Why do so many successful leaders feel burned out, misaligned, or unfulfilled? According to Raj Sisodia and Nilima Bhat, the issue isn’t a lack of skill or intelligence, but rather a lack of healing. In this episode of Career Sessions, JR Lowry sits down with Raj Sisodia, co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism movement, and Nilima Bhatt, leadership coach and author, to explore the deeper emotional and psychological dimensions of leadership. Drawing from their new book Healing Leaders, they argue that many leadership challenges stem from unprocessed trauma, unconscious patterns, and a disconnect from purpose.

In this episode, JR, Raj, and Nilima discuss:

• Why leadership today is facing a “healing crisis”
• The hidden cost of success: burnout, misalignment, and “hollow achievement”
• Why traditional leadership training often fails to create lasting change
• How unhealed wounds shape leadership behavior
• Why many leaders resist doing inner work
• The seven steps to healing as a leader
• How trauma, if processed, can become a source of growth
• Why leadership starts with self-awareness

If you’re feeling stuck, burned out, or questioning your path, this episode offers a deeper lens on what it really takes to grow.

Follow Career Sessions with JR Lowry for weekly conversations on leadership, career growth, and navigating the future of work.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/raj-sisodia-and-nilima-bhat

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Why So Many Leaders Burn Out And What It Takes to Heal, With Raj Sisodia And Nilima Bhat

Leadership As A Healing Crisis

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about leadership and healing. We often see leadership through the lens of performance in the forms of things like growth and profit, and we rarely focus on the emotional, psychological, or spiritual toll of leadership. This is what often leads to feelings of hollow success and values misalignment and burnout. For that reason, our guests, Raj Sisodia and Nilima Bhat, argue that we are experiencing a systemic leadership crisis. Not one that’s a failure of skill or intelligence, but rather one that stems from a lack of healing. That’s a topic of their new book, Healing Leaders.

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Raj, Nilima, thank you so much for joining. I’m excited to have you both on the show. I’d love to talk about the book that you’ve written together, Healing Leaders, but before we get into that, be great to talk about your background. Maybe Nilima, if you can start.

I’m a naval kid. You mentioned you’re ex-Air Force. We have something kindred there. I have a corporate career. I call myself a corporate refugee. I was with ESPN, Star and Philips and Sheraton. I had this existential crisis, search for meaning and purpose, and then took to yoga and Vedanta. Never looked back.

I got into cancer work because of my husband’s colon cancer experience and came to conscious capitalism as a way to heal my own journey through corporate. Three books, this is the third book, Healing Leaders. The first was My Cancer Is Me: The Journey From Illness To Wholeness. The second was Shakti Leadership, that’s with Raj. Now the third one is Healing Leaders.

I’ve been a Business Professor for over 40 years now. Professor of marketing and strategy. About twenty years into my career, I had an existential crisis of lack of meaning and purpose and was searching for a better way. Asking the question, is there a better way to think about business and marketing? That inquiry led me to research that first book, which then eventually led to the Conscious Capitalism movement.

Discovering a better way, we believe, to be in business that is defined with the higher purpose, a noble purpose, a stakeholder-mindedness, not just a shareholder-centric approach. Conscious leaders, and that’s really our focus now, who are not just about power and money, but about impact and purpose and healing. A caring culture. Those are the tenets of Conscious Capitalism. We started that movement in 2008. It was the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, and I and a bunch of other people. Of course, over time. That’s grown into a global movement, I would say, that has been part of the conversation about how we need to elevate the practice of business.

How did the two of you come together to write these books?

When we took Conscious Capitalism to India, so we had a conference in March of 2010 in India. As part of that, some of my partners in the movement were connected to a group that Nilima was part of in India called the Consciousness Collaborative or the Chitta Sangha. It’s about twenty or so practitioners working at the intersection of consciousness and business and leadership. I met her as well as a number of others from that community at that time and we got connected.

