Special Guest Expert - Grant Hunter: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

Special Guest Expert - Grant Hunter: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Daniel Aaron:
What does it take to create a vibrant, thriving life? First, the sad news is that Thoreau was right. Most people are leading quiet lives of desperation, lacking in meaning, fulfillment and vitality. But we choose more. We choose to create extraordinary lives. And the art of vibrant living show entertains you with inspiration, empowerment and education to create your life into a masterpiece. It's time. Let's vibe up. Hello, everybody. Aloha, y'all. Welcome to the show. I am Daniel Aaron, your host for the Art of Vibrant Living Show. And we got an awesome, awesome show set up today. A brilliant author, friend, colleague, businessman, deeply spiritual. Dude will be with us. I'll tell you more about him in a minute. And as has been my procedure for the last couple of weeks, I take this first moment to acknowledge and really appreciate the people that are challenged here. Where I live, on the island of Maui, we've had some really devastating fires in the last while, and there are people suffering and there are other people that are really stepping up in in what I would say is the the heart of spiritual leadership, the heart of compassion to support people. So this is my moment to acknowledge and appreciate everybody who's been affected, which is everybody here and at this point, everybody around the world. So thank you for allowing me that moment of honoring. And this show, as you saw in the introduction, is all about empowering you to live your most vibrant, thriving life. And one thing I know for sure, after having been a fat, sad, depressed boy as a kid, it doesn't happen by accident. Creating a vibrant, thriving life takes attention. It takes education, it takes inspiration. And that is exactly what we are about on this show. Today's guest, Grant Hunter, is a really phenomenal dude. The author of a best selling book. He is deeply spiritual, has gone through so much of his own work, really living that spiritual adage that I say so often, which is you can't take anybody deeper than you've been yourself. And while so much of his work as a serial entrepreneur has been about at supporting people in lower and different socioeconomic classes in third world countries, he's he's also a really brilliant businessman and doing some great work. Now, I'm not going to get into much in my introduction, though. I'm very honored that he's with us and pleased to call him a friend. So Grant Hunter is our guest today. And let's see if we can bring him up. Grant, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.

Grant Hunter:
Thank you, Daniel. Great to be here. And hello, everyone. I appreciate you taking the time to listen in.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah. Thank you. And it really is all about our audience and people tuning in live or by rebroadcast And how it works, y'all, is I will give you plenty of opportunity to connect directly with with Grant and ask some questions. First, I want to get some context. Feel free to drop your questions any time in the chat and we will get to those a little bit later in the show. But as far as context goes, Grant, would you be up for just sharing a little bit about your background and what brought you here? And of course. Explain the word syntropy. It's such a beautiful word. And that was one of the great things. When we first connected, I was like, not only does he know what the word means, he's using it. Holy moly. So, yeah, you know, what's the story, Grant? How did you get here? And what are you up to?

Grant Hunter:
Yeah. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Well, you know, personally, I've been interested in sort of the big questions of life, you know, the big whys, you know, and the big what's. What does it all mean? What's it all for? Since I was a young kid, probably early teens, when I had the mental capacity to consider questions like, what's the meaning of life? Does God exist? What's it all for? And I've been kind of preoccupied with those big existential issues from a very young age. So that kind of tape has been running in my head for a long time. But from the outside looking in, I led a pretty conventional life. University stint overseas, grad school work for a. Big five professional services firm, and then came out to Silicon Valley, where I'm at now and have been for the last 25 years. During the.com runup in the late 90s and early 2000. So I'm kind of dating myself, so outside looking in. My life was in many ways pretty conventional, at least as I say, on the surface. But I had something happen to me, you know, I was really flying high by external standards. I was at Agilent Technologies, which was a spinoff from Hewlett-Packard and was the largest. You know, spinoff in Silicon Valley history at that time. And, you know, I had been on a job for less than six months. I had gotten a raise. I gotten a bonus. I was working on the e-business team. And it was a go go time here in Silicon Valley. And yet. For some reason, it all kind of fell flat for me. The promotion, the raise did absolutely nothing for my soul and. I began to feel really lost. You know, it's one thing to be say struggling just to make ends meet. And you always have that sense that if I could just make a little more money, my life would be a heck of a lot better. But I had sort of arrived at the ripe age of 29 and kind of had made it at least at a certain level. Um, but it just all landed flat for me. So instead of going out and celebrating a promotion and a raise, I went on a juice fast and went down and did a lot of hot yoga down in North San Diego County and spent a lot of time out surfing.

Grant Hunter:
And it was there that I had an earth shattering awakening savikalpa Samadhi experience which. Kind of reformatted my hard drive, if you will, in terms of how I thought about life. And the only thing I wanted to do after that awakening experience was how to serve the sacredness of life itself. And because I found myself in the context of business at the time and still do, I asked myself, Well, how do I serve the larger world through the work that I did every day? And, you know, we're usually asked to make kind of a devil's bargain between meaning and money, between profit and purpose. And so my deeper purpose became, how do I heal that wound between money and meaning, between profit and purpose to enable business? What I did every day. To be a force for good in the world. And that's kind of the riddle and the koan that I've been deeply into for the last 20 years.

