we think of ourselves as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey, offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom. SoundsTrue.com. You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Priya Parker. Priya is a facilitator and strategic advisor. She's the founder of Thrive Labs, at which she helps activists, elected officials, corporate executives, educators, and philanthropists create transformative gatherings. She works with teams and leaders across technology, business, the arts, fashion, and politics to clarify their vision for the future and build meaningful, purpose-driven communities. Here's my conversation with someone who really understands how cr... posted on Sep 19 2019 (7,149 reads)

and think, ‘I haven’t got it so bad,’ and it makes me grateful.”  Her tongue was firmly in her cheek in a way, but she was making a deadly serious point.  There’s a real truth in what she says. It speaks to that part of us that is so aggravated to find ourselves the last person in an impossibly long line at the bank, supermarket or post office. And as soon as someone steps behind us in line, we feel better! We’re no closer to getting our business done, but, “at least I’m not where YOU are!”  Every time I turn around and look behind me, I feel better.  Like it’s some kind of Spiritual Ponzi Scheme! The... posted on Aug 20 2019 (10,048 reads)

don't have their high school degrees so I am in contact with people that are really motivated and usually the guys that have kind of real leadership qualities and are kind of leaders in the prison. They are the kind of people that try to civilize their life in prison and they are people with real positive outlooks as positive as you can get in a prison. Preeta: Have you got any feedback from the wardens or correctional officers from within the prison? Lee: Well it is a tricky business, prisons are tough places. And balancing the needs of the institution and balancing with what I am trying to do takes work and time and skill and we are not even entirely there yet so for the... posted on Dec 28 2019 (6,936 reads)

personal moonshot of arriving into middle America concurrently with America's (and humanity's) own literal moonshot through the Apollo 11 mission, she sets the stage for the gravity of heavy realizations from her own rocket-like career trajectory into the highest echelons of conventional power, and back to "a place that operates at a human and community scale bound to land and nature." Preeta Bansal has spent more than 30 years in senior roles in government, global business, and corporate law practice – as General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor in the Executive Office of the U.S. President (White House), Solicitor General of the State of New York, partn... posted on Oct 25 2019 (8,104 reads)

has the potential to foster unprecedented human creativity. Like, I even started an online community called HITRECORD, where people all over the world collaborate on all kinds of creative projects, so I don't think that social media or smartphones or any technology is problematic in and of itself. But ... if we're going to talk about the perils of creativity becoming a means to get attention, then we have to talk about the attention-driven business model of today's big social media companies, right?  (Applause)  This will be familiar territory for some of you, but it's a really relevant question here:&n... posted on Feb 24 2020 (5,756 reads)

I just want to be in my studio. But then there are other things where I feel I don’t have a choice. I went to a university when the chief historical advisor of the prime minister at the time was a frontier violence denier. I read his work and I was so devastated that someone was trying to rewrite history for a nationalist agenda about white supremacy, really. So, I see the flaws. Most of the things that I stand up for is about my role in it. You get accused that this is not your business, it’s so complicated. Being a straight white man in Australia is complicated at the moment! Good! I celebrate that complexity, we deserve it. I’m not whinging about it, it&r... posted on Nov 20 2019 (4,787 reads)

incoherence, to make order out of disorder—while, I think, respecting the wildness of the disorder. And actually, at one point, you’re saying that beginning to write puts the experience of panic at a bearable distance. And one of your newer poems has this lovely line where you say, “maybe beauty is the best riposte to dread.” I’m wondering if you’ve found that putting words on this extreme disorientation began to do its work in you. It’s a funny business, you know. I still have to say that most of my mornings on Earth are pretty dreadful times. [Laughs]. So I guess we hope, almost like children, that we’re going to get through things, t... posted on Dec 2 2019 (5,564 reads)

and scale.” Cookie cutter approach, right? But when you’re a gardener, you know that there are all these other inputs. You can’t control the sun. You can’t control the rain. But you can control so many other factors. So you are in concert with all of these factors. You are just supporting the emergence. You cannot look at a sapling and say, “I need a Tomato by Tuesday.” That’s manufacturing, which is predicated on control and knowing the recipes. Our business schools today are set up precisely to leaders who can take over manufacturing plants. That’s good, and certainly has its place in the world. But everything can’t be manufacturing.... posted on Nov 19 2019 (7,689 reads)

to the Center over a decade ago when I was coordinating retreats for tenured public-school teachers here in San Francisco, and for half a decade, I held six week-long retreats a year there until the funding ended. Throughout those years, the Center began to feel like a second home to me and was a place that comforted me as I journeyed through a time of deep loss in my life—facing infertility, grieving the loss of my older sister from breast cancer, and my husband closing his small business.   I hadn’t been on a retreat there in several years, and as I settled into my room, arranging my clothes in the closet, laying out my yoga mat on the carpet, and feeling t... posted on Dec 7 2019 (6,444 reads)

degree in international management at a school where I met my husband Andrew. If Mom had balked or cried or tried to talk me out of moving so far away when I called her that spring day in 1988, I don’t know where I would be. But I cannot imagine it could be better than where I have landed. There are other territories to mine for this one. Did your mother or stepmother welcome your partner into the family? Has she been an involved grandparent? Did she stake you when you opened a new business? Teach you how to make the perfect pie crust, for which you are now renowned? Or did she, in her choices, give you a template to avoid when you reached the same decision points? Does a strain... posted on Dec 9 2019 (8,633 reads)

