Elina Teboul: Rethinking Capitalism with Feminine Intelligence

Capitalism that says that the only purpose of an organization is to create profits for its shareholders has become this really weird, like, perversion. I want to create something that genuinely contributes to society, and profits are a byproduct of that. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between, with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, today's conversation is with Alina Tabool. She is a leadership expert who coaches influential business leaders globally. She holds advanced degrees in psychology and law from Columbia University, a former attorney at a major New York City law firm, an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School, and she pivoted to organizational psychology and started her leadership advisory practice.

So along with all that, she is also the author of a new book coming out here called Feminine Intelligence, How Visionary Leaders Can Reshape Business for Good. And ooh, is this a good one. I started reading through the intro for this and got hooked almost immediately with some of the things that she was talking about. And a lot of people think, you know, feminism, she actually debated quite a bit on whether to put feminine, not feminism, I made that mistake a couple of times in this conversation, but feminine, even the word in the title, because of, you know, it triggers a lot of people to get all, oh, this is all about foo-foo stuff, and that is exactly the opposite here. So we talked a lot about her background and coming from Russia and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the impression and the impact that made on her and her business, her life, her whole philosophy, and the importance of values and how it's grounded in that and everything that we do.

And then we got into capitalism. And look, she is a capitalist, true and true, and she believes it in every way, but also believes it's broken in so many ways. And I have the exact same opinion. I love the theory of capitalism, but how it's applied right now and the greed factor that's happening and what it's doing to us is just, it's hard for me to wrap my head around right now. So she brought a lot of cool perspective around that. I talked about awake capitalism, not woke capitalism and conscious capitalism. So her answer to adjusting or addressing the challenges that we're all dealing with right now, especially in business and everything else, is actually to lean into the feminine side of each of us.

You know, if we talk right brain, left brain, you know, the left brain is logic, and that's the masculine, and it's go, and it's doing, and that's where innovation, and that's how we get all this other stuff. But the right brain about empathy and understanding and all that stuff is absolutely essential if we don't want to tear each other apart here. So talked a lot about that. Talked about waking up from the matrix, quite frankly, which we actually resonate quite well on. She talks about getting broken open. Sometimes you need a forcing function to do that. And then bringing love back to corporate America, which, again, sounds foo-foo, but as she explains it, you'll realize it is critical for long-term success.

And then we finished with AI's impact on all this and how it could help or hurt the efforts here to move forward. So, man, I got a ton of value out of this. The book is incredible. You can pre-order it now, but I really hope you enjoy this conversation and try to spread it around a few more people who might need to hear it. Let's make it happen. Hey, real quick, before we get to the conversation, I wanted to chime in and let you know that I just recently relaunched my entire JBSales membership with all new content and different ways to engage. I now have three different programs, Core, Pro, and Elite. The Core program gives you access to both of my world-class programs, Filling the Funnel and Driving a Close.

These are the same programs I've used to train some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, like Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and hundreds of others. The Pro membership gives you everything that's included in Core, plus all my tactical tips, workshop recordings, all the different GPTs I've been working on, and access to my live events, including AMAs. The Elite package is everything in Core, plus one-on-one access to me, which I have never offered. You get a monthly one-on-one call with me to help you talk about whatever you want to deal with, whether it's sales, entrepreneurship, business, life, any of it. I'm here to help you get to the next level. As a special bonus, anyone who signs up for the Elite package before March 28th gets to join me, the other Elite members, and five other sales experts and influencers in New York City for a free training Friday hosted by LinkedIn at their office at the Empire State Building, and tickets to come with us to the Broadway production of Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, with my favorite comedian of all time, Bill Burr.

It's going to be an incredible event, and I would love to see you there. All you need to do is go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the training link for individuals at the top of the navigation and see what the details are for each program and sign up today. Now let's get back to the conversation. Alina Tabool, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast. How are you? I'm great today. How are you? I'm doing very well. You're out in, are you out in London? I am in London, yes, and it's actually sunny today, which is very rare for us. What? I'm in an exceptionally good mood. That's, well, I'm sorry you're inside. Usually if I do training in London or Dublin, you know, if it's a nice day, usually around lunchtime, I ask the facilitator, I'm like, hey, do you mind if we like go outside?

Because none of these reps are actually paying attention because it's gorgeous out. So I can finish this training at the pub if you want. And they're like, yes. That does seem to work well, yeah. Yes. Now there is a fine line, right? There's too many Guinnesses and it kind of goes off the rails, but usually it's okay. So Alina, I was very interested when you came across my email as far as what you were working on with this book that you're putting out there. And let me ask you before we get started, when is the book actually launched? Because I know there's pre-orders right now and everything because I'd love to get my, I read through it, the manuscript that you sent, but just out of curiosity, when is it launching?

Yeah, so it should be shipping at the end of March. I believe it's the 24th of March. I think whether you're getting it in the US or the UK might be a few days apart, but end of March and yeah, available on pre-order already. All right, perfect. So let's get into it. So for those of you listening, her book is Feminine Intelligence, How Visionary Leaders Can Reshape Business for Good. And don't worry if you're listening to this, this isn't going to be a male bashing thing. This is going to be about how we actually balance both sides, masculine and feminine. But before we get into that, Alina, I always love to ask where you're coming from, right? So we're going to get into your schooling and that type of stuff.

But growing up, could you explain kind of what were your major influences, your parents? Like what did they do growing up? And what made you you up until about the university age? And then we'll kind of go from there if you don't mind. Yeah, sure. So my story is interesting. I was born in Russia, in St. Petersburg. And in 1992, basically at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was just about six years old at the time, my family decided to immigrate to the U.S. So we moved to New York. And that was a really difficult time. We left in the middle of the night. I wasn't allowed to say goodbye to any of my friends. It was a time where, you know, my dad was an engineer and people were coming with threats to his business.

