Master Crisis, Triumph Life with Amrita Subramanian

Most times when we think of trauma or crisis, we have an extreme idea of rawness or raw woundedness. And so what we do is we immediately distance ourselves because it's self-preserving. I do not want to associate the thought that I have trauma or I have gone through trauma or there is a crisis. The reason is that trauma has a very popular meaning and it's popularized by the world, the media, that's done for and that's really bad. But if you look in the root word trauma, it means a dream. And that's why many people would say the pandemic felt like a dream, like I didn't feel the time, it was so blurry, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes schizophrenic. I didn't know what was going on. Because trauma, the word dream, means any significant life event that has a shaping effect on you. So for instance, trauma can be positive. For instance, falling in love. I love someone so much, I completely shattered reality, I will go upheaval. My reality, just because I love the person so much, having a child, starting a new family, having the career of your life. We struggle with such joy for our aspirations, but we don't call it trauma. We call it aspirations, dream, ambition. Welcome to Super Entrepreneurs Podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Darhani. Today we have with us Amrita Subramanian. Amrita is a former Fortune 500 VP who has devoted 22 years plus of her career to helping organizations thrive after a crisis. Currently, she teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on post-traumatic growth through the pandemic. It's great to have you on our show, Amrita. Thank you so much, Shahid. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I've listened to some of your podcasts and I'm a huge admirer of the people and how it flows. So thank you for having me. My pleasure. So this is a very unique niche with your level of experience. What drove you to serve these people in that kind of situation? What a splendid question. Look at it this way. I've been with the banking world for a long time and one of the things I saw is that recessions, 2006, 2008, and before that, recessions kept going and coming every time it surprised people. But from someone who was a part of banking, it was regular as a club. Recession kept every six, seven years. And what I wondered always, and as I was growing through the banks, is why do we keep wasting a good crisis? How come we don't learn from this? It's terrible. Learn from challenges. Because crisis makes us humble. It makes us very teachable. So that was the genesis of it, that I want to study not innovation, not disruption, but the shattering that happens of lives because recession is not an intellectual idea. Recession is a very real, lived experience of people everywhere. And so the pandemic was a perfect opportunity for me to study not how we get destroyed, but what happens after that when we grow. I'm interested in rebirth and reincarnation and reinvention of ourselves. Very good. So when you go into a situation like that to help them amidst a pandemic or some kind of pandemic, when you deal with them, what kind of challenges do you face in that journey? And can you share some experiences you had with those challenges? I loved the way you framed it. What steps, what happens in the journey? Take your time. Because it indeed is a journey. Yeah. The first thing to understand is that, so say, let's begin with the fundamentals. All of us have an internal GPS. We're born with that internal GPS. We think of it as, this is how I understand my reality. Everybody has a theory of life. So this GPS, very simply, and for the viewers and the listeners, I'm holding up a triangle with my hand. So the triangle has three parts. The first part right on top of the triangle is self, my relationship with myself. The second part of the triangle is everyone we work with, we live with, we love with. So the world of others. And the third part is my place in this universe. Why am I alive? So it's internal. And it's been there since we are children. We grow up with our parents, the community, everything informs it. But it has a certain element, which is pertinent to your question. It's an element of invincibility. The world is fair. The world is good. Good things will happen to me. We are born with that. If we have grown up in favorable conditions and we have been loved by our grandparents and parents, family and friends, when a crisis happens, this reality is shattered like an earthquake. So it's walking into a completely destroyed terrain of reality. No language can describe Shahid. When I walk in and the expression on people's face, my first job at any time, I walk into a pandemic. I walk into Turkey where the earthquake took place. I walk into a place which is an organization, say there is huge corruption. Everybody's been fired. No matter what the range of crisis, human made or nature made. The first thing is that there is a language for trauma. It's so stigmatized. And we're seeing such shock that it's like a wordless scream. People can't talk. And most people, oh, you just talk. That's not true. When we are in shock, language deserts us. So the first thing that I have to do is make it okay. Make it okay to really look at the shock that has happened. Because denial is a wonderfully first reaction. It's what we think to create that language. So basically, the language is super important. When you take a step back and you go into the thinking that is creating the language or listening to the language, what are your views on the thought patterns after a crisis? And how do you help them elevate that thought process or that thought patterns to see beauty in that challenge? Yeah. There are some of us who are able to create a space within ourselves which is psychologically safe for ourselves. But psychological safety is not elusive. But most of the time, we don't give ourselves this space to consider our facts. We experience