but if you step back, what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym, even if it was just for five minutes. I think this is a deeper truth about habits that often gets overlooked, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved. You have to make it the standard in your life before you can worry about optimizing or scaling it up from there. For whatever reason, we are so focused on finding the best business idea, the perfect workout program, the ideal diet plan, we are so focused on optimizing that we don't give ourselves permission to show up, even if it's just in a small way. So the... posted on Jan 2 2020 (9,676 reads)

of self-preservation and adaptation. So, if we've been in an environment that's harsh, that's judgmental, that's unloving, that's neglectful, or abusive verbally or physically, we learn to shut down. We protect that native sensitivity and we get on with our life. And so at some point—often it's somewhere in our 30s, or 40s, or later—there is a turning back and there is a seeing, a sensing and a seeing of what's been left behind in terms of unfinished business and a return to these child parts and child experiences in a process of embracing them with love and understanding, and we go to those places that we abandoned. And in so doing, we reverse th... posted on Dec 23 2019 (8,821 reads)

ears. He even had a couple of obscenely overpriced store-bought numbers, decorated with sequins, complete with Velcro fasteners for quick changes. A cape for every occasion, every mood.  UNLIKE THE ADULTS I KNEW, WORN DOWN BY UNIMAGINABLE GROWN-UP PROBLEMS, ZORRO EXUDED SAVVY AND ELEGANT GOODNESS I can still remember tying a bath towel around my neck when I was a little boy in order to play Superman. Somebody drew an “S” on a T-shirt for me, and I was in business. When I wore that cape, I was faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Later, inspired by the black-and white television series, I became Zorro. Unli... posted on Feb 2 2020 (5,290 reads)

possessed by a productive naïveté that can easily get crushed by reality. We are not the “money people” who add capital to an existing idea. We are the creators taking huge risks at great personal cost. We are often described as naive, idealistic, passionate, or crazy. The social entrepreneur has it even worse: we are fighting the battle of birthing a new venture while at the same time trying to show the world that we can inject a sense of justice into the business itself, rather than merely trying to rack up profit. Growing your own garden is the only way to recover from the devastating reality that most of the world doesn’t give a sh*t about ... posted on Feb 8 2020 (8,288 reads)

I want to let our listeners know that if you’re interested in learning more about the Stay Woke, Give Back Tour, you can check it out at staywokegiveback.org. I want to enact my own mantra here a little bit which has to do with really leading with the energy of my heart. The Sounds True Foundation is a real heart effort here at Sounds True to make sure that there are not barriers to the type of spiritual education that we make available through the for-profit part of our business. But Justin, the part about you and your work that’s so meaningful to me is that it became apparent to me that just lowering the barriers to our existing products, offering scholarsh... posted on Feb 17 2020 (6,501 reads)

hometowns to ride out the storm. Goodbye Italy. It angers me that we have no clear or intelligent leadership or guidance from people who are in a position to make the public do the right thing. So absent that, we need to step in and do our own leading, because we are smarter than our public leadership. Please stop. Stop moving, driving, erranding, traveling, running away, distracting, thrashing around. Please tell your friends, your family, and your colleagues to stop, as business owners, support your staff to stop if they can work from home. And if you are not home, don’t go home. Stay where you are. Like literally. And this means limiting the scope of... posted on Mar 17 2020 (29,870 reads)

Ceremony, and Materiality How are we to understand such stories? The politically correct modern mind wants to respect other cultures, but hesitates to seriously adopt the radically different view of causality they hold. The ceremonies I speak of are in a different category from what the modern mind considers to be practical action in the world. Thus, a climate conference might begin by inviting an indigenous person to invoke the four directions, before moving on to the serious business of metrics, models, and policy. In this essay I will explore another view of what modern people can draw from the ceremonial approach to life, as practiced by what Orland Bishop calls &ldq... posted on Apr 25 2020 (8,459 reads)

– with the idea that one is praying for a vision or dream.  I discovered then that sitting still and not moving when alone in nature – and especially without food – changes my relationship to animals in a wonderful way. Usually, animals just want to know if you have food or are looking to harm them, and when they ascertain neither is the case, you become to them just a big animal who happens to have made a nest in the middle of their world and they just go about their business. I love that. I love sitting in stillness as animals move around me.  So after that vision quest, I stopped hiking during my own solo camping retreats in nature – just to a... posted on Apr 13 2020 (7,050 reads)

returned to full production. People, most of them still masked, go here and there in this industrial city of 11 million, steadily resuming their normal, pre-pandemic lives. We are happy for them, but — at the same time — this is not the “normal” we want. As was seen recently on a wall in Chile: “We Won’t Go Back to Normal, Because Normal Was the Problem.” Joe Biden himself has just said, “When we come out of this, we can’t just go back to business as usual.” We have to fix what is “deeply broken” in our country. A new society can be developed from the inspiring ways people around the world are responding to this un... posted on May 7 2020 (7,916 reads)

in a way that made people feel like they had to take care of me. I knew that if I wasn't safe within myself with my own depression, I wasn't ready to go public with it. I needed to be able to look at myself and say, in public, “I am all of the above. I am my gifts and my strengths and my light. I am also my weaknesses and my liabilities. I am my darkness and I'm not ashamed of an ounce of it. What you see is what you get.” Until I got to that point, I had no business writing or teaching about something as profound and life-threatening as clinical depression. I am all of the above. I am my gifts and my strengths and my light. I am also my weaknesse... posted on Jun 9 2020 (7,758 reads)