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The Smoke Trail, hosted by Smoke Wallin, is a journey into awakening consciousness, weaving authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests to unlock high performance and perfect health. Each episode delves into spirituality, leadership, and transformation, offering tools to transcend trauma and find your bliss along the way. It’s a reflective space for achieving peak potential and inner peace in a distraction-filled world.
Welcome to the Smoke Trail hosted by Smoke Wallin. Join Smoke on a unique journey of awakening consciousness, sharing authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests. Explore spirituality, leadership, and transformation, tools to elevate your path.
Smoke:Hi, welcome to the Smoke Trail. This episode I thought we would just answer some questions. I have had the opportunity to speak to global business groups now around the world over the last several weeks. I spoke to an amazing group in Bangkok, Thailand. Spoke to a group in Stona.
Smoke:Last month, I had a group in San Francisco. And between those live sessions and some of the questions I've gotten from the smoke trail, In the first from the first fifteen episodes, we had a number of questions. So I kind of consolidated the questions and I thought I'd work through some of them today and see if we can, clear a few things up. The first one is meditation for leadership. How can leaders fit meditation into the busy schedules?
Smoke:What benefits have you seen? So I get this question a lot. I actually was talking to one CEO after my talk last week who said, Yeah, it sounds good but like what, you know, what is the real benefit? And something came to me that I thought was useful and seemed to be very useful for that person to understand. And that was that the, you know, if you ask yourself the simple question is, are you better or worse off if you can make decisions without emotion?
Smoke:So whatever it is, an irate customer, an employee who's got issues, an investor who's putting pressure on you, your board, you know, competitors doing something in the marketplace. You know, all the things that happen running a business, running a company, or frankly just being alive, right? All the things that happen in our day to day functioning. The question is, would we be better off if we had a moment to think and make a decision with or without emotion? So it doesn't mean that emotions don't come up For all of us, they do.
Smoke:That's part of being human. But if we can take a moment and we have a gap between the stimulus, whatever the situation is, and the response, which is, you know, what we do, and filter out the emotion and just look at what are all the options. You know, I think everyone can agree that we'll come to a better decision. So I bring this up in the answer to the meditation because a direct result of building a meditation practice and getting good at it is your ability to separate yourself from the emotions that you're experiencing, the thoughts that are coming up and your response. So in meditation, and this is not a course on meditation and there's certainly a lot of ways to get there, but you know the basic premise is you get to a point where your mind is calm and you just become the witness to your thoughts and emotions.
Smoke:And once you get there, you can, you observe them. You can say, oh, that's a good thought, swipe left. That's not a good thought, swipe right. That's a good emotion. That's not an emotion.
Smoke:And I don't mean good in good and bad. I mean something that would serve me right now. So if we are able to have that little gap between stimulus and response and make a conscious choice, then we've got incredible power. Think about the power that you have if each of us, if we could make choices, make decisions in responding to every stimuli no matter how stressful it is, without emotion and with that kind of contemplative calm mind. That's really what meditation, does for leadership and for anyone.
Smoke:And I think it's extremely valuable. I may get into kind of methodologies and ways to get there, but I think that's probably enough on that question. So let me go down to another question. Shifting team mindsets, what are ways leaders can help their teams stay optimistic during tough times? I think that's a good question for this.
Smoke:But, you know, again, I think it ties to the first one, which is being able to think and be calm in tough situations. So the one thing that, you know, separates really strong leaders in tough times is their ability to be, to remain calm when everything is crazy and all the environment is hectic. And typically team members are looking to the leader to be that calmness in the storm. So to the degree you have kind of mastery of your own emotions and thoughts and you're able to stay calm in tough situations, you know, you could, that will be something that reverberates dramatically with your team. So when things are tough and you can stay in a calm place, it spreads to your teammates.
Smoke:And so when a leader isn't able to do that and they panic or they get reactionary, it's very obvious to everyone else. And it becomes very difficult for the team to stay cohesive, to stay optimistic. So I think it's directly tied to that first one. Transforming team dynamics. Can you share examples of how conscious leadership changed team culture?
