Leading in Chaos: Soul Centered in a Tumultuous World with Amy Elizabeth Fox

PodcastInner Freedom
Written By Geneva Tolentino

Show Notes

What does it really mean to lead when the world feels like it’s on fire-when the news cycle, the climate, the culture, and even our own nervous systems feel stretched past capacity? In this episode of The Rose Woman Podcast, we’re asking a deeper question beneath all the conversations about performance, productivity, and “resilience”: What kind of inner life does it take to stay human, sensitive, and sane while holding responsibility for others?

Since 2005, Amy Elizabeth Fox has served as one of the founders and Chief Executive Officer of Mobius Executive Leadership, a global transformational leadership firm.  For the last twenty years, she has served as a leadership and culture change advisor to eminent professional services firms and Fortune 500 companies and facilitated immersive executive development programs for senior leaders.

Mobius offers top team intervention, business mediation, executive coaching, and personal mastery programs, all aimed at unlocking potential and building deeper trust, intimacy, and change agility within a company’s top tier.  Mobius also sponsors a professional development arm for maturing transformational practitioners called the Next Practice Institute and has an e-learning arm entitled Mobius Touch.

Amy is considered an expert in healing individual, family, and collective trauma and has been a pioneer in introducing trauma-informed development and psycho-spiritual principles into leadership programs.  

If you’re curious about how leadership, trauma healing, and spiritual practice can actually belong in the same sentence, you’ll want to lean into this one. Settle in, listen to the full conversation

In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:

  • (00:00:00) Introduction to Amy Fox and Leading in Chaos

  • (00:04:58) Amy’s Path merging Spirituality, Activism, and Leadership Work

  • (00:07:01) Challenges of Corporate Culture and the Need for Inner Development

  • (00:10:00) Organizational Consulting in Behavior and Executive Development

  • (00:15:37) How the Book came through Meditation and Collaboration with Nicholas Janni

  • (00:18:35) Meditation as Deep Receptivity and Access to Higher Guidance

  • (00:22:47) Ongoing Inner Work as the Ethical Basis for Transformational Leadership

  • (00:24:42) “Next Practices”: Inner Ground, Regulation, and Imagination in Chaos

  • (00:27:15) The Role of Leaders in Creating Stable and Supportive Environments

  • (00:32:17) “Nests” and Micro-Communities as Islands of Coherence and Care

  • (00:35:11) The Impact of Gender and Cultural Dynamics on Leadership

  • (00:37:56) Humility vs. Trauma-Driven Narcissism in Leadership

  • (00:40:53) Inner Safety and Risk-Taking

  • (00:42:55) “Innovation Titration” and Contemplative Practice to Handle speed

  • (00:45:34) The Importance of Ethical Counsel, Humility, and Hope

  • (00:50:48) Closing Thoughts and Invitation to Lead with Beauty

  • (00:53:35) David Whyte’s “Start Close In.”

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Your host:


Brought to you by Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care:



Christine Marie Mason

@christinemariemason

@rosebudwoman

Founder, Rosebud Woman

Co-Founder, Radiant Farms and Sundari Gardens

Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: 

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Transcript

Amy Fox  0:02  

I think that there is a lot of people. I believe certainly a lot of your listeners, will resonate with the impingement on their hearts at this moment of watching the collective level of violence and degradation. You mentioned environmental degradation, you know, literal war of fragmentation, where we can't even speak to each other, we can't operate in any stabilizing way. What does it mean to be alive in that kind of a time? Is really it's a psychological question. It's a sociological question. It's a question of cultural creativity, and I think fundamentally, it's a soul question.


Christine Mason  0:42  

Hello everybody. It's Christine Marie Mason, and you're listening to the Rose Woman Podcast on love and liberation, where every week we bring you something that will help wake up a little bit more capacity to live from the essence of your soul, to live and work with a bit more sparkle, to be to be more free in your whole architecture and system. I was tempted to start this episode with a, you know, that song, this girl is on fire, that song, but we would do it like this world is on fire. Of course, that's not 100% true. You know, I'm looking out the window right now, and the avocados are still growing, and there's a hawk flying overhead, and the mountains are still beautiful, and it's just all in a perfect, harmonious natural environment. But right over the hill at Camp Pendleton, they are testing certain military operations. So we live right here in the heart of both end, I feel like what I'm seeing in the news and what I'm getting in the world is kind of a collapse of an old architecture and an invitation for us to remake the new but in the context of the transition, while we're going through the transition, which I think is happening, by the way, while we're going through the transition, there are people who are charged with leading in their families, in their business and in corporations, and trying to sort of navigate all of this accelerated pace of change and instability while still like holding on to themselves and and being judged and rated and ranked. The conversation. When I do a conversation on business or leadership or organizational behavior, I don't really think that I'm doing it as a business show. I feel that showing up with our children, our communities, our clients, for our own becoming that it's pretty much the same thing that when we show up for what we love. Leadership is lovership. Leadership is servanthood, and right now that love is being tested in ways many of us really weren't prepared for. But Amy and Nicholas Johnny, her co author on a new book that just comes out this week in the United States, do have a lot of things to offer us on how to hold that complexity. Amy Elizabeth Fox has spent 20 years inside of some of the most powerful institutions on the planet, sitting with executives at their breaking points or in their deepest questions looking like, how do we do this better? How do we how do we make lasting change, not superficial change? The boardrooms may look nothing like our living rooms, but underneath, they're running on exactly the same wounds. What she has discovered is that the C suite and the kitchen table share some of the same patterns we've been asked to perform and deliver and hold others together, often while not making the deepest self contact that would make that possible. So in this conversation, we talk about things like why your exhaustion is not a personal failure, why the trembling so many of us feel right now isn't weakness, but actually accurate perception, why the masks of being capable or the one who has it together often cost us more than they protect us. She also says something very beautiful, anything that is not beauty is actually trauma. Anything that doesn't move us toward more beauty and more love is actually trauma playing out. So we might even take a little time and sit with that. Amy is the co founder of Mobius executive leadership. She is also a devoted student of some of the most rigorous teachers of our time, also a couple of mine, Thomas Hubl and Patrick Connor. And she is the co author of a book called leading in chaos with Nicholas Janni, who was on the show before for his book, leader is healer. So the book arrived to them as the best things do not through ambition, but through surrender, like through deep listening. I hope you enjoy this episode, this conversation. It's for anyone who loves serves, and anyone who's trying to stay awake and remain a blessing field in a world on fire. So please welcome Amy Fox.


