289 Carol Sanford

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast where you learn how to extract your business and personal Deep Wealth. 

I'm your host Jeffrey Feldberg. 

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Carol Sanford is a number one Amazon best selling multiple award winning author and business educator, summer producer, and podcaster. She's a consistently recognized thought leader, working side by side with Fortune 500 and new economy executives in designing and leading systematic business changes and design. Through her university and in house educational offerings, global speaking platforms, best selling, multi award winning books and [00:02:00] development work, Carol works with executive leaders who see the possibility to change the nature of work through developing people and work systems that ignite motivation everywhere.

For over four decades, Carol has worked with great leaders of successful businesses, such as Google, DuPont. Intel, P&G, and 7th Generation, educating them to develop people and ensure a continuous stream of innovation that continually deliver extraordinary outcomes.

Carol is the author of The Regenerative Business, The Responsible Entrepreneur, The Responsible Business, The Regenerative Life, and No More Feedback: Cultivate Consciousness at Work. Her books have won over 27 awards and a required reading at leading multiple departments at universities including Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT.

Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast, and you heard it in the official introduction. She is back. We have a number one bestselling author and incredible thought leader, someone who has turned the world upside down, and she's back once again because that's exactly what she's done with [00:03:00] her latest book, No More Gold Stars.

And when you get the book, that'll be in the show notes. I encourage you to click on the link and get that. We have management gurus like Tom Peters saying, you know what, Carol, you turned my world upside down with what I read. You're absolutely right. I've been completely on the opposite side of things all these years.

Where were you telling me not, before and off we go with that. So I'm going to put a plug on it right there. Carol, welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast. It's so wonderful to have you back. And I know when we recorded last and we'll put that link in the show notes, you were working on the book and lo and behold here it is. So welcome.

Carol Sanford: Thank you so much, Jeffrey. It's great to be back with you.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And Carol, since you've been on the podcast, we have been so fortunate. Our community has been growing by leaps and bounds. So for our newest members in the community, why don't we start with what we always start with on the podcast, the story behind the story. So Carol, for the new members, what's your story?

What got you from where you were to where you are today?

Carol Sanford: Well, first, congratulations on your [00:04:00] growing your own podcast because I think you're up to important stuff. So, my story for this book, and I have many stories, I write my books half memoir because I've learned so much in my life. Primary one for this one is my own upbringing during the time behaviorism was coming into the fore was very conflicted and disturbing because I was part of, and I write about this in the book, I was, of an experiment that Southern Methodist University in Dallas did at my high school where they studied people to find out how to apply the new test and rated they called a diminished, I the word, and my mother was asked to put me In a particular remedial class, and I even, they asked my [00:05:00] homeroom teacher who had to prove it, and both of these women, for some reason, they refused to do it, thank goodness.

And I watched for years after that, the number of behavioral Incentives, rewards, recognition. I wrote one book on No More Feedback, which I found in my research was one of the most contaminated processes for human being psychology. So after it affected me, I started studying and did a doctoral dissertation that had a lot of looking at what happens to kids.

Who are in behavioral modification programs. And I, all these years Tom Peters said to me, after he read it to write the foreword, he said, I wish someone had told me all this, because it may be the more upsetting thing that he learned [00:06:00] about how we've undermined humans. So, I finally did, but I'm eight years old, I have ALS, and but I wanted to get it done.

I'd put the research in one book, the alternative, what you should do instead.

Jeffrey Feldberg: You know, As you're sharing that with us, Carol, and again, you're very modest. I want to go actually quote what Tom Peter said in the introduction. Because he said a few things, and I want to go back to you as a thought leader, you as a person. So, firstly, and I'm quoting, and he says, quote, well, I came out of this incredible book 100 percent sold.

 This is Tom Spears speaking, yes, I'm 80, but I'm excited and overwhelmed. I have never read a book quite like Carroll's. And in so saying that, what he said a little bit earlier that I didn't read, That his model has been completely wrong of top down. You're saying, hey, not quite the case. It's actually the other way around.

And so, Carol, there's a saying, don't shoot the messenger because back in the day when someone came with a different [00:07:00] message, perhaps a negative message, one that wasn't popular, one that wasn't liked, the messenger got shot. And so, thank goodness we're past those days. But where have you found it within you to really be contrarian, to go against the trend, to go to people and say, you know what, I know you've been doing it this way.

