227. From Zen Center to Google: How Mindfulness Transforms Leadership - Marc Lesser

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy you're here. I'm Sandee Sgarlata. I was born in Virginia and raised in the Baltimore Annapolis area and had very humble and tragic beginnings. And as a result, my life was a hot mess.

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Thankfully, 33 years ago, I got my act together, and since that time, I have dedicated my life to serving others and raising awareness that no matter what you've been through, you can choose happiness and live the life of your dreams. Happiness Solved is dedicated to giving you content that is empowering, motivational, inspirational, and, of course, a dose of happiness. It's my way to give back to the world and share other people's stories. This thing called life can be challenging, and my guests share their amazing stories, wisdom, and life lessons that demonstrate anyone can choose happiness. You see, happiness is a choice, and the choice is yours.

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Today's episode is amazing, and I am so grateful for you. Thank you for listening, and don't forget to leave a review and follow me on social media at Coach Sandee Sgarlata. Enjoy the show.

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Marc Lesser it's such a privilege to be talking with you today, and I'm so excited for this conversation because everything you do just seems so up my alley. So thank you so much for being here. Well, great. Well, tell me a little bit about your alley. Well, you're a Zen teacher, first of all, and you helped develop a mindfulness program inside of Google's headquarters.

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That's so cool. Yeah, I feel amazingly privileged and lucky.

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My parents were not thrilled when I dropped out of college and spent ten years living at the San Francisco Zen Center, but they were much happier when I went back and got an MBA degree and ended up starting some companies. And, yeah, then that was a life changing I still remember that phone call of, hey, are you interested in helping to develop a mindfulness program for leaders inside of Google? Yeah, that sounds like fun. And it was. It was life changing.

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So before we go into your backstory, because I want to hear more about that, and since we're talking about Google, do you think that that really helped shape some of the culture that they have? I mean, it's known as a really great place to.

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I mean, in some way, there were many, many people who went through that program, and it certainly changed a lot of lives. It had an influence on the culture there, but it's enormous company spread around the world.

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But I think the fact that Google was supporting a mindfulness and emotional intelligence program, everyone knew that that was yeah, it definitely had a positive influence. I think that's really awesome, and it's great to hear that such a huge part of most likely the world, I think Google I mean, for years, I was like, oh, I just asked my best friend Google, and I'll find the answers right. Well, one of the things that it did for sure was it gave mindful leadership a kind of heightened credibility. And mindful leadership programs ended up being part of many, many companies all around the world. So even though I couldn't say for sure answer that question, like, did it change the Google culture?

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It changed the world culture around. It kind of shifted the way people look at leadership. And I think that's still kind of ongoing, right? That the old school, top down leadership. The sense that business is essentially rooting out the emotions and humanness, all of that was kind of the underbelly of corporations in our country for the last hundred or more years, and we almost don't even see it.

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But in some way, I think it's been an enormous shift that still we're still in it about how do you organize people, how do you get stuff done productive ways, but how do you do it at the same time? Bring in and build humanity and collaboration and trust and all those things and the mindfulness piece that there's a good deal of research as well as experience as to the positive influence that this mindfulness and meditation practice have had on the corporate world. Yeah, well, I know that they do say that most billionaires attribute much of their success to mindfulness and meditation and things like that. And like you said, I don't think we're there yet. But I think in corporate America especially, we're still working toward getting that emotional intelligence to be really sunk in.

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It'S. Again, I think there has been a major shift, and again, still ongoing. Still ongoing. But hey, at least the seeds have been planted. Put it that way.

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The seeds have implanted and it's on people's minds. So that's really great. Okay, so let's hear about your story of how you ended up quitting college and going to the San Francisco Zen Center for ten years, because I'd love to hear about that. That's kind of a bold thing to do, right, for most college kids? Yeah, I look back and think there's a thin line sometimes between courage and stupidity.

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But no, it's interesting.

