Human First, Performance Second

Your calendar is packed, your notifications never stop, and somehow you still feel behind. That isn’t a personal failure. It’s what happens when workplaces treat humans like machines and call it “productivity.” 

We sit down with Veresh Sita, a transformation leader and founder of vasana.ai, to get honest about what thriving actually means. We talk about why money only buys happiness up to a point, and why high-quality relationships, belonging, and real connection are often the missing pieces in modern work culture. From hustle culture to hyper-independence, we unpack how “success” can quietly break the very community and recovery our nervous systems depend on. 

We also get practical about the future of work with AI. Veresh shares why AI can generate answers all day long, but it cannot provide wisdom, meaning, or judgment, and why outsourcing your gut to a chatbot can damage communication and conflict skills. We dig into brain science like the amygdala and identity threat, plus a clear progression for growth: self-awareness, self-regulation, situational awareness, and situational flexibility. And we call out a hard truth for leaders: resilience has been weaponized, and well-being cannot be dumped on HR. 

If you want a more human way to work that still delivers results, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s burnt out, and leave a review with the boundary you’re setting this week.

Join our human advantage masterclass: https://vasana.ai/vasana-types-masterclass/

Follow Veresh:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/vereshsita/

Transcript

Welcome And Why Kindness Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Literally not instantaneous at all. And we're live. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Crash Out With Me. It's been a couple of weeks because although I love y'all, I love me more and I was traveling. So I am so excited to be here with one of my favorite people today. But if you don't know me, my name is Madison Butler, Maddie Bia for friendly. But I started Crash Out With Me to remind everyone that everyone has stuff going on. Everyone has something that is taking up brain space for them. And not only is it a reminder to be kind, but it's also normal that stuff is going on for you. So I'm so excited for my guest today. Would you like to introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Yeah, yeah, of course. Um, Maddie's soul, so happy to be crashing out with you today. Um I'm privileged to be in the company of people that get to call you Maddie and not Madison. So uh super, super excited to connect with you. And just as you talk about being kind, it's so true, right? You know, it's we need people to stop being nice and start being kind, right? And I think that just should be our overall theme for today. Like stop being nice, start being kind. But by way of introductions, my name is V Rash, V Rash Cita. Uh, you pronounce it V Rash, and you know, I know people have bastardized it over the years. I speak with a funny accent. I was born and brought up in South Africa. I'm third generation South African, moved to the US about 28 years ago, and I've lived all over the US: Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Seattle, I've lived in the Netherlands, I've lived in Dubai, I've lived in India, and now broadcasting out of New Jersey. And, you know, I've spent a lifetime working with some of the largest companies in the world: Starbucks Coffee Company, Alaska Airlines, Avis Budget Car Group, and then some of the fastest growing startups in the world, companies like WeWork. And so, you know, I like to say every startup wants to be an enterprise, and every enterprise wants to be a startup. And, you know, I sit at the intersection of that. But really, Mary, every time a company has hired me, they've brought me in to drive some type of massive business transformation. And the minute I got there, you know, I quickly realized that, you know, you don't have a business problem, you don't have a hardware problem, you don't have a software problem, you have a people problem. Right. And just the friction and and lack of trust and lack of psychological safety and all of those things that that exist within organization. And so, you know, about 15 years ago, just spent my time focusing on behavioral science and neuroscience and bringing that into the workplace, which is what has led me to today with Vasana, the company that I founded, which at its core is just designed to help people thrive. Like, how do we help people just be the most awesome version of themselves? That's what I'm focused on.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

I love that. And so for you, I guess when you think about people being the most awesome version of themselves, I think there's several definitions, right? Like there is a very capitalist individual individualist version of that, which is like they produce the most, they make the most money, they drive the nicest car. But for you, what does that actually look like when we say the most awesome version of someone?

SPEAKER_02 3:11

Yeah, look, it it varies by individual and their priorities and what they value, right? Ultimately, it's about your value, your values and what drives those values, right? And so for me, it's a very personalized thing. But for me, it ultimately boils down to fulfillment and happiness, right? What are the things that make you happy? And look, everyone's chasing money. And what we know is look, money can buy happiness to a point, right? There's a minimum, there's a threshold after which money is not buying you more happiness, right? You need the basic things. You need clothing, you need food, you need the money, it does buy happiness to a point. After that, money doesn't matter. For me, the things that drive happiness are the level of connection you have with people. For me, that's the highest level of happiness. You know, I like to say the relationships you have with people is the number one source of angst in your life, but it is also the number one source of joy in your life. And so ultimately, how you connect with, how you relate with other people, how you engage with them is ultimately going to be the source of happiness for you in your life. So, you know, if you take care of the base level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then all of the things then is about overall happiness. And for me, that is being with people, connecting with people, having a sense of belonging, but also having high quality relationships.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

So I love that because I think we've been sold this like fairly bleh idea of what work should feel like, right? Like you come to work, you do your thing, you go home, but the emotional side doesn't matter. You're not expected to have emotions at work. And of course, emotions are part of normal human connection, right? Like you can't have an emotional connection with someone if you don't have emotions. So I guess when you think about the lie that we were sold about how we operate, what do you think the biggest flaw in that system is?

