Henna Inam on Adaptability, Midlife Crises, Growth, Self-Reflection Questions, and Self-Compassion

This post is an excerpt from my interview with Henna Inam. This excerpt sheds light on overcoming mid-life crises, self-reflections daily questions practice, self-limiting loops, practicing self-compassion during tough times and bringing soul to work.

You can check out my full interview with Henna here Henna Inam — Wired for Disruption, Lessons from Ashram, 5 Shifts in Agility, 10 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself, and More (#120)

Let’s begin..

Mid-life crisis:

One of the things that I realized while growing up and this goes back to my midlife crisis is that I was so adaptive. The reason I wrote my book wired for authenticity is that I really had struggled, even in my corporate career. I worked in corporate America for Proctor and Gamble, then for Novartis. I was an Asian woman, mostly in meetings with white men. As I grew up through the organization, I was in various C-level roles. I was always adapting and it was sort of the same thing as in my childhood growing up I was always adapting and until I had my midlife crisis and I thought about this has been a really great adventure – but who am I? what do I want? What’s really important?

I think that the advice I would have is for people to dig deep inside, to find their deepest inspirations, to find their most brilliant strengths, and to find a need, that calls to them, there are so many needs right now, whether it’s a need To help people become the best versions of themselves, the people that you lead, or whether it’s a need to find innovative solutions because you are a brilliant thinker and scientist or, whether it’s a need to, create something new, in terms of experiences for people. Our job is to find that fire that’s inside of us that ignites us so that we can step into the most powerful and inspired.

Daily questions practice

This is something that has been written about and talked about by Marshall Goldsmith, who is a leading CEO coach. So I have an Excel spreadsheet and it has my list of 10 questions and I have an accountability partner. We call each other at 7:00 AM every day and she’s got her list and we basically say, how do I rate myself? I rate myself from 0 to 10 – did I do it or did I not do it? 10 is – yes I did it.

  1. Did I exercise today – either walk 10,000 steps or work out for at least a half-hour?
  2. Self-care is sort of the key component to maintaining our own energy and is such an important part of any impact that we’re going to have externally. The question is – did I drink 64 ounces of water?
  3. Did I make healthy food choices? And for me, it’s protein and veggies and anti-inflammatory foods.
  4. Did I eat mindfully with appreciative attention?
  5. Did I meditate and connect with my wisest self for 15 minutes today?
  6. Did I journal the three things that I’m grateful for?
  7. Did I write my top three priorities and progress them for the day?
  8. Did I do my best to practice courage today in situations that called for it?
  9. Did I appreciate the good in others?
  10. Did I take my daily vitamin supplements and Apple cider vinegar?

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Creative Labour and Defining Success

How do you define success for yourself? I’ve been very curious to know how people define success for themselves. I started the podcast in 2020 with the clear intention of building skills and relationships with people, and I’d say that I am super successful as I’ve been achieving what I wanted based on my intention.

In my quest to learn more about how people define success — I’ve asked several of my podcast guests about it and read other articles and quotes on the web. This post is a short compilation of podcast interviews and selected quotes that I’ve struck me deeply.

If this post resonates with you, please help me in spreading the word about it. That’d mean the world to me. Thanks!


Podcast interviews:

Quotes and Passages:

“Excerpt from Maria Popova, founder of Brain Pickings: “…I frequently get emails from young people starting out and asking, ‘How do I make a successful website or start my own thing?’ And, very often, it’s tied to some measure of success that’s audience-based or reach-based.’ How do you build up to seven million readers a month or two million Facebook fans?’ But the work is not about how to get that size of an audience or those numbers. That’s just the byproduct of what Lewis Hyde calls ‘creative labor,’ which is really our inner drive. The real work is how not to hang your self-worth, your sense of success and merits, the fullness of your heart, and the stability of your soul on those numbers—on that constant positive reinforcement and external validation. That’s the only real work, and the irony is that the more “successful” you get, by either your own standards or external standards, the harder it is to decouple all of those inner values from your work. I think we often confuse the doing for the being.”

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The Art of Ending Things and The Lost Art of Closing Rituals

Endings are always hard. Trust me, I’ve had to end many things internally and externally in 2022. I found this fantastic article The Art of Ending: 3 Steps for Pruning Your Life and I’ve read it dozens of times. Below is an excerpt from this article which I personally read over and over.