Smoke:You know, I think, again, building on those first two, to the degree as a leader you're able to demonstrate through your beingness calm and thoughtful responses to all situations. That spreads. And so the team dynamics become that becomes the way they follow. And, you know, literally I've been in situations where I had a leader who was not like that and was very emotional and got very aggressive when things were when things weren't going that person's way. And it all it did was make everybody stressed out and everybody aggressive.
Smoke:So it became like the team was not cohesive. So if you think about it, as the leader is, so shall the team be. So your calmness, your ability to remain present and non responsive gives strength to everyone around you. And we probably all have been in situations, I certainly have, where it wasn't the official leader who was the calm one but it was someone, you know, on the team who could just stay calm in a tough situation, never panicked, and then that person kind of innately becomes the leader. I've been that in my life in different situations where I certainly wasn't the boss or the the person in charge.
Smoke:But because I was able to stay present, stay calm, and wasn't reactionary to the situation, became someone who helped the rest of the team. So any of you, whether you're in a leadership position or you're aspiring leaders, if you can cultivate this presence of mind and this contemplative state where you are not reactionary, you're not a robot, you're not an animal that's just responding to stimuli. You are able to make, you know, choices based on the best information you have knowing that we never have full information. So we're always lacking information, but you can make choices without emotion, with the best information you have, you become, you'll, that's how you become a leader. So the next question is on journaling and gratitude in leadership.
Smoke:How can leaders use journaling or gratitude to boost their consciousness and influence their teams? Well, I have found, I'll just speak from firsthand experience, I have found that I was not a journaler for most of my life and it was not natural to me. But once I started and literally starting is the key, it's not about how much you do, it's about doing it consistently and on a daily basis. So when I started, I was a, you know, just literally it can be, you know, right the day and where you are, the date and just, you know, here's some things that happened yesterday, here's some things that have come up, here's what I'm doing now, Here's what's coming to mind. And, you know, and then let it flow.
Smoke:And things will just it becomes easier and easier. And now it's like I can if I have the time, I can I can write pages and pages? My thoughts just flow. But what I think it does is it helps you with perspective. If you can write down, you know, situations and circumstances and things that have come up for you in the last, you know, day or so that have been, you know, good, bad, indifferent, doesn't matter.
Smoke:Just kind of get them down and how you responded to it. It helps with perspective. It helps you get this contemplated, kind of viewpoint. And, I think it gets it out of your head and onto a piece of paper which I think is key. The next question is using the map of consciousness.
Smoke:And this is referring to David Hawkins, the author of Power versus Force and a bunch of other books that are fantastic resources on his map of consciousness. So how can leaders use David Hawkins' map of consciousness to improve their team's emotional states? Well, I don't know about emotional states. I think what it is the question is really getting at is how is the whole framework in Hawkins Power versus Force and his Map of Consciousness useful to leaders in understanding their teams and understanding their situation and understanding, ways in which they can be the most effective leaders. And it is to me a direct tie.
Smoke:So this is really cool. I think Power versus Force is one of the most important books ever written. Now, if you have not read it, I recommend reading it. And at the very least, even if you don't agree or don't buy into everything that David, puts out there, it gives us a common language, a common framework for understanding consciousness and the mind, ego mind, and how make decisions and how people react. So if you think about the map of consciousness very simply, and I will do it at a level that I think makes sense for this episode, and I'll probably go much deeper in a future episode.
Smoke:But in essence, if you think about the human emotions that start at the very lowest, which is like, you know, you're alive, but you're in despair, fear, shame, moving up the map of consciousness to higher levels of, you know, maybe up to anger, which is a lot more energy, up to neutrality, up to courage, and all the way up to a sense of really up to love, unconditional love, and all the levels above that which are kind of different iterations of unconditional love. The Map of Consciousness goes from zero to a thousand and it's a log 10 scale, which means that every increment is a, it's logarithmic, it's a massive increase. So someone at a hundred, which I think is anger, I don't have it sitting in front of me, is much more, has a lot more power, energy than someone who's at shame or down at a very low level like 20 or 30. So 20 or 30 is 10 times 10 times 10 times that number, right, that many times. A hundred is 10 times 10 times 10, a hundred times.