Christine Mason  4:58  

I would like to know a. Little bit about your path, so that people understand the sort of framework from within your approaching these questions, it seems to me like you've merged business and spirituality in a very unique way.


Amy Fox  5:12  

Well, let me just start by saying it's such a joy to be with you, Christine and I treasure our 20 year friendship and walk together and this journey of self actualization, so that's great to be on the podcast. Thank you for your question. The first part of my career was in a very sacred context, because I spent a decade at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in Manhattan, which is the world's largest Gothic cathedral. And at the time that I was there, I was privileged to be part of a absolutely extraordinary hotbed of consciousness, activism, liturgy, expressive arts, the complete joining of the sacred and the secular, and that incubated in me a passion, I think, both for social activism and cultural Creativity on the one hand, and spirituality and inner development on the other hand, and those two worlds really came together when my sister Erica Ariel Fox and I founded Mobius in 2005 and created a leadership firm that, exactly as you said, was designed to hit work with business leaders as well as public sector leaders in consciousness, development, in healing and awakening. And over the 20 years, I've come to say that there are two central secrets in corporate life. One is the level of regression and untreated trauma that's running the day in terms of corporate decision making and team dynamics and organizational culture, and the other is the degree to which spirituality or community or purpose or the numinous or the artistic, the poetics, are a gold mine under the conference table that is not yet being allowed to flourish and express itself. So that's how I would say. I mean,


Christine Mason  7:01  

this was a, this was, this is a really interesting place to even begin with, the idea that a corporate environment like you bring your whole personal self to your office, you can't like separate at the door, the fact that your mother ignored you, and then come into the office and work for a female boss and not have that get triggered, right? So, but there's been sort of a separation of the professional persona. The idea that we can do that seems to be pretty rampant. How do you think that we got to that? And what is the responsibility inside of a corporate context to allow what you call the whole self intelligence to express itself? So most


Amy Fox  7:41  

corporate cultures, exactly as you said, Come out of an industrial technical view of the workplace. So they're antibody. We work people past their physical and mental limits, their anti emotion. We're supposed to check our feelings at the door, exactly as you said, which has this false assumption that professional and private are, by necessity, divorced and divergent. It's anti relationship. You know, the workplace puts an incredible primacy on resilience and autonomy and being self directed, as if we're not supposed to need each other, when, in fact, every research suggests that the more trust, more coherence, more care in a team, leads to psychological safety, which in turn leads to innovation and creativity and high performance. So we can't we've made all these false cutoffs that really don't serve life and they don't serve the creativity and fruition of a successful organization. I am really talking about the radicality of corporate intimacy, that the workplace could be a place where people do their healing work, where people have a chance to accompany each other deeply in what is going on, in the interiority of their heart and in their personal lives, where they are really invested in one another success and amplifying each other's gifts, and perhaps most importantly, in a time of great chaos where we can lower the level of fear that's in the system, which is going to delay or slow the adaptive capacity of that organization to meet a fast transforming context. So I think I've been talking about this for a long time, but I think the context now, the zeitgeist now, of increasing chaos and unpredictability, is going to make this kind of inner development, vertical development, essential. Let's come back


Christine Mason  9:35  

to the fear piece in a little bit, because that seems to be at the core of where our emotional skills and our relationship skills sort of hit the wall. I want to go back to this idea of what the container of a corporate environment sometimes holds, like they'll speak to emotional IQ or they'll speak to communication skills, but somehow that scratches the surface. You're making a. Much more structural claim that it's not skills, per se, it's sitting on top of a much more trenchant way of existing, if