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Look, if you think about the Industrial Revolution, right? It was all about machinery and things that are coming to make our lives more efficient. And I think what we've done is we've started treating human beings like machinery, right? It's just think about aircraft, right? These planes are in the sky all the time. They just fly. There's no rest for these planes, right? They're just flying all the time. And we start to treat human beings the same way, right? We start to treat human beings like machines, but we're not wired that way. Our

Thriving Means Connection Over Status

SPEAKER_02 5:35

biology is not built that way. If you think about the best performance athletes in the world, regardless of whatever sport they are playing, if you think about how much time they spend in the intensity of the game, and then how much time are they spending in recovery, you'll actually find they're spending a lot of time in practice and a lot of time in recovery. And then they go into this high burst energy to perform at a maximum level. What we do is we start to treat humans like robots, right? And we expect them to be on this performance treadmill 24-7 all the time, always on. And therein lies the flow. And I think it's that flow I started, you know, 30, 40 years ago, longer even with the Industrial Revolution, and we just start to treat humans like robots.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Well, and it's you know, it's interesting that you say that obviously the World Cup is going on, and there has been a ton of controversy around how well can Iran play if they're not actually afforded recovery time because they're spending so much time traveling to their games. And it's something that I've even had to recognize myself as someone who spends a lot of time in the gym. Like, yes, it does it feel good to be in the gym every day, sure, like for my brain, but nothing happens, like that is not where you see yourself get better, is in the actual moments. It's in the recovery, it's in the practice. And for me, like that's been a hard lesson is like learning that part.

unknown 6:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

But I think you make a really good point about the industrial revolution, right? Like we have been taught that everything in our life should be optimized. We should optimize every little piece of our life. And I mean, we're seeing it really, really, really, really common, commonly with the rise of AI. Everything can be optimized. I can have a thing in my house where I say, hey, Alexa, order me a Diet Coke. I have Uber, I have Amazon, I have all these things that make my life more efficient. Why is it that we never really think about optimizing ourselves as humans versus instead optimizing the world around us?

SPEAKER_02 7:29

You you probably can't hear this, but I have Alexa on the side here trying to. She's giving me all kinds of stuff, and I can order from here, and this is the price point, and that's all going on on my Alexa on the side here. So that's but that's just making, right? It's just everything is optimized for for things. It's like everything has become activity-based. We track and manage every single piece of activity, right? We we it's we should take the robots out of the humans. Like there's a lot of work that humans do that is demeaning work, but humans should not do that work, right? Repetitive, mindless type tasks. Yeah, take that out of the humans, have the AI do that, have the robots do that, right? But there are certain tasks, activities that are deeply human, things that have to do with communication, engaging with people that we need to keep human. The amount of people that use AI ChatGPT, for example, to write the emails. The one thing that makes us deeply human is communication. The words we use, the phrases we use, the accent we use, like the way I speak. I say I speak funny. But that is what makes me uniquely me. If I take something and then have AI write it, it's gonna give me an awesomely curated piece of work that's grammatically perfect. But the beauty of what makes me uniquely me is my grammatical errors and the way I say things and how I pronounce things. That is what ultimately creates human connection. Right? And so using AI for everything and removing the humanness out of who we are is not the answer. We have to retain the things that make us deeply human.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

So, you know, one of the things that I Jasmine just said her Alexa was, her the Alexa was ready to crash out to, which is fair. I I for I don't have one, so I didn't even think that it would respond. But one of the things that I think about a lot, and I guess it's really just in my own head, is so many people are using ChatGPT or Claude or whatever LLM platform they choose to give them the answer to how they should think about a problem. Specifically, like arguments, right? Like I've seen I'm uploading, you know, the screenshots of me and my boyfriend's text messages so A, I can tell me who's right. And I worry how much do we lose of that like trusting our gut feeling if I'm giving my gut to Chat GPT? And I guess I would love to hear your thoughts on how does that impact communication as we move forward? Because again, a lot of that's like while I'm sitting in my living room, right? When you're in a conversation, I can't be like, one second, I have to ask G ChatGPT what she thinks, and then I'll respond to you. How will that affect in real life person-to-person communication? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

Look, when you look at my name and my signature below my name, I have the dot AI right in my signature, right? So that tells you I'm an AI forward person, right? I'm I'm using AI in everything I do. I use it extensively, I use it expansively as well. But I'm not using, I'm not outsourcing my heavy lifting, the humanness of who I am. I'm not outsourcing that to AI. AI will give you an answer to everything. It doesn't lack an answer. It will always give you an answer. Ask it whatever question you want, it'll give you an answer. The judgment, is that answer the right answer? Is that answer contextually relevant to your situation? It doesn't bring that. Judgment is one of the most human things we can bring to the equation. The sum total of our life's experience, the sum total all of our values, our perceptions, our perspectives. AI doesn't have that. It's just giving you an answer. Unfortunately, humans have become lazy, right? It's like if somebody else can do the work, well, just give it, take its answer and accept its answer, right? You'll be surprised that I will ask AI, I would get an answer. But the amount of times I've gone back to it and I'm like, no. Your answer sounds, and it will give you a plausible intellectual response for how it came to that answer, which at face value makes sense. But the sum total of my life's experience, the judgment that I bring to the table says, that is not what I need to do. AI will give you answers, but it will not give you wisdom. Wisdom is what people bring to the equation. So, yes, use AI, but be extremely discerning for it. You bring the judgment, you bring the wisdom. Use AI to challenge your hypothesis, use AI to challenge your ideas, but don't outsource the judgment emotion side of it. Like it's hilarious that people will ask it like who's right or wrong. And that's that's just poor usage of it.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Right. And it's like in in so many forms of conflict. When I teach conflict, I often teach you're not actually seeking right or wrong. Yeah, you're seeking middle ground. And so, although like ChatGPT could say your boyfriend's wrong, and it most likely will because LLMs are also trained to be agreeable, it's most likely going to side with you. Because even when ChatGPT or Claude gives me an answer and I say, Hey, I don't agree with that, she'd be like, Oh my god, you know what? You're right.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Yeah, yeah. And and unfortunately, we wired for right and wrong. We wired for good or bad, we wired for two sides of binary equations. We're not wired for curiosity, we're not wired for understanding, right? Actually, let me reframe. We are wired for it. That has just been beaten out of us. Like if you're for something, you have to be against something

