295. You Are Not Your Thoughts: Breaking Free from Mental Chatter with Dr. Srikumar Rao
Dr. Srikumar Rao is a sought-after coach for entrepreneurs, professionals, and senior executives. He works with a select group of highly successful individuals to help them have an even greater impact on the world. With millions of views on his TED Talk and workshops attended globally, his mission is to improve people's lives in an exponential way.
Dr. Rao received his PhD from Columbia Business School and started his career in corporate America, where he had some success and became the head of corporate research for a communications company. He later became burnt out by corporate politics and moved to academia, where he felt stuck. Channeling his passion for reading spiritual and mystical works, he decided to adapt the teachings of the world's great masters, stripping them of religious and cultural connotations, and created a course that spread organically and was written about in major business publications. He now coaches entrepreneurs who are successful and have a spiritual quest. He specializes in telling his clients that their business success is their spiritual path.
Dr. Srikumar reads widely in various wisdom traditions and focuses on the essence of their teachings, which all point to the idea that problems stem from one's mental chatter. He believes that an individual's thoughts drive them away from their true self and that recognizing this can lead to significant improvements in their life.
Dr. Srikumar emphasizes that becoming aware of and detaching from one's mental chatter is a lifelong commitment. However, the individual can expect to see significant improvement in their life experience in just a matter of weeks if they consciously practice watching their mind. Mental chatter is not a problem in itself, but it becomes problematic when an individual identifies with it. This identification is a habit that is developed through repeated exposure, but it can be broken by observing mental chatter instead of becoming it. The starting exercise in all of Dr. Srikumar's programs is for the individual to observe their chatter and label their emotions as they arise. With continued practice, it will become easier for the individual to remain a witness to their emotions instead of being controlled by them, leading to a place of calm from which they can make decisions without being influenced by passing emotions. Though it may not be easy, the process is achievable.
The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway
“You do not live in a real world. You think you live in a real world, but you don't — you live in a construct. You created it with your mental chatter and your mental models. It's like we're all living in the matrix, but this is not a matrix created by an alien civilization out to enslave us. It's a matrix that we created with our mental model and our mental chatter. And having created it, we experience it exactly as we have created it. This is actually a highly liberating notion because if you live in a real world and you don't like it, you’re screwed — grin and bear it. But if you don't like it and you're living in a construct, you can deconstruct the parts of it that are not working for you and build it up again. And you can do this over and over again, it's a rest of your life process. That's hugely liberating.”
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