Amy Fox  10:09  

I understand that correctly. Absolutely so in the 20 year history, or arc of how long I've been doing this kind of organizational consulting, we started out talking about behavioral change, or cognitive behavioral change. An executive was doing behavior x, but you would prefer they would do Y, so you should coach them on y and teach them the skills of y, and that would make a very interim, short term change. And then the recidivism was inevitable. People would revert to their more predictable and more ingrained habit. So we started to talk about Chris Ardres, talked about it as frames. McKinsey talked about it as mindsets. We started to think in terms of mental models. Peter Senge talked about it paradigms, or of perception, habits of belief. And we started to go a little deeper that you really had to take a step back and understand what was driving them to do behavior a in the first place. I think over the last 20 years, what I've come to understand is exactly where you started us so beautifully, the early hurts, the formative templates, the schemas that we get early in life, are so foundational that they operate at an unconscious level and repeat themselves over and over. And it isn't enough to just do the intellectual excavation of somebody's perceptual lens. You actually have to go back and slow way down and help them to metabolize that early seminal experience so that you can free up their operating system to be liberated from those early fears and early hurts and early absences, omissions of care, and not be driven by the motivation system and the behavioral survival system of a scared five year old.


Christine Mason  11:56  

It's true, and also, I have some skepticism arising that a corporation would want to do that. Many of them actually seem to thrive on getting people into the mindset of like, Let me please you. Let me compete. Let me stay in sort of a general agitation or anxiety in order to keep me on my toes and make me more productive, like the actual interior state of the worker doesn't seem to be a priority for many corporations. So who are you serving?


Amy Fox  12:29  

Well, the good news is client base are very well known brands, Fortune five companies, 20 years that people would say, or have a belief, that those places would never do this kind of work. Often, when I start my dialog with them and I propose what I think will really be needed for executive development, they're skeptical themselves. They're sort of drawn to it, but they say, well, our people are very technical or engineering or scientific or Cartesian analytic. They would never go for this. The truth is that the human heart yearns for connection. You don't have to teach people that their numbing habits, that they're what you call the professional persona, are costing them in loneliness, in burnout, in lack of connection to themselves, in misalignment in their choices, in their lives. When you give people an opportunity to pause and really reflect at how we're living in the workplace. They can name very poignantly and easily, the profound cost of the operating system we're working under, not for themselves, for their families, for their co workers, for their professional aspirations, for their corporate contribution. And they slowly grant you permission to wade them into deeper waters where self contact is possible. Authentic self revelation is natural. Acts of kindness and tenderness to their colleagues become organic. All of that does not take a long time. And I think the degree to which we think of the corporation as this big, unfeeling entity, we miss the fact that all the choices that that entity are making are being made by individuals with hurts. If we go in with a deep premise that healing is possible. As our teacher Patrick Connor would say, everything can be healed. That offer, if it's sincerely made and skillfully held. Very few people ever resist that offer. They're grateful.


Christine Mason  14:32  

It's such an optimistic insight. You know this, this idea that unprocessed trauma is running corporate culture and that we're we have that in a in a world that is getting, as you name it in the title of the book, more chaotic, that the capacity is there and the desire is there, gives me a lot of hope.


Amy Fox  14:52  

I feel that too. Christine, like I watch these programs now, literally over and over and over, and they come in Sunday. Night, walled off very formal, distant from themselves, awkward in their social contact and longing for something they couldn't name, and in a few days, they write the first poem they've written in 20 years. They dance together. They paint together. They share their fondest dreams that they wouldn't dare say out loud. They start talking about, as leaders, how they can lower the level of stress in the system and create a place of more belonging and more mutuality. I find it enormously helpful.


Christine Mason  15:37  

You've been writing a lot. You've been working on these essays for quite a while. Can you tell me a little bit about the collaboration with Nicholas and how that arose?


Amy Fox  15:45  

The honest process of the book is this, I was meditating last summer, and the title leading in chaos came to me in a meditation the way you and I sometimes get direct messages. And I thought, Oh, that's a great title. That's a best selling title. Somebody should write that book. And I blew it off. And then the second week, it came to me again, and I thought, am I being guided to write this book? I don't write to write a book. I'm running a company. I lead leadership programs. I'm working with my teachers. Nice idea, but no. And then the third time it came, I was like, oh gosh, okay. And then I sat down, and I thought, how can I write a book? Like, if I'm being instructed and it's somehow going to fit in my life? How can I write a book? And I thought, Well, exactly as you said, I've been posting on LinkedIn the last two years. If I put all those posts together in a cohesive statement of a singular voice, maybe that's half a book. And then, by coincidence, in that same afternoon, I was talking to my wonderful friend, Nicholas Janni. And as I'm talking to Nicholas, I realize he has the same teachers that I do. He does the same kind of work that I do. We publish on LinkedIn on the same themes. And I said to him spontaneously, Nicholas, maybe you have the other half of my book, and so we agreed to join forces. We had a contract from his publisher, from leading leader as healer. The next day, we had the book within a week. We wrote a Prologue and an Epilogue over the next subsequent couple of weeks, and we had the book within six months, which is, I think, really how it works that when you're when you're following guidance, the wind is at your back, and things happen in a seamless, organic, astonishing way. And this book is kind of like that. So I never intended to write a book, but I feel very grateful and surprisingly touched so often I'm teaching, as you know, in business context, and there's a large language translation from the mystical context to the business context. So I'm very sensitized to using language that will work for leaders in more conventional settings, in language of leadership development and organizational consulting, and in in the book, it's really very close to my natural language. And there's something that has just been so peaceful for me speaking it as I actually lived it. It's very touching.


