(interview blurb)
Scott: Our most important job is the development of our own selves, the being part, because when we develop our own selves, then our actions become much more powerful and our actions, by nature, become more whole serving versus self-serving. And our actions will naturally gravitate towards fixing or at least making some of these larger problems better.
(intro)
Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Our guest today is an executive coach, culture consultant and keynote speaker. His work has been featured in Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, and the popular podcast, Good Life Project. He is a 20-year advocate for mindfulness at work and the former head of Mindfulness and Compassion at LinkedIn. His unique combination of deep mindfulness experience and years as a Silicon Valley executive uniquely positioned him to help companies evolve consciously. He is the author of The Full Body Yes: Change Your Work and Your World from the Inside Out.
(interview)
Alex: Please welcome Scott Shute. Hi, Scott.
Scott: Hi, there. Good to see you. Good to be here.
Alex: Yeah, you as well. Thank you for being here. So, as many of you know, Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, we ask our guests to choose a drink, any drink, it could be tequila, could be kombucha, tea, coffee, whatever it is. So, Scott, tell us about what we’re drinking today.
Scott: Sure. Well, I have my favorite San Francisco fog mug here, first of all, and I have, I don’t know, some sort of mixture. I like the loose tea and so I have some ginger and some decaf Masala Chai mixed together. And then, honestly, I threw a little hot cocoa mix in there just to sweeten it, just a little bit, and so I like to like mix my own.
Alex: I like that.
Scott: That’s what I got going.
Alex: That is awesome. I got a Traditional Medicinals peppermint tea. I think I’m good with caffeine today. I had a green matcha tea, same brand, this morning so I was like it’s already 11 so if I have caffeine, I may be up all night.
Scott: Yeah. I cannot do caffeine at all.
Alex: I was going to ask. So, a lot of people I know that are into mindfulness and have a meditation practice stay away from caffeine. Is that where it comes from for you?
Scott: I mean, it’s not any belief system, it’s just it doesn’t work for me. So I can have — if I have a decaf cappuccino after eight o’clock in the morning, I won’t sleep that night.
Alex: I’m very similar.
Scott: It’s just — I just can’t do it. I will try, I like it, and sometimes I get away with it and I’m like, “Oh, maybe I can do this again,” but if I do it two days in a row, then I’m cooked. I won’t sleep.
Alex: I’m the same thing. A couple years ago, I started drinking coffee in the morning and I think people at work were like, “You’re drinking—” people always know when I’m on coffee, it’s almost like I’m on drugs. I see my mom or something and she’s like, “You had coffee, right?” I’m like, it’s a little annoying, but she knows me very well, I think it’s pretty apparent, so I’m trying to cut back. So teas are a great way to do it.
Scott: Absolutely.
Alex: So I’m always fascinated by how people started doing what they do and you have such an interesting background, you have a new book that we’ll talk about, but take us down your journey, like how is it that you end up doing what you do? I think one of the roles, I mean, you have a lot of different experiences, one of the roles that I find fascinating is the role you had at LinkedIn. So Head of Mindfulness and Compassion, so how does someone start a journey that ends up with such a cool gig like that?
Scott: Yeah. Well, in the middle of that, I had 25 or something like that years of career as a different type of an executive. I was a VP at LinkedIn. I was leading global customer operations so, essentially, all the customer stuff that’s not sales. And that was a big part of my journey. And I started a meditation or a contemplation practice when I was 13. It’s been a huge part of my life ever since. I’ve been teaching since I was in college. And I finally — but, look, it’s something I never talked about at work, for sure, but I got to LinkedIn, whatever, many years later, and it seemed like such an open place that, long story short, I finally brought my practice in a totally secular way to work and I ended up, over time, building something there. I raised my hand to be the executive sponsor of our mindfulness program, we didn’t really have one, and so grew it with a bunch of volunteers from essentially nothing to one of the world’s leading mindfulness programs, and still, as a volunteer, and it was moving from my 2 percent job to my 25 percent job and I needed to choose. And then, for me, the tipping point was our CEO at the time, Jeff Weiner, gave the commencement address at Wharton, this is four years ago now, and he talked about compassion. You get your 15 minutes of great advice during commencement address and he said if you’re going to be successful in life, be successful at work, be compassionate. And he told his own story of transformation. And I was thinking, okay, it’s time. It’s time for me, because I had been in this ops role for a long time, I was ready to do something else, but it’s time for LinkedIn, because, essentially, our CEO just told our 15,000 employees that compassion was the most important thing that they could do but what were we doing about it? What does it even mean? What do they do when they go back to their desk? And so I made a pitch to him and our head of HR and we essentially created this role with a great support, Head of Mindfulness and Compassion Programs, where my vision is to change work from the inside out and the mission is by mainstreaming mindfulness and operationalizing compassion. And so I did that for a few years. And then I really wanted to build things for LinkedIn and then bring them to the rest of the world, because when I talk about changing work, I don’t mean for 15,000 employees, I mean for 3.5 billion of us in the workforce. And so, during COVID, I was compelled to write this book called The Full Body Yes, it was my first foray into building a bigger audience, and then it became clear that I wanted to maintain that bigger audience versus just the employees of LinkedIn. So I left LinkedIn in 2021 and now I say I’m a free range chicken, I’m out in the world doing executive coaching and speaking and workshops and consulting on culture. So, that’s what I’m up to.