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I grew up in a small suburban town in New Jersey, and I think in a lot of ways I was pretty asleep as a kid, other than sports. Sports got me through high school, found myself in college, and I think a number of things came together that woke me up. Part of it was the people who were around me at Rutgers, who were there from all over the country and all over the world. I became passionate about reading, which I had not really done. And I took a course in French, German and Italian Literature in Translation, which was mind blowing reading about great writers through fiction.

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And then I discovered psychology and existentialism, and I read a book that really shook me by a book called Tortoise Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow, which was a study of exceptional people who and he did a lot of research. It's interesting. A lot of people don't know this about Maslow. They think of his hierarchy of needs, which was also groundbreaking psychology. But this was a study he did of thousands of people wanting to know why certain people seemed more at ease, more emotional, felt more deeply.

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And there was something about that that really grabbed my attention, especially in contrast to how I felt and how asleep I felt. And I feel like I need this. Someone handed me a brochure about some things that were happening on the West Coast, and I decided I needed to go find out for myself. Took a one year leave of absence from Rutgers. But then when I learned of the San Francisco Zen Center, as soon as I walked in, I think the people and the practice and the beauty of the place, it was something just right for me.

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I still have the letter that I wrote. My mother saved it. The letter that I wrote to my parents explaining why I wasn't coming back to college and why this was the education that I needed. I now know as a parent how hard that letter must have been, but it turned out to be really life changing. And also a big surprise was the role of work and leadership that I kept getting asked to take on leadership roles at the Zen Center.

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And there was something about the attitudes and culture of this integration of meditation, mindfulness Zen with work and leadership that I remember thinking, why isn't everyone doing this? It just made so much sense. And that set me on my course of life. And I ended up, after ten years, going back and finishing my degree at Rutgers and then going right into business school. I went to New York University graduate business school.

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And shortly after I came out, I ended up starting my first company. I started a company that made greeting cards and calendars out of recycled paper. Oh, nice. And we were licensing the words of the Dalai Lama and Nahan and others. I learned a lot about leadership.

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And again, all of that, I think, paved the way for the work that I then got to do at Google. Wow, that's really interesting. And I have to ask this question, so we're going to regrets for a minute. What did you say in the letter to your parents?

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I think I described that how much I was learning, appreciating, enjoying being at life at the San Francisco Zen Center, that I was surrounded by Ivy League dropouts. Really smart, good. Interesting. Did I think it was before that letter, they sent out a friend of mine to rescue me from the cult of the Zen Center. Of course, my friend ended up becoming part of the Zen Center as well, so that didn't work out for them all that well.

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But yeah, I think I described the best that I could, that there were some big needs and gaps that I felt in my own being, in my own life, in my emotional education, that this Zen practice was providing that college wasn't for me. Wow. So they eventually threw their hands up and were. It helped. They came out and visited.

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They got to see that it wasn't a cult and that it. Yeah, they even came at the time, I was living in the Zen monastery in the mountains in California, a place called Tasahara, which happens to be extraordinarily beautiful and has great food and natural hot springs. And they kind of got a whole different sense. Even without understanding or knowing anything about Zen practice or meditation practice, just the place, the vibe, the feeling, how there was a sense of there was a feeling of kindness and the way people treated each other and the mutual sense of respect that was, I think, part of Zen practice that they could feel and see nice. Well, that's really great that they were supportive because my son's a senior in college and he already has a job offer for when he finishes.

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And he's kind of hinted a few times, I wish I could just start working and I'm like, just get the degree, just finish the degree. Well, I'm going to tell you the story. It was always hard for my father, especially. I think he really had a different aspiration for me, and it was hard. But I was still living at the Zen Center when I got a call from my mother saying that my father was quite ill and was dying of cancer.

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And I went back. I left the Zen Center and flew back to New Jersey. And there was a way that I was able to be with my father at that time. There was a lot of people weren't telling him what was actually happening and he was confused and disoriented. And I had some really great support system that helped me take a little bit more control of the situation and work more skillfully with him and with the doctors and have some real meetings and conversations with him.