Smoke:So someone had love, which is 500, is that. It's 10 times 10 times ten, five hundred times. Right? And five forty is unconditional love, so it's a much more powerful than just love. Going all the way up to the highest level, that was during, you know, that Hawkins measured, was kind of the avatars or the leaders that founded religions were created around.
Smoke:So that would be, you know, Jesus and the Buddha and Krishna and Zoroaster, you know, all calibrated at 1,000, which is the highest the map of consciousness goes to. So they're at the highest consciousness level. And the different saints and sages and folks historically have been at different levels. So Meister Eckhart was one of my go to's, you know, in the third you know, around thirteen hundred's, was a Christian mystic and he recalibrated, in the high seven hundreds. Gandhi, who single handedly, a little frail man, with, you know, single handedly essentially defeated the British Empire, which calibrated below 200, which is the dividing line between positive and negative.
Smoke:It's 200, by the way. So if you're below 200, you're in negative territory. If you're above 200, you're in positive territory. And Ghani calibrated in the seven hundreds. So without going down too much of a rabbit hole, that's the framework.
Smoke:And the reason the framework is useful and the reason it's really valuable to you to read that book, and at least understand the understanding or the framing is it tells you about how people are going to react in any given situation based on where their consciousness level is. We grow up believing our thoughts and emotions are ourselves, they're ours. And what one comes to realize at some point is everyone who's depressed, who's operating in a low level of consciousness, which is very low, you know, it's in the you know, depression is like 20 or 30 usually, is operating at very, very low energy level. And their thoughts are the same as each other's. You know, the names change, who did what to them, what why their situation is bad, you know, there's different details that substitute each person's individual circumstance but those thoughts are the same.
Smoke:Same thing with someone who's calibrating at an anger level. They have a lot more energy than someone who's in depression but they're angry at the world, they're angry at situations or angry at people and those thoughts are all the same. As you go up the level of consciousness, these thoughts literally can be interchangeable. And so once you realize that, it's like, okay, so I'm not coming up with these thoughts. They're in the field of where I calibrate and therefore, I'm thinking at that level.
Smoke:Now, how does that translate to how it's useful for someone in leadership? Well, if you understand this well and you understand the levels of consciousness and you understand the telltale signs of how each level thinks and the typical thoughts that are coming and the way that they view the world, right, and the attractions and aversions that they have at these different levels, then one can anticipate how someone will behave in any given situation. So how is that useful? Well, if I am managing a team and I can pretty quickly assess where my team members are in the level of consciousness, I know how I need to talk to them, how I need to bring them along, how I need to lead them. Because you can only see and understand the level of consciousness that you are at and below.
Smoke:So if you're at, you know, love at 500, you can literally see all the levels of consciousness down below. You can help a lot of people. You can understand people who are in depression or in different, these different levels. And you can calibrate your responses to how they are seeing the world. But you can't see above you.
Smoke:So it's really interesting. So I say this with all humility, but the more I grow in consciousness, the more I understand, the more I know I don't know. And that is I'm aware that there are levels above me at all times. So it's really an interesting thing, like the more conscious you get, the more clear it is that there's always more. Right?
Smoke:There's more awareness. There's more context. So and that context versus content is really important. So what I'm talking about is instead of being a slave to the content of our lives and our situations, content being, you know, this person's in front of me, I'm dealing with this situation, I'm feeling this emotion, I've got this energy flowing, that's content. The context is what's happening here?
Smoke:What is the bigger picture? Why is this happening? What is the context of why this person is yelling at me or why this situation is happening? And in having context, I can detach myself from the automatic response and I can think through what are my options and how I best lead through the situation. So the Map of Consciousness that Hawkins does so beautifully outlines and articulates in all of his books, I've read a dozen or more many times over, The Power versus Force is the first one, the foundational one.