Alex: That’s awesome. I have a funny Jeff story. So, a couple of weeks ago, I was like on a date and she’s really smart, travelled person that is into business and she asked me, “Who’s your favorite CEO?” I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that, and I was thinking there’s so many CEOs out there and Jeff’s not even CEO of LinkedIn anymore and I remember Jeff Weiner is one of my favorite CEOs and she’s like, “No way, that’s the one I was thinking of too,” so I was like what are the odds, and she’s like, “I wish I had told you before, because you probably don’t believe me I was gonna say the same thing.” I was like, “Honestly, yes. He’s awesome.” And I think he was talking about a lot of these things before it was mainstream. Now, especially after the pandemic, I think it’s very commonplace for CEOs to talk about employee wellbeing and such but I think four or five years ago, it wasn’t as much so, yeah, I think Jeff’s definitely going for that. I know you guys were working closely with Fred Kofman as well so, yeah, some really cool, innovative work at LinkedIn. So, tell us a little bit more about your journey into getting interested in meditation and contemplative practice. Always a fun journey, right?
Scott: Yes. So, I’ll preface to say that everything I do at work is totally secular and I come at this from a spiritual perspective. I’ll share it. So, when I was 10 or 11 or —
Alex: I always react the same way when we’re talking about — I’m sure I’ll get to share too. I always set it up the same way you just did. Yes. Okay, let’s do it. Thank you.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex: Thank you, by the way, for sharing the real story.
Scott: Sure. So the real story is when I was younger, 8 or 10 or 11, I felt like I had this really deep connection to the divine. I felt connected. And the translation of that in our family religion, I didn’t understand, it didn’t resonate with me. I had all these questions that I didn’t like the answer to. And, long story short, I ended up finding another tradition, another path, introduced by my brother, and when my brother started telling me about it, I just started weeping because it felt like I had come home to something, like I’d been looking for something, not just since I was 11, I was 13 at this time, but it felt like lifetime after lifetime after lifetime that I had been separated from my truth and I’d come back to it, like two parts of a magnet being reunited and snapped together. And it became a big part of my life and part of that practice is essentially going within and making a connection to the divine directly and the religion or the practice is just a structure in order to have that experience. So, for me, that’s been the impetus and the drive. And now I’m really interested in, okay, what are the things that we can do to, in a totally secular way, use the same techniques to bring people joy and happiness and contentment and peace?
Alex: That’s very powerful. It’s interesting, like I react the same way when I’m talking — I have a hard time talking about spirituality. It’s one of the core things that drives me but, in the business setting, I’m always afraid to use that word or I’m afraid to showcase that side and I think I’m seeing the same in you, like we want to — you don’t want to alienate people necessarily with that, right?
Scott: Yeah.
Alex: Let’s unpack that a little bit because it’s so powerful, it’s such a driving force for humanity. And also within the business context, it’s something that I think when you understand how people perceive it or may perceive it, it makes it easy to thread carefully. So, let’s unpack that.
Scott: That’s right. Well, I think, first of all, we want to meet people where they are, and most people, almost no one is looking for religion, as an example, in their work environment. In fact, we’re really, really careful to keep it out. And I want to keep it out. I don’t want work to become a religious place. That said, everyone has their own relationship of what happens when they close their eyes. That’s a big continuum. And I want to meet people where they are to give them tools that are comfortable for them and meet them where they are. For some people, that is spiritual. For other people, I just want to close my eyes and make stress go away. So I think of it like the space program. Over the last 50 or 60 years, NASA and other space programs have developed technology that allow us to go to space. Now, that same technology trickles down into my bicycle, which could be made out of titanium or carbon fiber or the machining practices. That same technology trickles down into food processing and dried foods and all these things that came from this pursuit. Now, it doesn’t mean that everybody who eats frozen or freeze-dried food wants to be an astronaut but we all benefit from the same thing. Now, it works the same way in this world. There are people who, their goal for these practices is they want enlightenment. They want the divine right now. And they’ve learned a set of tools and techniques that are for that purpose. And some of those tools and techniques also are used for reducing stress, reducing anxiety, sleeping better, quality of relationships, etc., and so being able to use the tool and separate the original intent is really, really important for us in the work environment. Because a lot of people, they know the data that it’s good for them, that it’s good for us as a people, but still they’re resistant to it because they feel like it’s a religious thing and we need to get over that.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s so many — such a nuanced topic, spirituality, but I think, in our world, it usually goes back to religion and like some people, like I’m Jewish and I feel very Jewish, it’s part of my core identity, but I am not religious, so I don’t — I do this weekend is Passover and it’s like I’m hoping for a short seder because I don’t want to be sitting there for an hour and a half, but like it’s nice to get together with family and I love those elements of it. But it’s hard for me to go to temple, but I’m very spiritual, and sometimes people ask me, “How can you be so Jewish and not religious?” So, yeah, I mean, these are nuanced conversations.