I became part of that group and over the years, then we discovered common interests and one of mine had been this idea that in all the conscious companies that I had observed starting with my book Firms of Endearment, that there was a lot more feminine energy in those companies. There was a lot more compassion and caring and empathy and so forth. I was talking about the rise of feminine values for a variety of reasons in the world. Finally, in this point in history, we’re seeing that. Nilima had a parallel convergence towards that. I think she was writing a column for an Indian newspaper about this idea of Shakti. Shakti being the Indian word for the divine feminine. I’ll let her pick it up from there.

Yeah, my column with DNA, the newspaper, was called Shakti Speaks. Raj was very intrigued by that. I remember we had done a whole bunch of training for Whole Foods Market. They had a Conscious Leadership Academy. We must have trained about 1,000 of their leaders. I just had this deep urge to write this book, Shakti Leadership: Embracing Feminine and Masculine Power in Business, because even while we were teaching conscious leadership, there was something missing. Conscious leadership typically would be about mindfulness and is still that masculine approach, which is more about emptying the mind and being still on the inside.

However, there’s a complementary other side to that, which is being in touch with your deeper heart, your soul, and coming from that profound alive creative energy which then creates conscious outcomes. That’s the feminine and it’s missing across cultures and also in business and in leadership language. I remember when we did the last session for Whole Foods, I just sat and wrote this message to Raj saying, “Will you write this book with me? I need a partner for this book. It’s got to be a good balance between a healthy masculine and a healthy feminine in both of us. I see you as someone who could do that.” to his great credit and my great luck, he said yes. This was years ago at the Conscious Capitalism conference in Chicago, we launched Shakti Leadership.

I feel like in general, Eastern ideas have had a rise to more prominence even in the Western world over the last 15 or 20 years and so you were certainly aligned with that broader set of conditions that would give people around the world and in the US an interest in the kinds of things that you were writing about.

I think the West and the US has had a love affair with India since 100 years when Vivekananda went there. In Chicago where we launched Shakti Leadership is where at the World Parliament of Religions he made his famous speech. It’s been over 100 years of Indian masters going to the US and then I think yoga exploded in the Western world.

The Role Of Ancient Wisdom And The Gap In Modern Leadership Thinking

For me, like many people in India, I grew up with the colonial hangover. Even though I’m from India, my education was pretty much at the hands of missionaries in these different convents that I went to. I was not at all connected to the wisdom of India in my education. It was a big eye-opening moment for me when I wrote Firms of Endearment and I gave it to my professor in Bombay who had been my mentor in my MBA program.

The next day when I went to see him, he said, “I was up till 11:00 reading your book and I’m really enjoying it.” I said, “Well that means a lot to me because everything else I’ve done only came from the head but this book also comes from the heart.” he said, “Well yes, but as I read it, I realize it’s nothing new. That everything you’re writing here was written 4,000 years ago.”

I said, “What management book was published 4000 years ago?” He said, “It’s all in the Gita“, which is one of the Indian texts. I had never read the Gita and nobody had guided me to read the Gita. I had heard of it but it was a real awakening moment to say, “There’s so much wisdom sitting here in this tradition which I’m completely disconnected from.”

I think Nilima was more connected to it and then she had her own awakening at a much earlier stage. I was almost 50 years old by the time all this happened. That began the next phase of my education in a way to reconnect to the ancient wisdom of India as well as the other parts of the world. There’s a lot of ancient wisdom that still has tremendous value. We tend to disregard that and think that only the latest knowledge in the Harvard Business Review is what we need to know. Actually, there’s some wisdom that is timeless that we need to be connected with.

It is really interesting how much of this knowledge about humanity and sociology and psychology and the way that we all interact with each other has really been around in the East and the West for thousands of years but it just doesn’t get the prominence that it really deserves. A lot of these ideas, as you said, that gentleman told you, they were thought thousands of years ago, which is incredible when you think about how different life must have been like back then. How did the two of you come together on this book? What was the genesis of Healing Leaders?