And it was really this kind of time to go, time to leave. And I write a lot about the ideas of conscious capitalism. And I think that it comes from this fundamental belief in the American dream because we left a system of communism, a system that did not allow for prosperity, that did not allow for innovation. And that's why, while I believe that there's a conscious way to business, I fundamentally, through that experience, leaving Russia at a young age, I definitely have always admired the U.S. and the way that we do business. So I think those formative experiences were actually really important. And when I was growing up, kind of a typical immigrant story, my parents were working a lot. So I spent a lot of time on my own.

I remember being kind of a lonely kid. But again, at that time, I remember I had all these stuffed animals and I would line them up and I would present to them. So I always wanted to be like a speaker. I decided I was going to be a lawyer back then, which was my first career in corporate law. So I had these presentations for the stuffed animals. But, you know, I grew up in a... We were struggling to survive, right? We were immigrants at the time. And so I always... I think that's an important point for me to make because I speak a lot now about, you know, conscious approach to business and philanthropy and kind of big topics that I recognize not everybody is in the privileged position to be thinking about.

And I most certainly never had these conversations at home. Like, we did not talk about philanthropy and spirituality and how to be a conscious leader. So these are all things that came to me much later in life. And I'm very grateful that I was able to uncover those things. But yeah, the upbringing was quite different. Yeah. And it obviously gives you an incredible perspective. And I think we're going to talk later about kind of waking people up from the matrix, but also waking people up from their situation. And to your point of, like, if you're impoverished, if you don't have a lot of opportunities, like, this all, and, you know, foo-foo stuff about spirituality and stuff, it's like, I got to pay the bills.

I don't give a shit about, you know, spirituality right now. Because if I don't go to work, if I don't get a job, so it's like you're almost trapped in the matrix because you can't breathe without... You can't take a second to think about anything other than effectively survival. And so I'm very curious from your perspective on how that happens. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is the kind of fundamental psychological framework that most people are familiar with. And that until you can have your basic needs met, you cannot go up the pyramid to think about your relational needs, your spiritual needs. And then at the pinnacle of that, when you get to self-actualization, of course, is when you start to have the ability to think about other people's needs and you start thinking about philanthropy and giving back and your purpose.

And it's a privilege to have these conversations. So definitely recognize that. That's why it always amazes me, the people who are in those situations and still do that, right? You see people who are almost homeless themselves, showing up to food kitchens and actually serving the food and bringing the food and yet going home and probably not having very much themselves. Those type of people always... The people who aren't as quote-unquote privileged to get to a point in their lives where that stuff is taken care of. Those ones who still show up are the biggest inspiration in my mind. It's not the huge leaders of these massive companies. It's the person that shows up every day who's still struggling and then helps other people who are struggling.

Those are the ones that I think need a little bit more exposure these days, quite frankly. Yes, definitely. Kudos to them and a huge amount of gratitude to all the people who keep our world going. And so growing up... So then you went to NYU and you got... It was economics and politics, right? That was kind of your focus? Yeah. And then you went to Columbia Law because you wanted to be a lawyer to present in front of stuffed animals. Yeah. But then when you said when you got out, you kind of felt hollow because when you got into a law firm and you were kind of like, wait a minute, like there's just... This isn't what I wanted. What was... When did that hit you? Like was it almost immediate or did it take a little while for you to...

The shine of like the new job and I'm on a law firm to wear off to realize, wait a minute, this isn't really meaningful to me. And why wasn't it? Yeah. So it's a great question. And it was initially very shiny, especially given what I just described as my background. And so it was a huge salary because it was one of these white shoe big law firms and felt very glamorous and it was exactly the image I had of myself when I was presenting to my stuffed animals. And there are a few moments that I really remember thinking, this is a very strange culture. One was I was invited to a lunch with the female partners that was for the first year female associates. And I remember that they had this very strange narrative around like, yes, you can be a partner here, but you should have like at least three nannies and hopefully a stay-at-home husband and kind of like, don't expect to have friends.

And I thought, well, this is really strange advice because I was 24 years old at the time and I thought, I came here to be a kick-ass lawyer. Why are you telling me these things? And that really forever stuck in my mind as like what actually is going on here. Another interesting example, I mentioned this one in the book because I speak a lot about just authenticity and giving ourselves permission to step into kindness and softness. And there was one particularly spiky female associate that I had to work for. She was in a different department even from me, but we were on a deal together and it was probably around 2 a.m. and everything is important and urgent at those law firms. And she looked at me and she said, go hop like a little bunny because she wanted me to go get some paperwork done.

And she's like, go on, go, go, like a little bunny. And I thought, hmm, that's interesting. I wonder what in your life experience, why do you think you should say that? And I think I always had that curiosity and interest that I wouldn't take offense of situations that would happen to me. I was always, and this is why I ended up going to retrain as a psychologist because it was like, hmm, that's interesting. I wonder what makes you say that to me. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB Sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, which are filling the funnel and driving a close that cover all aspects of the sales process.

It also includes monthly workshops that'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like ChatGPT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process. Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to jbarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. That is so, and you feel like that, because that, is that a nature or a nurture thing from your perspective? Like, is it, you said it's always something where you, instead of reacting, because so many people react to something like that.

Like for me personally, you know, even when I was a young kid in, you know, business, if somebody had said something like that to me, you know, Boston John would have come out and been like, who the fuck do you think, you know what I mean? Like, you could be the CEO of the organization. I always had this fight reaction to something like that. How do you, is it just ingrained in you to stop before you react and be curious? Or did you have to find that within yourself as you grew? I think there was a natural curiosity that was always there. And the more developed I became in my psychological understanding of people, obviously the deeper I delved into my executive coaching work, the more I understood that in any given situation, people have their stories that they're bringing with them.

So, you know, I know the audience listening to us now deals with people a lot because there's people who do sales, right? That's what you have to do. And in those situations, people are hanging up on the phone on you. They could be rude to you. There's all sorts of experiences that I'm sure everyone listening to can relate to where you think like, oh God, why do I have to speak to that person? And in that moment, what would serve you most? And it is connecting with this, you know, feminine intelligence, which is compassion and love and curiosity to just say what's going on for you. And, you know, I'll tell you this story. This happened to me recently. I went to a talk by this Indian guru that a friend flew in.