Daniel Aaron:
Well, that's. That's beautiful. And. Yeah. There's so much in what you said that we could talk an hour about any little subsection of that. Um, you know, something you said reminded me of a Shri Bhagwan. Shri Bhagwan Rajneesh. Interesting spiritual teacher. One of the things he said is everybody knows that money won't buy you happiness, but most people want to find out for themselves. Yeah. And it's like, it's like as long as that illusion is there. But you know, you hit that point and you're like, Oh, okay, now I know for myself and. And, you know, and I love what you said also about that, that you were in the business world. And so that was sort of natural for you. And, you know, these days, with there being so much division in our culture, in society, there are a lot of people that really bash capitalism and bash the entrepreneurial world. Yet, you know, I, I know that we're aligned in feeling like, well. It's entrepreneurs that can really do something in the world and make a difference. So I'm curious for you, what's your perspective on. Um, you know, what's the upside of capitalism? And maybe, I don't know if if you see a downside. And how does that also load you up here with questions and, you know, tease out your magic? And then how does that relate to one's individual, vibrant living? Does that make sense as a question? Sure.

Grant Hunter:
Yeah, sure to. Absolutely. Um, business, I think. I mean, they're both healthy and pathological versions of just about anything out there, and business is included in that. Um, the healthy version of business, I think comes from. An embrace of sort of the creative, innovative side of our capacity as humans to be able to look at the needs of the larger world and come up with creative, innovative solutions to those problems, that that is essentially healthy and honors our unique capacity as human beings to create things that haven't been there before. And moreover, then to serve those in need to meet an unmet need out in the larger world. So I think business can be a force for good if we design it right and we bring the right intention to bear. And it certainly can be a problem for, you know, generally splits along the right and the left of the political spectrum where many of my friends who align more on the left tend to see the the problems and the excesses of business. Call it crony capitalism in particular, where underhanded, shady deals get extended to people not based on their merit, but based on connections or influence in this way or that. And certainly the externalization of the outputs of business become problematic. If we're talking about, say, a chemical company that's dumping their, you know, toxic sludge into the ocean or or and otherwise negatively impacting the environment or, you know, look at even now I'm with renewable energy, something I'm generally am for but also recognizing a a downside to it in terms of, you know, young kids that are forced to go into cobalt mines in the Congo or, you know, are forced to into situations or even how gosh, how our our our precious smartphones are actually created by, you know, what we would call slave labor In a lot of ways. It's it's a tricky business to tease these things out. And I guess I would say that taking a wider view of the full ecosystem of a business, call it the entire ecosystem of stakeholders, everyone that is involved in business is the way that we can honor our impacts both positive and negative, and find ways to to mitigate those negative outputs so that we can really enable business to be a force for good in the world.

Grant Hunter:
And one quote I remember from my corporate days was if we suboptimize sorry, if we optimize a part of the business and fail to optimize, we we suboptimize the whole. In other words, if we're focused only on our own achievement or the the the achievement of a particular group, say within, within, you know, if we're only looking at, say, short term profits at the expense of treating our supply chain partners as, you know, throwaway elements that we suboptimize the whole. And so the invitation, I think, is to take a more holistic view of the entire ecosystem from producers, suppliers, partners, investors and customers as well as society itself and the natural world in which we all function. If we can pull out our frame of reference to include all of those people and take an honest look at both the healthy and the pathological impact of our work out there, we can begin to honestly mitigate the worst and celebrate the best of what business can be to help build a better world.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah, beautifully said. You know, I think of something. I think it was Voltaire said a conclusion is what we get when we stop thinking. And, you know, and one thing about, like, part of why we love rules, commandments, whatever it is, is because life is complex, right? You know, it's like, well, but if we're really tuned in, like I remember years ago I was doing this interview series and I was interviewing a bunch of enlightened teachers, and this was way before I became a parent, a parent, not visible. I mean, a parent of children. And I, I for some reason I asked each one of them. I said at the end of the interview, I said, What does it take to do well with parenting? What's enlightened parenting? And this was like, I don't know where this question came from or why. I guess I knew I would be a parent at some point, and every one of them said the same thing. None of the other questions were the same or none of the other responses I got were the same. But on that one, every one they said was. Work on yourself. Right? And because. Because it's like the rules only work in certain situations and we have to like be able to keep deepening in ourselves to be able to say, what fits this situation? How does it work now? So I think I think what you said is a beautiful response. And we've got a question from Ray, which I'll come to in a moment. But first, I realized I overloaded you in the first question. I think it relates to what you just said now, so I'll come back to it. Your company is called Syntropy. And what what does that word mean? I've heard of other things that end in OPI. What's that word?