Well, so for me, the seeds were really planted in 2018. That’s the year that I turned 60. That’s a major milestone, I think, in a human life. At least it felt like that for me. The end of the second act and the beginning of the final act and a time for really looking back and looking ahead and trying to make sense of it. At the same time, I was still immersed in my normal way of being

I was writing a book called The Healing Organization that year. I had done all my research and I had set aside the entire summer for a series of writing retreats to work on that book. I was almost ignoring that milestone even though it was at the back of my mind. I had a wake-up call from I would say four wise women, Nilima being one of them, and Lynne Twist, as well as a coach that I worked with and one other person. They all asked me a version of the same question, “You’re writing a book about healing, but what about your own healing? Why aren’t you focused on your own healing? How can you write a book about healing if you’re not doing that?” my initial response was flippant. I said, “I don’t have time for that. I’ve got a book deadline.”

They convinced me that book deadlines are flexible and I delayed the book by five months. I then said yes to a trip with Nilima and the Shakti spiritual journeys that she organizes around the world. We had a trip to Ladakh in the northern part of India on the border with Tibet. The seat of some of the deepest Buddhist wisdom in the world. That’s where I had my 60th birthday. I also said yes to a silent retreat in upstate New York at a place called Peace Village. That’s where I received downloads. I had about 45 pages of notes after those 4 days of silence and within those were the 7 steps. An early version of these steps was really downloaded to me in that retreat.

I also went to the Amazon rainforest with Lynne Twist and the Pachamama Alliance and spent ten days with the indigenous people there in Ecuador with the shamans experiencing a variety of healing modalities, learning about healing in various ways. I worked with a coach for the first time as well. She helped me frame my life and understand my life in a different way.

Essentially telling me that I had spent 45 years trying to impress my father and then I had spent the last 15 honoring my mother with my work. That everything with Conscious Capitalism and Firms of Endearment and Shakti, all of this is really bringing that much-needed feminine mother energy into the spheres of business and leadership. It was a lot of profound understanding and then in a way the beginning of the next stage of my healing for myself.

The next several years were really about me trying to go deeper, understanding my own wounds. I had all this trauma that I had suppressed, some of which I had memories that had been erased and those memories were restored. I realized that I do have tremendous trauma that is in a way driving me or causing me to live in a certain way. I’ve been working on trying to heal a lot of those things. I wrote my own memoir in the process called Awaken that came out in 2023. I lived all of these steps and went through all of that.

Several years ago, Nilima and I were together in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico and I had been asked to teach a workshop for our faculty. I’m a professor there at a university in Mexico and we had already taught them about Conscious Capitalism, the doing part. What is it? The knowing and the doing part. The question I was asked is can we organize a workshop on the being part? Who do you need to be in order to teach Conscious Capitalism to our students? As I was brainstorming with Nilima, we were doing a program on women leaders there, she remembered the seven steps and she said, “Why don’t you frame it around that?” We designed that and that became the beginning point for the book.

It’s an impressive meandering path that you’ve taken. I’m a little exhausted by it, to be honest. I think you’ve been all over the world to create the underpinnings of this book. Nilima, I think you were going to say something.

Why Leaders Resist Inner Work And The Importance Of Healing For True Growth

I think mine was a shorter cut to this. My first book was about healing through cancer. Very real, stark, helping people die well or heal from cancer, including my now former husband. The second book was Shakti Leadership, which is about becoming more of an integrated and conscious leader. Somewhere I realized I now need a third book which puts the two together because it’s not just non-leaders who get sick and it’s not as if leaders have it all together. The more I worked with leaders around the world, the more I realized that you can take them to leadership and raise their game, but they start sliding back pretty soon if they haven’t done the inner work of healing their wounds.

We all carry wounds. We’re all humans before we are leaders. All humans carry wounds. No amount of leadership training can really last and stick if you haven’t helped a leader heal. I remember joking with Raj and saying, “We need a book called Therapy for Leaders. Leaders need therapy because there are too many wounded leaders out there causing a lot of wounding around.”

I also noticed these individuals were extremely talented founders and they had grown very fast and then they reached a point where they stagnated. No matter how much they were putting in energy, they were simply not able to break through that ceiling. I realized then it’s now having to go back, fix what’s wounded in order to be able to go forward. They simply can’t move beyond a certain point. That’s how I felt this really compelling need saying enough of telling people how to be better leaders, show them how to get to therapy.

