The best leaders master both sides: spirituality, science, and entrepreneurship
A conversation with Ellen Petry Leanse. Ellen teaches design at Stanford, she is a business consultant, author, ex-Head of Global Marcomms at Google Enterprise, and worked at Apple in the early days.
In the last couple of years, I’ve been meeting more and more entrepreneurs who are transforming their lives and businesses through opening up to spirituality and holistic practices.
Earlier this year, by pure serendipity, I came across a story on how Steve Jobs’s early spiritual path and learnings shaped him as the entrepreneur and innovator he became. The story is The Path to Thinking Different, by Ellen Petry Leanse. She writes:
“There’s something about Steve’s interest in the magical, the things on the other side of conventional reality, that seem worth a closer look…These mystical touchpoints weren’t a romantic diversion from an acid-dropping dreamer at an early chapter in his idealistic life. They were raindrops, markers on a path, for an ambitious, irreverent, hungry, different kind of thinker who valued his internal voice — one that told him there was something “more” going on here — more than he did external approval.”
Ellen and I connected thanks to the great Akash Shukla and had a conversation about following THE spiritual paths in a world of data, science, and proof.
Rio: Ellen, have you seen this pattern, of more entrepreneurs pursuing spirituality and opening up to holistic practices? (e.i. rituals, shamanism, transcendent gatherings, etc) How do you see the balancing between these two aspects, the rational and spiritual?
Ellen: I am very interested in the balance and integration of the two sides rather than the usual approach of enforcing a line that divides them. That line is largely artificial. Our mindset went from one of living in mystery to one of simply conquering it through science — which of course brought us countless advantages and deeply shaped human life for the better.
Our mindset went from one of living in mystery to one of simply conquering it through science
If we look at our history, we can see a big shift around the time of Socrates. A time when we looked to demystify the world around us through frameworks of rhetoric and reason. During this time, we turned away from the world of myth, which had largely shaped our understanding of the world until that time.
We abandon the old when we embrace the new. But it is interesting to see today how many people are becoming more curious about the things that still remain a mystery, and feel drawn to a path of seeking and learning from life’s mysteries.
The greatest leaders are those who master both sides
For many great leaders, part of their personal power comes from challenging that divide (between the rational and the spiritual). It’s all about being equally comfortable with the fact that there are things that I know and things that I don’t know. And see those things not as separate but as complementary. I believe that the greatest leaders are those who master both sides. Uncertainty and curiosity have always propelled human experience. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, the intellect is a faithful servant and intuition is the master. We have put the servant in charge of the master.
“And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choices of a leader. This characteristic is reflected in the qualities of its priests, the intellectuals. The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools, but is blind to ends and values. So it is no wonder that this fatal blindness is handed from old to young and today involves a whole generation.” — Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years
It took me a long while after leaving Apple to understand the power of integrating the intuitive and rational forces. Having been at Apple in the early days, I think I took it for granted that we innovated that way, paying attention to the ineffable elements of creativity and design as well as the functional ones.
Steve was a master of bringing these two forces together, the technology and the experience. He harnessed his cognitive abilities as well as his intuition to create highly useful products that were the delivery vehicles for deeply engaging, satisfying emotional experiences.
Perhaps more people are opening up to the unknown because, at an intuitive level, we know that disambiguation is not the richest path to the human experience. Ambiguity brings wonder, joy, and awe to the experience of being human.
There is a beautiful quote from a researcher on the neuroscience of consciousness that says “Evolution favored food, not truth”. We learned to disregard those things that don’t lead to our survival.
Our brain has this bias from our evolutionary biology and ignores what seems “useless”. Yet is it the “useless” that brings so much joy and beauty to life. Like art, it’s so useless to many, but if we look at human flourishing there is a correlation between the creation of art and healthy human societies.
Rio: How do you think we can talk about spirituality in the corporate context? I’ve been thinking about that idea of “coming out” spiritually. People seem to be scared about the spiritual and it seems to take some bravado to openly talk about the path. Even the term mindfulness can be a dirty word and some use “mental training” instead.
Ellen: The fundamental problem is that Spirit cannot be proven. We have many scientists looking at the neural correlates in the neocortex in the brain. We have researchers and cultural icons coming up with frameworks that suggest human reality might be a simulation and we also have interpretations on why this might be or not be true.
We have a huge lexicon from world religions across the ages, where we humans have looked to a supernatural force to give context to this thing we call life. But the truth is we don’t know.
One of the things that gets us into so many conflicts and oppositional positions in the workplace is the need to be right about things.
We use evidence as a chart or something we can hold up to prove we are right. And yet that “right” may slip away in the future when new information surfaces or a new research methodology is applied.
This isn’t a slam to evidence or data. But it is a caution to not think ONLY about evidence and data in our business interactions. The magic comes when we stay curious when we challenge assumptions, and when we get out of our own cognitive biases.
My short advice for anyone who is on a spiritual journey and wants to bring that to the workplace is: be very conformable and confident about saying I don’t know but I am ok with that. Begin with the most important fundamental spiritual message of all which is: who knows!
I think it is a very healthy thing if we are really are in any sort of spiritual journey is walking the walk and not needing to be right about it.
There is something to living in mystery uncertainty and curiosity that is deeply additive to the human experience. We don’t seek a meditation or transcendent experience to seek proof but to expand our capacity for experience and understanding.
I am curious why scientific proof is so important in this conversation. What will we lose if we took away at least the openness to the fact that something more might be at play?
Science is a process, like everything else in the human experience, and it evolves.
Years ago we believed that the hemispheres in the brain had distinct and somewhat opposing functions. We talked about people as “right-brained” or “left-brained,” only to learn over the years that the interaction between the hemispheres is very different from what we once thought.
Similarly, we’re finding some enlightening explanations in quantum mechanics for phenomena we once might have dismissed as impossible. Often these are things that have been discussed in ancient wisdom or spiritual practices — take the “you make a dent in the universe” mindset taught in the Upanishads. It turns out to be quite physically accurate.
A big thank you to Ellen for this wonderful conversation and help with the revisions of this post. Here are a few ways to connect with her: Website www.ellenleanse.com, Twitter @chep2m, and you can order her new book, The Happiness Hack, here: www.tiny.cc/thehappinesshack
About the author:
Rio Otoya is a Breathwork and Life coach, Startup Mentor, and Mindfulness consultant. He focuses on supporting big life transitions (e.g. divorces, career changes, launching a new business) and works mainly with entrepreneurs and startup teams to find their way to clarity and alignment.
Formerly he led startup accelerator programs with Google Launchpad and build communities in the intersections of technology, creativity, and entrepreneurship (coworking spaces, fashion tech meetups, and more). See more on RioOtoya.com