Have you ever thought about this way because this way is actually the better way or the correct way? Where does that come from?

Carol Sanford: well there are a couple of things. One is I don't like the term thought leader, because it's a behavioral term. It means an expert and I'm better than somebody. So where it came from, my grandfather I was half Mohawk on his mother's side. He said when I was very young I was always questioning, not like a two year old does, but a question from my lived experience, and I would defend my question with, well, it doesn't seem like that to me, and so, the second thing really is, that I always looked at my [00:08:00] experience, and said, does this fit?

I was always questioning, and so my grandfather named me the positive contrarian. He said, you aren't just contrary, you aren't disagreeing. You're disagreeing with something you see which you think is more true. And so, I call that my essence. and so my work in companies and their schools and families.

has always been to disrupt certainty, not so much to convince people, but to disrupt. So I've always things in my podcast, my communities, as something for you to question. I've been teaching how I question, how I disrupt being sell or convince. So, it's in my nature, I would say, and it's actually a wonderful way to live, but you do make a lot of enemies.[00:09:00]

Jeffrey Feldberg: Well, enemies or friends, I would err more on the side of friends with what you do, because listen, your knowledge, your books, what you're putting out there, it's training some of the top minds in the world. I mean, in the US alone, the Ivy League business schools, they're. Putting your books into the curriculum, they're having the students learn about this, who later go on into the business world, and ultimately, that's what's going to shape what we are, and who we do, and where we're going as a society, but let me go back to the book, No More Gold Stars, and again, for our listeners, in the show notes, there's a link to it, please click on the link, it doesn't get any easier, pickup of the book, you can get the audio book, you can get the Kindle, you can get the paperback, it's all out there for you, it's an incredible read.

I'm wondering, Carol, what's the story behind the story on the book? When did you first get the idea of No More Gold Stars? And part of the reason I'm asking that, with the book coming out now, more than ever, we need something like this because social media, and I can get on my social media soapbox here, I feel we've really lost our moral [00:10:00] compass and to what you talk about in the book, we've forgotten how to think for ourselves and it's just follow the leader, but it's really the blind following the blind.

So it's very timely, the book. But where did you first get the idea for the book?

Carol Sanford: I'm laughing because my mother, every time someone asked me a question about, where did you get that idea, whatever it was, she'd say, she was born that way, and I don't think that's quite, and the, First time I began to think about a way to present stuff was when I was writing the regenerative business and it had a bunch of case studies.

It has Chapter 5, which is called 30 Toxic Practices and I had been looking at what businesses did and organizations and families for years. And knew what was wrong, and so I finally created a chapter called 30 Toxic Practices of which uh, [00:11:00] 90 percent of our maybe 80 were behavioral studies and so I then wrote a book right after that called Taking One of Those Practices, Feedback, and wrote a whole book on it, which is how Tom Peters found me.

 this book was referred to him, and he went all over social media and said, this book is so well researched, it's so, profoundly important he said, I would drive over a thousand miles to hear Carol speak and hope other people would and follow what she said. So, I thought, well, that's pretty good, writing one book, maybe I should write 30 of them to go on each of the toxic practices.

But I knew there were two or three paradigms, which all of them were coming out of behavioralism of one, and the other was do good. The do gooders. I'm trying to convince others. So [00:12:00] instead, I thought, well, I'll write one book about the behavioral that covers a bunch of these toxic practices and do the research.

And I always have my own research because the most scientific method as I said my dissertation was studying scientists. and how contaminated their thinking is, and why scientific method objective observation is rarely, if ever, followed, and I say, you know.

Jeffrey Feldberg: huh.

Carol Sanford: that in this book, where, as you say, people don't always agree, they refuse to accept my dissertation because, who knows, but the given reason was It didn't follow scientific methods.

I said, but that's what I wrote about. So, anyway that's kind of how I got to this book.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And while we're speaking on the [00:13:00] book, and then we'll do a bit more of a deep dive on it, as always, your creativity and your insights never cease to amaze me. So with the book, and you talk about this in the book itself with the intermezzos, which is really. A concept typically more for a musical piece. I love the way that you wove it into the book.

And so for the benefit of our listeners who haven't yet read the book, and when they get the book and they'll see all these chapters that you have, 14 beautiful chapters, and then you have an intermezzo for each one, how did you come up with the idea? Let me put something from the music world into my world and I'll have these intermezzos really intertwined and woven into each chapter.