Christine Mason  18:10  

I believe that anytime we're close to our authentic voice, it's peaceful. The struggle of keeping the mask alive is the hard part.


Amy Fox  18:19  

Yes, it is totally lovely to do that. And I also think both you and I are cross model translators, and that that isn't a mask, actually. It's it's a skill. It's a finesse, to be able to meet a system where it is and then slowly open a portal to something else.


Christine Mason  18:35  

I want to just double click on a couple of things you said, there I was in meditation, and it came to me. I was in meditation, and it came to me again. So let's just flow that out. What is your understanding of meditation and where ideas come from?


Amy Fox  18:54  

The more I'm resting in some quality of profound receptivity, the more I have myriad intelligences providing me with reconnaissance, providing me with direction, providing me with observation. So it's as if the degree to which my own healing has quieted some of my own terror, my own reactivity, that space that is then afforded to me in my interiority has access to a whole numinous space of much more dimensional perception and quite informed guidance, and I don't know where it's coming from. I don't I don't have a theory about that, but I know that the quieter I get, the more reliable my my perception and choosing is.


Christine Mason  19:54  

I love that you chose the word reconnaissance, you know, which is like if you break. Down the French, right? It's like, connaissance is knowledge, but Nassau is birth. And so you're like, you're you're once again, knowing that which is innate and born into you. So it's a great, it's an amazing word selection to sort of name this


Amy Fox  20:17  

for the knowing of the heart. The knowing of the heart is a different kind of intelligence, the knowing of the body, somatic intelligence, is a different kind of intelligence, intuitive intelligence. And the world of business has not put much prevalence on any of those kinds of intelligences. And we're about to see the limit of what happens when you're relying purely on analytic capacities.


Christine Mason  20:39  

Yeah. I think if you look at some of the great innovator founders, in of our of our time, they they were tapped in, you know, you I mean, Steve Jobs is such a ridiculous example, because it's the one everyone points to. But, you know, he was a meditator. He was taking acid. He was like trying to reach the other realms that a lot of his clarity of design and intent came from that inner knowing that allowed him to stay firm when others were questioning his vision. I think there's another piece in your comments there that always has impressed me, regardless of the fact that you're serving at the highest levels in corporate America, that you yourself have done a tremendous amount of spiritual work, mystical work in progress. You still have teachers, and you are still seeking guidance in new domains that, in and of itself, is a meta lesson. How do you see the ongoing pushing of your own frontier with teachers going hand in hand with what you yourself are teaching and offering. What's the


Amy Fox  21:42  

relationship like? I guess, I think first of all that you can't ask people to go to their developmental edge in your presence, if you are not also in a rigorous commitment to be constantly on the edge of your unknown, your unseen, your hidden parts, your shadow work, the notion that we should be walking presence is transmitting that commitment as a lifelong commitment. I don't think of inner development as I know you do, not as a weekend workshop, right? This is a long path of unwinding and inducting and being gifted with initiation and transmission, and so I think part of it is congruence. Is just an ethical responsibility. I think the second thing is that at the level of this kind of work, you're really intervening with your presence, so constantly polishing the qualities of love, the qualities of unconditional acceptance, the qualities of deep, reverential listening and receiving, the access to beauty and awe and wonder that needs to fertilize the ground of doing trauma work and asking people to look at things that are very painful and difficult, All of that has to be embodied in your presence. And that's a cultivation that's nobody starts with all of those channels open. That's a that's a activation process. As you know, I have the privilege of Walking With four teachers, Lynda Caesara, Patrick Connor, Thomas Hubl and Shai Tubali, and every one of them brings to my life purpose a different kind of refinement and maturation, a different kind of confrontation and provocation and a different expansion into a fuller version of myself. From Linda, I really learned about how to send subtle realms, and had a set of field that has a permeating kind of energetic that people intuitively and automatically respond to. From Thomas, I learned the deep, deep restorative work of our time of addressing family and collective and ancestral trauma as the most urgent thing to restoring the fabric of humanity. From Patrick, I learned the joy and wonder of being in a sangha that is full of real, unconditional love and dancing together in the beauty of Divine Presence. And from shy, I'm learning the very refined, purest, most essential aspect of all, each scriptural tradition and what it's meant to convey about mercy, about compassion, about healing, so very beautiful. And I hope I always am graced to walk with those that are higher up on the mountain than I, and whose water comes down the mountain as Manna for one soul.


Christine Mason  24:42  

Gorgeous. It actually seems to feed directly into the distinction you make between best practice and next practice. This frontier of your own self development is like, in a way, the ongoing next practice. Can you speak a little bit to that how those differ?