Smoke:If you don't understand that, you are missing a huge piece of information as a leader. If you understand it, whether or not you jump on the path, you buy into everything Hawkins articulates, that's okay. It doesn't matter. You don't have to. But it will be really important to your journey to grasp these different levels of consciousness and how the kinds of thoughts and the kinds of ways people think at these different levels.
Smoke:In fact, you literally can't effectively manage people without understanding this. We do it innately in some ways and I certainly did it, you know, for many years leading people just by my gut instinct and understanding like this person needs this, this person needs that. So we're doing it without the words. But what Power versus Sports and Hawkins framework gives us is an incredible way to, to to frame it, in our minds and also to just put words to the different levels. I think that's, enough for the moment and if I get more requests and it makes sense, I will do I'll put together a more detailed discussion of the Hawkins Scale of Consciousness and how it is useful for someone in a leadership position.
Smoke:But let's start out with go read the book or listen to the audible which I highly recommend. That one is recorded by David Hawkins. The other ones are also recorded by not by David, but they're by a really, really good reader. So they're all really well done. Go do that and then let's come back to this topic and see, what kind of information would be useful for people.
Smoke:But it's extremely important. I'll say one other thing. So just historically and putting Hawkins Map of Consciousness in perspective, there have been historical people who have raised their conscious level tremendously and we would call them saints and sages and in some cases, you know, the Christ incarnate, right, God living version of divinity. And, the books and the resources we have, which are really, really worthwhile, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist writings, the Dhammapara, and his other teachings that have carried on over the years. You know, many of the Christian mystic writings and master Eyster Eckhart would be one of them, John of the Cross, I think, the Teresa of Avila, the Cloud of Unknowing, there's a whole bunch of them.
Smoke:You know, when we look at the and then even fast forward to, the twentieth century and, you know, Roman and Maharshi and some of the other, mystics that lived in, know, in recent decades or, you know, last century, their writings. You know, I think what I would say is they are quite hard to grasp at first and they're not easy to assimilate. Over time, they make more sense, but they're very riddle born. You think about the Zen master and, you know, he says these riddles and then he hits the wax guy on the head with a stick. That's to create an instant awareness and understanding.
Smoke:But I think we create these resistances to the writings and you go back to those ancient writings and they're couched in ancient lore, right? A different era, right? The Buddha lived, you know, six hundred years before Christ, you know, so two thousand six hundred, two thousand seven hundred years ago was his time and the Upanishads predate that. So, you know, you think about the level of of humanity at the time and the cultural, differences that were happening at those times and then also the translations, right? So these were written, some of them were written in Sanskrit, some of them were written in other languages, and then translated over time by people of different levels of capability, intelligence, you know, knowledge.
Smoke:So when you think about that, it makes sense that a lot of these things are archaic and hard to grasp and they don't necessarily speak to a modern reader. That's where Hawkins comes in. Hawkins had the largest psychiatric practice in the country for something like fifty years in New York City and Long Island. He treated the worst of the worst cases, people who were intractable, you know, issues of mental, you know, challenges and depression and all kinds of ailments. And he treated them and he was very, very successful.
Smoke:And, you know, he's kind of famous and you know, he was on TV and doing things in the 70s and maybe even the 60s. And he had this tremendous practice. So he's a guy who started out at a fairly high level of consciousness, became a psychiatrist, built a big practice, you know, dealt with human ego mind issues every which way, you know, super knowledgeable in Freud and Jung and all of the traditional teachings of psychiatry and then broadly medicine and all that. And then became fully enlightened. So he moved out of the he got rid of his practice, sold it, moved to Sedona, you know, I don't think he, I think he says he lived for a decade without really, you know, talking to the outside world just in this enlightened state and then realized with his knowledge and now his enlightened state, he had the opportunity to frame consciousness in a way that no one had ever done before.
Smoke:And that became his dharma, that became his mission. So in Power Versus Force, was his first book, it was really groundbreaking in how he really mapped people's ego mind states of being to consciousness levels and then calibrated them on a power scale. So without getting into more detail, it is a extraordinarily important work of a piece of work and advances our understanding of consciousness at a level that no one had ever done before. And I can't emphasize enough how important this is, at least at the very least, so that you understand the framework. The framework is really important.