Carol Sanford: One of the things I've noticed for years, which I have to work on myself because it drives me crazy, is people read my books or Here my podcasts are I run a series of blogs posted on some site. They then write something to try and say how excited they are for what they're going to do, and they get it completely upside [00:14:00] down.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah.

Carol Sanford: And then I thought, how can that be? And then I, continued to look and could see it was the mind through which they were listening. They were listening through a paradigm, and they were seeing me proving their paradigm. What I was doing was confronting it, and the other time that happened, is the first time, I'll tell you a real story.

I took a TIO2 DuPont team to visit Kingsford Charcoal. Now, TIO2 is a white powder, and Kingsford Charcoal is a, black charcoal dust. And the first three, the guys had created a profound change in business and created a reduction in problem waste, as well as taking a hold and created a 70 percent market share in the charcoal market.

Now that's almost unheard of and they still hold it because of what we built. [00:15:00] So,

Jeffrey Feldberg: we are.

Carol Sanford: sat down and talked, and when they left, they said, well, that place is so dirty, and they didn't even have the manager in the room.

I said, they did too, and they said, well, he didn't talk, and I said, he didn't need to. And they argued with everything they'd done, and they couldn't see what they needed to see. So, my primary challenge is every time, even people who studied with me for years often can't see what they need to get, they get their own thing.

Alright, books are the worst. You read a book, you underline the book. You write your arguments in the Marginal, a journal, and in that process, you twist everything to fit you, to fit what [00:16:00] you already think, or you either that or you just decide, I'm probably right, you're going to try and do it. In other words, you don't think about it.

These fine guys didn't think about it. They were layering their own worldview. So, I thought, how can you do that, and how can you shake them up, and I'd already figured this out on my previous book, number six, Indirect Work. I thought, when I used to go to the symphony, and the opera ballet, all of those, they had an intermission.

So I went to look that up and in the Renaissance when the idea of concerts were created in Italy and belong, there was this idea of mezo so people could internalize. They could question, they could dialogue, and also get them to go to the bathroom. But the major [00:17:00] idea was to think about it.

I said, I wonder how I could do that. So, I inserted into both of these the last two books, and I'm working on my eighth one. Who knows whether I'll finish it before I die, but anyway. I inserted this intermezzo, which is a set of questions, which you stop and not ask about the book, but ask about how you're reading. Learn to watch yourself. See how much you are translating the words, because the words don't fit your words, so you ignore my words, which are designed to disrupt you. I understand. It's up to you, your own thoughts, or... You read them without questioning, so I ask people, and I give a big description on how to use an internet, so I ask people to not pay attention to what they just read, but how 

they read, and [00:18:00] I had so many people tell me that changed How they read books.

It changed how they listen to lectures. It changed how they watch movies, even, because they had never watched how mechanical they are about taking in outside ideas. So, I have workbooks. for each of the document tags. So, that's how I came up with the idea of trying to overcome the DuPont problem.

Jeffrey Feldberg: That's interesting, and again, I'm quoting from your wonderful book in one of the intermezzos, and you ask at the very end. How does this approach expand your understanding of the meaning in what you've read? What will you be able to do with the content that you experience this way? And then you cap it off by asking, how will you extend this practice, not only to stories, but to all texts?

So I really like how you're bringing the reader in and saying, Hey, not so quick, just don't go out there what you just read and think is this way, begin to look at it from this perspective. And [00:19:00] so Carol, let me ask you this. I know that as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, founder, particularly when I was just in the early days of my startup, I wanted my quote unquote employees, I never liked that term employees.

I always looked at them as team members. I wanted my team members to think like an owner. And I found I wasn't alone with that. When I spoke to other entrepreneurs, similar sized companies from startups all the way on through, they also subscribe to that. But somewhere along the line, that changes. And when I'm speaking to what are now the bigger corporations and I'm speaking to people in the C suite or people in leadership positions, what I hear from them is, Hey, I don't want my, in the user word employees, I don't want my employees to think for themselves.

We have our SOPs, our centered operating procedures. They should follow what's in there and do what's told. And that's the end of it. So, where do you think we went off the path with that? I can understand where that's coming from, but I suspect we would both agree if really team members in a small company, in a large company, if they could [00:20:00] think for themselves, society would be better off.