I have a book that I’ve been working on aimed at managers, newer managers, with my colleague Daniela deluca, and we have one whole section of the book that is devoted to the idea that managing others actually starts with managing ourselves. You need to prepare yourself emotionally and from a skill perspective to be able to handle the pressures of management.

Obviously, as you continue through the ranks and become a leader in a broader context, it becomes even more important for you to do that. That was also part of what resonated for me in your book. Why do so many leaders resist this and fight the idea of really getting to the inner work? So many of us end up, as you said, sliding back or maybe never even starting the journey if that’s a way of thinking about it as well.

I could answer that because of my years of work with cancer. When I would discover people’s inner journeys and I would be able to mirror to them where they are stuck or at least I could see where they were stuck physically, emotionally, mentally, relationally or even spiritually, I was often surprised that many times, they would rather die than heal. Here is the thing about healing. It requires a death of the ego. We are so invested. Our wounds are our shields. They are our protective shields. We worked very hard to actually develop them in order to not feel pain.

In order to not feel our fears. In order to not feel our feelings. In a way, in order to feel safe because the ego is so fragile, it doesn’t want to be touched in that wound. That wound does not want to be touched. People would much rather hit out and disappear and become ostriches with head in the sand. I have seen my own clients die before they healed because it was too painful to heal. Too scary to heal.

That’s a pretty incredible statement when you say it like that, but I also understand exactly what you mean.

Education And Business Training Overlook Self-Awareness And The “Human Being” Dimension

If you look at our education system we never ever go there. We always are about learning these skills that are focused outwardly in the world. There’s no education about self-awareness, about understanding yourself, about your emotions, none of that. Many leaders go to business school. What happens in business school as I’ve realized it in hindsight it was all about the head and the wallet. Everything is about the numbers, the theories, the frameworks but it’s all aimed at the bottom line. I believe you completely bypass the human in between the heart and the spirit.

We learn to shut that down. We’re never inspired. I was never inspired a single day in my business education and I had a pretty good business education by most standards. I had actually a version of dissociative amnesia. I had literally erased certain memories of my life because they were too painful. I didn’t do it consciously. I think my body did it for me because it was too painful for me to live with that memory. All leaders I think carry some of those things.

Raj and I love Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. You can look at it in a very superficial way or you can go really deep. It’s called the refusal to the call to adventure. When you are asked to grow or heal your wounds as the leader, it’s like you’re living in the world above and you’re going to have to make a journey into the underworld below. That is where you’re going to have to tread water, all bets are off, all your strategies will no longer work.

You’re going to have to navigate a whole different terrain that you do not know the rules or the map for and you’re going to have to face your worst fear in order to come out on the other side and heal that wound. Very often, you don’t even make the journey. You don’t even begin. You just stay on the surface of life and you refuse the call to adventure because healing the wound requires initiation in the hero journey language. That initiation is taking your infant or your adolescent psyche through to adulthood. Initiation requires a death of the former self in order to claim the next level of your being. No one wants to really die.

I love this phrase that you talk about in the book and you mentioned it in passing earlier, Raj, that leaders need to be human beings before human doings. It’s a great way of thinking about it. How does that change the way that they act, the way that they make decisions day-to-day?

Human Choice, Conscious Living, And Leading From Love Vs. Fear

What does it mean to be a human being? That essentially means that you can choose how to be. In the animal kingdom, they’re programmed to be a certain way but human beings have the power of choice. We can choose to show up in a different way. We can choose to show up in a fully human way. We can choose to show up with love.

One of the great learnings that I had in that year of my conscious awakening, 2018, when I went to the Amazon rainforest, I had an ayahuasca experience. In that ayahuasca experience, when I had gone there to learn about healing and I got many visions that night, one of them was, “Here’s what the world needs in order to heal” and it came as an acronym, the list.

Here’s the list. L is for love. Where every single thing we do must come from love. That’s a huge statement. Is it even possible that you can go through your day and every time you’re making a decision or taking an action, you remind yourself am I coming from love? Am I coming from fear or greed or jealousy or envy or any of the other emotions.

I for innocence. We’re all born innocent, as these pristine divinely connected beings, and then life takes a hold of us, society, our families, the media eventually, and in a way we get corrupted. We start to use our intelligence not to serve and not to live from love but actually to climb over each other. Even lie and cheat to get what we want and so forth.