Grant Hunter:
Yeah, right. Well, I often offer a definition of syntropy by its opposite entropy. Now some people call it negative. Entropy is the opposite of entropy, but entropy is the winding down of a system without further energetic input. So I think of things like a old fashioned windup clock that you wind up and then slowly, slowly, slowly, it begins to lose power. Syntropy If entropy is the winding down of an open system without further energetic input. Syntropy which is the name of my company, as you mentioned, entropy is the winding up, and we might call it the evolutionary impulse to increasing levels of care, cooperation and compassion. Maybe it might even call it love itself made manifest through the world. And so syntropy and everything that we do at Syntropy is really about. How we can help business be a force for good, more care, more cooperation, more compassion. Psychologically, we might call it wholeness. In a sense, how do we move from kind of broken, fragmented versions of ourselves to increasing wholeness through the work that we do every day? So that's what Centerpiece is about. And and that's the work that that we do.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah, that's beautiful. Well, it's an incredible word. And, you know, I think one of the fascinating challenges we have in the world we're in is the physical world, all of what's obvious and available and the survival part of all of us, what I call the human animal part. We don't have to pay attention to that because it's it's activated, man. It's always going on. It's always here. Yet we also have this other part of us, this spiritual part that's invincible and full of love and eternal. Yet we could go through all of life without really acknowledging or paying attention to that. And in the same way, it's like in the physical world, everybody knows what gravity is, but how many people, how many of us realize and know what levity is. Right? And that's an equally viable phenomena, just in the same way that, yeah, we know what entropy is. We've heard about that and we've heard about Murphy's Law. But what about Central P? Right? So and we know that what we pay attention to grows, right? What we appreciate appreciates. So, you know, and something you said earlier and you described some of your experience of having this this awakening experience and and that that opened up for you. I mean, you didn't use the words you didn't say it opened your heart, but in some way it opened up like some deep well of compassion in you. And so what would you say in terms of work with purpose that that for any of us, you know, whether we're entrepreneurs or working for someone else. But when work has purpose or when life has purpose, what does that what does that do? For one, what's the difference of having it and not sure?

Grant Hunter:
Well, I believe that all healthy change begins from the inside out and from the individual to the collective. So if you want to build. A life and business based on meaning and contribution and service. That you've got to discover a deeper purpose and work to find its expression in the work that you do every day. And for me, that awakening experience on a surfboard 20 plus years ago now. I didn't have the answers right away. I just knew that after seeing and recognizing the larger beauty, the interconnectedness of all of life and the fact that we get to participate in this beautiful mystery that it is essentially sacred, that. The Opportunity. It's not even the opportunity. It's it becomes almost an obligation, in a sense, to work on that koan, that Zen riddle of how do we translate that view of the world, of interconnectedness, of essential sacredness into our daily work and for everyone, that expression will will likely be different. You know, for me, I was working in Fortune 500 high tech Silicon Valley, go, go, you know, striving, grinding, long hours, you know, the whole bit. And. A couple of years later, I, after launching and selling a boutique marketing firm that I launched in San Francisco, had a little money in my pocket and I could finally get back to doing something really specific about solving healing that wound between money and meaning and profit and purpose to enable business to be a force for good. And for me, the way that I integrated my deeper purpose with the work that I did in the world was to become a social entrepreneur, which, as the name implies, many may be familiar with that concept, but it's the idea of businesses basically intentionally going after solving social or environmental challenges using entrepreneurial means. This isn't corporate philanthropy. As well-intended as that may be, this is about saying, here's a problem. Is there a way that we could design a business model around its solution? So it's about going starting with the problem and then working your way out to say, how can we begin to address this in a entrepreneurial way? Why entrepreneurial? Because it's the only method that can scale and and become genuinely self-sustaining is if we have a an earned income element to it.

Grant Hunter:
And for me, as random as it may seem, I found myself in Peru three years there, about four years after my time at working in Silicon Valley, launched the boutique marketing firm, had a little money in my pocket, and I ended up down in Peru with my first socially entrepreneurial business, which was a network of eco friendly taxis that were basically designed to help low income people lift themselves and their families out of poverty for good. And that was my first, like, real expression of not only finding a deeper purpose, but translating that desire to heal the wound in my own heart between money and meaning to creating a business that could actually deliver sustainable good in the world.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah, that's beautiful. I love that. And. And I love it on a double. Like, on a personal level, too, because Peru has been so much in my world in the last couple of years. I took my daughter down there last year and we had such a great experience of it. And I love what you said in response to that. And, you know, really, I think giving a greater context for what what entrepreneurship can bring and what its greater purpose is. And yeah, and you know, and you said it really well before, too. Of course, every every person, every situation, every business structure has within it an opportunity to move toward light or move toward darkness. And so it's so easy to oversimplify things and demonize something just because of some aspects that are coming forward. So I appreciate that you're bringing up some more of the the possibility, and I think that ties in really well. I want to pop up a question we have from Ray here. It's quite small, so I'll read it out. But why do people have such a challenge having a deeper sense of self and purpose and still having the money that can bring happiness and why always demonize it? I think Why always demonize money instead of broadening it to make an even larger impact? And racing at 29, I feel you were still searching and maybe he means he's still searching for that answer. What does that make sense? What Ray is asking there. What do you what do you think?