Scott: I think more and more people are separating the two things, because most people do not seek out religion. They seek out something deeper, you might call that spirituality. Some people like the social aspect of religion and there’s definitely a power in that. But we’re teasing the two things out and we see that a lot of times, unfortunately, religion has very little to do with spirituality and it becomes more of a social endeavor. And then spirituality is an individual pursuit. It’s not a team pursuit, it’s an individual pursuit. And then some people don’t know how they feel about spirituality, whether they’re atheist or agnostic or don’t even know what to call it or whether to give it name and so as soon as we start naming it, as soon as we start codifying it into something, then we start building barriers, we start building walls instead of bridges. And so the opposite of that is let’s leave it open. Let’s talk about things that are open for everybody and accessible for everybody, regardless of what you believe in.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s so much about — spirituality is really such a driving force for humanity. It’s always been. It’s like a way to come together and to ask the big questions. I think we — science has not eroded our hunger for these questions. And, I think, in fact, the foundational aspect of science that — foundationally, science is a little bit blind to the spiritual side because anything metaphysical, anything that’s beyond this plane is not something that science is interested in because they cannot measure, but the fact that they cannot measure it and it’s our standard way of looking at the world today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist and I think that’s led to a little bit of this dryness of rationality, where people are looking for something that is magic, like the world’s magical, we’re sitting in this rock that is gyrating across space and time. I mean, it’s wild to be alive. But then, in this rational worldview that is driven by corporations managing all these supply chains, it’s very dry and arid, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it enables this amazing way of life. But at the same time, it also makes us wonder what else is out there. I mean, there’s a whole movement for like micro-dosing and people finding spirituality through those pathways. A lot of people still find it through religion, but I think a lot of people are — and I’ve never done really major psychedelics, but I know that a lot of people find those states of consciousness through those things and I don’t know necessarily it’s super sustainable but it’s a way of dealing with this dryness that’s perceived. So I really, really am attracted to the work that you were doing at LinkedIn, because it’s so important for companies to be able to set the tone, exactly like you said, it’s like it’s the carbon fiber bike that came through the space program. It’s like so many of the things that you can do at a company can cascade to employees’ wellbeing without it being something that is like uncomfortably spiritual. So, if we go back to that role at LinkedIn, what were some of the programs that you were running or the initiatives that would help cascade that spiritual practice in a way that’s very practical?
Scott: Sure. I divided the work into two camps: mindfulness and compassion. So let’s talk about mindfulness. Mindfulness, my idea was to mainstream mindfulness. In other words, just make it as commonplace as physical exercise. So, in other words, mental exercise becomes just as commonplace as physical exercise. Now, how? Various ways. We would start with an app, we would get everybody access to an app and, over time, we used Headspace. We really liked the app Wise@Work from our friends at Wisdom Labs. We found this to be super practical for people who are working and relevant for people who are working. And they also have a community drop-in program also called Wise@Work that we loved as well. It allowed us to scale in different places.
Alex: We will take notes of these and add it to the session description for anyone that’s interested.
Scott: Great. We do a speaker series, we do just straight-up meditations. I had my own that I led once or twice a week, but over the course of time, we built it into 50 or 60 weekly meditation sessions around the globe for 15,000 employees. We would do weekend or Friday afternoon retreats and expose people to different practices, try to show them, “Hey, here are six different styles of inner practice,” and let them decide what they liked. So, I would do things like LinkedIn Live. So here’s this, let’s face it, older, middle-aged white dude who’s been successful meditating on LinkedIn Live, just trying to make it normal as physical exercise. On the compassion side, this is where — here’s the thing. I’m excited about the mindfulness piece but I’m really, really, really excited about the compassion piece, because mindfulness, we offer all these things but, at the end of the day, maybe 15 or 20 percent of our employees over the course of time will attend something, which means 80 or 85 percent never attend anything. But the compassion piece, this is how we work. Mindfulness is the individual pursuit but compassion is how we work together, which means everything we do, how we sell, how we service, how we build products, how we treat each other, the policies we put in place. And what I would say on that front is, I’m not saying that I have made a big impact on LinkedIn as a compassionate place, what I’m saying is LinkedIn is already an amazingly compassionate place and I felt like my job was to be sort of like a reporter, an investigative reporter, to say, “How did we get here?” and to codify it and to say, okay, if we were gonna take these, myself and five other execs left and started another company, and brought the five or ten best practices to build a compassionate company, like what would that be? And that’s what I’m working on now is codifying these practices into something that any organization or any leader can put into place.
Alex: That’s very powerful and I love the idea of corporations paying attention to these subtleties, because, at the end of the day, I mean, I got into IO psychology because I had an under — I had a vision for the world being better through corporations. It’s so easy to talk smack on big corporations but if we can make a change within those systems, this is the way to change the world.
Scott: That’s right. Corporations, companies have more power in the world than they’ve ever had. They’re already shaping our consciousness. If you start with a big company and pick any big company, you have to fit into the company culture or you’re not going to be successful. So they’re already shaping the way that we think. The question is, is it for good? And I think they’re shaping, look at the world right now through sanctions and other things, they’re shaping the world in ways that governments and religions have been doing and trying to do for thousands of years. Actually, now, it’s companies who have that level of ability to change. Think about examples like the following: the meatpacking industry or the meat safety used to be a huge problem. And it wasn’t until McDonald’s said, “Okay, suppliers, we need you to shape up, like move from this level of quality to this level of quality,” then, in a matter of a few years, they all made the move. It was because one company decided they were going to do things better. And it’s the same thing and these companies are — look, every company is just a collection of individuals. They’re a collection of us. We are the company. There’s no robot somewhere. It’s a collection of people. So as people gain consciousness, as people become more mindful, then their actions become more compassionate.