Amy Fox  25:00  

Sure, absolutely so. Best practice is a sort of codified set of behaviors and norms that leadership development has put forward over the last 20 years that help organizations to function well. They give you the ground of organizational health. Examples of best practice are teaming and helping a team to build enough trust to do important work together after action reviews and helping organizations to build habits of reflection after big projects so they're in a deliberately developmental cycle, helping people to have difficult conversations because so many of us had painful conflict as a child that most organizations have the difficult conversations at the water cooler and not in the conference room. All of those things are absolutely necessary, but I believe, meaningfully insufficient in the age of chaos and some of the next practices become not so much about what people are doing, but how qualities of their inner development that will require them or enable them to operate differently. So if the systems and structures and processes that we count on for an inner sense of safety and security are all brittle and falling apart, then you need to help leaders cultivate a deep inner ground which they can rest in. And you also need to help the younger facets of people's psyche stop needing to be in control and needing everything to be ordered and perfect in order to feel safe, because that order is going to be relatively impossible as the external context becomes more and more fluid and more and more fast changing. If the situation is heightened anxiety, then you're going to need to have the ability to regulate your own interior state, to calm yourself down, to ground yourself and the critical interpersonal skill of CO regulation, so that people can help each other when they get stressed and reactive and triggered, which is almost inevitably going to be happening more and more. If things are moving from a linear, predictable and incremental change process to one that happens in catalytic, expedited time, then we're going to need to cultivate exponential imagination to believe that tomorrow could look very different than today. These are different transformational, alchemical capacities whose time has come.


Christine Mason  27:31  

Boy, as you're speaking, it's just going to get more chaotic. I'm thinking about the people that I encounter on the daily and the progressive activation. Of political chaos, economic instability, environmental chaos, and like, a sense that no matter what they do, it's never going to be enough, that there's no way to, like, grab on to something and just put a stake in the ground and know that this is something I can count on, and that the result is, is like a a high level interior flutter and a scanning of the system that is draining energy from the true creative process that would be present in a more stable environment, or stable system. And you, you name it in the book, as a I think like a numbness, a near universal numbness before I go into like the what to do thing, I just want to say, like, I really feel betrayed by governments that don't put stability, like creating a stable environment at the core of their operating mission to create a stable environment in which people can count on things And then do their best and most creative work. So it feels like there's no stabilizing entity in our current environment. You speak to how the inner instability creates the external instability, and then at the same time, the people who have risen to a leadership position where they control the levers of stability, for even those who have an inner ground of stability, there's kind of a very interesting reciprocity between the inner and the outer of these systems that that are creating the conditions that make your book so necessary. Just maybe we could talk to the chaos part of the book before get to


Amy Fox  29:17  

the leading Yeah. I mean, you mentioned numbness, but you're also evoking beautifully Christina tremulousness. People have an interior shakiness because they correctly apprehend that there is no safe ground and there is no coming security like that. Things are not going to stabilize anytime soon. So what we need to do is it's actually a leap of surrender. We befriend the mystery we need to come to terms with, whatever part of us was existentially unsafe and scared as a child and now projects that unsafety onto the world as it moves. The movement, the fluidity in itself, is evolutionary. It's not problematic the. Cruelty and the symptoms of untreated trauma are the problem. The polarization and fragmentation is the problem. So we have to increasingly learn to view life with a unitive view and with a sense of faith, because otherwise the trembling will become intolerable, exactly as you're saying, and in fact, for many people, it is currently intolerable, which is why we're seeing such a rise in the degree to which people are numbing themselves. I do an exercise in my leadership programs where I ask people to make a rigorous inventory of the small and large ways that they keep themselves from emotional self contact, and you get a panoply of of activities from overwork, over caring, exhausting myself, staying busy, so there's no white space at all, all the way to I drink at night. I have a, you know, addiction to pornography. I have a mistress. I'm out of alignment with my life. I make shorts, you know. I'm flooded with shame so I don't feel the terror. It's a complicated cocktail of addiction and compulsion that keep us hovering above what would otherwise be a felt sense of that trembling and until we are willing to and can tolerate and have safe containers where we can self observe the shakiness and talk about it candidly. We will not have leaders who can provide the temple pillars that might stabilize


Christine Mason  31:30  

there is so much in there. So to pause on that, touching the shakiness, the anguish,


Amy Fox  31:39  

I think that there is a lot of people, I believe, certainly a lot of your listeners, will resonate with the impingement on their hearts at this moment of watching the collective level of violence and degradation. You mentioned environmental degradation, literal war of fragmentation, where we can't even speak to each other, we can't operate in any stabilizing way. What does it mean to be alive in that kind of a time is really, it's a psychological question. It's a sociological question. It's a question of cultural creativity. And I think fundamentally, it's a soul question.


Christine Mason  32:17  

Yeah, it's a soul question. What I'm noticing in my field, is many people are disconnecting from tuning into what the collective is doing and making micro communities of thriving. And you talk about moving from personal resilience to interdependence in the book, like how that's required inside of a corporation or outside of a corporation. And I find more people interested in creating communities of 12 to 30 people who they can really become naked with, you know, and that that's the response when the institutional stability fails, is that there is an innate instinct to turn to one another, but in a way that's more present and in real life, so to speak, like a rejection of algorithmic nervous system control hijacking.