AI Answers Versus Human Wisdom

SPEAKER_02 13:05

else. Right? The World Cup is going on right now, right? And like everyone's debating is is Messi better or is Ronaldo better? Folks, why does it why does one need to be better? They are both amazing players. Why don't we just appreciate the beauty of the game? Right? And so we we we always looking for this if this then that, if this, then that. No, let's let's stop that. The argument of right or wrong, let's start to approach the argument with curiosity and seek for understanding. Hey, let's just try to understand that person's perspective, right? Before we even figure out what's right or wrong. So we need to bring empathy and understanding to conversations and debates and arguments, not just trying to defend who's right or wrong.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Well, it's interesting because one of the things I talk about a lot in my own teaching is we're sold this really bad idea that you're either a good person or you're a bad person, right? But like life isn't binary that way. You're just a person and you'll do really good things for the rest of your life, and you'll probably do pretty bad things for the rest of your life. And although you're probably someone's favorite person, you're definitely probably someone's least favorite person. Like they cringe when people say your name. And that is the thing that I've had to remind myself, right? Is I think I'm lovely. There are other people who don't think I'm lovely, and that's okay. Right. But life isn't binary in anything that we do, in the decisions that we make, in the conflicts that we have, and even in the way that we navigate the world. But I think one of the really interesting things about Basana is you talk about the genome, right? And I would love to hear you kind of dive into how much of us are we capable of changing versus how much of who we are is a fixed item.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

Yeah. We we often use this thing about fixed, like people are fixed, and you know, that's just their mindset. And I don't like to use the word fixed as we describe humans, beings, right? And a lot of the neuroscience or a lot of the science that's coming through right now talks about brain plasticity, our ability to learn. We can learn even as we age. And so this phrase you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, well, it turns out you can. The research is showing you can. The brain is plastic. It's ultimately a mindset thing. Do you have a fixed mindset or do you have a growth mindset? Are you willing to learn? Are you willing to grow? Are you willing to develop? If you have that, yes, things are not fixed. You'll continue to learn and grow and develop. Now, that being said, there are certain attributes that are wired in your biology. They're hardwired into your biology. It's in your autonomic nervous system. So we talk about your fight or flight response, right? Everyone has that. You're born, your fight or flight response, you're born with it. Right? That's never going to change throughout your life. What is going to change is your response to it, right? You're going to allow your conscious mind to be able to override your biology. When I think about myself, when I was younger in life, younger in career, and there was a fresher moment, I would probably react out of that through my biology. Right. In fact, you know, I left South Africa 28 years ago, and you know, my mom still thinks about me and the version of me from 28 years ago. So if you ask my mom to describe me, she describes me probably at that version, like, oh, you know, he'll get angry and he'll outburst and he'll just yell at you. And you know, yeah, because 30 years ago, I was reacting out of my biology. I didn't have the level of awareness that I have today. You know, fast forward, I have more awareness. So I'm more measured, I'm more thoughtful, I'm more intentional. My biology still gets triggered, but I now have better tools to be able to override my biology. So my reactions are not so so explosive. Right. And so I don't think it's fixed. I do think we can learn and grow and evolve, but we need to start with awareness and understand what is happening in our biology under pressure, under stress when we are pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

So I think that's such an interesting topic because I think self-awareness is truly one of the hardest parts of any of the self-work that we do. But I think a lot of people don't know how to start to get there. Yeah. And so for you, it doesn't necessarily have to be like a play-by-play on what your journey looked like. But obviously, I think you know you're saying that you today is fairly different than you 28 years ago. And so, what were some of the steps that you took to gain some more self-awareness around your reactions?

SPEAKER_02 17:38

You know, I like to say 28 years ago, I figured out the playbook and I had the answer manual, right? And so therefore I did this, I did this, I did this. Like I it was organic, it was circumstantial, it was one step at a time. I would say the biggest thing that I had at that time was curiosity, right? And and a and a belief that I wasn't always right, that I needed to treat everything that I say as a hypothesis. Like it's my view, my perspective may not be the right one. So I should be open to other views and that kind of stuff. So I just had that mindset 28 years ago. Now, fast forward as I reflected along my journey, I think, you know, for me, there's there was a logical flow that happened. It wasn't intentional 28 years ago, but now we've mapped it. Now it's intentional. And for me, it's like, look, what's the outcome we seek? The outcome we seek is to be situationally flexible based on whatever the situation is. I want to be adaptive, I want to be flexible to what's going on, right? In leadership context, we say, oh, be situationally flexible and situational leadership. What does that even mean and how do you build it? And it's such a nebulous term, right? And so for me, the path to that is you start with self-awareness. It's deeply introspective. You're starting to look at yourself, it's starting to understand your biology. What is going on in your biology when you are under pressure, when you are under stress, what does your biology do? And paying attention to your biology. So self-awareness. The next step is once you have the awareness for what's happening in your biology, it's self-management and self-regulation. So, what do I do about this thing? Right? If I know that, you know, if somebody somebody looks at me funny, that's going to trigger me, right? And so, okay, what am I going to do about this when I know I'm triggered? Once you have that, the next evolution is situational awareness. Okay, what's the situation? What's happening for other people? What are other people's reactions when they are triggered? And so in this world, you're starting to become an observer, right? I want to deputize everybody and say, become an observer. One of the biggest skills you need to have is be an observer of the environment. Just observe what's happening. No judgment, just observation, understanding. Once you observe the environment to understand, now you can be situationally flexible and adaptive. All right. So, so organically, that's been the journey I've I've been on. Now, upon reflection, I can say that. But you know, 30 years ago, I didn't have this map and say, now let's go and do it. Now that now I have the map, I'm just being more intentional about it.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

So, you know, I think one of the hardest parts about self-awareness is the

Self-Awareness Tools That Actually Work

SPEAKER_00 20:30

fact that our ego is like strong and rude. And your ego doesn't want to be wrong, right? So your ego doesn't necessarily love self-examination because when you start to get into self-examination, you've got to start looking at like, oh gosh, here are all the places I've caused harm. Here are all the places that my parents taught me harm. Here are all the ways that their parents' parents taught them harm. And so I guess when you're thinking about this journey for you, what role did your ego play in maybe being your enemy or your friend, whichever it was? How did your ego show up in this journey?