The ego starts to take over. You don’t have a choice as a child but as an adult you can choose. Am I going to continue living in that state or do I choose to return to innocence? Now it doesn’t mean you become a helpless child again. It means a chosen conscious decision that I am going to live in a way that does not knowingly cause unnecessary harm or suffering to another or to the world.

S for simplicity. We make life too complicated. If you pick up an academic journal, it’s all mathematical equations, if you look at economics, all of these things. We have been mired in the mud of complexity in so many ways because we have these incredible brains that can go so deep but we forget that there is a simplicity that we’re ultimately striving for.

The T is for truth. What is our commitment to the truth? We seem to have lost our connection in the world of business, in politics. Certainly, I came from the world of marketing and you know the word truth has very little meaning there. We need to reconnect to those things. I think as a leader, if you start to operate from the being, you start to reconnect to that pristine self that you were.

Start to operate in accordance with the list, I think it starts to change everything. For example, when you just start operating with love, I have a book called Everybody Matters with Bob Chapman. Bob Chapman discovered that way of being, probably around the time he was 55 years old, and it completely changed everything. The company has dramatically shifted and grown dramatically as well because of that awakening of his opening of his heart that happened. I think to me, those are some of the elements.

Really great acronym for explaining the underpinnings that I think a lot of people forget. This idea of things coming from love as opposed to from hatred. We have a lot coming from hatred in the world right now. The idea of simplicity, particularly simplicity on the other side of complexity. Truth, innocence also very important to the equation. I feel like at this point, we should talk a little bit about the seven components, the seven steps that you cover in the book. We’ve made tantalizing reference to them but haven’t covered them so maybe, Nilima, you can walk us through. Give us the quick tour of what the seven steps are.

The Seven Steps Of Inner Development For Leaders

Sure, so the first is Know yourself, then it is Love yourself, then it’s Be yourself, Choose yourself, Express yourself, Complete yourself, Heal yourself. They are a very beautiful follow-on one after the other. You can start anywhere, I guess, but we like to start with the Know yourself. That’s the famous Greek wisdom.

It’s really about knowing your identity. How do you hold your identity? Have you even thought about what is your identity or have you just been unconsciously being led by it? We start unpacking the layers of who we are, the race and gender and nationality and income, upper class middle class. When you start looking at that, you discover like a privilege quotient that you didn’t even know you had.

You suddenly realize there’s so much inequity in the world and most of all you go right down to the sense of who I am, that being self. We start from there itself. The concept that we have two selves. We have this essential self that is pristine and love and so on and then there is this conditioned self on the outside, the small self, the ego.

How do you learn to start unpacking the small self in order to more and more know the true self and live from that true self, the self with the big S? Loving, you know as Raj said, you can know yourself but you don’t necessarily love yourself and that’s a huge step. Many of us have internalized self-loathing for various reasons. Patriarchy, colonization, it just goes back into many things.

After loving yourself it’s about being you love yourself and now you give yourself the choice of presence. Be yourself, be authentically who you are. Now you have nothing to defend, nothing to promote, nothing to fear. You can just stand in the ground of your own being. There’s a lot of this vagus nerve thing going these days where you have to cool down your nervous system and just be in your spine and be in that neutral witness state, that being state, holding state. Choose yourself. That the life you have had, you’re not a victim of it. If that’s the story you tell, it’s a very disempowering story. How about you choose your past as if it’s something that didn’t happen to you, but happened for you?

What can you learn from there? How can you grow from what happened even though it may have been terrible but you can always make new meaning? You can reframe it. Choose your past and from there choose your present and then choose your future. After that comes Express yourself. You’ve chosen who you are now you can find your purpose and you can live into your purpose. You can express your core talents, your natural gifts. You can really go to your deepest sense of right, your higher purpose and discover what that is and live into it. Raj, why don’t you share the rest?