I wasn't even thinking I would tell this story. But it just, it came up. This Indian guru and he was just giving this talk on, I don't know, mindfulness or something. And I was there and someone asked the question about anger that he felt like he felt angry a lot. And I said, well, it's really important that you don't feel like you can't be angry. Emotions are important and you don't have to suppress your anger. That's not fair to you. But what you should try to do is ask yourself, I wonder what about this situation is making me angry. I wonder what about this situation is triggering a subconscious memory from childhood, from a different experience that is creating this emotion of anger in me because this is really valuable information and it will help me understand this person.

So I say this and this guy who is, you know, in the audience who doesn't know me at all, he turns to me and he says something like, you sound really aggressive right now. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And everybody kind of like, shh. Everybody starts looking because everybody was nodding when I was, when I said the thing about anger, which just textbook psychology, you know, and, and everybody's like, shoo, and I was like, ooh, I wonder, why do you think I'm making you feel like that right now? And everybody's just like, because most people would get defensive and how could you say that to me? And, and, and what's fascinating is that, that ability to understand and to be soft and to just approach with, with an ease and to, to make a space between stimulus and response and response is so powerful and for any business relationships, especially, you know, when you're dealing with people a lot, I think this is such an incredible skill, which I, I do think comes from a feminine, you know, feminine approach to just say, I don't, I don't have anything to prove here, but if I hold the space and, and have you ask yourself what about this is triggering for you, then you, you, you will sort of save, save that relationship and just have people be more curious about, about the situation and about you.

Yeah, I love that. Like, again, pausing yourself and saying like, why am I so pissed off about what they just said here? Why is that making it, you know, I think that's a, it's a, it's such a self-control thing though that, you know, a lot of people that aren't inherently have that, I think they have to be conscious to, you know, like we talked about, maybe be pulled out of the matrix a little bit because I think the matrix almost forces us to, to react. And I, as a psychologist, have you ever seen the movie Inside Out? Is that a cartoon with the emotions? Yeah. Yeah. If it's, the first one and the second one are just absolutely, they're great movies in general for kids, but they're brilliant from a psychology standpoint and because you had said something that, you know, anger is necessary and, and it was that the, the Inside Out, the first one, like she was, Joy was always trying to stop sadness.

She's like, stop, you know, get away. Like you, everything you touched turns sad, leave me alone. And then realizing that sadness is necessary. Sadness actually is why happiness is. Yes. Because if you don't have one side, you can't have the other, right? And, and I think anger, right? You, you can't have really joy without being angry in a lot of ways because you have to be angry about the things but then you have to kind of search in yourself about why that is making you angry so that you can find joy, which I think is beautiful. Yes, absolutely. No, I, I remember that movie and I started, my, my interest in psychology actually started with positive psychology which is the study of happiness and a lot of people would say to me, well, this is this toxic positivity and you have to be happy all the time and at the very beginning I, I fell in that trap myself and I remember, um, you know, my husband, I was in a bad mood and my husband said something to me about like, you know, aren't you supposed the hackiness lady and, and that's such a misconception that of course positive emotions are critical but neglecting your negative emotions is extremely unhealthy and having emotional mastery is, is only, is, is, is the first step to being a conscious leader.

And I think that that's, that's the feminine and masculine energies, right? I think it's almost, there's a, there's a fight or flight with the, with the masculine where it seems like I'm always fighting and, and it's with the suppression of the feminism it actually turns into even further anger because you don't know how to deal with the stuff that's coming at you or how other people are reacting to you so you almost lean more into the, the masculine component to protect yourself in a lot of ways it seems. Whereas, if you step back and, you know, introspective and kind of start to ask yourself some questions you realize the outside factors are really not what the issues is, it's the inside factors.

Am I, am I on the right path there with some of this? Yeah, and you know, and especially because I know we have a lot of male, male listeners, there's a, there's a story that I tell in the book, it's one of the opening stories and it's about Lieutenant Chris Hughes from the U.S. Army and this was something that I remember reading in the news and, and I love telling this story. So, it was during the Iraq War and he was in a small, small town out on the outskirts of Baghdad around 2003 and you can just imagine this scene so it's like you and your men, you're walking for days, it's hot, right? You're in Iraq, you're carrying, you know, 95 kilos on your back, you're on edge, you haven't eaten, so you're, you're already in fight or flight mode and then imagine, you know, one small boy, you see him approaching from the town, okay?

And then you see another small boy approaching from the town and then you start seeing people descending on you and all of a sudden you have an entire mob of angry, scared, frightened townspeople who have surrounded you. So you have a choice in that moment, right? Like he had a choice in that moment which the ordinary choice is, well, I've been trained for this, I'm going to take out my weapons and I'm going to take out these townspeople because we're in danger and what Chris Hughes did was he yelled a command to his men and he said, kneel and they dropped their weapons and they all kneeled in the dirt. Just silence. And the townspeople dispersed. Little by little there was peace, they calmed down and they left.

So, you know, you're talking about feminine intelligence and the example of that is a male army soldier in Iraq who is able to in that moment diffuse the tension and save lives and choose love and peace by the action of trusting his intuition not following orders the linear logical rational left brain response and you can choose another way and that's what feminine intelligence is for me. I always stress, you know, it took me a long time, I kept thinking about this title, I was writing the book for two years and for two years I'm like, is this the right title? because the word feminine has become radioactive even before last November that a lot of the people that I would interview, especially like senior executive women that I would interview, the reactions were, I don't believe in this kind of stereotypes and like I'm not gonna lean into something that's gonna make me seem weak and like I can't afford to show vulnerability and like this is an outdated duality, why are we even using this language?

well, the feminine and the masculine like these are archetypes that have been in our collective unconscious for generations. We have had thinkers since the enlightenment who have relegated scientific principles and rational thinking to men because that's who was in the workforce at the time and women who were in the domestic space were relegated to the emotional space, right? And that was the feminine. And little by little in Western society, we have decided that well, this is all weakness and we don't need this for business leadership, this is not going to help with progress and so this word feminine, especially now for women who have strived so much to achieve what they have is like we're afraid of it and so people are like just ignore it, you know, shove it under the rug, we don't need to use this word anymore but what does that do?