SPEAKER_02 21:04

I would say earlier in career, lots of ego, right? I was in a call with someone yesterday, and we were talking about some, you know, my title and they wanted to use it in some promo stuff. And you know, what I said to them is, I've had my ego beaten out of my heart a long time ago. Right. So I'm I'm now meaning like I'm now at a point where I don't care about these things. Like it, my ego is not sensitive anymore, but it used to be. But this has come with awareness. So now let me bring some brain science into this conversation, and I won't, I won't get too nerdy about it, right? No, please deal. The simple brain science is in our brain, we have this little thing called an amygdala. It's the size of a P, right? And this thing is just scanning for threats. That's all it's doing. It's looking for threats, it's looking for risk, and it's looking for any type of risk, and it treats that risk as if it's a life or death risk. Every risk treats it as if it's life or death. The reality as humans, we actually have two types of risks. The first type is real life and death. It's true life and death risk, right? Hey, you know, you're in a car accident or somebody's about to, you know, shoot at you or something. That's a life and death risk. In that case, we say let your biology do whatever it wants to do. Your biology has been designed to protect you. That's okay. The second type of risk is a risk to your identity, it's a risk to your reputation, it's a risk to your ego. Right. And so what happens is absent awareness, we our biology will treat that risk as if it's a life and death risk. Right. And this is where we want to bring awareness. So maybe 30 years ago, if we were having this call, right? And at the end of this live session, like, hey, let's get some feedback. And people are like, oh, that was terrible. That guy sat. It was nasty. If I got that feedback 30 years ago, my response to that would be like life and death. Like, oh my God, my life is over. Like people hate me. This is nasty. I did a terrible job. Like you just get into your biology about it. However, with awareness, awareness now brings about the option for choice. We get to choose our response, right? You know, if the feedback is that was a terrible waste of time, it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt my ego. It's going to feel bad. I'm going to feel bad. Like we can't help that. But it's not life and death. I will still continue to move on. I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll be just fine. Right. And so understanding what our biology is doing and separating this ego from life and death risk. It's like it's not life and death. So let's stop treating every impact to our ego, to our reputation as if it's life or death. It's not.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Gosh, what does it say about my biology if I have literally zero survival instinct? I like have the survival skills of like a broccoli. So probably not great. I've learned that traveling, that like I just could fall off a cliff and I wouldn't, I wouldn't even realize it was happening. So, you know, to circle back to one of the things that we talked about at the very beginning of this, we talked about again, money buys happiness to a certain extent, right? Because again, we live in a world that food, shelter, water are basic human rights, basic human needs, but they're not always accessible. That being said, I think a lot of people optimize their lives for success in the form of money. And one of the things I've noticed about myself, right? And I've had to really untrain this version of me, but when I was really early in my career, it was first, once I get six figures, I'll feel okay. And then you get the six figures and you're like, well, if it's just 125. And then once you get 125, you're like, maybe just get to 160. And you just do that for never and never and ever and never. But you do that in lots of ways, right? You do it with your salary, you do it with your title, you do it within the house that you live in. You buy a house and you're like, well, I saw this house on Instagram. So if I could just make my kitchen look like that, or if I could just buy a slightly bigger house or a slightly nicer car. I guess when we think about the ways in which we think of optimizing our lives, it's fairly consumable. We try to make our lives consumable to the world around us, but we're not actually touching them. And so I would love to hear what people miss out on in terms of well-being and experiences when we only optimize for the external, but never the internal.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

Yeah. I think what started out as something well-intentioned has actually had the reverse effect of that. It's a bit of a paradox. So if you think about since the time we are all young and little, right, from the youngest of eight, our parents want us to be independent. Like you need to be independent. You need to aspire to financial independence, right? You need to be financially independent. So we've been brought up and raised up all about independence and become financially independent. And there's no end to this notion of independence. You know, I remember growing up in South Africa in, you know, lower income, middle-income community, right? And people were struggling to put food on the table or meet the monthly, you know, at the end of the month, you're waiting for that monthly paycheck and you're stretching, you're stretching your money. But there was joy and happiness because there was interdependence. Everyone rallied together as a community, as a network. You talk about World Cup, growing up, watching the World Cup in South Africa, we would all be outside at the neighbor's house, sitting on Coke bottle crates, uh, watching a makeshift TV screen, watching the World Cup. And there's joy and there's energy and there's camaraderie. It's been amazing. But this notion to force everyone to a level of independence, you start to break those bonds, you start to break those relationships with people. The relationships we we have with people has been scientifically proven as having one of the largest protective barriers on our well-being. Yet our desire to be independent is stripping the very essence of what we need. We need people, we need community, we need belonging. But because we seek this independence, we're actually killing all of the things that we thrive for. And then to get to this independence, we're like, I'm willing to do whatever it takes. Like the hustle culture, right? I'm willing to do whatever it takes. I'm gonna work out, I'm gonna know sleep, I'll sleep when I die. I don't need to sleep, I only need four or five hours worth of sleep. Like I was that guy. I was that guy 20, 25, 30 years ago. It's silly, right? And so what you end up doing in the pursuit of this independence, you start to give up all of the things that make you deeply human. You give up your sleep, you give up your recovery, you give up your energy, and then you bring in habits, all of the bad habits that make you feel good, right? You need you need dopamine, you need a dopamine head. You want to you all the feel-good stuff. And so, what is that? It is the bad food, it is the junk food, it is the alcohol,

Hustle Culture, Independence, And Burnout

SPEAKER_02 28:10

it is all of those things that make you feel good. And so now you introduce these bad habits that put you in a well-being spiral. It's just compounding and making things worse versus making things better, all because we're pursuing independence.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Well, and I think even more so, right? Like now dopamine is in my pocket. I can go on and I can order whatever I want. But even more so, I think people forget that we also use conflict for dopamine. And when we handle conflict in a poor way, it comes out as dopamine. When you get on the internet and you argue with that random stranger on the internet, it feels good in the moment because your brain gets that little dose of, ha ha, I have the upper hand. And so now you have all this access to your bad habits, but I think you're so on the money about we are taught hyper-independence. And so, in that hyper-independence, we create our whole lives around the idea of being productive. How much can I produce? How many hours can I work? How many hours can I not sleep to make sure I get work done? I know one of the hardest things for me is being able to sit on my couch and watch TV without my laptop because I am really bad at being like, I could just be like getting some stuff done right now because I feel like I always have to be getting stuff done. But I guess how does that impact us when all of our lives are centered around productivity instead of health or well-being or just like rest? How does that impact us as the years kind of you know accumulate on one another?