We'd have better solutions. We'd have better service all the way across. What's going on with that?

Carol Sanford: Well, we'd have better businesses, and I think what happened was the behavioral stuff I talk about in this book, where John Watson convinced people That we were machines, and we were conditioned to think in a particular way and so you had to incentivize them not let them think for themselves, but I think the biggest problem is they don't have any idea how to do that. they got, all of them grew up in the era

That was behavioral, job behavioral, and so, the behavioral problem was so conditioned for them that they could see another way. Once you've learned a particular way of seeing the world. You can't change it, really, because you can't [00:21:00] see what you don't see.

So, all of the current age of an average CEO is about 58. And that means they've only ever known the way where the top down, works. Because that's, it's not because they've tested it. So, part of this book, and the reason Tom Peters was thrown completely part of what he was talking about, and he didn't say it all in the intro or the forward, is that Top down itself is a problem, and it means the C suite has to give up power in order to make some changes.

And what they don't know is Jeffrey Hollinger, who founded Seventh Generation, which is now owned by Unilever, said this work changed his whole view of how life works because it meant there were no hierarchies. That's also, that is a paradigm for kings and queens. The kings and [00:22:00] queens know, mostly kings know more than the peasants so if you have a worldview, a paradigm, you race with it, it's all you know and then your ego gets involved.

Where you have to give up something yours, that's what you see, you don't know will. I have now proven for almost 50 years of practice how you can get an increase of about 35%. to 65 percent improvement revenue over the next five years after switching this. and I don't get rid of hierarchies, we just switch the role.

And once you do that, people experience it. They think, why did I never do this? Like Jeffrey said and one of my forwards. It's written by the Chairman, CEO, and President of DuPont, who proved it to himself. Not every manager can [00:23:00] do this but I think some of the research says you only need two to five percent to change, and everything changed.

So, I have hope.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yes, such a small percentage that can make a huge difference. In other words, you don't need to have complete quote unquote buy in from the start, start with a small number of people who can then take this out there. But Carol, I'm thinking of a listener who says, okay, you know what, Carol? You make a really convincing narrative here of why I should do this.

I'm speaking as this listener now and the listener saying, I hear you on that. And there's always a but, but you know what? I don't know if I trust my people that they can actually learn to think for themselves because when we didn't have structures in place or different ways of doing things left to their own devices, it was a mess.

They made all the wrong decisions. It got us into trouble and that's why we had to really clamp down. So what would you say to that listener who's saying, Oh my goodness, this is a firestorm ahead for me if I go down this path?

Carol Sanford: yeah, so you're absolutely [00:24:00] right if you do it the way you did before, or the way most people. Because they all think it's structural. You get rid of hierarchy, and you turn it over to the inmates, as they say.

keY is, and this is the thing that's left out of 100 percent of those efforts, is development of capacity to think for yourself, which is the subtitle of this book.

We all have the capacity, and I proved in DuPont in the Minerals Group where we did a little research and found out what people do in their private lives. we did the same thing in South Africa, Colgate, and we found they were ministers, they were mayors, they were their private businesses.

They were brilliant. But no one was developing people the ability, I call it the mind of a CEO, which basically means systemic. You understand the working of [00:25:00] an ecosystem. So, in this book, I talk about the nature of what you have to do to develop people. It's also why democracy is breaking down.

People can't think for themselves. They follow social media. They follow fake news. And if we don't develop them for business, we're not developing them for a democracy. It also breaks down families because people, well, the behavior soldiers don't bother to develop people. We can't test it. That's the inner work.

It doesn't exist. And as it turns out, the reason your listener would say wisely what they just did, or you just did, is they don't understand how much inner development that has and how much personal development has to happen, so in every event I've been in all these companies, all these [00:26:00] years, every meeting begins with some kind of reflection, re teaching people how to reflect on the effects of their thoughts, on the effects of their actions, and learn to think about a system, we increasingly do.

Rewarding people for thinking small. How to fix me. Enchanting. Make people think about themselves only, not others. And, therefore, they don't think about their effect on customers. So, restructure what people are held accountable for and develop capacity to think about that broader world. I think you're right about what your audience would say and I would agree with them if you do it the way So you're using behavioral non developments.

That's the 90 percent of the difference.