Grant Hunter:
Yeah, let me take that question in a little bit. Why do people. Yeah, well, I think what I'm hearing there and then this second part of the question, why always demonize it instead of broadening it to make even a larger impact? Right on. Well, I don't think we have to. I guess it was through things like social entrepreneurship that I got over this demonizing aspect of, say, business of making this. You know, heretofore devil's bargain of, you know, either one or the other, profit or purpose, money or meaning you can't have it. All right. I mean, there are many people that. Find themselves in situations where they feel stuck, where they have financial obligations. They're doing a job that's soulless, that's deadening to themselves. It's not adding any particular value to the larger world, but they feel stuck because they've got three kids in college and a mortgage to pay and they need to put beans on the table. And I think when you're looking at it from that aspect. You are still making that devil's bargain. And I'm sympathetic. Now, not everybody can pick up and run down to the developing world and try to help the world's most needy. I mean, there there are degrees, and I can talk more about that. But I think I'm agreeing with the question to say that why? Why, why demonize one? And in fact, I also concur that with more resources, you can make a bigger impact. I mean, I could not have gone down and done what I did. I mean, it wasn't just for me. It was for demonstrating a model of business that had the capacity to lift thousands of people up and out of poverty in a sustainable way. And mind you, provide 30 year stock market average returns to socially minded investors so that it's genuinely win win and that I'm very much pointing to that and concur that there are ways that we can heal that wound so that again, you don't have to make that devil's bargain. It's either or. It's definitely a both, and especially if you bring a win win mindset. To to the work.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's it's so often the case again, we just we try to simplify things sometimes and say it's this or that and one of the greatest and we've talked about this before, I think we both wrote about this in our most recent book, saying it's, you know, the concept of both and is so powerful. And one of my favorite quotations in the last few years that I came across is anybody who says money can't buy happiness. And actually I'll rewind a little bit because I said earlier, I was kind of making a joke and saying, you know, well, we all know that money can't buy happiness, but we need to find out for ourselves. Actually, we also know that to some degree, money can buy happiness or that we need a certain level of money. It's not sufficient. On the flip side, though, this quotation I love, which is anybody who says money can't buy happiness has not given enough away. Right. And you know the and Derek Sivers in his great work often says like if you want to if you want to do good for the world first get rich right because you know and he's again you know being a little controversial pokey with it in a way but like when you are taking care of and coming from not that survival place, then there's a lot more space to focus on. And not that everybody does this, but there's the possibility to focus on how can I give, how can I support my my fellow human beings. Right. Does that make sense?

Grant Hunter:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's worth kind of underscoring what you're saying there. I'm not so naive as to believe if you're in survival mode. And believe me, I've worked with people that were living hand-to-mouth and, you know, couldn't think more than a week or two in front of them. If that is the situation you find yourself in. Your purpose essentially is survival. I mean, we're talking the kind of deeper purpose that I'm talking about. Coming from personal comfort and abundance is an emergent possibility. I don't believe that if you're struggling to be able to, you know, keep the lights on or feed your family, that deeper purpose is even on your radar. And in a sense, it's it's an emergent privilege almost to be able to consider such things. Um, and, and I think that privilege comes with a sort of responsibility and an opportunity, which is what you're pointing out is that when you have more, you can give more, you can serve more, you can be a bigger force for change in the world. And I would say that money can make you comfortable. But happiness is elusive. Happiness is never something that you can chase directly. You know it. Real happiness. Joy even is an artifact of doing good in the world. It comes of its own accord and can't be like enlightenment itself. It can't be chased directly, and it comes as an artifact of serving. Ultimately, I believe that all deeper purpose resolves to a desire to serve a call larger than ourselves, a self transcending call. And when you can find that expression, you. Are able to serve most generously. And. Receive most abundantly.

Daniel Aaron:
Nice. Yeah. Nicely said. Well, and it reminds me one of my coaches said something I love. He said, you know, he was speaking to a group of coaches said. If you're struggling to cover your expenses, you know, you don't need to be doing coaching. You need a job, right? You need to take care of expenses and pay the bills. And and coaching or service on some level becomes a privilege and responsibility. It can be both and right. Once you've got basic things taken care of and it's the classic, you know, put the oxygen mask on yourself first so that then you can be able to help others. So indeed, let's let's switch gears a little bit, though, because, you know, part of why I'm so excited to get to talk with you here, Grant, is is you're you know, you're deeply immersed. You've got a foot in both worlds, very deeply in the in the in the business world, as we've talked about. And you've got a lot of great experience there in the Silicon Valley and and all of that and a foot really ensconced in the spiritual world. So, you know, what more can you say? Want to guess about the the relationship between those two? And also, what do you do in terms of spiritual practices that enable you to face the challenges that are there in the in the normal physical world?