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Well, I think we have to start questioning this definition of productivity. Because what is productivity? I think it's busyness, right? And so we use this was the word productivity sounds so amazing. Oh, I'm productive. You're not productive, you're just busy. You're just busy doing activities, right? But companies, organizations are based around activity management. Like we call it activity-based, right? Activity-based work. And so we we just care for activity. I bet, you know, on this stream, almost everyone, you know, listening into the stream, think about yourself. If you have five minutes before a call, right? You're about to get on a Teams call or a Zoom call, and you have five minutes of free time before the call. What do you do with that five minutes? We've been conditioned that even that we we can't just be. We don't know how to just be and just sit with ourselves for five minutes, right? What we want to do is, oh, I need to do something. I need to fill this time. I'll reply to this email, I'll open to this, I'll reply to Slack. I have to do something, I have to be busy, right? And and what we've what we've taken out is the joy of just being with yourself, being introspective in that self. Use that five minutes as a micro recovery moment, right? But we've been conditioned, and not just conditioned, we've been managed to activity. What's the volume of activity? What's the volume of throughput? You know, we we get, you know, we there are companies that I know that are men measuring response times, right? How long does it take before the person replies to an email? How long does it take before a person replies to a slack message? And and so this is learned helplessness. This is conditioning. We are we are removing people's ability to just be and find those moments of recovery, those moments of respite that you need, and your our biology needs it. Right? We've just beaten it out of people.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

And I think even, you know, a step further, like there are some organizations where I know someone who works for a healthcare company and they have a toddler. And when they go to the bathroom, they make their toddler like play with the mouse. So that way it doesn't look like they weren't at their desk. And that feels wild to me because I don't know any, I don't know any humans who are going eight hours without peeing. Like, I just I should as an adult be able to be like, you know what, I have to go to the bathroom. I'm gonna go to the bathroom and then I'm gonna come back. I'm gonna go back to my like silly little emails. I'm currently doing a like what I'm calling a 21-day corporate anarchy challenge, which is every day like just setting a new boundary with work. And today's boundary is actually exactly what you just said. When you have a 10-minute block going outside or whatever, without your phone. And you would be surprised how many people were like, Well, can I bring my phone to be on social media? No, can I bring my phone to go on to play music? No, you have to just go outside by yourself with a bottle of water, maybe, because I do believe in hydration. But I was like, gosh, how many of us are so reliant on technology? And I'm I'm even guilty of it. I had a conversation last week with someone who they run like 20-some miles a day. And I was like, Oh, but what do you listen to? And they were like, I don't. And I was like, you run for 20 miles in silence. And he was like, Yeah, I solve problems. I like think about what's going on in my day, and I was horrified. But then I had to think about like, why am I why am I horrified? Why would I be uncomfortable spending that much time in my brain?

SPEAKER_02 32:58

Yeah, so I'll I'll build on that. So I'm also that guy, right? I run, you know, 25 to 30 miles a week, and I do not listen to podcasts. Like everyone is podcast obsessed, right? And it's like, oh, you know, what podcast? What podcast? Everyone wants to listen to a podcast. I'm like, why? You're out on a run, enjoy nature, enjoy being with yourself. Why do we feel the need? I need to be learning something at or or ingesting something in every moment. So actually, when I'm on a run, I do listen to music, but I'm actually not paying attention to the music. The music creates white noise for me to tune out everything that's happening around me. And it actually gets me to a meditative state, right? And you know, my definition of meditation is rhythmic breathing. Running is the best form of that. You're breathing rhythmically. But Mary, I can tell you when I'm on a run, especially a longer run, I'm so in my own mind, my own consciousness, my own. I'm solving world hunger at that point. The clarity of thought at that point is incredible because I'm not listening to a podcast, I'm not ingesting third-party stimuli. It's just me and myself, right? The music has created the white noise I need for me to be contained in myself. And I would just encourage everyone, find that version for yourself. Like, what are the things? Think about rhythmic breathing. What are the things that give you that? I think singing is one of those, right? I mean, you can see I'm set up like in a music vibe environment like now. No one wants to ever hear me sing, believe me, right? But I do, right? And and and again, the the science around singing and what that does for you. You know, you're singing in in key and it creates sort of rhythmic breathing again. What it does to your biology, your brain, your mindset is incredible. We need to go back to those moments. And I'm not saying stop working. Look, I work hard, I'm probably working harder than I ever did, but I've built in moments of recovery, right? I'm I'm I have that schedule throughout my day and I'm doing it all the time, which actually has improved my overall performance. It has improved my entire cognitive capability, right? It's just because now I'm being more intentional about it.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

So I think it's interesting. I have never considered listening to a podcast while I'm working out. That sounds horrific to me. I also fundamentally believe we should have to take a test before we are given a podcast microphone. But I start to wonder do people find comfort in being a part of conversation that they do not have to engage in because we're not having enough conversation person to person these days. So much of it is through text message, and so much of it is through email and Slack and all of these things where it's not person to person. But when you're it's like in a podcast, you're like a private third party in a conversation. And so I wonder if there's some level of comfort in that. But I want to circle back to you planning rest into your calendar. I think that is something that people really miss out on. Is that for me, my gym sessions, like people look at my calendar and be like, why is the gym on there? You know you're gonna go. But it's not about me knowing if I'm gonna go. It's that I would never miss a meeting with you. So why would I be willing to miss a meeting with myself?

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

So talk to me a little bit about how you have worked rest and recovery into your calendar while still feeling like you are getting work done and you're still working harder than you have, because again, business ownership is not for the week.