Alex: Absolutely. And you’re totally right about that shift towards the power of corporations, we went from tribes to city states to nation states and that’s kind of how the world evolves. And now, we have this globalized world in which corporations are becoming detached from the country, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing, but they’re becoming detached from the countries that they sprung from and have power that is, I mean, it’s not in the scope of our podcast but a lot of government and the way it works is lobbyists, it is the power of corporations — you used to need the separation of church and state in the Middle Ages, now we need the separation of corporations and government. It’s so complex. It is a very nuanced topic outside of the scope of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee but we know coaches, a lot of them work in these systems and a lot of them work in government and also work in corporations. And I think healthy dialogue between corporations and government is so vital, but it seems to be one of the challenges of our age.
Scott: Yeah. I’ll share some data that many listeners may already know about the power of what I will call compassion, you could call it consciousness in business, and this is from the work that Raj Sisodia and team did on Firms of Endearment maybe 20 years ago and then Conscious Capitalism but the research shows that, essentially, this is true of individuals as well, when a company moves from solving from just the “me” or finances to the “we” of all of the stakeholders, they’re actually more successful. So, in other words, if a company on purpose creates a great place to work for their employees and creates long-term value for their employees, they create real value for their customers, they care about their customers and their customer success and they have a good business model which yields returns for their shareholders. These companies are 14 times, 1,400 percent more profitable than the S&P average. So, to me, at the root of it, this is not just some hippy, new age thing to do that feels good, it feels good and it does make the world a better place. This is also how you build a successful business. And so we’re waking up to that part of it, where companies can have so much influence in the world and so infusing them directly with these concepts and talking about it directly, that time has come.
Alex: I mean, for me, consciousness and compassion are two different things. When I look at the spectrum of human development, you go from selfish care all the way to universal care and that’s scientific, we know that people, as you become more aware and developed, your scope of care towards others increases and it’s like this developmental path and you can’t start here, you have to start here and then develop, just it’s the nature of development. So, a lot of what you’re describing, that work that you’re doing at LinkedIn, it almost sets the tone from a consciousness perspective, it’s like if you’re more aware and more mindful, that is going to give you the tools to be more compassionate. And a lot of what you’re doing through meditation is breaking these layers of understanding. I mean, meditation is the only thing that’s been proven to help you move through stages of adult development, which I think is fascinating. How can sitting there breaking these kind of thought patterns and trying to find this stillness help you become someone that is more in tune with other people’s needs? It’s so powerful. I think a lot of what I’ve seen meditators do sometimes is that it actually accentuates your egocentrism because you’re focusing so much on yourself but if you break through certain barriers in meditation, it really opens up that pathway for compassion. So doing that at scale within the scope of a corporation and embedding it in the DNA is probably a lot of what we need to be able to make better decisions because if you’re trying to solve these problems, stuff like corporations and government relationships, just by looking at the problem itself, it’s very different than if you set the right foundation within corporations to change the way we think and then it’s almost like the problem starts solving by itself because you’re trying to make better decisions. And it brings me back also to the profit motive, like a lot of what we have created today is based on this idea of capitalism that was — what was that famous economist throughout the 20th century? Milton Friedman. That Milton Friedman way of looking at the world where it’s like this raw competitive ecosystem and like nothing else matters other than economic man and its ability to make decisions around what to consume and compete with others, but there’s so much more to that in humanity, isn’t there?
Scott: Absolutely. I think the two sides of the coin are doing and being. Now, most of our life is focused on the doing, the tick list, the OKRs, the MBOs, the stuff we need to get done today is all about doing, achievement, but being, which is an active force, it’s not a passive force, like how we show up is just as powerful. Now, mindfulness or any inner practice that we do shapes our being, shapes our consciousness. It’s another way of saying consciousness. And when we shape our being, then the doing is shaped as well. When we ourselves achieve some level of, whatever you want to call it, this being-ness that is better, then the natural action is every one of our actions becomes more compassionate, becomes more conscious. So I think of it as you can open a newspaper, a news browser and look at the world and look at 50 different massive problems that nobody can solve on their own, everything from the environment to war to social injustice, etc., and I always thought, wow, maybe I should quit my job at work and try to go help, help fix one of these things, but what I’ve come to believe is that each one of us have a set of skills, this is the expression of us, our most important job is the development of our own selves, the being part, because when we develop our own selves, then our actions become much more powerful and our actions by nature become more whole serving versus self-serving. And our actions will naturally gravitate towards fixing, or at least making some of these larger problems better.
Alex: I think for some people, this is still a little woo-woo, like if this resonates with you, you get it, you see that connection, but would you say that we’re living still through some times where, for a lot of people, the connection between let’s say consciousness and creating better economic systems is not necessarily clear?
Scott: For sure, probably for a majority of people it’s not clear. Yeah, for sure.
Alex: Yeah, it’s one of those things like coaching ROI, it’s like why are we measuring it if we know it works, we know if we’re more conscious. Yeah, it’s interesting, and now there’s all these shows in TV at the moment, like, for example, WeCrashed, such a good show, it’s on Apple TV and it’s the story of WeWork — your cat…
Scott: My cat let’s join the conversation.
Alex: Yeah.
Scott: Insisting on me petting her, she’s going to put her —
Alex: Let’s get that perspective and that’s funny. I’m glad we’re not in person because the only thing in the world I’m allergic to is cats.
Scott: Cats?
Alex: Yeah, so…
Scott: Well, there you go.