reality through our bodies. We experience reality. And that experience is the truest form of reality to us. So when I walk in and they say there's no language, it's okay for silence to exist. And for most people, I allow silence. But you see, we have 32 kinds of intelligences, right? We over-rely on language. We over-rely on words. But there is something about the eyes. There's something about the body. There's kindness. There is compassion. And one of the first things is the permission to be human. It's a big, big earthquake. Everything that you loved was destroyed mentally, emotionally, psychologically. To move from the absolute shock to action requires a neutral state for me to arrive where I can grieve the loss. And irrespective of how society trains us for genders and for cultures, because different cultures use language differently. And for some cultures, it's very open. For instance, in the West, it's very open to talk about that I'm suffering. But in more sophisticated and Eastern cultures, we might find that silence is the time to process. They do it as a group. And then there is a writer's passage, if you will, I always create a ritual where people are able to express their honest feelings. Emotions and thoughts are two critical data. Thought shuts off because our amygdala is completely hijacked. And so what happens at the time, the only data that you really are holding on for your life is your ability to use emotions as information to move forward. And when the emotion starts to unblock like a saw, that is when people begin to put one step before the other. Otherwise, they're stuck. Statues, zombies. And it may be that I appear very functional. I'm getting my cup of coffee. I'm getting on the call. I'm doing my functional. But that's a screensaver. That is working. The person behind, inside, not moving. We call it the self-image that we have, what we have in the mirror, what the world sees. And we have inner self-image, the trueness, what we feel, what we are, what we think of ourselves as, like that belief within our subconscious. There's two self-image, one inner and the one that we portray to the world, project, that's a better term. So becoming more aware is, it sounds like it's around the realm of becoming more self-aware during a crisis is beneficial or after a crisis or anytime, actually. Anytime, favorable, unfavorable. I think you touched upon something that's the nerve of things. You see, our image of invincibility, I'm good. All good things will happen to you. This happens to others, never to me. Yes, we have this attitude. And when a shock disabuses us of that myth, we are launched into a hero's journey. And this image that you spoke of, the internal and external, sometimes there is a lot of distance because I've learned to show myself in the world and I've adapted myself to please and fit in. And when the shock happens, what happens? There is a sudden collapsing of this distance between the outer and the inner. And so when you speak of awareness, I think I would love to make it practical for someone to say, it's not an awareness that you have to sit down on top of a mountain. It is an awareness that you have multiple intelligences and you have to activate intelligences. And so you have to ask yourself very simple things. When you are in the middle of a busy street and suddenly your GPS goes, this is a new town. You've never been there. What do you do? You cannot stop. It's a highway. You have to keep driving. So there is a functionality. You have to be functional. Minimum level of operating efficiency. You keep operating at that. However, what you do is you wait for your GPS to upload because your GPS, the one that is shattered, will take some time. So giving ourselves the permission to understand, creating a new kind of resilience within requires, as you rightly said, a terrific level of intelligent awareness, terrific level of observation. Just knowing the sound bites of what's the crisis and how can I get through crisis is very different from knowing I freeze up. And this is my nature of freezing up. And it takes me this long. For instance, when we get super angry, hugely angry, there is this thing that happens to us when we are angry. First is we have righteous sense. I am right. Nobody very angry would ever say, no, I'm very wrong and I'm very angry. Anger makes us feel right. And so in crisis, our shock makes us feel this is impossible. So when we know how we have acted, we have this previous intelligence. We know how we have been in crisis before. Then the question is the one you asked. So if I've been that in the crisis before, how can I be more responsive to reality when the next crisis comes? We don't want to think about crisis, but here is an offering to investigate, move quicker and quicker into the realm of upheaval. And I don't mean just ecological disasters, but our reality, because we are at such a fast spin of progress, we're going to spin faster, or that's how time would feel inside. It means we have to adapt much quicker than our previous generations or even five years ago. So if we are not adaptable here in the way we upgrade our software, we upgrade phones every day, but we don't upgrade our thinking. If we don't upgrade our thinking, then we will not be able to handle, let alone the big crisis, but even the smaller crisis of life, which is why you're seeing so many issues with mental health. It's such a unique way to explain all that, and I was captivated by the analogies and everything. So it's wonderful what I heard. But for me personally, and the people that I work with, when we ask ourselves these questions, I find that there's so much clarity in there because of what you mentioned, that awareness. All of a sudden you become aware of what's happening in a more targeted manner. It just doesn't happen. We're getting angry. It passes. Something new comes into our experience, takes over that situation. Not saying crisis won't be taken over, but any regular, even a small