Amy Fox  33:12  

I think that's a beautiful notion. When I talk about building nests in the workplace, you join an organization, you get it assigned a role, you get it connected to a team. You get assigned to a division, but you also get a nest, and the nest are the people in your workplace who meet with you once a month and who know that you have an autistic child, or they know that you have a mother in the nursing home, or they know that you're thinking of leaving your job, or they know that whatever that that's a place where of refuge, where you can bring your personal life and your personal circumstances, the things that you're struggling with, the things that you're aspiring to and that they deeply care in a mutual and generous way, for that, I also love what you're saying about people building what you know you could think of as islands of coherence, or many transformations that operate as microcosms of a better world. And people have a lived experience of what is it like to live in a more wholesome, fully human, fully alive, fully vibrant way. And I think we're going to need examples to know what the possibility even is of what our future could look like. So I think those incubation places where people are choosing to unplug and make commitments of a different kind of covenant are going to be sources of incredible inspiration and incredible information. However, I would just caution us that our generation is, I think, very specifically asked not to live our lives purely in transcendence, but to live them also in imminence, and to be imminent in this moment is also to be part of the unfolding of the collective dance. And I don't think we can exempt ourselves, although I think it's important to. Have one foot in a world that nourishes and is vibrant and healthy and wholesome and intimate. I think it's equally important to be part of the conversation of atonement, of agitation, of protest and of tending to the hurt that's happening.


Christine Mason  35:18  

Yeah, when you when you're writing about leaders who are showing up in one way, but they're like privately exhausted and uncertain. There's nowhere to go with that.


Christine Mason  35:28  

I feel that a lot.


Christine Mason  35:32  

There's a chapter in the book on men who can't cry, and that really struck me. Oh, my friend Lucy Caldwell, who was on the show at one point was at an event, or they were having a two hour broadcast conversation on the divine feminine. But it was four dudes. There were no women on the panel talking about the divine feminine. So they gave the handed her the mic. She did a beautiful piece, and her piece, you know, spoke to that. And I was like, we have the renaissance of bro culture, like the sort of glass grasping onto this dominant form of individual agent cowboy masculinity. I got to do it all myself. And here come Amy and Nicholas, and they're writing about men who can't cry as a as having a systemic cost, not just for the individual, but for the organization. So, you know, it's interesting time to be writing about developing your whole self. Can we talk a little bit about the the gender component of of the work? What you're finding there?


Amy Fox  36:38  

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think the first thing to say is that this generation of leaders, many of whom at the senior most positions, still are men, were never really given a blessing to have their heart open. I had finished my program a couple of weeks ago, and he said the most beautiful thing to me, he said, Thank you for helping me to cry the tears I've walked with for 63 years, and I thought we're a weeping, scarce society. We've so sanitized the level of emotional expression that people don't even dare to shed a tear, when in reality, our embodied emotional experience is wailing, is joyous, is Marvel, is tender, is it has every possible color and every possible saturation. And I think that in some ways it is a more feminine principle to say it takes a village to hold a wailing heart. It takes a village to call forward someone's courage. It takes a village to metabolize ancestral hurt, and those villages are urgently needed now.


Christine Mason  37:56  

Well, I have some things I'd like to dive into. Some of these sections on the book, consciousness, innovation and humility in the shadow like risk taking, relational intelligence. Is there any part of the book that you particularly feel sparked by this morning that you want to dive into?


Amy Fox  38:13  

Want to double click on humility? Because I think arrogance, narcissism, self, orientation is exactly one of the toxins of untreated trauma, because what happens is, if I don't get mirrored as a child, and I don't get valued for my innate gifts, my innate beauty, my innate particular traits and qualities, then I scan for what's going to make Me acceptable through a social lens, and I get myself on a treadmill of endless ambition in which I have to constantly seek the next prestigious accomplishment. I have to constantly seek the next accolade, or, you know, acquisition. And all of that becomes a kind of endlessly insatiable ambition to be in control, to be the expert, to be the one who knows, and to be the one who's, quote, leading. But those qualities of leadership lack the humility that's absolutely essential for leading collectively. If the picture is becoming more complex than any one person can see, I'm intrinsically dependent on other people's ideas, information, closeness to the process, intimacy with the customer, the adjacent context that they may be operating in that have parallel implications for our industry. All of that is going to suggest that we need to learn to work together and not be in the state of expertise, but be in a state of curiosity. Be open to persuasion. Be constantly intrigued by what we might be missing. Be constantly scanning for where novel ideas and new inputs can be coming from anywhere in life. And that humility that. Constant panoramic accessibility to be refined and informed is, I think, one of the most essential leadership qualities that's going to be necessary in the future, really now.


Christine Mason  40:11  

So the idea that narcissism, we say that so much, you know, everybody's like, you're a toxic narcissist, you're this, you're that. That's such a merciful way to look at it.


Amy Fox  40:22  

I don't think anybody is narcissistic or really any derailer that we're going to point to that we would say this person's behaving in this dysfunctional way, this person's behaving in this particularly dark way. All of that has its antecedents in untreated trauma and the repetition of that generation after generation after generation. I sometimes say, anything that is not beautiful is trauma. There are only two categories, pain and life. Life's vitality, life's wonder, life's lusciousness.


Christine Mason  40:53  

You're going to get all of these quotes from this interview. Amy Fox, anything that's not beautiful is trauma stunning. Let's go to the innovation piece, how the relationship between inner safety and risk taking.