Jeffrey Feldberg: It's so true and really important what you're saying, Hey, if you do things the way that they've always [00:27:00] been done, what everyone else is doing, you're going to get the same results. And Carol, as we're talking about this, I'm actually reflecting upon a conversation I recently had on the podcast with, he's an author, Jeffrey Shore, and he's all about why society needs.

People graduating from liberal arts programs, and he's saying through liberal arts, you learn to actually reason, to think for yourself, not to take everything given to you at face value and to really come up with your own conclusion, not just go with where the tides are going or with people are going, very similar to what you're saying.

And he goes on to say that, hey, society is trying to eliminate liberal arts programs. If we do that, democracy, life as we know it, is going to suffer. And what's interesting, you're coming at it from a different angle, but the message is the same. Unless we can have people who know how to think for themselves, as a society, we have some tough times ahead for us.

And I would further take what you said and agree with you. Social media has taken everything down to the soundbite because, okay, what [00:28:00] do I need to know about this particular topic in 30 seconds or less? Okay, great. That's it. Now I know, and now I form my opinion. We're not thinking for ourselves. We're having other people tell us what to think and what to do.

Would you say, Jeffrey, you're on base, you're off base, where would you be with that?

Carol Sanford: Well, I don't disagree with what Shora's saying, but I think it's incomplete. And so, I'm talking, when I say think for yourself, I mean something different. I need something more not wrong with what he's doing, but that tends to be an educative about the world, and consider more of the world. I'm talking about the inner being the reactive being, the ego being, and nobody, even in liberal arts, they don't do that.

I teach in colleges, and even in liberal arts. They teach how uh, do critical thinking skills by their definition, but it's not by mine. They don't know how to do living systems thinking. [00:29:00] They're using... Our scientific method and epistemologies of knowledge transfer. And so, I have a different epistemology when I say learn to think for themselves.

It's a native method built in. They don't do that in liberal arts. So, it's not that you're wrong, agree that they're even killing off liberal arts. But I in some ways would love for colleges to die and rebuild the entire system because um, I created an institute that people become members of for up to 40 years.

I have members now, because we have, we're so conditioned with how we have paradigms, and they don't teach you, they use a particular paradigm in liberal arts, not teach you about paradigms, and say how you're seeing the world, how you're interpreting it. Again, intervento. [00:30:00] So, I don't disagree, but it's incredibly incomplete to think if we, Converted everything to liberal arts.

We'd be fine. We would not.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Fair enough. So let me ask you this because following what we spoke about earlier, what Tom Peters also said for the past 100 years, it's been completely wrong. Carol, let's fast forward a hundred years and let's put into the equation that what you're putting out there of how to actually do this, of how people can actually think for themselves.

And we can take that back into the business world, back into society. If we fast forward a hundred years and now people have been following this and we're now looking back as we look forward. What would you hope the narrative would be?

Carol Sanford: All right, so, I don't like hypotheticals. Who knows what the future is. I would say we should go back a thousand years, or back a pre hundreds, because it was 1905 that behaviorism was introduced, [00:31:00] which the primary idea was humans cannot think for themselves. They need experts. So, the idea of experts, thought leaders, influencers, all of that would go away. Because it wasn't here before, and you had small farms, small businesses, where people did think for themselves. And so, then the other thing is I've spent a lot of time studying wisdom, traditions, indigenous, Because my grandfather was half Bohawk. And also quantum physics. I use quantum physics principles for my dissertation.

Which are very different than scientific methods. To be in a circle of logical positivism. Came in exactly the same time behaviorism did, and the reason is, we were having floods of immigrants, and also, the thought was, as it often is, there were more [00:32:00] criminals. Commercial farming came in and wiped out all the small farms.

So, 

Jeffrey Feldberg: huh.

Carol Sanford: a lot of chaos in which behaviorism And scientific method had a lot of power, because they promised order and reduction of bad people. And the other option was eugenics. Let's kill them all or prevent them having kids. And so people chose behaviorism. Thank goodness, I guess. But by going backwards in time, instead of imagining, Going forward, I think it's helpful to see the effects of defining a whole psychology, which I was working in as my field of study at the time.

That in itself saying humans cannot think for themselves because, and they did it because they couldn't study inside people. They could only study behavior, and that's how we [00:33:00] got where they are. Imagine if we were able to erase behaviors and but there was one other thing, which was public school was mandated and it meant that you had huge classes and very few people, to think for themselves.

