia]

You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

[Dr. Darshan Shah]

Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you like this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.

[Raj Sisodia]

Sat.