Amy Fox  41:09  

So my friend Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School wrote a wonderful book in the last year called the right kind of failure in which she's pointing to the degree to which most companies operate within a zone of failure avoidance. They're doing things they're confident will work. They're making short term bets, and what they're not doing is experimenting and iterating and dancing fluidly with the context. So she's pointing us to a new level of safety that has to happen on teams where we give each other a license to take safe to fail experiments, to try little pockets of mini transformation, to send a probe out into the world to see what we learn. And in that environment, you have to be have people get their ego out of the way, because if I'm going to tolerate being able to say to my colleagues, I made this didn't work, or I have things to learn, or I need help. You have to get your ego out of the front, front of your awareness, and have a kind of coherence with the other participants in the team that make it safe to have it not work and innovation is going to live in experimentation because the context is so chaotic and fast changing. And somebody I talked to, a futurist last week, who said to me, Horizon thinking is over. What did he mean by that? He said we used to talk about horizon three as three to five years, but what used to take three to five years is now going to take a week or two. So the compressed and accelerated pace of change is going to mean we have to try some stuff and learn, because we can't copy paste what we already know into the future.


Christine Mason  42:55  

Do you think that people have the ability to absorb things that are changing that quickly,


Amy Fox  43:00  

not without serious practices of stillness, spaciousness and slowness. In a frenetic, constant pace of exertion and information, saturation and movement, you can't absorb the pace of change. You can only participate in its overwhelm.


Christine Mason  43:21  

I was thinking even like on the technology side, switching, what we used to call switching costs. Yes, exactly that, the ability to switch from one system, one tool set, one like one after the other. Why do I need a Wi Fi enabled refrigerator? You know, like that. They're basically we can't absorb, nor do we need to absorb innovation in every domain at once. Okay, I've never thought about this before, so let me just see if I can trace it like the joy of one group of people innovating very quickly, right? You're getting all these new ideas. They're all coming out, and they're not getting picked up in the culture, because your level of change is competing with everybody else's level of change. And the recipient of the change, the body who is receiving all of that change, is like, uh, I think I make myself a cup of tea, turn everything off, go for a walk and have a nice conversation in front of the fire with my dog. You know, like it's kind of shooting yourself in the foot to to put, to push so much out to the point where people can't actually absorb it. I love


Amy Fox  44:31  

what you're saying, and I'm going to describe it as innovation titration, like one of the new skill sets is going to be figuring out in which domain do I need to make a change, and at what speed can I make it in a way that I'll be able to metabolize it? And in which domains do I need to even have a forced stabilization, because my body and my heart can't move so fast? Yes, and I think when I'm talking about contemplative practice. I'm partly talking about dwelling in things that are eternally true, so that we can tolerate the present moment moving like a kaleidoscope. So I rest in prayer. I rest in the beauty of nature. I rest in ancient texts and wisdom. I rest in the language of poetry. I rest in that which is so universal and eternal that it puts a perspective on the fact that the modern moment has a kind of Kaleidoscope effect on us. I have a


Christine Mason  45:34  

wild card question unrelated to the book, but I'd love to hear your feedback on it. Go for it. Okay? Elon Musk, on the one hand, we are having this incredible moment where data centers appear like they're going to accelerate the energy crisis on Earth, right? And so here comes this guy who says, what we're going to do for you is we're going to put those data centers in orbit, and we're going to combine my Starlink, my SpaceX, and we're going to basically send all of your queries up to the atmosphere, up to the orbit, do all the data processing up there, send it back to Starlink and back to Earth. They'll stay perpetually powered and perpetually cooled, and it's going to solve the whole greenhouse thing. But 10,000 data centers in orbit seems like a civilization level decision. You know, the rest of us who are trying to live our lives are like these civilization level decisions, starting a global war or putting data centers in space that might solve one problem but create 100 others. At the individual level, I completely feel my prayerfulness, my meditation, my ability to regulate myself inside of a system like that. On the other hand, I just want them to stop, you know, like Who said you could start world war three and put us all at risk, you know, and I want to speak to the sense of powerlessness that arises in these imbalanced systems where the traumatized individual or even the visionary individual, but but one who has Very limited ability to think of the impact on others from their work has those levers of power. I'd love to sort of speak to what is the medicine, structural medicine for that?


Amy Fox  47:34  

Maybe I'll say a couple things. I mean, I love what you said. They're like collective decisions. They're cosmically important decisions that have implications for the ordering of all of life. And one of the things Thomas Hubl talks about is how we don't have an ethical counsel that's giving deep consideration to those choices. So you have individual leaders making unilateral moves that have implications for the rest of us. There's almost no choice but for the rest of us to feel powerless and impinged on and heartsick the notion of creating councils of elders or councils of wisdom or circles of mutual exploration to elevate a discourse of ethics, and alignment is a critical thing for this time. I also love Thomas's advice, which is the real his definition of humility is, figure out which instrument in the orchestra you're supposed to play. In this case, we could say the orchestra of repair, the orchestra of aligned action, the orchestra of restoration, and play it with impeccable discipline and devotion so we don't have to solve all of the global problems. It's overwhelming. I feel that you feel that everyone listening feels that our obligation, our fidelity, is to do our part as beautifully as we can, and also not to play small. Whatever the terrain is that your soul is called to take, take up that much space. It's a false humility to try to be smaller and to shine hide your light. A proper humility says, I will go where God sends me, I will take up. I will offer all my gifts as profoundly and with as much audacity as I can. I think the third thing is that we have to share stories of hope, as you asked me earlier, at a time of overwhelm and a time of disorientation and at a time of degradation, we have to disproportionately turn our attention to what's kind, what's beautiful, what's sacred, what's holy, because that is where the nourishment and the soil comes from, to then do the hard thing, or to face the overwhelming thing, and to stay engaged rather than withdraw. I think the impulse. Be a passive player right now that that's the most dangerous thing.