Alex: So that show’s really good and you see like Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, like, “Our purpose is to elevate the world’s consciousness,” and they’re selling office space. It’s so interesting. That was probably not a great example of consciousness at work because the name of the show is WeCrashed so didn’t work out, I guess, but it’s very interesting. I recommend that show —
Scott: It’s fascinating. Not every endeavor is successful.
Alex: That’s true.
Scott: But it sounds like a valiant effort.
Alex: But the idea, I think, of there’s more and more of that entrenching into work and it was well received by investors, the idea of bringing consciousness into the world, so although it wasn’t a successful venture, ultimately, he was successful in some ways, but, yeah, I think people are less resistant and that was my thing, my point with the show, less resistant to combining consciousness with work, but still, I think I can see our hesitance to talk too much about things that would be like woo-woo for some people, but it’s like if you meet people where they are in terms of that spectrum of talking about these things, I think there’s a lot that can be unpacked. So, sounds like you guys were doing some really cool stuff at LinkedIn so that’s awesome.
Scott: Yeah. I’m happy to have been a part of it and the work continues.
Alex: Awesome. So, as the work continues, I would love to learn more from you about your book that you published very recently.
Scott: Sure. It’s called The Full Body Yes and what I mean by The Full Body Yes is just when all of you is aligned. Now, this happens when you’re trying to decide what you want for breakfast and you just know, but it’s most poignant when you’re going through something that’s hard, when you’re trying to make a big decision and you’re grinding the emotions and the mind, and so at the highest level, it’s how do we follow that deeper inner voice, because when we do follow the deeper inner voice, we have the full body yes, we are expressing ourselves in our most potent form. At the root of it, here I was, I was the Head of Mindfulness and Compassion, I wanted to write a book about how to be compassionate and what I realized when I sat down was 99 percent of compassion, for me, is about getting out of my own way. It’s about my own mess. It’s my own self development. And so the book, it’s a collection of stories about that journey, about the journey of getting it right, mostly the journey of getting it wrong, and the impact that we have when we get it right.
Alex: That’s awesome. What was the genesis for the book?
Scott: Well, the fire started — I’ve been wanting to write a book since I was 15 so I always knew that I would write a book. And I was with my friend Soren, who leads Wisdom 2.0, some people may know about the organization, we were coming back from a speaking event in December of 2019 and he’s driving and I’m in the passenger seat and he gets this funny look and he says, “The universe has told me to tell you it’s time to write your book,” and we both laughed and I checked inwardly, I’m like, “Does that feel right?” And it did, it felt I had the full body yes, like it’s time. And so I got an editor, because I had all these stories — I’m a good writer but I’ve never written a book before so I got an editor and together we created an outline and then I was off on my own and so when it came time to write, it was around the beginning of April of 2020. Now, remember that time, we had, at least I had been sent home, I thought we were going to be home for two weeks, because of COVID. That turned into — everybody knows how that movie ended —
Alex: Still going on.
Scott: It’s still going, still going. And so I essentially traded commuting time for writing time. And these were the stories that were right. These were the stories that I tell during my workshops, where I tell when I get invited to speak somewhere, so they just spilled out and it took me only less than three months to write the book. It was quite exciting.
Alex: Wow, less than three months. You must have been commuting for a long time then.
Scott: Yeah. It was ready and I was very disciplined and it was coming from a good place.
Alex: How did the title come about?
Scott: Yeah, the original working title was From Me to We. That was going to be it, From Me to We, this idea that as we grow — when I was 16, I only thought about myself, and then life teaches us better. I ended up getting married and have kids and become a manager and then a leader at work and, with all of those, realize, oh, actually, for me to be happy, we need to be happy. For me to be successful at work, we need to be successful at work. And so that was the title, but there was an organization in Canada that got in trouble for something and they were called Me to We, we didn’t want every search engine when they searched for the book to find this other thing going on. And so what I was really talking about was this other thing, and this is a better title anyway, this Full Body Yes. So I think that the people who — there’s something about it which is attractive to a certain group of people and those are the — that’s the audience for the book. If you’re excited about the title, then it’s for you. And if not, maybe not for you.
Alex: That’s awesome. Yeah, I think, speaking of WeWork, they could have sued you because I believe that they trademarked the word “we.”
Scott: Well, it wasn’t just — yeah, they probably can’t go that far.
Alex: Probably not. I mean, it’s a hard thing to trademark, like “we,” it’s like we can use “we” anymore? But, yeah, it’s interesting. Yeah, I guess. Well, I liked the title. I try to read people’s books before I talk to them in the podcast, but sometimes reality just hits you, slaps you in the face, it’s just like no time sometimes, yeah. My bookshelf actually didn’t make it through my new apartment, it’s too big, so I just have all my books there. So plenty of things to read. I will add your book to it, for sure. Sounds very interesting. How has writing the book, because a lot of our audience are coaches and a lot of coaches have books and a lot of them want to have books and a lot of them, I’m sure, don’t want to have books, but what was your experience as an author and how has that changed some of your consulting work?
Scott: Yeah, it’s a great inquiry, because my relationship with it has changed a lot. I knew going into writing a book the statistics. Actually, do you know offhand like the average number of books that a single — an average title will sell? What would you guess?
Alex: Probably like a couple hundred?
Scott: Yeah, it’s 250 so…
Alex: Most people would say thousands, like I know I’ve done that mistake before so now I know.
