Enroll and Inspire: Interview with Kristoffer Carter, Founder of This Epic Life
I recently went one on one with Kristoffer Carter. Kristoffer is the founder of This Epic Life and the author of the new book Permission to Glow: A Spiritual Guide to Epic Leadership.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Kristoffer: When people ask me what it is I do for a living, I usually answer that I’m a coach for founders and executives, and a meditation teacher for organizations. I can safely say that this line of work chose me. I probably wouldn't have chosen it based on my earlier training and corporate career experience. I've always been one of those people that you sit down next to on a plane and for some reason share your deepest darkest fears and ambitions with. I've always had this coaching quality in my being somewhere.
My earlier career was in sales, and I was blessed to help build this incredible startup company called Centro which was headquartered in Chicago. It was a very people first organization, and we won a lot of awards for our culture. We want the best place to work for an unprecedented four straight times in Crains Business Chicago. Best place to work in Advertising Age, which was the leading magazine in our industry. During my time there, we grew from 40 people to well over 900 in a period of about eight years. So, there was some great training around running those sprints that add up to the marathon of start-up life. I spoke to our new hire classes every month, and eventually those new hire classes were larger every month than the entire organization that I started with just a few short years earlier.
I attribute that training and experience to Centro’s founder, Shawn Riegsecker. He was just a high-integrity, visionary leader. He really turned me loose to really share my perspectives, teachings, and ultimately coaching with a lot of the leaders there. I also was able to launch Centro’s first company-wide meditation program. That first program was a complete failure, but I learned a lot. My original intention was to get everybody in the company to meditate at the same time every day across all time zones, for 15 minutes. We called this The Pause. I remember meditation-at-work being like those beer kegs which were in the kitchenettes at the time. Where people knew they were there, but never felt comfortable using them. My insight was that people were hungry to create the meditation habit. I launched a website called This Epic Life and started helping people create an unbreakable meditation habit.
Like many seekers on the path before me, including Steve Jobs, I discovered the book Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. It's a spiritual classic that was published in 1946. Steve Jobs eventually read it over 50 times before he passed away. I realized through reading that book that Yogananda was my teacher, or guru. The rest of my career since then has been surrendering into this path. I get to take these proven, scientific spiritual principles that have been around for thousands of years and apply them in a modern context. I do this through coaching executive leaders at companies as large as Amazon or eXp Realty, and also the scrappiest young startups. I feel really blessed to do what I do. That doesn’t make it easy though! This year I'm celebrating by releasing a book of everything my clients and I have learned together so far. My website This Epic Life has grown into a small business that supports my family, and the work families of all of our clients. I also lead meditation trainings and leadership retreats in various parts of the world. As your readers know, entrepreneurship is filled with exhilarating highs, and face-palming failures. Meditation practice has been so essential in helping regulate those highs and lows of the journey. It's just another thing that helps me try to pay it forward with other entrepreneurs.
Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Kristoffer: At the core of Permission To Glow, the purpose is peace. After doing a lot of digging and exploration with my own coach, I determined that if I could only give my clients one thing, it would have to be peace. We work like crazy all year long in the hopes of finding or earning a few fleeting moments of peace. The most impressive conscious leaders in my experience are those that pursue all accomplishments and attainments from a core of deep, inexhaustible peace. So, I really hope readers and fellow leaders get a sense of peace and calm from this book. I also hope they get a taste of activating these four permissions in their own lives and in their own leadership. They are truly profound and transformational. Personal transformation can be a brutal journey. I tried to make this process a little bit more fun and to include plenty of self-compassion.
Adam: What should all leaders understand about meditation?
Kristoffer: At the most foundational level, meditation is about the time we spend each day getting and reclaiming our own attention. It is not about the absence of thought. Meditation is about working with any, and all thoughts, emotions, or stories that pop up to stop us. Believe it or not, it can be a very straight-forward habit to create. I believe someday meditation will be regarded for what it is: a practice that supports mental and emotional hygiene. There are certainly well-documented spiritual benefits. However, it also has endless practical benefits. One of the most powerful benefits I see with my fortune 100 executive coaching clients, is that meditation strengthens our meta-attention. This is the muscle we build that helps us stay in alignment with our values, our goals, and our KPIs.
Adam: What are your best tips on meditation for those who don’t currently meditate?