Christine Mason  50:04  

Yeah. So inspired by this conversation with you personally, like it validates what you just said, Is it very much validates the mission to call others into beauty. Yes, to like, this is the truth of your embodiment. This is the truth of the given world. Have a look. Try, you know, drop away these frames that say you're in competition and there isn't any support and you're alone, and have a look. And it's, it's so inspiring.


Amy Fox  50:30  

Amy, yeah, and I just want to bow to you, Christine, because I think your stand for that which is sensual and nourishing and erotic in the deep Audre Lorde sense of the uses of the erotic, the poetics, the beauty, the sexual, the sensual, we need all that right now.


Christine Mason  50:48  

Thank you. So this book captures the essence of a lot of private conversations that weren't in the literature. You and Nicholas both bring forth incredible insights on how to be leaders, healer, to lead in chaos, both of those things. And you end the book with the vision of the leader as a blessing in the world. And I think I'd love to invite us to, well, first of all, invite everybody who's listening to get the book and to dive into these it's very easy to pick it up, open it at any place, and use it, almost like as a bedtime reader, or perhaps a morning coffee reader before you enter into your workplace. Like use it as a meditation on, how do I lead today? And then, to close with this idea of what does it look like to lead a sacred vocation within a corporate environment, or really, within any environment. So maybe we can


Amy Fox  51:47  

end with that beautiful Yeah. I mean, what you said is, right, the essays are all two or three pages, and they're very much intended to be user friendly for these very busy and pressurized times. So I hope people will use it as a kind of daily meditation. I think that the notion of the leader as a blessing field, I would say this, my experience of working with 1000s of executives is that they naturally rise up to a level of nobility. They naturally rise up to a level of offering their open arms to receive each other's stories, hearts, dreams, as I've said already, and that act of I give myself in Kabbalah, they talk about it as the shift from the will to receive to the will to bestow. And I think we're calling leaders to the bestowal, to the conferring of blessing, to the attention not on yourself, but on what is mine to heal, what's mine to address, what's mine to own, what's mine to share, what's mine To receive. Like these are a different set of questions. What medicine am I for a hurt world? That's what we mean by blessing.


Christine Mason  53:10  

Thank you so much, and a personal thank you for bringing me to Thomas and for your good nose with our beloved Patrick.


Amy Fox  53:19  

We're very blessed you and I


Christine Mason  53:21  

yes and for holding the feminine moth in both of these containers. Thank you. Thank you Christine. Love you so much. All right, everybody say goodbye to Amy. We'll get her back bye. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Rose Woman, please go and find a copy of Amy and Nicholas's book leading in chaos. I'm sure you will enjoy those essays. I'd like to close with a David White poem that really talks about moving from our deepest interiority. It's called Start close in. Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third start with the first thing close in the step you don't want to take. Start with the ground, you know, the pale ground beneath your feet. Your own Way To begin the conversation, start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions. Don't let them smother something simple. To hear another's voice, follow your own voice. Wait until that voice becomes an intimate, private ear that can really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step you can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Be humble and focused. Start close in. Don't mistake that other for your own. Start close in, don't take the second step. Or the third start with the first thing, close in the step you don't want to take. So I super love that poem because it reminds us that the innermost heart paying attention to that innermost voice gets us closer to the end. Result we're looking for, if you have the right starting point on your GPS, you're much more likely to get the correct directions to the destination you want to get to. Please have a look at the show notes. Find Amy and Nicholas. You can also check out if you are in business and you're interested in some of their larger offerings. Amy runs something called next practice Institute. We talked about next practices in the interview, and I highly recommend it. I met some wonderful people there and learned a lot every time that I've gone, in terms of my activities and retreats and programming, I am so thrilled with the way living Tantra is going and how the community is evolving. I'm so thrilled with the way Rosebud Woman is going, so I would love it if you would come to christinemariemason.com, join me for an online class. Join one of our retreats, find the books. We just completed a magical week for the mystic heart of Easter, which looks at Easter through a tantric lens. We're going to do that again next year, because it was so fantastic. And there's an online component of that too. Also come and find me this summer. I've got some online programs on Rewire for Pleasure, finding the wisdom of the Crone, all kinds of things, where I'm joining other people's programs. And I would love to get you on our email list, if you're if you're interested, if there's things in here that turn you on, we have so much more to offer. The community is beautiful and connected and transparent and authentic, and one of those islands of coherence that we talked about in the show. All right, sending you utter love, utter blessings, wherever you're at. I know you will lead from your own deepest heart, your own deepest essence, and really vibrate that frequency out into the world all love all the time you.




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