Scott: No, 250 —
Alex: That’s crazy.
Scott: — means half the books published in the world sell less than 250. It’s only the top 100th of a percent that actually do anything. But, of course, I thought I would be different because we have all these connections at LinkedIn. If you think about my second-degree connections, it’s everybody in the world because of the connections I have with certain people.
Alex: Absolutely.
Scott: And I thought, okay, well, I’m going to be the one that breaks that mold and I assumed that we’d be in reprints and fifth edition and blah, blah, blah, and the truth has been anything but that. And this comes with great endorsements. It’s critically acclaimed but yet, commercially, not what I wanted it to be. And it took me a little while to, I would say, get over that or to get used to it, but the truth is the most powerful, the most important part of writing the book is writing the book because what it did is it codified my belief system. A lot of it is about the story of my own life and you think, “Oh, of course, I know the story of my own life. It’s my own life —
Alex: Right, it’s your story.
Scott: — but if you go write this — yeah, but if you go to write it, it’s all of a sudden like, “Oh, now I understand the story of my life in a much deeper way.” And also I’ve codified my belief system and my coaching system and my training system so there’s a power in just the writing itself. And then, of course, there’s the opportunity to share, because it’s allowed me to be a guest on many, many podcasts and many, many speaking events and each one of those is an opportunity to share the work that we’re doing. And I was having this conversation early on with a friend and I had mentioned, I was griping about book sales and then I was talking about all the things that I had done and he says, “Wait a minute, why does it matter? Like it doesn’t matter at all how many books you sold,” and I gave him a funny look, he says, “In the last six months, you got to talk to over a million people about the work that you’re doing so who cares who actually read the book, you got to talk to and be in front of a million people because you wrote the book.” I’m like, ah, that’s true, and that’s a really powerful thing. A lot of that work has then turned into people who want to go deeper, either clients who turn into executive coaching clients or they turn into culture consulting or they turn into other opportunities to partner in other ways. Because my mission is not have a bestselling book, my mission is change work from the inside out. I never want to forget that. That’s the real mission. So the book has been a very useful tool in opening doors and creating connections and codifying my own belief system.
Alex: That’s wonderful and, honestly, consistent with a lot of what I’ve heard from people writing books that, from a consulting practice perspective, it’s helpful. It provides a frame to talk to clients about something that you obviously are an expert in and you care about. So, it sounds like that’s consistent with your experience. But I will still — we don’t do plugs here at coaching.com, consistent with how we’ve always run WBECS, but I’ve taken a look at your book, it looks very interesting so I would say people should go and check it out and help you, I’m sure you’ve sold more than 250, but I think they need I think to be a bestseller, you only need to sell a couple thousand books, someone told me.
Scott: The bestseller list is pretty fascinating. On Amazon, it’s all based on the last hour, so you can be — if you sell a couple thousand books in one hour, you’re a bestseller on Amazon, The New York Times, I have a friend who is a New York Times bestseller author and he paid $150,000 for the right because a lot of its manipulated. You can hire a firm and what they do is they go buy a bunch of books and then return them. Not all of them happen that way but those lists are very — it’s a false sense. So I also early on realized I wanted to be authentic about it. I didn’t want to have that next to my name as a false thing.
Alex: Definitely. I agree with you. It’s just, at the end of the day, it’s business and there’s different strategies, but I think what’s very powerful about writing a book and with the work that you do is bringing it back to that framework that you can use with clients and I’m sure it’s helped with the consulting side too because it’s always, I think people — there’s something about having a book when you’re a consultant and I think it just provides people a window into who you’re working with.
Scott: Yeah. It’s a strange level of gravitas that people still give to an author. Because I could have written the exact same material and published a series of articles one by one on LinkedIn or Medium or Facebook and nobody would have cared, but if you put it together and it’s in a book, then all of a sudden it has this level of achievement or this level of honor that we give to it in society and, for right or wrong, I’m just saying this is what it is, we give special credence to people who are authors.
Alex: Absolutely. Sounds like you run a pretty tight ship, like you wrote this book, your friend told you maybe it’s time to read your book, you checked in and you were like, yes, it’s time, three months, a couple of months later, you have your book. So, I’m curious on your routine. What does an everyday day look like for Scott Shute?
Scott: It’s true, I am pretty organized. I mean, I spent 25 years as an operations leader. This is kind of my natural personality. I wake up at 6:30, first thing I do is, I live in San Jose, California, so I go out in my backyard every day, rain or shine, usually it’s shine, and I do my practice for about 30 to 40 minutes and then I try to come in and do whatever the most creative thing is that I need to do that day. So if I need to write an article or when I was writing the book, this is what I would do, or if I need to record a video, I tried to do it first thing of the day before all the mess of email and other distraction comes in. And then I try to schedule all my meetings on three days during the week and I have the other two days for spaciousness. Real life happens so they tend to get taken up too. I try to schedule time just to be, especially in this work, because if I’m oversubscribed then I can’t be the person that I want to model in the world so I definitely am leaving time for my own pursuits, my own creative pursuits but healthy pursuits, like this last week, I did a mountain bike race and so leading up to it, in the few months up to it, I was biking 8 to 12 hours a week for a few months, best shape I’ve been in in 15 years so this whole free range chicken thing is pretty good.
Alex: That’s awesome. And what about like your — sounds like you’re pretty healthy, you have your whole tea routine, so tell me more about your eating habits. I think they’re going to be interesting and solid so I’m curious.