situation. And then we never actually give it that attention that it deserves because it is coming from our emotions. So if we actually just hold on for a second and ask ourselves, why did I feel that way? And why did I react that way? What happened? We ask those kinds of questions, they start losing their importance, how they made this body feel the way it felt when those things happened. But when we ask the question, why is this causing this kind of feeling? When we actually dig deeper, over time, it loses that power that it has over you. Does that make sense? Of course. I think you're speaking in a way that makes it so functional. And Shahid, one of the things that life has taught me over and over again, and this goes to the first question you asked, when I meet trauma or crisis, the first assumption that I have to clarify is most times when we think of trauma or crisis, we have an extreme idea of rawness or raw woundedness. And so what we do is we immediately distance ourselves because it's self-preserving. I do not want to associate the thought that I have trauma or I have gone through trauma or there is a crisis. The reason is that trauma has a very popular meaning and it's popularized by the world, the media, that's done for, and that's really bad. But if you look in the root word, trauma, it means a dream. And that's why many people would say the pandemic felt like a dream. Like I didn't feel the time. It was so blurry, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes schizophrenic. I didn't know what was going on. Because trauma, the word dream, means any significant life event that has a shaping effect. So for instance, trauma can be positive. For instance, falling in I love someone so much. I completely shattered reality. I will go upheaval of my reality just because I love the person so much. Having a child, starting a new family, having the career of your life. We struggle with such joy for our aspirations. But we don't call it trauma. We call it aspirations, dream, ambition. But when it happens on the disappointment spectrum, yes, somebody betrayed us, the stakeholder, the shareholder who had promised support at the last minute of seed investment did not come through. Completely shattered, yes? And at that time, I don't think of it. Then, you know, the GPS shatters and the world is unfair. And why me? We always ask that question. Why me? I'm a good person. I've done good karma. Why me? I did not deserve it. Nobody deserves it. Yes. So when you've said the things you said, one of the first things to understand is that we are in this generation the most blessed. Best of technology, best of healthcare, best of connectivity. Most of our elders are around because elders are living longer. So the world has a great opportunity. But we forget because we're trained to be pleasure junkies. Everything is instant. Everything right now. Now, that's one end of the spectrum, pleasure. But there is another quiet spectrum that light has very honestly and gently been showing us. That is pain. I'm not glorifying masochism, but what I mean by pain is anything that is undesirable, anything that makes you grow up. Now, the choice is we all suffer from disappointments of life. Small disappointments, great disappointments. But when a disappointment like death in the pandemic happens, our mortality is right to our faces. We cannot look away. And when we cannot look away, we have two options. The first is to understand that it is real. Our mortality and our fragility is real. And the second thing is, so do I continue to live or do I give up? And if I'm continuing to live, then what is the quality of life I wish to have? And that is the central question of the whole world right now. Everything that we're doing because the pandemic really showed us whatever we thought about the world and whatever was novel is not true. We've woken up. Yeah. It has shifted a lot of mindsets, that's for sure. I'm also a product of that crisis. And to your point, focusing on the results, focusing on what you're doing and what you expect to happen and trying to force an outcome and trying to make things happen by sheer grit, you're going after something that you want. And then when you see hiccups and it doesn't work out, it just drains you. And then the quality of work that you do for the next round is not as optimal because now you're disheartened. That's why it's so important that you got to shift that focus within. When you make that focus within and you make that your home and you start spending time in that stillness and you just see that beauty from there, all this outside stuff just becomes things that you just need to manage. Because if there's a challenge, you get excited because you know what you can do with the challenge. There's always hidden opportunities. So when you change those kinds of mindsets, life just becomes more enjoyable. You have that blessing in your heart that, oh my, I have this breath. And then each breath, you just feel really excited for that breath. And when you decrease that awareness to just that level, just a small level of gratefulness creates such a huge impact on the bigger things. Like something big happens, that's really good news. That's obviously exciting. But if you're really excited about the small things like breath, the journey just becomes so much more easier. Wow, Shahid, I think people should be listening to you every day. What you said is very fine. The truth of the matter is you spoke of attention, Shahid, a few minutes ago, you know, what we pay attention to. And that I think is something that is very closely linked to the concept of breath. Today we are in the world where the only product that is being vied for is our attention. Look at our lives from morning to evening, screen to screen, object to object, everything requiring attention. A brain is a battery of attention. And the question, as you said, is the movement inside, the stillness inside. It requires an effort and an intelligent planning. I