Summer Series Ep 1: Start Where You Are

Summer Series Ep 1: Start Where You Are

What is the last thing you told yourself you would start once things settled down a little? That is exactly where this episode begins. In this first installment of a special summer series, Clayton goes deeper into the ideas at the heart of his new book, Magic in the Moment, Mindfulness in Real Time. Not reading it word for word, but using each chapter as a starting point for the kind of conversation this show does best. Personal, honest, and grounded in real life. Chapter one is called Start Where You Are. And Clayton opens it with something he admits is not easy to say as a mindfulness teacher. He is a world-class procrastinator when it comes to beginning things. He will wait for the right conditions, the right alignment, the right moment of readiness. And what twenty-five years of sitting practice has taught him is that the right time is almost never the real issue. The real issue is a voice. You probably know the one. It shows up whenever something matters. It sounds reasonable, even wise. And it is almost never telling the truth. This episode explores what meditation teaches us about beginning, why the wandering mind is not a problem to solve but a practice to return to, and how that same invitation available on the cushion is available right now in every area of your life where you have been waiting for the starting line to appear. It has already appeared. It is here. It has always been here. This episode is brought to you by Meditation for Leadership. Leadership happens in the space before the decision. Meditation for Leadership helps you pause under pressure, notice what is really happening, and choose how you respond instead of react. Visit www.meditation4leadership.org [http://www.meditation4leadership.org] to learn more.

Flipping the Mic: Producer Jon Goehring on Presence, Storytelling, Mindfulness, and OCD

Every episode of this show starts the same way for you. You press play and a finished conversation appears. The music rises on cue. The pauses sit where they should. The moments that matter rise to the top. Today Clayton flips the microphone around. Jon Goehring of StoryTrust Media has been inside almost every episode of this show, not as a guest but as the person who sits alone with the raw recording, listening and watching closely, deciding what stays and what goes. He has heard Clayton stumble over names, restart sentences, and occasionally compete with a barking dog for the microphone. He knows this show from the inside out. And somewhere in that editing process, something unexpected kept happening. This conversation goes places that were not planned. Jon shares what it actually feels like to sit with someone else's story so fully that you stop editing from your own opinions and start listening from something quieter. He talks about what storytelling has always meant to him and why the medium keeps changing while something fundamental about it never does. And then he goes somewhere most guests do not. Jon opens up honestly about living with OCD, what it actually is beneath the cultural shorthand, how it has shaped his relationship with his own mind, and why the very act of editing a podcast has become one of the most reliable mindfulness practices in his life. Not because he planned it that way. Because the work itself keeps putting him there. Find Jon Goehring and StoryTrust Media at storytrust.media [http://storytrust.media]. The Limitless Leadership Lounge podcast is at limitlessleadershippodcast.com [http://limitlessleadershippodcast.com].

How Kindness Travels: What Stops Us from Being Kind and What Sets Us Free

Late night. Cross County Parkway. A flat tire. A really nice suit. And then three strangers pulled over. In this solo episode Clayton returns to a moment from the mid-1990s that he has been carrying for thirty years without quite having the language for it, until a recent episode of the podcast Hidden Brain and psychologist Amit Kumar's research on kindness finally gave it a name. What Kumar found across study after study is quietly extraordinary. When people perform acts of kindness they consistently underestimate how much it will mean to the person receiving it. We evaluate the competence of what we are offering. The receiver experiences the warmth of being seen. Those are two completely different things. And we keep talking ourselves out of acting because we are measuring the wrong one. The three men who stopped on that highway thirty years ago almost did not. Not because they did not want to help but because they were afraid of how they would be received. That hesitation, and what it cost them almost to act on it, is at the heart of everything Clayton explores in this episode. What does the pause between impulse and action actually contain? What would it cost us to simply make the offer, not solve the problem, not have the right words, just stop and say I see you? And what happens to both people when that threshold gets crossed? This one stays with you. Find Clayton at mindfulnessrealtime.com [http://mindfulnessrealtime.com]. The Friday morning sangha on Zoom is open to all.

The Leadership Stroke: Frank Rowe on Precision, Presence, and the Rowing Life

Picture a rowing eight at full speed. Eight people. One boat. Every blade entering the water at the same instant. Nobody pulling harder than anyone else. The whole thing moving like a single organism. Now here is the question worth sitting with. What is actually happening inside those eight people? Frank Rowe has spent a lifetime asking a version of that question, first in the boat and then in the boardroom. He walked onto the rowing team at UC Santa Barbara with no experience, made it to the 1991 Pan American Games, and somewhere along the way discovered that everything the boat demands of you, trust, timing, precision, and the willingness to say what is actually true, is exactly what great leadership requires too. His new book is The Leadership Stroke: Precision, Practice and Performance Under Pressure. And the conversation that unfolds from it goes places that will surprise you. There is a story about a day on the water in Boston when something unspoken between teammates finally got named, and the boat got faster. Not because anyone's technique changed. Because the space between them did. There is a conversation about beginner's mind, and what it looks like when a 43-year rower goes out on the water and pretends he has never rowed before, noticing things he had long since stopped seeing. And there is an honest reckoning with identity, performance, and what it actually means to keep showing up for something you love when the results are no longer what they once were. Frank and Clayton also share something personal in this one. Both rowed at the collegiate level. Both found the sport through something close to accident. And both carry it with them still, as a lens, a practice, and a reminder that presence is not just a concept. It is something you can feel in your body, in a boat, at full speed, when eight people finally stop fighting each other and start moving as one. About Frank Rowe: Executive Coaching: https://cecondopinion.com/ [https://cecondopinion.com/] Author of The Leadership Stroke: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Leadership_Stroke.html?id=59MO0gEACAAJ [https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Leadership_Stroke.html?id=59MO0gEACAAJ] Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankrowejr/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankrowejr/] Philadelphia City Rowing: https://philadelphiacityrowing.org/ [https://philadelphiacityrowing.org/] Philadelphia City Rowing Podcast Episode With Frank: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6tBYxqA7gPSO95yHApNBbs?si=zuld3SdyTDudyXkVy-rtVw [https://open.spotify.com/episode/6tBYxqA7gPSO95yHApNBbs?si=zuld3SdyTDudyXkVy-rtVw]

The Door Was Always Open: Three Voices on Presence and Coming Home

Three guests. Three very different stories. One thread running through all of them that took three conversations to fully see. Hans Andreas Weygoldt spent 15 years running a family business while quietly losing himself inside it. Ray Arata has devoted more than 25 years to helping men lead from the heart, and yet the hardest work of his life turned out to be something he had never taught anyone else. And Kira Higgs sat down in 2020 to write a business book, and by day two, the book said no. What connects them is not a method or a framework. It is something quieter and more essential than either of those things. And it has been waiting for each of them the whole time. Clayton weaves these three voices together into a single conversation they never actually had, and what emerges is one of the most honest explorations of presence, pain, acceptance, and the courage it takes to finally stop pushing against the door that this podcast has ever produced. Links to the full episodes: Hans Andreas Weygoldt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i11y873ZmaM [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i11y873ZmaM] Ray Arata: https://youtu.be/Q0xjsxPdnDs?si=Zp_VK41vRf7qdrdH [https://youtu.be/Q0xjsxPdnDs?si=Zp_VK41vRf7qdrdH] Kira Higgs: https://youtu.be/TVOHtmq1i_g?si=W-27ZdbvCQp2wa7O [https://youtu.be/TVOHtmq1i_g?si=W-27ZdbvCQp2wa7O]