It just makes it grow bigger. It's like any problem that you want to ignore in your life, the more you ignore it, the bigger it gets and when we decide that interconnection and intuition and our emotional space and all of this aspect of ourselves is something that we can ignore and avoid and not label, then I think it causes serious problems for ourselves as whole human beings that want to feel joy and purpose and love and for our society and for the way that we run businesses and the choices that we make because we are leading with just half of ourselves. So I'm always advocating for the feminine is not better than the masculine, it's that we need both and it's a critical toolkit that we need to be able to access both.

I mean, you had said something, I want to get into capitalism and a little bit of history lesson for you and where it broke and where it's going right now, but you said something that struck me in the book, it says, thus together we stand at a proverbial crossroads. We must decide if today's capitalism paradigm will deliver us to a brighter future or destroy what matters most to us. The responsibility falls on leaders like you, upgrade your leadership skills, transcend conventional ways of operating and seek alignment with your heart, your mind, your soul, embrace integrity as you drive guiding principles, especially when facing challenges and temptations to deviate. I mean, I do feel like we're at a crossroads right now.

As a society, I think in sales, I'd pick it. We'll talk about AI and the impact of all that because that's another layer to this conversation, but talk to me about, you are a capitalist, right? You come out right out of the front of the book. Let's be clear here. This isn't about just some woo-woo stuff that I think is good to do for business. You are like, I like capitalism. You came here, you saw the impact and all the right things of theoretically what capitalism stands for. I have said that capitalism is great in theory, but it's horrible in practice and it's gotten off the rails. Could you explain what you see or what kind of the theory of the promise of capitalism is business and where you think it kind of turned, if you will, into what it is today, which I don't think is a healthy capitalistic society.

I actually don't even think this is capitalism of what we're dealing with right now. So could you help kind of educate me in the audience on the arc of capitalism, if you will? Yeah, sure. So I think that this idea of shareholder primacy is where we really started to go wrong. So in shareholder primacy, you know, Milton Freeman model of liberal economics, which was based on Adam Smith and Adam Smith was kind of, you know, the father of economics who had this idea that we're all rational, self-interested beings, which I, you know, I talk about in the book, which is like, I don't know any of these rational men, like I haven't met any of, any of them. We're all completely driven by our emotions.

But that theory was created at a time when we were sole traders, right? We didn't have these huge conglomerate organizations that are reaping profits, extracting from the planet, making all of us have mental health issues and physical health issues. And like the world that we've created just doesn't work for anyone because capitalism has become so extractive, which is benefiting the very few at the expense of everyone else. It's like the 26 richest people in the world have more money than like 3.8 billion other people. So why does that exist? Like this is not capitalism, this is perversion. But what capitalism also has created is advances in technology and, you know, like all of the luxuries that a lot of us in the West are privileged to have.

And so you do have to incentivize people and I saw under communism, you know, my parents would say the janitor makes the same amount of money as the doctor and so kind of like why do I want to become a doctor and then it's all owned by the state and, you know, it really kills people's motivations. But the capitalism that says that the only purpose of an organization is to create profits for its shareholders has become this really weird like perversion where like why why does a business exist and I can do all sorts of, you know, fraud, extraction, I can put crazy chemicals in my food and lower the price and make everybody sick and that's okay because the shareholders will make money. That's crazy.

And so the sort of evolution that hopefully we're going on is this conscious approach to capitalism which is a multi-stakeholder model which says that the purpose of an organization is not just to create profit for shareholders. There is the capitalism part. Yes, profits are important because if you don't have profits you can't pay your people, you can't put food on the table, you can't keep the lights on, you can't invest in R&D. So profits are not the enemy here, right? Like we all want to make money, we all want to be successful, we all want to have good lives. That's great. In addition to profits, we also need to understand what are we doing for our employees, for our customers, for the planet, for our suppliers customers, and really that buzzword of conscious capitalism was created by business professor Raj Sisodia and the founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey, and both of them in that book and otherwise talk about can we put love instead of profits at the center of the business model.

That doesn't mean that you should not have a profitable business. We all know Whole Foods not as just the place that we get our organic kale, but as the place where that's a revolutionary business model. And John Mackey came out with his memoir, I think last year, and he writes about this, that his life experiences were like, well, I want to create something that genuinely contributes to society, and profits are a byproduct of that. Okay, well, so now you, this just popped into my head. That's a great example, Whole Foods, right? But let's look at the exact opposite profile, the company that bought them. So here's what my question was, is like, yeah, okay, profits are important, and then, but that's what I feel like everybody has to say, well, we'll do all that stuff once we become profitable, but it's a lack of understanding that if you do all that stuff, you will become profitable, and that's why I think people think all the DEI stuff that's getting slashed and everything, and even before this administration, and I don't want to get into that too much, but in the tech industry, one of the things that was so disheartening to me was that for years, when interest rates were low and growth at all costs, and everybody was, oh, DEI, yeah, we're great, you know, we have a huge initiative around this.

And then when the shit hit the fan in early 2023, literally the first thing to get cut was DEI initiatives. I mean, to the bone, too. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, this isn't just a nice thing to do. It's actually a way to build a healthy business and a profitable business. But why do you think, and quite frankly, the Whole Foods story is disappointing to me, because I'm about values and like aligning values and doing special things. So why Whole Foods that started this incredible movement and happiness and joy and quality and value and health into the ecosystem of the world. Then they sell to Jeff Bezos, who creates a dick rocket to go up into space for his own gratification and then tells everybody, thank you so much for being Amazon employees and people who paid for this, because you're the ones who paid for this.