Integration Of Inner Energies And The Concept Of Wholeness

We come to Complete yourself, which of course is Shakti Leadership. We’ve taken it another level so Shakti Leadership predominantly focuses on integrating the masculine and feminine. The healthy aspects of the masculine and feminine in each of us regardless of gender. Here we also talk about the elder energy and the child energy because each of us has access to our own higher self, our divine self, which is the repository of wisdom and meaning and purpose and transcendence and then our child self.

If we have access to our healthy inner child then we have access to joy and creativity and play and innovation comes from that. You need a healthy child energy to be actually able to think outside the box and be innovative. If we’re able to heal ourselves and if we’re able to operate with the positive aspects of each of those four energies, elder energy, child energy, masculine energy and feminine energy, then we can become a lovely phrase that Nilima coined, the wise fool of tough love. You have the wisdom of the elder, you’ve got the playfulness of a child, the foolishness of a child, the strength of the masculine, and then the unconditional love within you. Each of us can be our own unique versions of a wise fool of tough love. Of course, it’s all culminating in Heal yourself.

Part of that is simply healing your story. There’s a way to tell the story of your life as a victim. I can sit down next to somebody in the airplane and just tell them all the terrible things that happened and make them cry. It’s all true. I can frame it as a hero story. Look at how I overcame all these incredible odds and did what I did and that’s also a true story. The third way is to frame it as a learner. Here’s what happened, here’s how I learned and grew from it. That’s a more empowering version of our own story. Heal your story, heal your body. About 13 million Americans I believe have been diagnosed with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, but I think all of us have PTSI, post-traumatic stress injury.

Unacknowledged for the most part because most of us tend to say something like, “Well I didn’t go to Afghanistan and I was not a first responder, so why should I whine about my little problems? Life is tough. Okay, suck it up and deal with it.” Just because somebody else has more severe trauma doesn’t mean that your trauma is irrelevant. Just because something is commonplace doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

It still matters for each of us. We have to acknowledge and understand what that trauma is. The good news is we’re living at a time when there are tremendous resources and modalities available to us. One of the teachers whose work I really resonate with is Gabor Maté and he has a wonderful documentary called The Wisdom of Trauma. There’s a gift sitting in trauma as well because if you are able to face it and then if you are able to heal it, work on healing it, you emerge on the other side with what is called post-traumatic growth, where you are now a stronger human being than somebody who never had that trauma in the first place.

The strongest people in the world are not the ones who sail through life without a single bruise. The people who have dealt with difficult things and come out on the other side healed, they now become the source of healing for others. The gift of trauma, the wisdom of trauma, is that you can now be a happier, healthier human and more importantly be the source of healing for others.

Some leaders will hear everything you’re saying and say, “That sounds fascinating and great but really hard.” How do you, harking back to the hero’s journey, get them past the refusal?

Overcoming Resistance To Inner Work And The Conditions For Transformation

Sally Kempton, who’s passed away, a dear friend and mentor of ours, she said this so bluntly. She said, “You know what, when you meet people and they are not willing to hear or not receptive, the answer is if their current strategies are working to solve their problems, they don’t need this work. They don’t need this material.” People will come to this deeper work and deeper material and the deeper journey when their current strategies no longer work and they really want to break through. They should want to break through and not die. Only then will they find the courage. It’s really in their hands if their current strategies are working, they’re not going to make the journey.

I would say that having a coach who can mirror to you that you think your current strategies are working but guess what you’re planting the seeds for burnout, for disease, maybe cancer. I mean you know all that stuff shows up in your body at some point. As the classic book says, The Body Keeps the Score.

You may be ignoring it and sweeping things under the carpet and locking it away in a safe but it will catch up with you and it’s much better to be proactive about it rather than waiting for that heart attack or waiting for that stroke or waiting for that crisis. If people are under the delusion that, “I’ve got it all figured out and I’ve got the strategies to go around it,” without actually going through it, I should say. The only way out is through.

We say two things in Shakti Leadership. The only way out is in and the only way out is through. Ultimately not making the journey is not an option.

Tying all this together not making the journey is not the option also this idea of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger going back to what you were saying a few minutes ago, Raj. We grow through pain. Unfortunately, that’s the reality. Whether it’s physical pain, mental pain, emotional pain, whatever form of pain. If you can survive it and you can get past it you will be stronger for it. I think as long as you can get comfortable with that then you’re often much more willing to dive into the discomfort. If you’re not, then you spend your whole life avoiding risk.