Jeffrey Feldberg: So Carol, now that you've given us a really solid foundation, where we've been, why we've been where we are, what's potentially ahead for us, and I agree with you, no one can really predict the future. And I like you saying, Hey, let's really look back to get a sense of why we are where we are.

So I'm now putting myself back into the listener's shoes. And for every episode, Carol, Coming out of the Deep Wealth Podcast, wherever possible, we like to have an action item. So before the listener goes off to the next meeting or email or phone call, us finish talking, if they could do one action, and my one action for them would be to buy the book, but after they buy the book, if they could do one thing [00:34:00] that is really going to make a difference for them, for their business, for themselves personally, based on what we've been talking about with No More Gold Stars and all the strategies and insights that you've shared with us.

Is there one strategy that you would suggest that they consider? 

Carol Sanford: Yeah, I don't like that question. I think it's dangerous,

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay. 

Carol Sanford: and the reason is, it's driving toward doing without thinking, without knowing any background, without any context, without any, I mean, how in the world would I suggest something that isn't generic to the whole world, which my book says is the most First place to start.

Don't start with there's one way, one thing to do. So, I'd say, I want people to increase their discernment. So, if I were to suggest something, it would be to start watching yourself and the effects of your thoughts. an animatron. Where you're saying, alright, I just came out of a... I'm eating, I said this and [00:35:00] that.

What was the effect? What was the effect on me? Where did it come from? Did I, was my ego driving that? Was my reactivity and fear driving that? And when I do that, what do I come up with? And then what does that lead me to do in effect? Now that's a simple answer, It's the way to do the research on ourselves and find it where we need to get better at thinking for ourselves, because those are the kind of three you have to have discernment and then I kind of work on effect and then action.

Don't go to action. So I tell everybody in interviews, don't ask me for a takeaway because that violates everything I just wrote a book about. I'm so sorry.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Carolyn, I love that about you and I take every word that you're saying and you're absolutely right. There I am in my old way of thinking and it actually, you [00:36:00] remind me of our last time that we had together our fireside chat and At that time, we spoke about the importance of the words that we use, because words have meanings and going back to the field and quantum physics, even how we're feeling and how we're feeling on the inside, how that can really make a difference on the outside.

So guilty as charged, you got me. You know what, I have the old way of thinking in that question, but I love how you responded to that. And It just goes to show how, at least for myself, I'll speak for myself. I'm making all the mistakes. You know what, Carol, if I had a dollar for every mistake that I made, I would not have needed my nine figure exit.

I could have done it all in my mistakes and would have been very happy. But it's so ingrained in us that it's really a conscious effort to retrain ourselves of, okay,

how am 

I thinking? What am I saying? 

Carol Sanford: let me say something. I do this too. I have to fight it because we're in a culture where we have old paradigms around us and all our friends and all our family and all our education, we're going [00:37:00] uphill and getting unconditioned. And so, I'm not accusing you, I'm joining you and saying here's what I try and watch, here's what I try and manage to be.

And my members of my communities have been around for years. We all struggle. So, it's not like we're wrong, it's like we're developing a new capacity.

Jeffrey Feldberg: You're so right, and putting myself under the microscope, and I suspect it's the same with most other people. It's really taking a lifetime of doing something in a particular way, and as you're saying, to really untrain myself. Easier said than done, but it's absolutely possible, particularly when it's the right way.

And, you know, before we go into wrap up mode, what's been really powerful, and Carol, you If we're both open about this, we have just gotten to the tip of the iceberg as the saying goes. I mean, it's all in your book. We're not really doing it justice other than providing a wonderful overview that with the guidance that you share in the book, teaching us [00:38:00] for firstly ourselves, how to think for ourselves, and then understanding how to think for myself.

So, of how I can take what's in the book and very specifically apply that in my business, apply that in my personal life. We're now doing what others before us perhaps didn't have the tools to do, or didn't want to do, or didn't know how to do it. We're now doing that. We're taking the torch. We're passing that forward so that hopefully as we look forward, we have the right mindset, the right words, the right strategies to really begin to have people think for themselves so that everyone.

You can benefit from that as opposed to the traditional way of doing things. Thoughts about that?