Smoke:And you can, again, buy into all of his findings or not. That is actually not required to understand the framework and it to be very useful for you. So that's my not going into detail on Hawkins Power versus Force. I spent more time on it than I would had planned, but I think it's it's that important. Okay.
Smoke:We're on to a couple more questions and then we'll wrap this up, and I'll do more of these if if they're useful. Clearing emotional baggages. How do emotional blockages or blockages. How do emotional blockages impact leadership, and what can leaders do to clear them? Okay.
Smoke:So I call them emotional energy hairballs. This is when we experience something, it can be good or bad but let's just talk in terms of trauma and bad things, and we don't fully process what happened. When we don't finish a process, when we, don't complete an experience, it remains undone and, it goes, it stays in our subconscious. Now our subconscious, many of you have heard this but, you know, I would say, you know, I've heard 10, you know, our awake mind, our conscious mind is like 10%, ninety % subconscious. I think it's a lot higher than that.
Smoke:I'm going to say 1% is our awake mind and 99% of the power is in our subconscious mind. So what does that mean? Our subconscious mind is the power that's connected to divinity. It's actually can manifest anything in this world. It's creating our reality.
Smoke:And, and, but it's the subconscious. Our conscious mind is the one I'm talking to you with. So I'm here, I'm present, I'm speaking to you and I'm awake and I'm conscious and I'm aware of it and I'm aware that I have this giant power below the surface. So uncovering what's in there is about understanding that and then understanding how to program it. So, the waking up is about kind of this process.
Smoke:And I say, and I I know I got that I think from Kent Wilbur, but there's others anyway. We all have to grow up, clean up, and wake up in this life. So what do I mean by that? Growing up is that. It's, you know, taking responsibility, you know, as your person, as an adult person in this world and some take longer than others, some people never grow up.
Smoke:But, you know, there's I'm talking to probably an audience that is growing up or growing up very quickly. Clean up is about that subconscious mind. And so when you ask about clearing emotional blockages, what I'll refer to is the thing, the emotional energy hairballs that are stuck inside, that are stuck in your subconscious that need to be cleaned up. Some refer to the subconscious as karma. I won't go down that path but that is also where it is because it's going to keep coming up, whatever situation you didn't resolve, it's going to keep coming up, keep coming up, keep coming up in different ways until you resolve it.
Smoke:So there's lots of different modalities to doing the cleanup. But I guess the simplest way to think about it is, first we have to want to do this. So once we decide that, it's kind of the spiritual will, I want to raise my consciousness, I want to clean up what's in my shadows. You've heard shadow work. Well, shadow work is simply that, it's what's in my subconscious, it's uncovering those things.
Smoke:And the fear of what's in there is usually much greater than the actual work that going through and putting conscious light on the shadows and cleaning it up and then because at the other end is, it's beautiful. It's a higher level of consciousness. Higher level of consciousness is happiness, joy, bliss. It is living in a state of complete bliss all the time. And that's where I live.
Smoke:So I'm doing this because I want to give I want to help other people who are on the path to try to figure this out. So why am I doing this? I'm doing it because I live in bliss. And how do I how do you get to that point? It's nothing on the outside.
Smoke:It's all about this. Clean up your subconscious, clean up your shadows, work through those and in so doing, you enable, you put the clouds part and the light of divinity shines from within. That's what we're talking about here. So cleaning up blockages. First, spiritual will.
Smoke:Yes, I want to do this. Two, how do I uncover? What are they? I don't even know I had them. I didn't even know I had them until they, till I uncovered them.
Smoke:I literally didn't understand it. You might be in the same boat. Like, I'm fine. I'm doing great. But like, yeah, have some issues, but I don't really know what they are.
Smoke:Okay. There's lots of different ways to get there. Therapy will take you so far. I think therapy is a good thing for people and people that haven't done it, fine. But understand that in therapy you're working within the framework of the ego mind.
Smoke:So you are inside the mind, inside the ego mind. You're understanding things. You're rehashing things. There's definitely value to that. But therapy will never get beyond that.