So that's my disappointment and how I'm so frustrated right now that greed seems to be not just winning, but thriving. And I don't know how to address it without being angry and without fighting. But fighting obviously does nothing but push them further apart. So how can we use the obvious, in my mind, balance of feminine and masculine and empathy and all those type of things to fight this capitalist, imperialistic fucking grow at all cost, win no matter what, screw everybody else on the way? How do we do it? Because I think people right now specifically feel so helpless. And that's why I say you'll hear it at the end of this podcast. Like, go out and make somebody smile today. Because you could control that.

And maybe that's infectious. But it doesn't help when every single thing is being slashed around us. All minorities are being diminished back down to 20 years ago for crying out loud. So how can we use this book, what you're talking about, to fight this wave of bullshit that is seemingly driven 95% masculine energy and almost none on the feminine side? Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with your anger and I feel it too. And there's days that I feel really powerless and I'm just looking around and I'm thinking, how can we have a food system that kills people? How can we have a medical system that thrives on the food system that kills people? How did this happen? And then sometimes I get into my conspiracy theories.

So I'm with you. It's painful and I think, you know, what I do in the book and as I speak a lot to the individual, so there is the first place is your own consciousness. That's what we can control. We sometimes, once we have established our own consciousness, we can go out into the world and think, how can I authentically bring my skills and my passion and my purpose into the business context? But I genuinely believe that what every single person can control is first themselves. So we often walk through the world blind. And, you know, you talk about the matrix. I think I use the unplugging from the matrix in the book as well. How do you do that? You have to start with yourself. So you can't...

You talk about broken open, right? Like, how do you break open from this? So when I speak about broken open, that's, you know, most of us have experiences in our lives that it's, you know, it's always darkest before the dawn. And some of the examples that I share, so, you know, my first experience, I'll go into this story, so my first experience of conscious capitalism was when I went to work for a man called Alan Gray. And Alan Gray is sort of the billionaire philanthropist that you've never heard of. So his story is in the book because it's really my story. So I left the law firm to go help him and his family start a foundation. What he... He created the largest investment firm to come out of South Africa, which was called Alan Gray Limited, and now is worldwide known as Orbis, has offices in US, Europe, UK, Asia, and has over $30 billion in assets under management.

So he's a capitalist. Like, he created that himself, right? Okay, so we're not talking about, like, woo-woo feelings here. We're talking about very legitimate scale business. And what Alan decided to do was to give away his controlling stake in the business worth billions to a foundation. And Alan's story that broke him open, where he decided to do that, was he was a white boy growing up in South Africa under apartheid. And he saw the inequality, injustice, horrendousness that all around him. And he, and so that was his breaking open moment, just witnessing that and understanding for him, he said that the only way to help South Africa was to support entrepreneurs. Because, and this is again, the, I would say, the feminine approach because the masculine is, I know how to fix South Africa and I'm just going to do everything.

And his approach was, I'm going to educate, empower, and fund the social entrepreneurs on the ground because they know the answer. Not because I'm going to tell them what to do, but I'm going to create an ecosystem which allows for them to be able to address exactly the challenges that they see that their community needs. So he, so the foundation created an accelerator that social entrepreneurs can go through, realizing that actually there was not enough social entrepreneurs at the time. We ended up going back down the chain and from 13 years old giving scholarships to kids who eventually end up going through the accelerator. I mean, can you imagine taking a 15 year bet, on a kid that you think has entrepreneurial capabilities and you're just going to fund their school at the, you know, thinking that one day you're going to, your VC arm of the philanthropy is going to fund their business.

So for me, this is like an amazing example of someone who had the story of being broken open. He was a capitalist. he created an incredible organization and then he created a symbiotic relationship. It wasn't just, you know, CSR and like, let's throw some money somewhere. But the profits from the investment management firm are now, now go to fund the accelerator. And when the VC invests in the social entrepreneurs, that money doesn't go into somebody's pocket. it goes back into the loop to fund more social entrepreneurs. And so what happens to the clients of Alan's business? They love to, you know, like, would I rather give my money to XYZ fund manager that's going to go buy a yacht? Or do I want to put my money here, which I know where this money is going and is going to fund all of, you know, this entire philanthropic organization?

And to your point about, you know, selling out to Amazon and, you know, how things happen, we actually put the provisions in the documents that the investment management firm can never be sold and it can never go public. Nice. Because there you go, right? Because as soon as you go into public markets and short term quarter pressures fit in, then it's very, very difficult to make these kinds of decisions. And so, yes, this is the story of one extraordinary person. For me, this was my mentor and the way that I got into this space and, you know, extremely inspiring. And it's possible. So this was, he didn't grow up in privilege. He didn't come from, you know, he was a just regular young boy in South Africa.

and so I think every single person listening to this, regardless of your, whether you're an individual contributor, whether you work in an organization, whether you're the CEO or you're just, you know, beginning your journey, if you know who you are, if you understand where you come from, what values your roots create, you know, like I explained, for me, Russia, that immigration story was a big moment, what are the values that have come out of that story? And that's why in the book I have a lot of, you know, questions at the end of each chapter to make this applicable for the person. So if you, you start with self awareness, you start with deep self-exploration, because that is where the life force is, and that's what the feminine is.

The masculine is execution, it's action, it's doing, but if you're, you know, doing all the wrong stuff, that's not really helpful, right? And you're climbing up the wrong ladder, and you're executing on the wrong things, and if we're not valuing enough time in stillness, in intuition, and interconnection, and self-exploration, then we don't have enough actually power and life force to create these kinds of conscious endeavors. So, you know, when you're feeling helpless and everything feels like too much, which I know I have those days, go back to the one thing you can control, and it's becoming the best version of yourself. I love that. I mean, I think you, you know, you talk about the limiting beliefs that we all have, right?