“Our lives are very similar to this rose bush. They are often filled with so many good things; so many opportunities, commitments, endeavors, and relationships that we are overwhelmed. Our resources are stretched, and nothing, or no one,  is getting our full attention. In most areas, we are surviving, not thriving. What would happen if we were to prune back some of the good for sake of the best?

“So, too, does this happen in our lives. We limp along with broken relationships, hang onto toxic habits, and linger in commitments that deplete us physically or emotionally. It feels as though all of our energy is being diverted to sustain parts of our life that are not meeting our hopes and expectations. Essentially, the season of possibility for these buds has passed. What would happen if we were to get out our shears, and extract the parts of our life that are no longer giving us the results they once did, or are never going to amount to anything no matter how much we try?

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Keren Tsuk on Wisdom to Lead, Caging The Monkey Mind, Mindfully Wise Leadership, and More (#202)

The longest journey you will ever take is the 18 inches from your head to your heart.

Thích Nhat Hanh

Keren Tsuk, Ph.D., is a keynote speaker, consultant, and thought leader in 21st-century leadership sought-after speaker, As the founder and CEO of consulting firm Wisdom To Lead, she specializes in the development of senior management teams and corporate leadership. Tsuk guides companies and senior management teams to reach their full potential using various techniques in the field of mindfulness. She is also the author of Mindfully Wise Leadership: The Secret of Today’s Leaders.

Please enjoy!

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite platform.

This podcast is brought to you by Newsletter. If you’d like to learn more about what I am reading, new documentaries, what I am learning new, recent podcast updates, things I am experimenting with, or anything —which I share extensively in my weekly short and sweet “Friday Newsletter”. No spam ever! I hate that too!

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The Recap of February 2022 Episodes — In Case You Missed It (#200)

Usually, my job on this show is to interview world-class experts in different domains. But this episode is an experiment and a quick recap of 2 episodes Dr. Gail Brenner — Be Empty of the Exhausting Story of “Me”, The End of Self-Help, Conscious Life and Embodied Living, Suffering Is Optional, Healing from Early Trauma, and More and Amanda Tempist Jade — Stocking the Furry Edges and Caverns of Possibility, Saying YES to Personal Transformation, Dragon at Heart, Grief-Remembrance, Equine Informed Experiential Inquiry, and More published in February 2022. I took the first 15 mins of each episode and combine them into this single episode. If you enjoy the short version of each guest’s interview, you can listen to the guest’s full interview.

Please enjoy!

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite platform.

This podcast is brought to you by Newsletter. If you’d like to learn more about what I am reading, new documentaries, what I am learning new, recent podcast updates, things I am experimenting with, or anything —which I share extensively in my weekly short and sweet “Friday Newsletter”. No spam ever! I hate that too!

Continue reading “The Recap of February 2022 Episodes — In Case You Missed It (#200)”

Aliya Grig — Exploring Esoteric Practices, Human Design and Human Cosmos, Human Evolution, Future of Humanity in Space, and More (#195)

Aliya Grig was born in 1986 in the USSR into a family of astrophysicists who had collaborated with some of the greatest scientists and space thinkers of our time (e.g. Stephen Hawking, the Strugatsky brothers).

She’s currently developing Evolwe – AI virtual companion with a focus on well-being.

Aliya has worked in both the public and private sectors and is the founder of two high-tech companies in the area of fuel cells and new materials. She also headed a Foundation dedicated to urban and social awareness, and successfully launched a project aimed at the sustainable redevelopment of several regional cities, and the Moscow River catchment area.

Aliya is a frequent speaker and panelist at the world’s leading tech and innovation events. She is the author of a number of space-themed books, a contributor to Forbes, and is the founder and CEO of the Human Cosmos online platform launched in Autumn 2020.

Aliya was listed as one of the Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs in Europe by Forbes magazine and Top 100 women entrepreneurs in AI and Big data by Leta Capital. Aliya is engaged in the development and support of scientific projects in the field of new materials, deep space exploration, and initiates and leads projects in the field of education and art (in particular, a project within the Venice Biennale in 2015, support for gifted children in the field of music).