Carol Sanford: well, I would not say, like, we have this funny idea of progression, like, we'll get better and sometime we'll be perfect. It doesn't work that way. The concept of regeneration says more often am I able to come to the uh, way of thinking, the way of working, the way of speaking, I want to. And if I can do that, I can think about it every moment, not, [00:39:00] because otherwise you have the whole failure thing.

This is what an ideal looks like, which your question about the future was, and you think, are they ever closer and closer? Rather, am I in this moment being able to see my thoughts, see my effects, see my source see my words and their effects, and if I can do that every minute, it will do what I call crystallizing, and that's better.

And sometimes it will be better, sometimes it won't. But think about it, it's in every moment, and here's a moment to practice. And so I think about a podcast I do or you do. I should say, well, that moment I can see I became reactive. And, oh, in that moment I can see what the world really... Could consider.

I could say that. I could say, alright for that moment's more conscious, but it's not permanent ever. So [00:40:00] we don't ultimately get them, we get better at activating and crystallize that capacity. who knows whether it's true, but that's the way I see it.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Very well said. And Carol, as we go into wrap up mode, and as you're just sharing what you share with me right now, you bring me back to a passage in the book. It's actually right towards the very end. I'm just going to bring this up now. I'll share it with you. I'll share it for the listeners because I think it's a wonderful way to do a recap of where we've been, where we've been heading and really what's ahead for us.

And you said it so beautifully. And I quote. And so we come back around to where we started, the work of evolving society and the way that humans inhabit our planet cannot be accomplished through behavioral conditioning, role modeling, advocacy, or regulatory control. Direct methods may produce temporary results, but they leave intact our collective failure to develop discernment, independent thought, creativity, and commitment to time binding endeavors.

To reverse this failure requires an indirect and epistemological approach [00:41:00] that rebuilds our commitment to individual self determination.

This will require a revolution in the ways we raise children, educate ourselves, manage work and shape the social and legal infrastructures by which we govern ourselves. As I approach the end of my life, I have great hope that we're on the cusp of just such a revolution. I pray that it will happen in good time.

End quote, I mean, wow, Carol, what I love about that is you really paint what's ahead for us. It's not just about business and the business world. It goes to the very core of who we are and what society is all about. I mean, what you said there, as I like to say, I don't say it all that often on the podcast.

It's not gold. It's platinum with what you've shared with us. And so Carol, right before we go into wrap up mode. Let me ask you this. Is there either a question I didn't ask, a topic we haven't covered, or some kind of message that you'd like to share with the community?

Carol Sanford: This book is an epistemological book. And pensibility [00:42:00] means how we learn and how we change. We think behaviorism says it comes from outside, from experts, from rewards recognition.

That's a whole different philosophy, which is only 100 years old, or 120, but it's become embedded. To be able to be self determined, we have to, every day, work on learning a different way. And that's the uh, uh, and I tell my students in college don't trust me. Don't ever accept anything I say without attesting an application and observing yourself.

But also, don't reject anything I say without attesting an application with observation. And companies... I work with, they have weekly, and maybe every other weekly, development sessions, developing people, and you're doing it on real business [00:43:00] stuff, so it's not lemonade stands or abstraction, it's teams working together in a new way of learning, disrupting the old way of learning and doing it about systems thinking.

Living systems thinking, so if a company spends 10 percent of its time for a few years intensely, it will change people's capacity, but they'll be improving the business while they do it, improving their families, improving democracy, because they're learning a new way. And you have to do it very intently, though and not have it get cancelled because you have an urgent meeting.

So, everybody in my books have had this 10 percent development time. A new way of working, a new epistemology of working, which has these 24 practices. I have in [00:44:00] the books embedded in how they learn and how they change.

Jeffrey Feldberg: said. And you know what? As you're sharing that and as we're recapping our conversation, we're about to go into the wrap up question. It's a perfect segue actually. And Carol, I've asked this question of you before. I'm going to ask it again. It's a ritual here on the Deep Wealth Podcast, and it's really my privilege, my pleasure to ask this question. Let me set this up for you. And perhaps you'll answer the same like you did last time. Maybe we'll go down a different path. Either way, the choice is always yours. Here's the

Carol Sanford: I never remember. Okay, go ahead.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay. Well, we'll see where it goes.

So when you think of the movie. Back to the future. You have that magical DeLorean car that can take you to any point in time. So Carol, the fun part is, is tomorrow morning, you look outside your window and not only is the DeLorean car curbside, the door is open, it's waiting for you to hop on in, which you do.