Be your authentic self, relationship with nature, courage, and values. These are all ways to kind of reflect on what's important, what's important to you. I think values, I keep screaming this from the mountaintops, that, you know, after my dad passed a little while, a few years back, back in 21, you know, I thought, I know, I always knew I had pretty good core values, and I thought that I lived by core values, but then I went through that core value exercise, and it was an eye-opening exercise for me to say, like, what's really important, and how am I living those? And, you know, I'm looking at the flip side of it, it was like, what do I really react poorly to? Because the opposite of that is probably a core value of mine, and that opened up my eyes to start really evaluating all my relationships, or evaluating all the things that I do, and only working with people who align with my core values, and if they don't, whether it's customers, or clients, prospects, doesn't matter, friends, family, quite frankly, I don't have a lot of time to educate them on why they should have better, you know, different, and I won't say better values, because I'm not going to put myself on, like, look at me, and I'm so much better than everybody else, but I've gotten exhausted trying to educate others who don't seemingly have good values, and instead align with people who do, but the problem there is the further bifurcation of those two things, right?

It's just like social media, it's going to feed you what you look for, and I look for people that share my values, and I tend to now these days, at the age I'm at, avoid people that don't fit my vote of color, because they suck energy away from me, and so in lieu of an awakening, right, because I do think it's pretty obvious, right, people who support a certain thing, and they have this mindset of, that is so ingrained, like, they really, I don't see them change until it has, whatever's going on has a direct impact on them, direct negative impact on them, to break their belief system, you know what I mean? Like, oh, DEI is bullshit, until their wife gets fired from their job, because the company says that she was hired for DEI purposes, even though she was more qualified than anybody else, and then the husband's like, wait a minute, what?

Like, I thought DEI is for black people, you know what I mean? And all of a sudden, they wake up a little bit, but there's another one that you actually touch on, which, you know, I think more people need to pay attention to, but again, another taboo topic is LSD and psychedelics, and using them to break through and break out of the matrix, and quite frankly, they helped me. I mean, I've always, I think I've always been rather awoken, not woke, in a lot of ways, but man, the first time I did mushrooms, I saw the world in a completely different, from a completely different lens, so could you talk to us a little bit about your research and your experience with LSD helping people break into their own selves?

Clearly, I love taboo topics. So, a little bit of background again, and a disclaimer, which is extremely important. So, psychedelics are illegal in most places. So, the vast majority of listeners here, in wherever you live, they're most likely illegal. This is very important to know. There are certain jurisdictions, like the Netherlands, Jamaica, there are certain states in the U.S., like Colorado, that's legalizing mushrooms, Oregon. So, you know, we are not advocating for you to do anything illegal here. I happen to also be a lawyer, so I think that's very important. I will also say that what I advocate for is intentional, safe, and guided use of psychedelics. So, that means that there is a big preparation process, there is a big integration process, which means that after the experience, you figure out, like, what did this mean for me?

And you work with someone who is, who can assess your medical history to make sure that this is something that you should be doing and who can help to guide you, who has the experience to guide people on this path because it's not simple, right? So, this is very important. So, in my executive coaching work, I was seeing a lot of leaders come to me with, you know, a lot of maybe different superficial topics, but if you think about the roots of a lot of the topics that they were bringing, they all, like, come down to some fundamental human truths. And as a psychologist, I became really interested in, you know, like, what is it, like, what are these tools of the masters that can really help people?

And psychedelics kept coming back up. So, I went and I, you know, I'm like a nerd, so I went back and I did a full year at the California Institute of Integral Studies, which is the longest-standing academic program on psychedelic assisted therapy, which is, there is a portion that is in collaboration with MAPS, which is the organization that is trying to legalize MDMA. So, you know, I took the approach of I'm going to, like, read every, all of the case studies and listen to all of the experts and treat this very seriously because it is very serious. So, that was me leaning into my masculine side and going by the book and reading all the stuff and checking off all the boxes. Okay, that's my left brain.

Right brain, Alina, was able to have the psychedelic experience that completely shifted who I was, right? And one of the stories that I tell is, so mushrooms, for example, really, there's a lot of research that they specifically connect to with nature. And all of a sudden, I, like, I remember this journey where I all of a sudden, like, for the first time, understood that I am nature, that I'm not separate from nature, that like, I felt Mother Earth and I felt her rage and I felt a sense of responsibility and I was sobbing, like, holding the earth as I felt the earth breathing. and feeling all of this sort of, like, weakness and rage and, like, what can we do to shift our relationship to nature and to the divine and to ourselves because we are nature and we are divine.

It's, like, extremely beautiful spiritual experience. And at the time, I was, I helped an organization called the Earth Law Center and I was sort of coaching the executive director. I did some work with the board, so I knew they existed. It's basically a non-profit that's trying to change our law in order to give nature legal rights. So oceans, rivers, working with different governments, like Ecuador actually has now put rights of nature into their constitution, which, you know, once something has legal rights, it's like a corporation, right? Like, a corporation can have legal rights, so can a river. And there's consequences around that. And God, it was, like, so high and so crying and so in love and so emotional and so in my, you know, like, altered state of consciousness completely in my feminine, like, you know, we have to protect Mother Earth.

And then I understood, I was like, wait, like, you're a lawyer, you know, this organization, like, you can help them, right? And so it was, there's the being in the feminine and feeling the feelings and seeing an altered understanding of our world and taking off the blinder, stepping out of the matrix. That's something you can't do rationally. That's something you have to do with your whole being. And once you do that, then you can have real business consequences because then you can say, okay, corporations can put directors on their boards to speak on behalf of nature and what does that mean, right? But you can't, I think it's really hard to get to those sort of left brain solutions without letting yourself experience the creativity, the divine, the emotional realm of the feminine.

And that's why I think the feminine is the power source for the action that we can then take in the world. So there's a lot of research on psychedelics now. People have probably, you know, seen articles and on the news. It's been talked around a lot over the years. The more I talk about it, the less shocked looks I get from people. But, you know, there is the area around mental health, which is extremely important. Again, for any listeners that are interested in this, there's also clinical trials. If you can't get to a place where it's legal, it's also, you know, very expensive these days. There are trials where you can go for free to universities. So a lot of, you know, the, like, Harvard and, like, Imperial and, I mean, like, there's so many Johns Hopkins that are having these clinical trials.