Smoke:So it's like, it's transcending those issues. It's actually, so therapy can help surface them. That can be useful. I think there are other modalities. One of them is, I have talked to some of the leading experts, psychologists who have psychiatrists who have like gotten into EMDR which is this asynchronous it's a way of loosening up emotional energy hairballs through asynchronous vibration.
Smoke:It used to be lights but now they have like chairs that vibrate asynchronously. And essentially you get into a theta state which is your meditative state, hypnotic state. So you kind of get into a hypnotic state of relaxation. That's when your mind is open. It's where we are from the age of zero to seven.
Smoke:It's where you go when you're in a deep meditation and hypnosis. You're getting into a theta state. So we get into this beta state with a professional and they take you back to, you know, in my case, I did with one expert who took me back to early childhood. So he specializes in infant and early, you know, like literally infant trauma. So take you back to when you're one years old and you're standing in your crib, and you're crying because you can't get out.
Smoke:Anyway, you go back to that moment in time in the hypnotic state and then you go through this asynchronous vibration. It kind of shakes the energy and it's a way to release it. So it's in that case you don't necessarily understand what it is you're releasing. You're just releasing old energy that's stuck. There's other ways, you know, one modality is using plant medicine.
Smoke:So, one mode is to, with a guide, is to go deep inside through plant medicine like mushrooms which, the compound that's psychoactive is called psilocybin and that can open up a portal to buried memories in your subconscious. So that's what I did and you can basically uncover all kinds of things. In my case, I uncovered lots of childhood trauma that were emotional energy hairballs stuck inside. And so step one is uncovering the stuff. Step two is, you know, understanding it, embracing it.
Smoke:And then the important thing to know is that no matter how horrible you thing you uncover, and in some things, it's it's gonna be mild. Some things gonna be a little more severe. It doesn't matter. Nothing can withstand your conscious awareness on that thing. So consciousness should bring think of it as like shining a light on a shadow.
Smoke:When you shine a light on a shadow, bring your consciousness to it, the shadow goes away. Well, that's what the how you dissipate these things. Your emotional energy hairballs can't withstand consciousness. So they will literally dissolve through the light. They'll dissolve through your awareness.
Smoke:And it doesn't mean it isn't, it's always pleasant. It doesn't mean it's enjoyable. Like the emotions can come up. You have to relive a trauma, you know, it brings up those emotions. The key is staying with it, just staying with it, staying conscious with it and not panicking.
Smoke:Understand that it's just energy. Every emotion is just energy. So when you feel fear, you feel pain, you feel, you know, these things, it's just staying with it and just all energy will dissipate at some point. It will kind of dissolve at some point if you stay focused on So the other thing, you know, and and one of the teachings I heard that I really love is, you know, as these energies come up, instead of saying, oh, it's making me upset, it's making me fear, it's making me feel anger, it's making me feel anxiety, Stop naming it. Just recognize the energy, the feel of it, and stay with it.
Smoke:When you stay with it, it will dissipate. The other thing you can do is bring love to it. Like, whatever it is, it's a feeling of dread, it's some horrible feeling of, oh no, this is something bad. Just stay with it and love it. Just bring love to it.
Smoke:And that power of conscious awareness love dissolves anything that's out there. So it's really powerful. Hopefully, that's helpful in terms of at least a few of the different modalities. There's others, you know, in terms of surfacing them. But tapping, I'll just mention one other I think is cool.
Smoke:You know, you can look online and and find videos on people how they do it, but you you do tapping at different spots and you're and you kinda do this routine of tapping. And then you think of a, you know, an issue or a time or an age you were, and you just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and you can basically reprogram things and it will dissolve that those emotional energy you hear about. So there's lots and lots of ways to do it. If this is useful information, I'm happy to dig deeper. And I can also, you know, bring in different resources for discussion about how they go into these different modalities.
Smoke:I've gone, been on a mission to learn them and to experience them and to be able to share them with people, not to do them to, you know, I'm not a practitioner, but so that I can help point people in direction that can be helpful to them. Because not every modality is going to be right for you. It's got to make sense. You got to have the right, you know, when you pick one, pick the best resources. And then when you do it, you know, just be aware of, like, you know, there's lots of other ways to do it.