Scott: Yeah, we’ll see. So, I think it all — health starts with sleep, actually, so it starts there.
Alex: Absolutely.
Scott: So, for me, sleep is super important, like I try to safeguard my sleep and I’m regular about it. I think regular to bed, regular waking up is really powerful versus the all over, I call it the college schedule, the all over the place when I was in college. And then eating, I’m not the world’s healthiest eater but I’m pretty good. I’m an omnivore so I eat pretty much everything but I’m trying to reduce my sugar intake and so I used to have a real sweet tooth but what I find is the more that I work out, the less that I want sugar. It’s a total upward spiral. And then it works the other way too. When I fall off the workout wagon, then I start eating sweets and then I fall off the workout wagon even harder. And so, right now, I’m in a pretty good way of eating mostly healthy.
Alex: That’s good. It’s always good. I actually got back to, speaking about sleep, I couldn’t sleep the other night and I started meditating. I hadn’t meditated in a few years and I used to love my meditation practice. I’ve never had a meditation practice. It’s always been like I can — if I meditate, I can meditate for an hour, so it’s like an interesting relationship I have but it was like just have access to being able to do that. But a lot of people that know me are like, “How are you doing that?” I’m always like moving and like doing things, but for some reason, I can focus on my breath and I can get into deep states of meditation. So I did that the other night, I couldn’t sleep and I did it for an hour and a half and it really reconnected me with how powerful it is. It’s just so empowering to get your body in such a state where, barely after an hour, barely have to breathe, you’re one-pointed concentration, that was playing around with keeping an apple in my — an image of an apple, like that kind of style of meditation where you’re thinking about an object and so empowering to be able to — it comes back, its face comes back, it’s so empowering when you suddenly see that in like HD and everything else of size and you can focus and then you stop thinking about that object and you’re just one-point meditation. It’s one of my favorite things in life but I have an interesting relationship with it. I have to be able to not sleep the other night to say like, “What am I gonna do? I’m not ready for work at 4 AM,” so I did that and it was so empowering. I loved it.
Scott: Good. One of my favorite techniques for insomnia or if I wake up, you wake up at whatever, 2:30 and you can’t get back to sleep, I like this practice. It’s called the 4-7-8 breathing, it’s something super simple. It’s basically counting breaths. So, on the in breath, you count slowly to four, and then you hold your breath for seven counts, and then you exhale for eight counts, and then you restart. And you do that only four or five times or you can repeat as much as you want. But there’s something powerful about this which helps calm both the body and the mind. Because, oftentimes, it’s our mind, we wake up at 2:30 and then our mind gets going, like, “Oh my God, I need to get back to sleep because I’ve got a big meeting at 9:30,” or whatever. And so this practice forces us to think about something, really concentrate so it calms the mind, but then there’s something about this pattern interrupt in the breathing of breathing differently which indicates to our body like, hey, let’s do something different here. I find it super helpful for me personally.
Alex: Yeah, no, that is very helpful. I’ve started doing it now when you were saying it, I just started breathing deeply and holding. Definitely some physiological effects of breathing. Breathing is so important. We’re doing it all the time that so many people don’t stop and just like take a deep breath once in a while. It’s very powerful. I’m very encouraged to go back to my meditation practice. So I need to time it with my neighbors, I feel like, because I get distracted so I need to make sure there’s no one doing anything outside or the gardener, but, like, yeah, I think for me that’s the problem.
Scott: Those can be part of the practice. It’s funny, one time I was leading a session at work, and at work, to get to the place where we did meditation, which is like, imagine a corporate gym with the wood floors and the mirrors on the walls, this is the room we were doing it in, but to get there, you had to go through the gym part that has all the workout equipment, the stair steppers and the bikes and the weights. So as I’m headed in there, I see these three big dudes who are going to do deadlifting. They’re getting the bar ready, they had this big bar, maybe 300-pound bar, and a deadlift, if you don’t know, it’s like you pull the bar up ’til you stand up straight and then you just let it drop onto the floor. That’s kind of what it looks like. So we start our meditation and as soon as we start our meditation, there’s this, boom, and the shaking of the mirrors and like it just rattled, it’s like terrifying, shakes you out of your skin.
Alex: It does really.
Scott: And every 45 seconds, another boom and also you could hear the guys like high fiving each other and shouting, and I’m leading the meditation so in my mind, I’m thinking, okay, I play out the scenario, like in one scenario, I open the door, I’m like screaming at these guys like, “Hey, we’re trying to do a meditation session, blah, blah, blah,” and I was thinking, okay, well, that’s probably not the best look for a meditation teacher to do.
Alex: Seriously. Walk the talk, dude.
Scott: Yeah, so I decided that, for me, personally, I was just going to let it go and every time I heard this boom, I was going to inwardly smile and just say thank you. Just thank you for helping me put my attention on something. And it lasted the entire 20 minutes. And as soon as we were done with our 20 minutes, they were done, like on the dot, they were done, it’s just like the universe had timed it this way. And we were kind of debriefing with the people who had come to my session and this one guy is like, “Yeah, you know, I kinda noticed at first but once we got going, I just kinda let it go. It didn’t bother me.” I’m like, yeah —
Alex: That’s awesome.
Scott: — that’s the definition of the practice.
Alex: Absolutely.