So that is one avenue for people to go to. But the connection, like, the empathy, the understanding that, oh, my God, the world doesn't have to be this way. Like, capitalism is a story that we tell ourselves that's not based in reality. like, the tree is real, but all of these stories that we tell ourselves. And so if capitalism isn't real because it's just an invention of our language, if money is not real because it's an invention of our language, and we're actually all interconnected and energetically, like, in my right brain consciousness, there's no me or you. Like, we're not separate. We're actually all together. Then, why can't it be different? And I think that's the question, is we have stopped asking ourselves why, like, why can't it just be different?

Like, what else could we do? We're so ingrained into, like, this is how it is. And what psychedelics do is because of neuroplasticity, which means that your brain can create new neural pathways. So, like, you have a habitual way of thinking because you're always using the same neural pathways. It's, you know, for people who don't know, it's like, imagine your brain, it's like a highway. And you have certain roads, so you take the same road to work and you take the same road to drop off your kids and you take the same road to your granny's house. And these are all the roads that you know. But now, all of a sudden, a bunch of, you know, planners come in and they put traffic lights, they put diversions, they create new roads, and all of a sudden, you are able to access places that you didn't even know existed.

So, all of a sudden, you're like, wait, I can go to, you know, this other city, I never heard of this city. And so, it expands your realm of awareness and ability to ask bigger questions. And I think what I try to do is, I might, I don't have a lot of answers, I have a lot of questions, because, because these experiences just expand your capacity to understand what is possible. There's no question. To me, I think mushrooms are the most introspective drug I've ever come across in my entire life. And I tell people, if you are not comfortable with yourself, don't touch them. Because they will open up doors that will go so deep into your inner child psyche, that if you're not prepared to handle it, it will actually, and guided by somebody who knows what they're doing, ideally in a medical state, but obviously people are going to find them and do them whenever.

So, I always encourage people, it's the environment and it's your comfort in yourself, and you have to be willing to be open and explore. If you're scared, if you're not confident, if you're self conscious, those type of things, there's actually a compounding negative, in fact, because it'll just get you to focus on those negative things if your brain takes you that way, but if you allow your brain to open, all of a sudden, literally and figuratively, the world changes in front of your eyes. And to your point, be outside. Don't be sitting in a dark dungeon doing these things or whatever, because that's the environment and they are very connected to nature. I'm a big believer in energy. That's why I talk a lot about the matrix, because for me, I genuinely felt energy the first time I did them.

Somebody was in another room and I could feel their laughter coming through the floors and into where I was. And I'm such an energy person. I can feel people's negative energy, even without any drugs. I've always been able to feel positive energy and feel negative energy and legitimately be like, ah, whenever negative energy, even if they don't say a word, I can feel it. And I'm like, I can't be around this or I have to find a way to balance this because it actually hurts. And so I think a lot of times if you do it, ketamine is one that's actually legal in the States here. And I had somebody on the podcast talk about ketamine therapy. And it's like a six-week thing. You go in, you put a mask on, they guide you through it.

There's a therapist there with you and it breaks through, you know, PTSD, depression, all these different things that people just can't on their own. And so that's why I'm a huge advocate for it in the right sense. Yeah, and what's interesting is that people think this is sort of something new, but psychedelic enthusiasts like to think that all of human civilization is grounded on altered states of consciousness and that you had the Elysian mysteries in Greece and that Plato and Aristotle were taking what was the precursor to LSD, Kaikion, and that indigenous tribes all over the world have been using various medicines and some people say that, you know, mushrooms is the way that nature speaks to us and and helps us to understand it's like our shared language.

So I think, again, it's some people have been corrupted by the, you know, war on drugs, again, that kind of very toxic perspective that happened to the U.S. and to Nixon, which was all, by the way, racially and politically motivated. And so for people who are, becoming curious about this, I always say Michael Pollan's Netflix documentary is a really good place to start. It's called How to Change Your Mind. It's very accessible, goes through the differences between each of the medicines because MDMA, mushrooms, LSD, and various other substances, they have very different chemical composition and they're actually used for different purposes. And you might find a guide that works with one but not the other, but you need to be educated as to what it is that you're looking for.

And again, really, for safety, please have a guide that knows what they're doing. Absolutely. All right, let's finish on this topic because it's all over the place and I think it goes back to what I had said earlier on where we are from an inflection point and how you see it as well. the AI absolutely take everything else aside. We are at an inflection point with AI. This new technology that just woke up, and let's go back to the Matrix, or the Terminator and the Matrix, because the Terminator is the prequel to the Matrix, where Skynet woke up and it was a totally new world. So let's try to avoid the apocalyptic conversation here, but how do you think AI can be used for a positive right now to help unlock the feminine energy to help balance masculine and feminine?

Because unfortunately, the AI was created by mostly masculine, capitalistic, driven, greed, whatever, and I want to make sure that my philosophy is I feel like there's more good, this is what keeps me going, which is I feel like in general there's more good people on this planet than bad people. I have to believe that or else I would just go into too dark of a hole. And because we made this effectively in our image, my hope is that there will be more positive AI than negative AI. But how can we use it today to help break open, to help highlight the feminism and the strong qualities of feminism and balance the masculinity? How can we use AI to do that today? I'll just clarify for language because it's important because I think feminism, which is about gender equality and I mean extremely important and absolutely necessary but not what I write about actually.

I think the topics we've been talking about is more about for each person regardless of gender, how to be whole. So I intentionally always make sure people understand the difference. so it's a great question with AI and I think the biggest problem that you've identified just now is that our algorithms have been trained on the patriarchy. That's it. And funny enough, this morning, actually, I was having breakfast with someone who is building an AI who has an expert network of all women and their indigenous perspectives, people who've lived in different indigenous tribes, people who are experts in ecology. So all seeped into the feminine and they want to build an AI which is trained exclusively on the transcripts of those conversations.