SPEAKER_02 36:28

Yeah, look, I I we have to change our association with certain words, right? Words, words have meaning and different meaning to different people. And so you use the word rest. I'm resting, or you must be lazy. Right? That's you know it has those types of connotations. I'm like, yeah, I don't use the word rest. I'm recovering. You know why? Because I went hard and now I need to recover. Right? I did something that put in a lot of effort, I need to recover, right? If you think about a lion, like I know you were in Africa recently, right? And so if you think about a lion, a lion rests for most of the day. But when they are attacking their prey, in that moment, their level of focus, energy, speed, all of that is at the topmost level, but they can't perform at that level if it wasn't for all of the rest they put in. Right. So you have to think about it. If you want to behave and operate like a lion, if you want to be the lion of your work, well, where was the rest and recovery to support that, that effort, right? And so it doesn't mean bum around and lay around and you know take three hour siestas in the afternoon. That would be lovely if you've been if you're in a position to do that. No, but how do you build in those micro moments, right? You'll be amazed. If you have 10 minutes before a meeting, go and take a walk. Like if if if anyone takes anything out of today's live session, a 10-minute walk outside, the amount it can do for your overall well-being is incredible, right? And so I do that all the time. I'm I'm moving all the time. I'm creating these micro moments, I'm going outside, I'm walking outside. Yeah, it's okay to take a team meeting outside, right? It's like, hey, you want to meet with me? Yeah, I'm gonna go on a walk, come with me on a walk, right? So I'm not, we don't have to be binary about everything, right? We just talked about, you know, when you're outside, don't take your work with you. Yes, do that as well. That doesn't mean if you do take your work with you, it's bad.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 38:27

It's like I would rather go on a walk with someone than sit at my desk and be on a Teams call or a Zoom call. Right? So we should just think about, and it's deeply individual. Like, what are the things that gives your biology a recovery? Maybe it's singing. Go find a quiet room and just sing, go sit in the car and just sing. You know, I one of the things I'm like, if for those people that commute to work, just put your music on to full blast and sing in the morning, sing, sing, yell at the top of your voice in your car to yourself. It'll change your entire biology and posture when you show up into the office. Right? And so I do think it's about being intentional and and if you can schedule it, wonderful for those people that have the ability to build a nap into their day. Now, when I say nap, I mean nap, I don't mean sleep.

unknown 39:20

Right?

SPEAKER_02 39:21

Again, the science around this is 20 minutes. You need a 20-minute nap and try to do it like between, I would say, one and two are the good sort of time zones to do it like after four, it's too late, it's gonna mess with your nighttime sleep. Longer is not good. But to the extent you can build in a nap within that, even if the the goal of the nap is you're not gonna fall asleep, like you're not gonna get into deep REM sleep, right? But even that provides a little bit of reset for people. So for those that that have the ability to do it, I would.

SPEAKER_00 39:53

I love a nap and I specifically love a car nap. Like I will leave my house to go sit in my car and nap. But I also, for me, the best thing I ever bought myself was a hammock.

Resilience Gets Weaponized At Work

SPEAKER_00 40:05

Like that is just the best thing I've ever I've ever done in my whole life, truly. So, you know, one of the things about Boston is you work with high pressure teams, right? You work with teams who do hard work day to day. But I would love to hear a little bit about how do we know the difference between pressure that is day-to-day, because work is hard, right? Using our brains is hard work a lot of the time, versus organizations who are truly putting undue, unnecessary amounts of pressure that are triggering our nervous systems a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 40:36

Yeah. Yeah, look, we we do work with high pressure environments. We work a lot with first responders, so fire departments, police departments, emergency response, healthcare professionals. We work with some of the largest companies in the world as well. So these are super high pressure environments. So I think about a firefighter or a police officer, like that super high, high pressure kind of environment. So we spend a lot of time understanding their biology, understanding their psychology, and like what are the things we need to help them, be excellent under pressure in the moment of pressure, and what are the things we can help them outside of that moment from a rest, recovery, well-being perspective, so that they can be excellent under pressure in the moment of pressure. What has happened in the enterprise context? Here's the problem, right? It's anytime you have a leader who has intention, they will put the environment in tension. Right? So you have boards, you have founders, you have executives that have big intentions. We want to grow the company, we want to reduce the size of our work, or we want to do these things. These are big intentions, and that's going to naturally create tension in the environment. There's never been a better time in the history of the world to be alive than right now. Yet the level of stress and pressure we feel has never been higher than ever before, right? And it's because of this notion of ambition and intention and what's that's that's doing for people. And I think we're putting unreasonable pressure on people because of this word productivity. We want people to be productive. We need to start measuring productive and what's the unit cost of productivity? And we start to measure people at a unit level, which is unreasonable. Again, you're treating them like machinery, you're treating them like robots. Instead of measuring the activities, why don't we start to measure the things that contribute to productivity? Let's start to measure the level of trust. Let's try to measure the level of psychological safety. Let's start to measure the level of recovery that people have in their given day. Nobody measures any of those things. We'd rather measure how many meetings we have and you know, do we have agendas, two meetings, and does the meeting finish in time? And like we're measuring activity again. And that starts to create a compounding spiral, right? It's just activity upon activity, which is putting undue pressure on people. And then we we the the sort of greatest cheat code to get out of it is resilience. We just need people to be more resilient. That is what ends up happening.

SPEAKER_00 43:25

So, you know, resilience is a word that we talk about fairly often on this show. So I would love to hear your take on the word resilience before I ask maybe a couple more questions about it.