Scott: And this is, whether it’s the noisy neighbor or the kid screaming next door or the thing that’s irritating about whatever’s going on in our mind, this is the practice.
Alex: And when I used to have a practice, that is the attitude that I had and it was a long time ago and I think, as I’ve fallen off the wagon, I think to get in the wagon, you find all these excuses for why you’re not doing it and it’s interesting. Why do I need so many excuses not to do something that when I do it, I enjoy it so much? It’s such an experience. I think they compare meditative states to like an acid trip, like the way your brain looks when you’re like in an advanced meditation state is just like, yeah, I’m sure it’s harder — again, I’ve never done psychedelics but I’m sure it’s easier to take a pill or do something like that than to actually induce it yourself. But it’s so empowering to be able to experience the world in such a way with just controlling your breathing and paying attention to certain things. I’m encouraged to — next time we speak, you’ll have to ask me is, “How’s your contemplative practice going?” So, when you start your day, you do 30, 40 minutes, so what does that look like? Does it change? Are you doing like the same exercises every day?
Scott: It changes a little bit, there’s a portion that’s the same all the time. I have this — the basis of my practice is I use a mantra, I use the word “hu,” sung long and drawn out, like some people use “om,” I like the word “hu.” For me, it’s like a tuning fork to that deepest part of me, which I would call soul, and as soul, I think I’m a spark of divine so this access this tuning fork to that deepest part. And then I’ll do that for 15, 20 minutes or so. And then I usually do some sort of visualization or some sort of self-talk — oh, I’m losing the word on what that is. Affirmation, that’s the word. Some sort of affirmation, depending on what’s going on in life. I actually use it as a creative problem solving practice. So if I’m struggling with something, could be a relationship issue or a job issue or something, then I have a set of visualizations or creative practices I’ll use to make that situation better, whether it’s to visualize it going better or visualizing taking the emotion out of it or something. So, I’m very much active based inner work type of practice.
Alex: Cool. Do you bring some of that work into your coaching? Let’s talk about your coaching practice. So, do you bring this kind of work with clients?
Scott: If they want to go there. Not everybody wants to go there. If they want to go there, then I meet them wherever their practice is —
Alex: Do you ask or do you get a sense of where you think they are?
Scott: You try to get a sense first and then ask, and often the asking, in the intake, I do this thing where they tell me for each area of their life on a scale of 1 to 10 where are they with that area and also how important it is to them. So I might ask about their career, their relationships, but also their emotional state, their mental state, their physical state. In other words, their physical wellness, mental wellness. And if they tell me on their — and spiritual wellness. So if they tell me, oh, their spiritual wellness is a 10 out of 10 on the importance scale but they’re only a 4 out of 10 on where they are right now, then that’s an open door for us to have that conversation. And this is not about me sharing my own belief system but it’s about finding out what they believe and then working with that. And then continuing to ask permission about can we expand that? Can we keep talking about it? And depending on the client, depending on the situation, they either they’re all in or it’s not something that’s a big deal for them.
Alex: Absolutely. How long have you been running a coaching practice?
Scott: Well, I mean, I’ve been not at LinkedIn only since September of ’21 but I’ve been interested in coaching for a long time. About 15 years ago, I got coaching certified from NLP, from neuro-linguistic programming, and I thought at the time I might be interested in being a coach but I wasn’t ready yet. I wanted to run a business. I’m more of a business guy. And so, even in that moment, I tried to do a startup that was for coaches, because I was in training with all of these coaches and, the truth is, let’s say there’s 35 people in this class, 35 amazing people and probably amazing coaches, and the truth was that almost all of them are terrible business people. Sorry, but it’s true. Like they were going to get five clients from their five friends and one of them would get a referral and then that was going to be it. And then they’d go back to being an HR business partner or whatever they were going to do before. And that was just the reality of the way it worked. So I tried to do a coaching startup that connected people who were interested in developing themselves with coaches and so I spent a few years moonlighting, trying to get that off the ground. So the net of it is I’ve had this love of coaching and the practice for a long time. I’ve incorporated those practices when I was a leader leading giant teams in the work environment, and now it’s more of a direct part of my income stream, I guess you could say.
Alex: Well, I didn’t know that about your background that you were working — you were ahead of your time trying to build this kind of network of coaching referrals, sounds like. And a lot of what’s happened in the coaching industry is actually like large scale that, so maybe you were a little ahead of your time.
Scott: I have something else I’m working on now that hopefully will be like the next incarnation of helping us all change work from the inside out really. That’s what it’s about for me.
Alex: It sounds like it. Cool. Well, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today. It’s always nice to dig a little deeper into some of these topics that are very grounded in this rational approach, this enterprise-driven ways of thinking that bring next gen dimensionality to it, because the world’s not in a place right now where we’re like, “Yes, everyone’s aware of how consciousness and development is so important for leading us to the next level of humanity’s evolution,” but — and sometimes it like turns people off so I think we both come from the same place where we’re trying to like, yes, these things are powerful in our personal lives, we’ve experienced them, and how do you communicate it with people in a way that’s going to be received effectively.
Scott: Absolutely. That is the work.
Alex: That is definitely the work and, yeah, it’s a fun journey. So, want to thank you for your time today and for being a guest in our podcast and looking forward to staying in touch and seeing some of the great work that you’re doing, Scott. I’m excited to see your session at our upcoming summit as well.
Scott: Beautiful. I look forward to it.
Alex: Okay.