can't just say I'm going to sit and I'm going to be still. Hello, that's not how the brain works. So what the brain requires is evidence. Your mind is very intelligent. And it is also very loyal to what you have trained. That's why they say it's a terrible master, wonderful servant. And so to tame your mind, one of the first things you have to ask is, generally, say take five minutes, yes, not much time, five minutes. What is the movie of thoughts that runs through my mind? That's data, right? What happens inside my mind? We're so concerned about how I look and what's my Instagram, and do people think white things about me? So concerned about external appearance, the image. But we do very little housekeeping of how clear our mind and attentiveness is. Well, I'll just live on coffee. Thank you very much. It works in a very different way. So you see, if for five minutes, I'll make it three, just observe where your thoughts go. Just the train of thought. And you will be amazed that your mind holds you like a bug's bunny on a leash. It runs everywhere. It goes anywhere. And you have zero control over it. Maybe that's for some of us. Now, for some of us, we are aware and somewhere along the life and experiences of crisis and growth after that, we learn two things. First, thoughts and emotions are data. I am not my thought, I'm not my emotion. But nobody teaches us that. That what I think is data. It informs me of a certain synthesis of intelligences. Thought comes in a language. Thought occurs in a socio-cultural background. Emotions are conditioning. So am I allowed to feel this emotion? I'm not allowed to feel this emotion. It's a good emotion. It's a bad emotion. So thoughts and emotions are two pieces of data that can appear to have a lot of control over us. In fact, they do control us if we've never turned around and questioned them. And the second thing is we never question our conditioning. We never question this way I think. Is this good? Is this helpful to me? Is this helpful to the people I love and work with? Does it make this world a slightly better place? Does the way I take decisions, and which is why the field of post-traumatic growth is so relevant, we never see the patterns of our decision-making. And so we get into the cognitive trap. When we are in crisis, we regress to our default behaviors. We try harder, but it doesn't get us a result because it's insane. We've never upgraded our method. So we will never get better results. So I'll pause here by saying what you said with breath is the beginning of exceptional intelligent observation of what the patterns of our mind and emotions are. Because after that, everything is smooth and easy. But before that, if you don't know your mind, no matter how many books you read or how many awesome things you do, your mind will lead you where sometimes you may not want to go in life. Becoming aware of my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors has changed my life. So I completely agree. It's super important. We're always looking outside, but you can find it all. You just got to become more aware and just putting that attention, like you said, putting that attention on there. The more you spend time there, the weakening, the limiting, the negative type of bodily emotions, they lose their grip. They start decreasing in their power. Before, when you felt that was my life, that was who I am, and whatever it is, the victim mentality, whatever that past conditioning is, you just feel that that's me. You never know. A lot of people don't know about this stuff. When you're so consumed into something, how do you know if there's a problem? And that awareness helps a lot. Amrita, I want to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on our show. It's really wonderful speaking to you. I love this topic. We could talk about this stuff forever. We keep our episodes around 20 minutes. That's where people like it, going to the gym and stuff. They just get that dose of some kind of information that can help them in their business. So I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Rahid. I wish you and your listeners and viewers a lovely life ahead because I think life is tremendously blessed and we are living in the best of times. Yes, it is a little tough, but I think we have a choice to make this life truly movement from trauma to triumph. So I wish a lot of goodness and a lot of triumph to all your listeners. Wonderful. I like how you said that. Trauma to triumph. That's amazing. At the end of the day, that's what it is. It's that focus shift and it makes huge changes. So I appreciate you again. And audience, audience, thank you so much for joining us. You heard Amrita. Her information will be in the show notes, but do these little tips that she's sharing. Just start asking questions. Start becoming aware of those thoughts that are coming. Where are they coming from? You can just have that kind of conversation and ask those serious or not serious questions, but just find out why your body's feeling that way. When something happens, you're infinite. You have so much potential. That's why I say you're super because the only way I could say that about all you guys is because I have experienced within there's something really phenomenal within that. When you spend more time and take yourself out of whatever's happening on the outside, put more focus on there. You start experiencing that comfort, that belief that there is more to you and you can do so much more in your life. That's why entrepreneurship need that foundation. When you're looking to grow, you're looking to provide for your family, you're looking to make something out of this idea that you're creating or going into to support everybody that loves you and you love them. You need to have that foundation. I wasted so many years. So if you need help, get in touch with Amrita, get help, ask for help, ask for help. Don't hold back. I wasted so many years holding back. So definitely open up those doors.