Grant Hunter:
Yeah, sure. Well, as I foreshadowed earlier, I think that if we all change happens from the inside out, from the individual to the collective. So as an individual, um, working in the context of business where I'm interfacing with others. I often look at the notion of practice, spiritual practice. From a personal level and interpersonal level and an organizational level. And at a personal level, I have a series of practices. In fact, I think towards the as we shared earlier, I'm happy to share with viewers here of the Art of Vibrant Living Show, a toolkit of practices 33 practice summaries of best practices that I've seen that cover this gamut between the individual, the basic personal practices, interpersonal and organizational practices around deeper purpose, around authentic leadership, conscious culture and impact. And and perhaps at the end of this program, we can direct people to where they can pick up their own free copy of this toolkit, which ultimately became kind of my cheat sheet as I would consult and coach with other companies. Clients wanted to actually see that. But I have been, you know, from personal practices, I teach coach and engage in personally practices around meditation, around purpose, discovery, interpersonally, looking at conflict, healthy conflict, resolution to culture, building at work, and and also this notion of impact, how business can be a force for good in the larger world and all of these practices, I believe. The I say the synergy sorry, the syntropy that upward evolutionary impulse to greater care and compassion to psychological wholeness is driven by the synergy of multiple practices used together. So. And maybe I'll just pause there and see how that lands. Because when most organizational change initiatives fail, it's anybody who's worked in the corporate environment is done learning and change, work training and development and that kind of a thing. 70 to 90 billion is spent in the US alone on corporate learning and change initiatives every year, but only 10 to 20% of that actually results in performance change on the job. And I think the biggest problem is that people don't have an integrated mental model of how all of these dimensions, purpose, leadership, culture and impact all show up moment to moment, and that if we only take a fragment of each of these, maybe you bring a purpose consultant in or maybe you bring a mindfulness teacher in to help you learn how to work on yourself.

Grant Hunter:
Or maybe you have a conflict, somebody doing a course on nonviolent communication or they're doing stakeholder mapping with regards to impact in the larger world. All of these things are important and they're parts of the puzzle. But unless we take this holistic view that honors individual team and organization, both interiors around mindset, around consciousness, around purpose, collectively, around deeper culture and the norms that drive business and its expression in the outer world in terms of our leadership work, in terms of processes and procedures that drive work through the organization and how all of that works impacts the entire ecosystem of stakeholders. Unless we can take that larger view, these initiatives generally tend to fail. And so that's what I offer really through my toolkit and through the work that I do with organizations, not only businesses, also nonprofits as well, to help them show up effectively and do good work in the world.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah. Beautiful. What you said reminds me of a couple things. One is that. I've as I've evolved my own work in the world, one of the things I heard many, many times from business advisors is, hey, you got to you got to be more niche. You got a niche down. And and of course, there's great wisdom to that. And for me, I still maintain the the strong conviction that in order to have a great thriving life. Well, you can't you can't focus on just one thing, like having a finely tuned body, a vessel, a vehicle that has energy. Well, of course that's essential. But if that's where you stop, you know it's not going to work. You got to have good relationships and Right livelihood, as we've been talking about, and take care of the financial aspect and the spiritual aspect. And we need all of that to to be able to thrive. You know, and I know and we will for sure give people the opportunity to connect to your tool kit. Cool. Kit. We'll call it that. Cool tool kit. Yeah. Which which I know and appreciate and, you know, 33 practices, all of which have a lot of power to them. And it reminds me a little bit of one of my teachers used to say, if somebody is ready to wake up, it doesn't matter what they do. If somebody is not ready to wake up, it doesn't matter what they do. Right. And, you know, and I know the practices that you bring forward are there all of them beautiful? I've looked at the list and I'm like, oh, yeah, I love that one. I love that one. And I've engaged with many of them. This is I don't know if you'll have any response to this, but going back to what that teacher said about readiness and not ready, what do you think makes the difference like for you when you had that surfboard experience? What what what do you account for your ripeness in that moment? And how is it that some people seem to wake up and some people don't or not yet? Does that make sense?