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And at one point he looked at me and said, I don't really understand what it is you're doing at the Zen Center, but whatever it is, keep doing it. And it was really again, I think I wasn't aware of my own changes myself, but seeing myself through my father's eyes, I was like, oh, this is really having a big impact on me in allowing me to show up in a different way and allowing me to show up in this life and death situation with my father and to meet my father in that way. And in some way there are many, many ways to talk about mindfulness or leadership, but in some way it's about cultivating the ability to really meet ourselves and to really meet other people in a much more profound, full way. Yeah, because you call it Zen. For me it's all the same thing.

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We're just coming at it from a different angle. You're in alignment because your vibrational frequency is at a higher state. And when you raise your vibrational frequency, people are going to react to you in a different way because you're showing up differently. Yeah. To me, Zen is a kind of code word for how to be a more full functioning human being.

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Right.

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Of course there's a whole rich tradition, 1000 or more years in the Zen world. But what I like about Zen is it doesn't care about Zen, it wants to get rid of it. What it really cares about is human beings and life and how to be more compassionate and connected and full functioning. Love it, love it, love it. So you have a book out that's called Finding Clarity.

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What was the driving force that you felt like, I have to write this book. Yeah. Much of my day job is I do coaching and consulting to all kinds of large companies, small companies. But a client who has been one of my main companies that I've been working with is a socially responsible bank whose mission is to change capitalism and how the right use of money. And in working with this bank I mentioned the term, somehow it came up around accountability and compassionate accountability.

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And they just completely have adopted it as the kind of culture that they want to create. High accountability, high alignment, high measuring results, and at the same time trust, care and compassion. And out of that work I began developing this ongoing training programs called compassionate accountability. And the book grew out of that work. And of course I realized that the same kinds of themes and practices also apply to all our relationships, our families.

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And it's really about effective and caring relationships in all aspects of our lives. I love that. Now, for those listeners that are scratching their head, can you just elaborate a little bit more on compassionate accountability? Can you just explain sure. How that works?

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Yeah. Well, let's start with accountability. Right? Well, what's interesting is generally people don't like accountability. Has this sort of negative connotation, this harsh being held accountable.

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But really, accountability, maybe the word that I like, maybe that's a gentler word, is alignment. In a way, accountability means to be aligned with your own action. Your actions and words and values are all aligned. This is a form of holding yourself accountable. And then accountability with others is around alignment.

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In what ways are there gaps? And in what ways are we in sync with what we're trying to do? With our vision of what success looks like? Or even in families, in how we are speaking to each other? What are underlying values, what's most important to us.

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And accountability though, can be cold and harsh and needs the caring, trusting, compassion side. And to me, especially in workplace cultures, there's something so I think useful about what looks like competing kinds of values or activities. But they're needed we need this clear sense of measurement, this clarity about what it is we're doing. But we also need the humanity. We need the trust and the care.

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So this is where that as a practice, this compassion and accountability, right? Workplaces that are high in compassion and low in accountability don't work very well either. They might feel warm and fuzzy, but they're kind of frustrating because not much is getting done. And workplaces that are high in accountability also not the kind of place that people need. We need the humanity.

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We need to bring in the compassion piece as well. So this, I think, is the AHA of bringing these two practices together as one practice, as compassionate accountability. And all of it underneath is about cultivating more clarity, more self awareness, more not being caught by our fight, flight and freeze tendencies or the negativity bias or whatever our stories are. We're such storytelling creatures. Clarity cuts through.

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In order to actually be more accountable and compassionate, we need to shift those stories. So that's how you're suggesting you bridge the gap in an organization that is highly compassionate but is not holding anyone accountable and vice versa. So is that where you come in and say, you've got to get very clear on what? What are they getting clear on? They're getting clear on two things, two main big buckets.

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One is what is it we're trying to accomplish? What does success look like? And it's amazing how easy it is to lack clarity there because it's always changing and growing and developing.