Smoke:So, but there's not, like, a wrong answer here. I think the wrong answer is ignoring your shadows, your blockages, your subconscious, and thinking that life is just fine as you perceive it. I think what you'll find is life is so much better once you go through this process. So it is different, and it's definitely an awakening. So that's it on emotional blockages.
Smoke:You know, I think I will let me answer one more question. Balancing spiritual growth and leadership, how can leaders balance spiritual development and business demands? I believe that they are absolutely consistent with each other. Just based on what I just said, I just went through on why meditation matters for leadership, how team mindsets change, and why being in control of your own mind and your reaction to things is transformative to a team, how it impacts everyone else on the team, and then how using the map of consciousness, you know, is extremely important in understanding how to deal with different levels of consciousness of other people. So those are all and then clearing emotional packages, you know, if you clear yours, you are in a position to not be reactive, to be able to exert free will, to be able to make choices in any situation.
Smoke:So I think that's a, I mean, I don't even have to go further. That's a compelling case of why spiritual growth and leadership are consistent. In fact, you can't become the leader that you're meant to be without spiritual growth. You know, how far you take it, how far you want to go in this realm, in this lifetime, that's up to each individual. But, you know, to not address it, to not go down this path, I don't see how you become an really effective leader.
Smoke:You know, sometimes really effective leaders do it innately and they don't realize that they're they're really conscious and they're doing these things. They don't they don't call it what we're calling it. You know? And so that's okay. It's not inconsistent with what I'm saying.
Smoke:But I think the balancing thing also, I think the question is getting at how do I do this and not, like, you know, go off the deep end and you lose everything that I I work for? Well, what I would say is it goes in waves and it's, like, think of it as like a a sine curve that's on a trajectory. So as you raise in consciousness, it's going to go up and down, up and down, and you get to different levels, but it's going to have dips and ups and dips and ups and ups and ups. And if you're doing it right, you're heading in the upward direction, but, you know, you're always going to have these dips. So you get into these different levels and then you have to adjust.
Smoke:And sometimes that adjustment can take, you know, days, weeks, months, or years. It could take a long time. But sometimes you you adjust very quickly. So what I would say is, as I have gone through this, there have been times when I was like, oh, I I don't wanna do anything in business and leadership, and I just wanna focus on this consciousness thing, and I'm on this journey. And then I got to a point where I'm like, wait a minute, they are are consistent and I totally see how they connect and how they help each other.
Smoke:So the key is just doing it listening to your heart, listen to your your inner voice, and just do it at the pace and the level that makes sense for you, things are going to change. And there's going to be relationships that go away. There's going be new relationships that happen. There's going to be jobs that make no sense for you. There's going to be jobs that you're in that all of a sudden you have a whole different lens and context for how to do that job in a more effective way.
Smoke:That's happened with me. So I was already on the path of doing M and A, selling companies around the world. I spent a lot of years building businesses as an entrepreneur. Now I'm helping my fellow entrepreneurs do that. And, you know, there was a moment when I was like, God, do I really, is this what I want to do as I'm focusing on raising my consciousness and being aware and all those things that, you know, clear all my shadows.
Smoke:And then I realized, like, wait a minute. I see the bigger picture now and I see so much more. And I can help so many more people in the world by doing what I do really well. And, you know, money is energy, and all the whole world is energy, and we're energy. So to the degree you can affect that energy and then make it work properly, it's gonna flow for you.
Smoke:And in so doing, with the right intentions, with the greater good in mind, there's nothing that can stop you and and and there's nothing that there's no barrier. Like, literally, you can do anything you want. So I think it's completely consistent. Not only is it consistent, not doing it holds you back and is a huge disadvantage as a leader to not have a spiritual journey of some sort. So I'd love to get your feedback if this is useful and if I address these questions to a degree or detail that makes sense, that is actually helpful.
Smoke:I've got a long list of questions, so I'll do some more of these segments and we'll see how this goes. With that, signing off. Smoke Trail for today. Thank you.