Grant Hunter:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the short answer is it's a mystery. Yeah. Um, you know, if I heard it expressed that if enlightenment is an accident, spiritual practice makes you more accident prone. And which is to say that, as I foreshadowed earlier, it it's not something you can pursue directly and intentionally. The the opportunity. Is. To surrender to practice and in the work that I do. I broadly I say what I'm providing is a map of the territory. A direction of our work together, meaning clients, team members, organizations and individuals in them. And I offer a set of specific tools to help get you there. And I think that when it comes to to practice that again, that word practice has a lot of baggage on it, especially for we lucky enough to be in the developed west. It sounds like like drudgery and work to people. But if anyone has ever reflected on how your mind can spin you into. Are scattered, disassociated, frustrated. Um, unhappiness. How your own mind can kind of generate a living hell for you on on a bad day. I mean, we've all had bad days. I'm not saying that anybody needs to be clinically diagnosable with an illness, but stinking thinking. Right. Can get us all. And. And if I start talking about meditation as a discipline or as a practice, it may sound like drudgery, but what I've found with very simple, simple, repeatable, doable practices, these aren't things that you need to take a half day seminar on to learn. This is something you can learn in a few minutes. That it is a refuge when practice and discipline moves from being drudgery or like a lot of work. To a refuge from the tyranny of your own mind. And when it comes to not only your individual work, but how you show up in organizations, I mean, spiritual practice tends to be individual in orientation. Even if I go to a yoga class, I'm kind of doing my own practice. We're just doing our individual practice together. But when you show up on a team. I mean, we show up in community. It moves from an individual to a collective experience.

Grant Hunter:
And so we need to be able to recognize that there are. So-called we space practices, the intersubjective work between one another to build deeper connection to build. The the bridge to learn to slow down together and to really deeply connect with the humanness of the other is the key to building authentic connections with with inside of teams as well. So it's a long winded answer but I think the the invitation is to make reorient our kind of orientation to this notion of spiritual practice and to see it for how I see it as a refuge, as a refuge from the tyranny of thought, of mind of. Um, reflexive thinking so that we can take these notions of deeper purpose and find its expression in the work that we do with others and in organizations to build a better world.

Daniel Aaron:
Hallelujah. Yeah, Beautifully said. I'm with you. And it is true. We have a lot of baggage on some of the words that relate to practice discipline. And I remember for me, 1995 when I had a spiritual awakening going crazy. God smacked me upside the head, whatever way we say it, you know, when I came out of that, like, oh my goodness, how do I live in the world now? My previous worldview has been shattered. I've tasted this incredible oneness and enlightenment, but I don't know how to live that, you know. And so I got like really obsessive, Like, I mean, my friends thought I was just a nutcase. I wouldn't go to yoga class. I would do three yoga classes before the yoga class, you know, Um, and, and it was like in those days for me, discipline looked like, you know, flogging myself to make myself do the thing. It was work. It was hard. And I would have defined it then as, as getting myself to do the thing I don't want to do. Right. And and I remember after my daughter was born and I started getting turning my obsessiveness now to learning about parenting, and one of the incredible books I came across then was the title Joseph Chilton Pearce. And it's something like Joyful Parent, Joyful Child, something like that. He's got a few different titles in that book, though he gave this definition for discipline as being joyful follower, just like a disciple, which is another word that is loaded in Western culture. But a disciple is a joyful follower of a guru, a guru being the one that sees the light in the disciple. And, you know, and I recognize that now for myself in myself as well as with clients and students, it's like there is this corner that we can turn where spiritual practice becomes a joy. It becomes the opportunity, like you said, refuge. It's like if I if I can't if I miss my practice for some reason, you know, life gets in the way or whatever it is, I don't I don't beat myself up. I have a longing. I'm like, oh, I missed that. Right? And so it took a while to get there, though.

Daniel Aaron:
It's this possibility that, wow, this is something that I can engage in because it fills me up with peace, with joy, with vibrancy that I can then bring to everything I do in the world. So I love that you you made that distinction for us. And and as I say that I look at the clock and I say, holy moly, time is flying. There's so much that we could speak about here and. Well. Well, let me pause. Actually, I want to clue people in a little bit more about your tool kit, and then I've got a big final question for you. But before that, you know, you're such a wealth of wisdom. You've got so much great experience both in the business, entrepreneurial world as well as the spiritual world. The both. And is there anything that I haven't asked you or that you would like to bring forth? You know, as you have this this chance to share with our audience here?

Grant Hunter:
Well, just a note, just to kind of put a line underneath this discussion of practice and how it sits and. You know, many of us have had these transcendent experiences throughout our lives here and there. Mine was on a surfboard in 95. You had your own kind of awakening, Daniel, through different circumstances. And many of us can be, say, transported by the beauty of a sunset or a birth of a child, or on the negative side, some tragedy that befalls us, where our kind of our world just crumbles around and. You know, when it comes to spirituality, like many folks in the Postmodern West, I dabbled in all sorts of different things over over many years. I mean, I was at the Esalen Institute at the ripe age of 19, which is kind of a buffet of different offerings, you know, as well as going deeper. For me, Zen Buddhism was sort of my, um, root non-dual teaching. But my point is, is, is this move to practice is as a refuge was really important. It was only until 2011 that I met my now late mentor, Terry Patton, who helped me understand the difference between being a seeker and being a practitioner. And just as a kind of a, you know, warning, if you will, that being a seeker, the problem is it gives us time. It allows us to delay living the spiritual truth. We've been blessed to see something about that shift from being a seeker to a practitioner is really powerful for me and everyone's unique. You know, people are going to resonate with different traditions. You know, you're maybe you're religious, maybe you're spiritual, but not religious, maybe you're atheistic, maybe you're agnostic or, you know, or you're a known name whatsoever. Different strokes for different folks. And my approach to practice is to provide a plethora of different kinds of of practices that all help us discover our deeper self and then find its turn, its expression. And through the work that we do every day in the world. And so I just wanted to offer kind of underscore the role and place of, of practice, is that the reason that practice is important is that we may have these transcendent moments out there.