In the last book, Shakti Leadership, one addition I made to the classic hero journey is the concept of the conscious hero journey. Saying do we have to grow through pain or is there another way? There is, which is wait for an evolutionary impulse instead of a crisis. When you think your growth has reached a certain zenith, be awake and aware that a call to adventure will come, the next wave of inspiration will rise. Wait and catch it when it comes and then allow a dissolution.

Allow something of the old ways to die, to dissolve, to go. At the same time engage with some unrealized potential because life’s hero journey comes to keep you growing. To keep evolving your unexpressed potential. Instead of waiting for a whack, wade into the potential and take on a growth edge, lean into a growth edge. On the other side is evolution. You’re going to grow in some way from the challenge you have willingly taken on instead of having been forced to grow.

The Inevitability Of The Healing Journey And Its Impact On Legacy And Life Outcomes

JR, I was going to add that what are the consequences of not doing this? What would happen if you go through life not knowing yourself? Just playing a role. Dictated by society, by the norms of your religion, your profession, etc.? You really don’t love yourself. You’ve got that self-loathing that defines 80% to 90% of people. You’re not fully present in your own life. You go through all of those and you never deal with your own wounds and traumas. You’re operating only as a middle-aged man or whatever it is you’re not a wise fool of tough love.

What happens at the end of life? In my own family I saw the consequences of that. When my parents died within a few months of each other. My father died first. He was the patriarch and a pretty powerful figure in many ways but he had all these wounds and he inflicted a lot of suffering on other people as well for all the normal reasons. When he died, it was a solemn affair but I looked around and nobody cried. There was no grief. There was only a sense of relief because he was somewhat tyrannical in the way that he dealt with a lot of us.

When my mother died four months later, there was tremendous grief. A tremendous sense of loss. A deep sense of gratitude that we had her for as long as we did. That really is a stark question. At the end of your life, will there be grief or will there be relief? How do you want to live now so that at the end of life there is profound sense of grief? You don’t exit this life in that painful way for yourself and for everybody else. I think these are important steps for all of us to take not only for ourselves but for our loved ones, the people we love and lead and for the legacy we want to create.

You have a poetic way of words. The relief and grief, just amazing way of striking the contrast, I guess, in unfortunate death of both your parents. Going back to the beginning of what you said it really comes down to what’s the option? Would you rather not do any of these things? Intellectually people will say, “Of course not,” but then getting them to really wholeheartedly full-body commit to it is a different thing. Is there any last thought you want to leave our audience with in terms of what you would want them to take away from the book or your work in general?

I would simply say Carpe diem. Just go seize the day, seize the career and you are living into a time that all your options are open and you can create your own career out of your purpose. Find that higher purpose and then go enjoy it.

I do think that connecting to this wisdom at an earlier stage in life, for me it was mostly post turning 60. I found my purpose when I was about 48 or so. I thought that’s the end of the journey like I found my purpose and now I can live my purpose and I’ll live happily ever after and I discovered that wasn’t enough. That’s why the subtitle of my memoir is The Path to Purpose, Inner Peace and Healing because I had to do a lot of work. I was purpose-driven but I was not happy. I had no peace of mind. Learning how to let go of that and really create from a place of centeredness and being and inner peace and connection to soul.

I think it’s a very important journey. In a society that emphasizes professional success and achievement and career and money, we measure success with all power and money and all of those kinds of things, to recognize ultimately that those can be very hollow pursuits. To realize that at an early age and not wait until you’re 60, 70 and say “I lived my whole life running after something that really wasn’t ultimately that important or meaningful.” yeah, I love that you’re able to bring this to people at that stage of their lives.

Thank you both. This has been fantastic. I really appreciate the time from both of you and I look forward to seeing how the book finds its way into the market and grabs root like your prior books have. Again, thank you both.

Thank you.