For starters, just decide that you will make the effort to meditate a little bit every single day. The consistency alone will make this easier. Next, start small and expect yourself to be pretty terrible at first. Since meditation is just the time we give each day to strengthening our meta-attention, your only goal in the beginning is to show up consistently. I've had success getting very busy people to meditate and to create the meditation habit, by showing up no more than five minutes per day, every day no excuses. They do this for 10 days. From there, they expand to 10 minutes per day, no excuses. The goal all along is to get everyone to 15 minutes per day minimum no excuses. This level of consistency is like a drop of water that will eventually carve through a slab of granite. The investment of your consistent time and attention will produce compounding benefits and returns. Simply by showing up, your practice will improve and deepen. Think about this quick math for a second, if you are meditating 15 minutes per day seven days a week every day, no excuses, that means that every 96 days you will have dedicated 24 hours of your life to meditating. That is 3 point whatever days per year dedicated to meditation. 15-minutes a day is transformative.
Adam: What are your best tips on meditation for those who are already engaged in meditation practices?
Kristoffer: I would tell any established meditators what I need to tell myself about my own practice. Your practice has plans for you. You have earned the right to trust what your practice is asking of you. Don't be afraid to go deeper, to meditate longer, or as needed, to even meditate a little less! You can trust yourself to honor this commitment to the practice. There are no limits to how deep you can take the practice. Also, you don't want to use your lofty ambitions to judge yourself by how much or how little you are showing up. If you've been practicing for a long time, I like the blanket goal of deepening or expanding your practice by 25%. What would that actually look like for you? How much could this transform your life or deepen your connection to everyone and everything around you? And then I would get to work expanding my practice the same way we did creating it up above.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Kristoffer: Whether we are talking about leaders and organizations, or the fact that all of us are leaders in our own lives, I believe that there are very common essential qualities of leadership. The first and most obvious is an ability to enroll and inspire others in a shared vision. Do you foresee a better way of life or a better way of doing things? Another quality of leadership is embodiment. This is becoming a very hot topic of conversation around vulnerability and increasing our emotional intelligence. Embodiment can be experienced from an advanced leader in their authenticity, or how we perceive their alignment between their actions, their decisions, and their spoken word. Somehow when a true leader enters our space, we can feel that coming off of them! It is inspiring to surrender our skepticism to someone else’s airtight integrity. I think we've seen a lot of great examples of truly terrible leadership in the last few years. The ability to take ownership, to truly see and acknowledge other human beings, and to empathize with the struggles of anyone in all walks of life— all of these, I believe, are essential qualities of leadership. The data actually supports that these qualities also produced the best results.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Kristoffer: My book lays out a practical path for conscious, embodied leadership. These principles and practices have been around for thousands of years. And I believe truly, that expanding our leadership is a spiritual conversation. Sure we can all read more personal development, and make more smart goals. We can push forward and achieve the unprecedented. And also, through spiritual practices we can expand our containers to hold more then we can possibly conceive of. More change in disruption, more chaos and uncertainty, and of course more abundance, teammates, fellow executive leaders, and innovations.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Kristoffer: This may sound self-serving, but I would have to start with hiring a coach. Professional coaching is still in its infancy in many ways, and there is unparalleled value in regular feedback conversations. True coaches help us see our relationships to the things that we want to achieve. We’re able to hear, understand, and notice the stories that have always held us back in the past. Creating this deeper sense of awareness is a huge part of my book. Without conscious awareness, how can we expect to change anything for the better?
Second, I would encourage anyone to create a basic meditation practice. Just having the ability to see things as they are— free from the stories we tell ourselves that make us suffer, is incredibly important.
And third, surround yourself with incredible people that have plenty of diversity not only in their backgrounds but in their thinking and their perspectives. Create a team dynamic of collaborative component parts. Collaboration is one of our higher aspects, when we can move past our petty competitive agendas, and collaborate in service to something bigger than ourselves. This is where transformation takes place on the organizational level. The most impressive organizations, and leaders I've worked with have an intuitive sense for creating, maintaining, and accelerating team dynamics.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Kristoffer: Aside from the obvious (which is to figure out any way possible to meditate everyday), I would pass along this little piece of Southern folk wisdom: “You can't read the label from inside the jar.” Throughout my career I have interpreted this to mean that we need to share ourselves openly with one another, and actively enroll others to mentor and coach us. To ask others that we trust to not only see us, but to help us see ourselves. This may sound obvious, but it is extremely powerful.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Kristoffer: Thank you for this opportunity Adam! Truly impressed and inspired by what you’ve built.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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