SPEAKER_02 43:37

I do believe that as individuals, we want to develop a higher degree of resilience so that we can manage pressure and be excellent under pressure. However, this term resilience has been weaponized. Leaders, managers have weaponized this word in that people just need to be more resilient. I'm going to put more stuff on their plate. I'm going to treat them poorly. I'm going to abuse them. I'm going to micromanage them. I'm just going to work them to death. And they just need to be more resilient. So, hey, it's a you problem. It's not a me problem. Right? It's like that is unfair. That is not what leadership looks like. Right? What leaders need to do is yes, help your teams be more resilient. Resilient, you see, is not something you demand. And so what's happening in the world right now is managers and leaders are just telling people you need to be more resilient, which means you need to be more accepting of the things I'm shoving down your throat. Right. So we've weaponized this term. The reality is we need to develop programs, practices, habits that build resiliency for people. And those things are all the well-being categories. But what we've done with well-being, we've also outsourced that to HR. Within every organization, we I love HR professionals, right? But we've put this unfair burden and responsibility on them. Oh, if it's a well-being thing, it's your problem. No, it's not. Every manager and leader in an organization has direct responsibility and accountability for the well-being of their people and therefore helping their people have a higher level of resilience. But that's not what's happening right now. Right? It's easier to outsource the problem. Oh, that's an HR thing.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

Well, that's funny because I think people forget, right? Like, yes, am I capable of standing up a well-being program, a wellness program? Absolutely. However, well-being has a lot to do with how people feel about their work day in and day out. Like, tell me how your team feels at Sunday nights at 9.30 p.m. It has a lot to do with the manager they report to, which in 98% of the cases is not HMR unless they are also HMR. And I think people forget that because again, that's a big burden, right? To make sure that you are contributing kindly to people's well-being, knowing that you're not always going to get it right. It's much easier to be like, well, we'll give it to HR. And if people hate it here, it's HMR's problem. But, you know, I think one of the things that really frustrates me about the resilience topic is I think a lot of people are setting resilience and not understanding that the resilience they're forcing is just contributing to their team's burnout. Yes. And then all of the things that you wanted, all that high performance, all that innovation, all that productivity goes out the window because people don't perform well when they are burnt out. And so if you were talking to a leader today, how would you help them understand the repercussions of burnout and also recognizing it in their teams?

SPEAKER_02 46:47

Yeah. Look, uh people understand athletics and athletes and professional athletes. So I just use the analogy of a professional athlete, right? I'm like, pick your sport. Allow them to pick the sport, whatever sport you want. You want golf, you want tennis, you want soccer, you want football, whatever. Pick whatever your professional athlete is. And let's go to the makeup of that professional athlete, right? You want your team, your individuals on your team to perform at a master professional athlete level. Agreed. Let's do that. Now, what are the things that help them contribute to that? One is practice. We've got to allow them to practice. So, are you creating opportunities for your people to actually just practice stuff? The answer is no. Right? You you they are playing games all the time, life. Like they, they, they, they, it's nonstop, like perform, perform, perform. There's no opportunity to go and practice yourself. There's no opportunity to practice your volley, right? There's no practice, there's no time allocated for practice. Practice is what creates growth, learning, development, those types of things. So you haven't built that in. The second is these professional athletes have have recovery, right? Have you built in a program that creates recovery? Practice and recovery are the two things that create resilience. Right? If I let's use tennis as an analogy, right? If I'm playing a tennis player who's got an amazing first serve, right? How do I become more resilient to that? How do I manage? I've got to practice. Right. So, what are the practices, habits we are allowing our people to do? And that's not what's happening. And so for me, it's sitting down with the leader and say, you want a high performance person, amazing. You want to be have them be resilient to the things that are going on in the environment. Understood, what's the number one contributor to creating a more resilient person? Recovery practice. And are you incorporating any of that into your workflows? Jordan says, No. We have an employee. The answers, oh yeah, we have an EAP. That is not built into the workflow. You need these things to be built into the workflow. You know, we've become obsessed with efficient meetings. Like my pet peeve right now is why does every meeting need to be efficient? We need an agenda, we need to start on time, we need to have on time, and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We've taken the humanity out of meetings. You know, when I was at Starbucks, right, people thought it was funny at the time. I thought it was the most beautiful thing. We started every single meeting with the coffee tasting. We would brew a French press of coffee, we would sit around for the first five, 10 minutes, we would slurp the coffee, we'll talk about the coffee, we'll that created a moment of connection, right? We we connected with each other as human beings for the first five, 10 minutes of the meeting. And the rest of the meeting was just amazing. You were able to do amazing things because you first created connection. And what we've done is we've become robots. We've taken all of that moments of connection out of our daily workflow, right? And and that coffee tasting was a human connection moment which creates resilience. We've stripped that out of our organizations. We need to put that back.

SPEAKER_00 50:01

So it's no secret that I fundamentally believe that the future of work is more human, not less. And so, you know, I guess when you think about the future of work, right? Like there's never a world in which we now exist where AI doesn't exist beside us. So unfortunately, regardless of your feelings on AI, if you continue to stay in corporate America, it is something that you will exist alongside. And so I guess for you, thinking about how that changes what work looks like, what do you think are some of the human skills that will become more valuable as we head into the

The Future Of Work Stays Human

SPEAKER_00 50:35

next decade or so?

SPEAKER_02 50:36

Yeah. I think multiple, right? The first is ambition. AI doesn't wake up in the morning and say, hey, let's put, let's send someone to Mars. AI doesn't wake up in the morning and say, hey, let's build a new company that's going to sell ABC product. AI doesn't wake up to do that. AI can help you figure out how to do that. It can figure out a plan to do that, but it doesn't wake up in the morning with ambitions humans do. Right. So we the ones that start with, okay, what do I want to achieve there? So it starts there. It's like, let's be world class, it's creating ambition. The second thing is judgment, right? AI can AI can give you answers, AI can give you responses, AI is not bringing judgment. Right. And so, you know, the phrase in AI world is, you know, human in the loop. Yes, absolutely there needs to be human in the loop, right? Because that's where the judgment side comes into play. But here's the thing this whole notion of judgment is again a paradox with the concept of empowerment. How can you apply allow people human judgment if they're not empowered? So we know it needs to go back as we build the future organization. How are we building organizations where people are genuinely more empowered? They have more autonomy so they can do what humans were designed to do, bring better judgment because AI can't do that. Yes, they'll use AI for the tasks, but ultimately they need judgment to do that. And then the last is from a creativity perspective, bringing meaning to things. People give meaning to things. This is good, this is bad, I like this, I don't like this. AI can generate, like we, you know, this entire live session, we could have had an AI generator live session for us, right? But we bring the meaning to it, we bring the experience and the expertise. We need organizations to allow that to come through, right? And so for me, it's like allow the robots to do the robotic work. Yes, let's look at what are humans doing that are demeaning that we shouldn't be doing. Yes, have the robots do that, but let's also create workflows where people are empowered to do the human things. Oh, that's amazing. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

Could AI bring a cat onto the screen? I think not.