—

I want to thank Raj and Nilima for joining me to discuss their new book, Healing Leaders, and their own journeys, both very powerful and led to writing this book together. As a reminder, this episode was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• Raj Sisodia
• Nilima Bhat
• Healing Leaders
• My Cancer Is Me: The Journey From Illness To Wholeness
•  Shakti Leadership
• Firms of Endearment
• The Healing Organization
• Awaken
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces
• Everybody Matters
• The Body Keeps the Score
• PathWise Community
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
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About Raj Sisodia

Raj Sisodia is widely recognized as the world’s leading authority on Conscious Capitalism and conscious leadership, with a career dedicated to redefining and elevating the role of business in society. As Co-Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Conscious Capitalism, Inc., FEMSA Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise at Tecnológico de Monterrey, and Chairman of its Conscious Enterprise Center, he has spent over three decades teaching, researching, and guiding leaders toward a new paradigm of business rooted in purpose, healing, and humanity.

He has authored or co-authored sixteen books and over 100 academic articles including Conscious Capitalism (with John Mackey), Firms of Endearment, Everybody Matters (with Bob Chapman), The Healing Organization (with Michael Gelb), and Shakti Leadership (with Nilima Bhat). Raj’s most recent book, Awaken: The Path to Purpose, Inner Peace and Healing (2023), laid the foundation for his new book Healing Leaders: 7 Steps to Recovery of Self, which continues the journey of bringing wholeness and healing into leadership.

With an MBA in Marketing and a Ph.D. in Marketing and Business Policy at Columbia University, Raj went on to hold faculty and leadership roles at Boston University, George Mason University, Bentley University, and Babson College, where he was the FW Olin Distinguished Professor of Global Business and Whole Foods Market Research Scholar in Conscious Capitalism.

Over the past 15 years, Raj has delivered more than 1200 keynotes and workshops on conscious business and leadership to audiences around the world—including at the White House, the United Nations, and the Vatican—as well as to executives from companies such as AT&T, Whole Foods Market, Tata, Volvo, IBM, Walmart, Kraft, Siemens, and McDonalds. His life and work reflect an ongoing commitment to integrating purpose, inner peace, and healing into every sphere. Healing Leaders represents the culmination of decades of scholarship, practice, and personal evolution. It is not just another leadership book—it is an invitation to a journey of recovery, renewal, and impact.

About Nilima Bhat

Nilima Bhat is globally renowned for her expertise in leadership, gender equity, and well-being. She has facilitated transformative workshops and training sessions globally for corporations such as Microsoft, Whole Foods Market, and Tata, among others. Her regenerative systems model promotes personal and organizational transformation toward conscious growth.

Following a successful career spanning over a decade in Corporate Communications and PR with industry giants like ESPN STAR Sports, Philips India and ITC Hotels, Nilima transitioned into social entrepreneurship by founding the Shakti Leadership Mission. This venture has propelled major initiatives such as the Shakti Fellowship, which, in collaboration with the University of San Diego, Skolkovo FLOW and other global institutions, aims to empower 100,000 women changemakers by 2035.

Approaching 60, she has “heroically journeyed” many times. Through her mother’s cancer, father’s near-fatal car accident and brain injury, husband’s cancer, and her own search for meaning from a sudden sense of failure in a thriving corporate career in 1998. A vocal advocate of the Conscious Capitalism movement and Women’s International Networking, Nilima’s contributions are widely recognized. She has served on advisory boards such as MixR, Peace Through Commerce and 20-first, and her efforts have been honored with the INDICA Cultural Changemaker Fellowship Award. In 2022, she was awarded an Honorary PhD by Jharkhand Rai University, India, for her exceptional contributions to women’s empowerment. In 2023, Shakti Leadership was recognised as a Home for Humanity. And in 2025, she was welcomed as ‘Global Goodwill Ambassador’ and ‘Director – Special Projects’ for World Union.

Nilima graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai in Life Sciences and Biochemistry, followed by a diploma in Social Communications Media from Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai. She later qualified as a yoga teacher from the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre and is a teacher-practitioner of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother. Comfortable in every culture and socio-economic setting, from cleaning toilets to dining with CEOs and interviewing world leaders, Nilima speaks five languages and truly calls the whole planet “home.”