Grant Hunter:
We have a state of bliss or maybe agony. You know, we lose somebody close to us and we're just absolutely devastated by it. But to move to from kind of a transient state of awakening to more of a permanent stage of awakening from states to traits, if you will, requires practice. And the orientation I would invite people to consider with practice. Again, not drudgery, but refuge. And the beautiful thing about practice is, is that we all are going to fall off the proverbial wagon, right? Maybe I go a week and I don't do something. I don't I don't engage in my morning practice, which is how I like to start my day. But the important thing is your attitude to be. Grateful for recognizing that you've fallen off the path and celebrate arriving again. And this if you've if people haven't done like a seated meditation for a while, this is going to happen multiple times every minute. And the important thing that I invite people to do is is to be mindful of your attitude. Don't beat yourself up if you're not able to show up as regularly as you might, or if you lose focus when you're engaging in any kind of practice. But to be grateful for recognizing that you've fallen off the path and celebrate quietly internally when you arrive again, ultimately it comes down to we're either in the flow and living our practice or we're not in any moment. And any other baggage, you know, self-flagellation, beating yourself up is not helpful. And so that's just the invitation I would have people to do and the power of practice to move from being kind of a seeker who's always looking for the next book course workshop. Guru. Method tool and find something that lands for you. And really dig in. In light ways. So anyway, I'll leave it at that. But that was just kind of something I wanted to make, that distinction between being a seeker and a practitioner and how we can relate to practice and come back again and again. Because as we inevitably fall off the wagon, all of us, myself included.

Daniel Aaron:
Well, absolutely. Yeah. I remember one of my my very first practice. So we have this nice comment echoing that here from Ray. And one of my first practices I was thinking of, as you said, that after that, you know, slap upside the head that I got was was Zen meditation, which was a very, very stern, sort of strict approach to meditation. Right. Famous for the Zen master, moving around the zendo with a stick. And if you lose awareness, you know.

Grant Hunter:
Catsuit.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah, exactly. And and I remember, you know, and that really resonated for me. I came from a martial arts background and I was like, okay, I'm going to be very disciplined on this. And I remember another meditation teacher that I met not long after that who was from Texas who put it this way. He's like, he's like, You got to imagine it like this in those moments when you find yourself drifting off, when you're thinking, when you lose awareness. It's not about beating yourself up in that moment. It's like it's like you're taking a child by the hand and just walking them back to the presence. The way he put it was, you know, it's like, Hey, good buddy, come on back now, you know, action, right? So and one other thing I will say here before I turn to last, Ray made a good comment here that about the replay and that's always available on the art of vibrant living. Show.com takes about a day to get up there though. The replay will be there in three broadcasts in in many places as well. Let's though go now to I want to put up on our screen the kind offer you've given people free access to this tool kit. So there's the URL for it there and let's put that there. And that's super valuable resource that I know took you a ton of time and really like your whole life to put all of that together. Yeah, and that's powerful. So but beyond that, there are some other ways of engaging with you, Grant, in the work you're doing, you know, what would you say to our audience in terms of the best ways to go further if they want to connect with you more what's best? Sure.

Grant Hunter:
Thanks for that. I'll just say a quick, quick word on the tool kit. The tool kit, again, is a open sourced document that includes 33 practices around deeper purpose, authentic leadership, conscious culture and impact. And the way I invite people to use this is I've actually shrunk the margins down so that it could be printed, perhaps even on like cardstock, basically to come up with a quick what, why and how of some of these practices. I want to demystify various practices that are out there to make them accessible to people, especially kind of in my mind, I have sort of this time pressed corporate kind of executive kind of person in mind because I know we're all busy and we don't have the time to read the 300 page nonfiction book on a particular practice. So I invite people that resonate with this that to even consider printing these cards so that they can be available when you need them. That's the whole thing is to make it usable, accessible. Um, and there's a QR code on each of them which will take you back to the website where I'll, I'm continually bringing more things in and we'll be updating those and hope to create a dialog with people who resonate with this approach to personal and organizational change, to learn what works and what doesn't, you know, and how we can can facilitate that more. So that's the tool kit. And I'm also pleased to announce that on September 5th, I'm having a my my course that kind of brings all of these elements together that I've foreshadowed here called Ignite Your Playbook for plugging into purpose at work and specifically for the art of Vibrant Living Show viewers I'm offering This is kind of a while. I've delivered this content before in different modular ways, both in corporate settings and nonprofit settings. This is the first time that I've put it all together into a seven week course. And so I have offered this course at a 60% discount, call it a a beta run. So I'm normally this is a $1,000 course I'm offering for for just under $400 at 397 for folks. And so please use the link below if that's something you want to learn more about. And that is specifically for viewers of this program. I support what you're up to, Daniel. I consider you a brother on the path, and I want all the viewers who resonate with our collective message to be able to go deeper if it resonates with them.