So I do think that, yes, we are at a place where our current models are certainly trained on the patriarchy but I think that there are a lot of, or there are people who are now thinking about how do we create alternative models that are going to be trained differently so that we can have feminine perspectives as well, which I think is extremely important. What else I think is important to mention is that if our AIs are going to be vastly superior to our intellectual capabilities in terms of the sort of left-brain capacities of reasoning, writing, logic, mathematical, scientific capabilities, what is left for humans? And that goes back to our inherent feminine human nature of empathy, of collaboration, of our relational spiritual intelligence.

And so more than ever, as we are able to have the AIs do the work for us, they will never be able to have the feminine qualities. We're not training them to do that, and they can't because those are inherently feminine. So your adaptability, your agility, your ability to face the uncertainty of the coming world all comes from an inner strength, inner confidence, inner capacity, and purpose. So the self-reflection of who am I really and how do I show up becomes ever more important as your actual hard skills are replaced by AI. So I think this is more timely than ever before. So effectively, you know, to your point, I actually didn't think of that, the right brain, left brain, if it takes away all the left brain stuff effectively, because it is better than us already.

Pick a topic, it's better than us. And I tell people all this all the time when I'm reading, I'm like, you know, let AI do the heavy lifting, right? But just make sure you humanize it before it hits the, you know, before you send the email, before you make the call, before whatever. And because there is, I mean, look, I train reps on how to send emails and all this fun stuff. And there are AI bots that absolutely can send way more personalized, way better emails than 95% of the reps out there. But I always tell them, I go, there's something, though, because I get them all the time. And I go, I can't explain it, but I can tell every single time there's a, I would get probably 95 out of 100. I don't care how good your AI bot is, I will get 95 out of 100 to say like, yep, that's AI.

and the only way I can describe it is that it just doesn't have a soul. There's just something about it that just, I just don't, like I can't logically put my finger on it and say that word told me or that this, it's just as I read it, I'm like, and I, what I'm leaning into is I call the give a shit factor. It's the one thing that AI can't do. It can pretend to give a shit, but it fundamentally can't. And so, so as humans, we can, we can fundamentally care. We can, decide to give a shit and, and that comes through that, that authenticity, that genuineness comes through. And look, until computers start buying from each other, you know, then who knows what the hell is going to happen, right? But as long as there's somebody else making a decision on the other ends, right, for whatever it is, there's that human factor that just has to be there.

And so I think we need to lean more into that right brain, more into the feminist and not think it's feminist quality, feminine quality. thank you, I'm screwing that up all the time. But feminine qualities and not look at them as a negative, which I think so many alpha males and all that stuff do. It's like, no, do you understand? That's what makes you a powerful person. But we could unpack this for a lot longer because I get a lot more questions. But in the interest of giving this to the around the hour time frame here, I mean, let's wrap it up on any last words for the audience of tactical things or something that they can, outside of buying the book and signing up early for the release, something they can walk away from this conversation and do.

Yeah, you know, what was coming up for me a few minutes ago when we were talking about values and you were explaining how powerful it was for you, what I had wanted in that moment to share with listeners is, you know, really sit down and do this exercise. So sit down and I would say it has to be three to five. So less than three is really hard. If it's more than five, it's not really your value. And try not to go value picking. So don't go and look for a list of words out there because they all sound nice. They have to come genuinely from you. If you have a lot of words, just write them all down. That's fine. And then you can refine it. So if you have something like, you know, excellence and intelligence, you can combine that into one perhaps, right?

So try to get to three to five and then rank them. Rank them in order of importance. So if you have, you know, something like communication as a value or like relationships as a value and then you have honesty as a value, then what happens if you have to tell somebody you love something that's going to hurt them, right? Because your values are how you should make decisions. So if I know that for me, you know, my number one value is love. I actually have this tattoo here. You can't see it. Love is everything. So my number one value is love, which means like that I will make decisions based on that and practical decisions, right? Like that example of do I tell someone something that will hurt them?

Well, is it for their benefit or not, et cetera? I can do that exercise. So you have your three to five values, you rank them, give yourself a score from one to ten. How well are you living in line with your values? And what is one step that you can do tomorrow or the next day to help you live more in line with that value? Because values are this buzzword, we throw it around, it sounds fluffy, it's, you know, we're going to put it with the ESG and we're going to put it with, you know, like all the words we love to just throw around. But if you are true and authentic to your values, you're going to make better decisions, you're going to relate better to your clients, you're going to choose which clients to go after more effectively, you're going to progress in your career, you're going to have better relationships, it is fundamentally true that if you're aligned with your values, if you're honest with what they are and you're aligned with them, then many things in your life can shift.

And so if you actually follow the steps to properly try to unpick what your values are, don't pick the values that, you know, your mom or society or the matrix or, you know, anyone thinks you should have, like be real and define what they are to you. I think this is a really great exercise for people to do and I always, always do this in my executive coaching work that we start there. love it. Love it. And I think that's the place you have to start, you know, and to again go back to unplugging from the matrix, reconnecting and really understanding what's important to you because then things tend to start to fall in line. So Alina, it's been a pleasure. The book is called Feminine Intelligence, How Visionary Leaders Can Reshape Business for Good and Deal with This Inflection Point that we're all in and hopefully we can turn this capitalistic society around in the right direction.

Alina, thank you so much for coming on. Anything other than making sure that they sign up for the book? Anything else you want to point people towards? Yeah, no, it's just really a pleasure to be here and I think again for especially the guys in the room to know that this was not about feminism, not about men versus women, but really a skill set and a way of being that anyone can tap into. So I was really, really glad to have this conversation with especially this audience. Love it. Well, thanks again for coming on and thanks everybody for listening. Hopefully you picked some good things up from this and helped you kind of reevaluate a few things on your own and fight the good fight here. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad it went, make somebody smile today and you know you had a good day and the world means a lot more of that right now.

So thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side. Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and I can't thank you enough. Now to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day just like you. Let's all level up and make this happen together.