And you're now going to go back to any point in your life, Carol, as a young child, as a teenager, whatever point in time it would be, what would you tell your younger self in terms of [00:45:00] life wisdom or life lessons, or hey, Carol, do this, but don't do that. What would that sound like?

Carol Sanford: Obviously, I don't like that question. It's hypothetical,

and it

time is a real thing. Nothing about it makes any sense to me. So, I also have a agreement with myself as a principal, which is I can never do anything or answer a question the way I have before. I have to keep thinking about how to do it going forward, so, what I'm saying here...

I would not go back anywhere. I'm so happy with the process of all the disruptions, the pain, the horrible father, the abuse husband, everything has happened. I wouldn't do a minute different. You know why? Because I believe I chose all that before I was born.

And so, if I were uh, second guessing. I would say that should not be useful, because I chose those things [00:46:00] because they were what my growth and development needed, and so I don't think the question of going back in time and giving advice is the wrong cosmology about how development works. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: Carol, spoken like the Carol Sanford that we all know and love. And I absolutely love that answer. And you know what, if I'm going to go into the quantum physics area and into the field, you're right. The past, present, and future is all happening at the same time. There is no differentiation in this time.

love your consistency and I'll close things out. I'll share this with you and perhaps this will have you smile. If there's one theme to that question, whether you like the question or in this case, you don't like the question, but if there's one theme, the theme is how you answered it.

A lot of guests, very successful people have said, Jeffrey. I would not change a thing because where I am today, who I've become is from what I went through. And if I change that, that could just change everything. So it's a common theme and said by very wise souls like yourself and Carol on that [00:47:00] note, it's official.

Congratulations. This is a wrap. And as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe. Thank you so much.

Carol Sanford: Thank you, Jeffrey. 

Sharon S.: The Deep Wealth Experience was definitely a game-changer for me. 

Lyn M.: This course is one of the best investments you will ever make because you will get an ROI of a hundred times that. Anybody who doesn't go through it will lose millions. 

Kam H.: If you don't have time for this program, you'll never have time for a successful liquidity 

Sharon S.: It was the best value of any business course I've ever taken. The money was very well spent.

Lyn M.: Compared to when we first began, today I feel better prepared, but in some respects, may be less prepared, not because of the course, but because the course brought to light so many things that I thought we were on top of that we need to fix. 

Kam H.: I 100% believe there's never a great time for a business owner to allocate extra hours into [00:48:00] his or her week or day. So it's an investment that will yield results today. I thought I will reap the benefit of this program in three to five years down the road. But as soon as I stepped forward into the program, my mind changed immediately. 

Sharon S.: There was so much value in the experience that the time I invested paid back so much for the energy that was expended. 

Lyn M.: The Deep Wealth Experience compared to other programs is the top. What we learned is very practical. Sometimes you learn stuff that it's great to learn, but you never use it. The stuff we learned from Deep Wealth Experience, I believe it's going to benefit us a boatload.

Kam H.: I've done an executive MBA. I've worked for billion-dollar companies before. I've worked for smaller companies before I started my business. I've been running my business successfully now for getting close to a decade. We're on a growth trajectory. Reflecting back on the Deep Wealth, I knew less than 10% what I know now, maybe close to 1% even. 

Sharon S.: Hands down the best program in which I've ever participated. And we've [00:49:00] done a lot of different things over the years. We've been in other mastermind groups, gone to many seminars, workshops, conferences, retreats, read books. This was so different. I haven't had an experience that's anything close to this in all the years that we've been at this.

It's five-star, A-plus.

Kam H.: I would highly recommend it to any super busy business owner out there.

Deep Wealth is an accurate name for it. This program leads to deeper wealth and happier wealth, not just deeper wealth. I don't think there's a dollar value that could be associated with such an experience and knowledge that could be applied today and forever. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: Are you leaving millions on the table? 

Please visit www.deepwealth.com/success to learn more.

 If you're not on my email list, you'll want to be. Sign up at www.deepwealth.com/podcast. And if you enjoyed this [00:50:00] episode, if it added value, if you walked away with some new insights and strategies, please leave a review on your favorite podcast channel. Reviews help us reach new listeners, grow the show. And continue to create content that you'll enjoy and as we wrap up this episode as always please stay healthy and safe.