SPEAKER_02 52:53

No, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 52:55

So, you know, the other thing is, and I I heard you say it a little bit, right? Like AI will automate the tasks. It can't automate the human. How do we continue to empower humans alongside AI so that we don't lose our humanity, but we can actually spend more time being human?

SPEAKER_02 53:12

It's look, I don't think there's a there's a clinical silver bullet answer. Like, here's the answer, and here's how we we have to do it. I actually think it starts with an intention and a declaration to do that, right? So, you know, 60 plus years ago, we put a person on the moon. Well, how did you put a person on the moon? You made a declaration, and that declaration at that point is within the next decade, we will put a person on the moon. Within companies, we have to have the same declaration. We declare that people well-being, people empowerment, humanizing the work that people do. I love that. That is so awesome. So we have to start by setting that intention. I think it starts there. Most organizations don't even set that intention. Then it's about figuring out how are you creating, you know, what AI allows us to do is change everything. Like what needs to change everything? The ways of working, the way you structure, the way you organize things. AI, the beauty of AI is it allows us to have a flat organization. Like the first thing that needs to go is the hierarchy, right? You know, you go and you work with organizations, and like some companies have N through 11. Like you have 11 layers of hierarchy, some even more. It's like, yeah, in this car, can we flatten the organization? Can we empower more people and change the human design of this thing? But for me, it starts with an intention. They really, it and that intention needs to come from the top.

SPEAKER_00 54:43

That was one of my favorite projects I ever worked on. I worked with an organization to, I mean, obviously, there's still always going to be power dynamics, right? Because there's someone who can't get fired. But I worked with an organization to remove like the hierarchy and decision making and allowed decision making to happen at the SME level versus the person with the most power level. And the way that it changed, the way they were able to work and problem solve completely changed because people who didn't have the power suddenly were like, oh, I'm supposed to talk about this because I'm actually the subject matter expert. People become more empowered when they feel like they have a say. And it was just, it was really awesome to watch how that manifested. But what are some of the other ways that you think humans could build for humans rather than building simply for the idea of like what a human can produce?

SPEAKER_02 55:29

Yeah, I again back to the intention, but I think it's starting to understand yourself. Like take the time to understand yourself, take the time to understand the other humans, right? The biggest issue we have is humans don't understand other humans, right? Think about when when you're out at a bar or a coffee shop and people are talking about work and they're bitching about work, let's be honest, right? People are bitching about work. If you actually listen carefully, they're not bitching about their work, they're bitching about somebody at work, right? It's either a colleague, a manager, a boss, or something like that, right? So what you have is besides the workflows, there's just a lot of human friction that exists right now. Right. And I think it needs to start with we need to remove the friction, right? And so, how do we start to create more interdependent teams? Right. And it starts by people understanding what are the foundations for building trust. It is equal parts competency and equal parts sincerity. And so, how are we managing those things to create more trusted relationships, to create more connections? Because ultimately the biggest breakdown you have in the organizations right now is friction. AI is removing the technology friction, but the human friction is still there. Right. And so it starts by being more intentional about how do we remove the human friction, and that starts by improving the relationships with people, and that starts by creating trust.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

I love that. Well, we are at time, but I would love for you to give us a little bit of okay, if people want to work with you, because this was a very interesting topic, as we can see by the comments. Where can people find you? How can they work with you? What are some things you've got going on these days where people could, you know, join in with you?

SPEAKER_02 57:19

Yeah, look, uh, a few things I'm easy to find online, right? On the socials and LinkedIn's pretty, pretty easy to reach me. Connect with me, reach out, DM me. You know, I get a lot of those, but if you DM me and you reference this live, I'll I'll engage with you. I'm like I engage with everyone, right? So online, I'm available. The other thing you can do is go to vasana.ai. If you look at my my sort of founder title, that's how you spell vasana.ai. Just go online, go to the website, and you know, you can learn more about that. We also have a masterclass tab on the website. You know, that's something Maddie, you and I will be talking about later and releasing more of it. But you and I have been collaborating on a on a masterclass that we want to announce in the in the near future. That, you know, it's a it's a six-session, highly curated masterclass session that people can come in and learn more about themselves and learn how to do that. And so they can learn more about the masterclass on on the platform. And people can sign up if that's something that they're interested in, or if they're interested in having us do this for their team or their organization, we can have a separate uh call about that. But um, I'm fairly accessible, easy to for people to reach and connect with me.

SPEAKER_00 58:31

Well, thank you so much for hanging out. And I heard through the grapevine that if you reach out to me, I can give you a promo code.

SPEAKER_02 58:40

Yes, Maddie does have a special promo code that um that will help with the pricing of the product.

SPEAKER_00 58:48

So very excited to work with you. So excited that you I got to have you on Crash Out with me, even though your DMs are so busy. So thank you for hanging out. I really appreciate it. And for you who are listening via podcast, if you're looking for the links to either LinkedIn or the masterclass, you can find it in the great big wall of text below us. But for everyone else, thank you so much for crashing out with me today. It's so great to be back after a couple of weeks. And I really appreciate you hanging out with me and giving us a little bit of your brain. You are so, so, so, so brilliant. And I am deeply grateful to know you, deeply, deeply grateful to have you on the show. But thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 59:26

Yeah, right back at you. Have an amazing rest of your day, everyone. Hope we take care. Bye bye.