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There's financials, but then there's projects. There's what are all of the assumptions about success? But the other big bucket is how are we working together? How are we doing with things like vulnerability and expressing? How do we treat failure and breakdowns?

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What are expectations about responsiveness with each other? And again, so the what and the how are the key pieces that we want to have a lot of accountability and it's hard, it's ongoing work. And then there's always that darn human piece, that emotional piece, that emotional intelligence piece that comes in and influences a lot, both the accountability and the compassion piece. Well, sure, because there's some people that don't want to be the bad guy, the good cop, bad cop, they don't want to be the bad cop. And then there's some people that don't have a compassionate bone in their body.

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So what do you do in that case? How can you teach somebody to be compassionate if it's just not part of their fabric? Well, first, there's a lot of interesting research and practices around not avoiding conflict, right? The importance of not avoiding when there are gaps, when there's conflict, and there will be conflict. And most people tend to be conflict, avoidant.

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There are some people who are on the other side who overreact, and there's some leaders who they might think they're questioning someone when they actually turn into interrogating them. This is kind of overreacting to conflict. I think that for the most part, compassion is baked into us as human beings. It's part of our makeup. There are exceptions, but the person who doesn't have a compassionate bone in their body, man, that is a real rare bird.

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I think what we're talking about is this much more in a bell curve. It's normal people are some exceptions. Those tend to be the real toxic. There are toxic people, there are toxic players. But more and more, what I've noticed, and this is part of the shift that's happening, is they're not tolerated.

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They're mostly not tolerated. Little by little, they're being rooted out of workplaces, or they're having to change. They're having to realize that that particular toxic, non compassionate style that used to work, people like that used to get promoted and used to end up finding themselves in leadership roles. Of course, it still happens, but it's really the exception more and more these days. Yeah.

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And I think what I was referring to more of is that you have and I'm not trying to say it's a male thing or a female thing, it's just more predominant in men is that their egos get in. The way and that there's many men that their ego is so strong because they feel like that's what they need in order to get ahead and in order to be that leader. Not saying they're not compassionate, it's just they don't allow that side to come into the workplace. Yeah. Well, this is, I think, why mindfulness practice and meditation practice are the secret sauce, because they get right to the ego, again, whether it's the male or the female.

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And ego is essentially a defense mechanism.

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I'm often quoting a scientist at Google who I became good friends with, who said, we humans are descendants of the nervous apes, the apes that were chill and cool. They all got killed. It was the ones who were really adept at scanning for threats. And we humans have inherited those genes. And this is, I think, we're so sensitive to anytime we're threatened.

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And we also have most of us well honed inner critic that we're scanning for threats internally and externally. And this is very much related, I think, to ego and why men or why people tend to be so ego driven, because it's a safety mechanism. It's a way to bolster one's survival. We're here to survive. So it takes some practice.

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It takes practice to notice that and also, again, to realize it doesn't work very well. It's not a way of building trust or connection or collaboration in the work world, which have become more and more essential to getting stuff done. Yes, no kidding. Thank you for all of that. And thank you so much for the work that you're doing.

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This is just incredible. Your book, Finding Clarity can be found on Amazon. Do you have a website? I do. My website is Marclesser Net Marclesser.net.

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Yeah. Fantastic. Is there anything else that you want to share with the audience before we close up that we haven't brought up or we haven't talked about? Well, I'll just mention the title of the first chapter of my book is Be Curious, Not Furious. And I think everyone should have that sewn in to our clothing.

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And again, this can be whether you're in traffic or on the line or someone looks at you in a certain way just to bring a sense of curiosity into, especially when we're triggered, when we're annoyed, when things feel hard to be Curious, Not Furious, as a I love that. Be curious, not furious. I'm writing that down. Yes, please do. All right, Marc, thank you so much for everything that you're doing.

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Folks, check out his book, Finding Clarity. Go to his website, Marclesser Net, and that will be on or in the show notes as well. Thank you so much. And thank you for listening today's.

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I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness. Take care, everyone.