Please enjoy!

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite platform.

This podcast is brought to you by Newsletter. If you’d like to learn more about what I am reading, new documentaries, what I am learning new, recent podcast updates, things I am experimenting with, or anything —which I share extensively in my weekly short and sweet “Friday Newsletter”. No spam ever! I hate that too!

Connect with AliyaWebsite | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

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Deirdre Fay — Clearing the “Stuff”, Becoming Safely Embodied, Your Protest is the Key, Attachment Theory, Integrating Sorrow and Aligning Life, and More (#191)

“What would ease feel like in my body?”

“TRAUMA HAPPENS IN RELATIONSHIPS…And it is in relationships that we have to heal.”

Deirdre

Deirdre Fay, MSW decades of experience explores the intersection of trauma, attachment, yoga, and meditation, teaching “a radically positive approach to healing trauma.”

She has 35 years of experience as a psychotherapist and educator exploring practical ways of how transformation occurs. Her approach is called a radically positive approach to healing trauma. Her message resonates deeply with those who may look successful on the surface, but internally feel plagued by shame, anxiety, distress, depression – wondering why they’re stuck in repeating relational and life patterns. 

Her third book Becoming Safely Embodied (2021) became a best-seller

Please enjoy!

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite platform.

This podcast is brought to you by Newsletter. If you’d like to learn more about what I am reading, new documentaries, what I am learning new, recent podcast updates, things I am experimenting with, or anything —which I share extensively in my weekly short and sweet “Friday Newsletter”. No spam ever! I hate that too!

Connect with DeirdreWebsite | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

Book: Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World

Safely Embodied offerings: https://safelyembodied.lpages.co/offerings/


Continue reading “Deirdre Fay — Clearing the “Stuff”, Becoming Safely Embodied, Your Protest is the Key, Attachment Theory, Integrating Sorrow and Aligning Life, and More (#191)”

Amanda Tempist Jade — Stocking the Furry Edges and Caverns of Possibility, Saying YES to Personal Transformation, Dragon at Heart, Grief-Remembrance, Equine Informed Experiential Inquiry, and More (#190)

Amanda, known by some as Tempist, is a polyphyletic creature, an embodied convergence of ancestral lines that stretch from the Dawnlands of Turtle Island (Passamaquoddy – eastern US) to the mountains of Macedonia; from the ocean-hugging lands of Greece & Sicily to the seafaring lands of the Celts. Mother to a shapeshifter, *she/they dwells in the mountains of Southern Ute territories with her partner, child, horses, chickens, felines, and canine.

As a lover of crossroads, she tends to the intersections of ancestry, mythos, gender, trauma, chthonic & cosmic spiritualities, inter-species relating, and place-based re-membering as pathways for the reimagining of emergent and unknown futures. Futures that humanity might come to inhabit from places of radical transformation. With a particular focus in (eco)mystical experiences and their capacity to in-form deep mycelial change, Amanda believes such experiences connect us to wider narratives of possibility and break down petro-patterns that feed the soil of life’s entangled becoming.

She feels that in these times of eco- and paradigmatic- collapse, our somatic intelligence is ancestrally equipped to channel a feral kind of consciousness. An awareness that we are so much more than what we’ve been coerced, forced, or seduced into believing. Amanda allies herself to the dawning of hybridity – a way of moving with the world that invokes our trans-specied and mythopoetic brilliance. A hybridity that is capable of inhabiting and learning to inhabit landscapes of uncertainty.

Work with Amanda: https://www.feralmysticism.com/mentorship

Please enjoy!

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite platform.

This podcast is brought to you by Newsletter. If you’d like to learn more about what I am reading, new documentaries, what I am learning new, recent podcast updates, things I am experimenting with, or anything —which I share extensively in my weekly short and sweet “Friday Newsletter”. No spam ever! I hate that too!

Connect with AmandaWebsite | Facebook | Instagram

Continue reading “Amanda Tempist Jade — Stocking the Furry Edges and Caverns of Possibility, Saying YES to Personal Transformation, Dragon at Heart, Grief-Remembrance, Equine Informed Experiential Inquiry, and More (#190)”