Daniel Aaron:
Yeah, beautiful. Thank you for that. It's a. Really generous offer. And you know, one thing I know for sure. Over now, almost three decades is it's, you know, we don't need anything like like like we got the survival part of ourselves. And and we can ignore the spiritual our whole lives. We don't need that. Just like we we can ignore our breath our whole lives, However. And if we tap in and use the breath consciously, well, whole new worlds open up. And in the same way, if we do focus on growth and spirituality, personal and spiritual development, including and especially learning from and working with people that have experiences that we don't, or just even insight or perspective that we don't have because none of us can read the label when we're inside the jar. It's so incredibly powerful and useful and just can save so much grief and trouble to get us where we want to go to, to to more passion, more purpose, to a more vibrant life. So I love that you make that generous offer for our audience. Sure.

Grant Hunter:
And I might I might also add, you know, I don't stand before your audience as sort of the sage on the stage pontificating on how to live. I'm more the guide on the side, a brother on the path, and somebody who's been deeply in this inquiry for more than two decades now. And, you know, my varied background speaks to a lot of the dimensions of of what I cover in the course I shorthand, I often say what I teach is a version of mind, body spirit, cross training at work. And I share with you what's worked for me. I mean, from and picking up stuff that I've learned from living in Japan and training in Zen monasteries for six years to working in corporate America for eight years in the learning and development organizational change arena to launching a total of five companies and having two exits and going through work in the developing world and how to put all that stuff together. So I hope to share this from a place of Here's what's worked for me, but not that I'm necessarily the expert on every single thing that I touch, but I'm happy to point people to other resources to go deeper on these things. But the power, as I said at the earlier, the the the syntropy that upward evolutionary impulse to greater wholeness, care and compassion comes from the synergy of multiple practices used together. And that's what's really unique about my approach and also because I think the pragmatic nature of it to be able to give you doable, repeatable practices that you can take into your life and work.

Daniel Aaron:
Pardon me. Yes. Well said. It was what you said was so true, it caused me to sneeze. Thank you.

Grant Hunter:
It must be true.

Daniel Aaron:
So as we are brushing up against the clock, I got one final question for you. Grant, if you are willing and excuse me again. Goodness gracious. Is that all right? Are you ready for this final question?

Grant Hunter:
I'm ready. Bring it.

Daniel Aaron:
So here is the question. Boiling all that down. And in spite of what you just said, which I completely agree with, if you were to give one piece of advice, one piece of information to our audience as to the one thing that would most help our audience members to live a vibrant, thriving life, what is that one thing?

Grant Hunter:
Mm Wow. As an integralist, that's particularly challenging because I see this kind of mosaic patchwork arrive in my mind's eye as I see this. I think that's my. Maybe that's it. That's what I'm just going to trust my intuition and say. Have the courage to pull your focus out, to consider the all of the dimensions of your life as an integrated mosaic and that they all deserve your attention. And I offer a very simple map, and maybe this is a nice way to to end it and to give people an organic metaphor to hang their hat on for how I think about my work. I say purpose is the seed. Culture is the soil. Leaders are farmers. And the impact they deliver to the world is the fruit. In order for the fruit for for this endeavor, these endeavors to bear fruit, you have to consider all of these dimensions. But they all work synergistically together. And maybe that's a good place to to end it for today.

Daniel Aaron:
Well, I can't imagine there could be a better way of ending it. That's beautifully said. And Grant, thank you so much for being here for, you know, all the work that you've done in the world and on yourself and in combining those two things and sharing so much wisdom with our audience. And to to the viewers, listen, you know, here that are live or those on the rebroadcast, thank you for tuning in because again, it doesn't it doesn't happen by accident that you take a vibrant, create a vibrant, thriving life. And your attention here, your efforts, they really make a big difference in the world. And I'm super grateful that you let us be a part of that journey for you. So we'll be back next week. Thank you so much for tuning in and sending you lots of aloha. Y'all take care.

Grant Hunter:
Thank you.

Daniel Aaron:
Mahalo for tuning in to the art of Vibrant Living show, y'all. I'm Daniel Aaron and may you live with great vibrancy.

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