I bring you a great story of…drive. And the fruition I find most people experience, where we start off in life driven by our base desires and find the shallowness and meaninglessness of it and wonder if this is all life has to offer. I’ve known of Scott Harrison for many years, but never got the chance to dig into his story and drive myself. Scott is founder of charity:Water and has literally put a dent in the global clean water crisis. He’s been so successful, not only do celebrities want to hang with him, but he’s become a celebrity himself. Scott’s story began by abandoning his faith-based upbringing to spend almost 10 years as a nightclub promoter in New York City. He had great success in driving other people to drink themselves into oblivion and made the nightclubs a lot of money. He was literally paid to party and he imbibed to the fullest degree with drugs, alcohol, sex and everything that goes along with it. As his soul began to dry up, he took a sabbatical to volunteer on a hospital ship as a photojournalist. While in Africa he witnessed people drinking out of a cesspool of water he wouldn’t have used to clean his glasses. He returned to New York City two years later and put his promotional skills to work to found the non-profit organization charity: water in 2006. Scott has not only made a global impact for clean water but today he’s changing how we view and do charity at large. Following is my conversation with Scott to understand what has driven him. You’ll hear his story and his infectious drive for his chosen devotion, clean water. You may not want to devote yourself to clean water, but this show will increase your drive to devote yourself to what you feel called to. You can get Scott’s full story in his book, Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World.

I grew up focused on performing. I’m an introvert who doesn’t care for the stage. The performing I’m talking about is being able and capable and winning and achieving and being limitless with no weaknesses. I found a lot of achievement, and heartache, by treating myself as a tool to achieve things. And I missed my potential. Being the fullness of me. In my quest, I’ve found George Mumford. George has worked with basketball legends Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, and countless other NBA players, pro athletes in many sports, Olympians, executives, and artists. George doesn’t work with them to perform better. He works with them to be more of themselves. To be their authentic selves. To play for themselves and score without trying to score. To be the best expression of themselves. And from this, they found more success on the court, but more importantly, more resonance with their own soul. It’s a compelling offering. Find your best success by connecting with your heart. George wrote a book, Unlocked: Embrace Your Greatness, Find the Flow, Discover Success. You can find him at georgemumford.com

It seems everyone these days is anxious. On edge. Stressed. Even the seemingly chill guy is simmering under his skin with an overworked nervous system. That would be me. We medicate the symptoms and have just culturally accepted an anxious life. I’m not ok with it. Being at peace to me is power. It’s wisdom. And those at peace are who I want to be around. I don’t want to numb my nervous system, I want to master it. So I’ve brought you two masters. Karden Rabin is a nervous system medicine practitioner and an expert in the fields of trauma and psychophysiological disorders. Over the last fifteen years he has combined principles of bodywork, brain retraining, and somatic trauma therapies and helped thousands of clients across the globe heal from chronic pain and illness. Karden is the Co-Founder of SOMIA and a regular contributor to Bessel Van Der Kolk’s Trauma Research Foundation. Jennifer Mann is a mind-body practitioner, yoga instructor, and functional movement therapist, and has battled severe chronic fatigue. She began researching alternative approaches to healing chronic fatigue and was able to completely recover using trauma-informed, mind-body healing. She now leads a community of over 100,000 followers on Instagram and is the Co-founder of SOMIA which has helped thousands of people from all over the world regulate their nervous systems. Friends, this was an incredible discussion as I sat at the feet of Karden and Jennifer as a student to learn. Really learn. Karden actually led me through a new therapy he’s using with great success called, “Emotional Cold Plunging.” Karden and Jenn have compiled their research into a new book titled, “The Secret Language of the Body: Regulate Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, Free Your Mind.” I studied it and we covered a lot in this talk. As usual, this isn’t an interview. It’s a class and it’s training and it’s vital to your wellness and potential. Find Karden and Jenn at somiainternational.com. Drive with me now to learn how to master your nervous system and find the peace you deserve, and can achieve.

Following is a story that is far more common than we realize. A childhood trauma that directs our lives, for better and/or worse. When I first started focusing on drive and researching for my book, this is one of the earlier conversations I had with an influential person, digging into their personal story of drive. Ashley got a Master’s degree from King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, as well as a Master’s in Psychology from University of Santa Monica. She started her career in counterterrorism under the Obama administration and learned speech writing while working for the government. She went on to write a bestselling book that put her on the map as an influencer, YOU TURN: Get Unstuck, Discover Your Direction, Design Your Dream Career. Today she runs the Wise Whisper Agency where she helps people create their signature talk and get on big stages. There is the fancy, public bio. My interest however was in her deeper story. The one where at age 10 her Dad had a panic attack about a business turned bad and he exclaimed to Ashley that money was going to kill him. Right then and there Ashley vowed, “I’m going to make a lot of money so that life is easy and I can save my dad from dying." I pulled on this thread and we discussed how it influenced her lifelong quest to save and rescue and help people. What is true to who she is and how much was errant from that early experience with her dad? It will bring up your motives and which are authentic to you and which are influenced by life experiences that could take us down a wrong path. You can find Ashley at ashleystahl.com and tune in to her You Turn podcast.

If you look at social media influencers, news headlines and commentary, late night TV hosts and a high percentage of the so called informed public, you find a consistent thread of cynicism. Cynicism is a general distrust and lack of faith or hope in humanity and it’s gotten to be viewed as clever and intelligent to take a cynical view of life, and naive to be hopeful and optimistic. My guest today has found opposing data. Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain and his interest is in how we can learn to connect better. You won’t find Jamil much on social media, as his years have been spent teaching at Stanford and studying humanity and he’s put his findings in a brand new book titled, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Jamil attests that is in fact cynicism that is naive and relates it to a trail lawyer who ignores half the evidence. Jamil says, “Cynicism is not a radical worldview, it’s the status quo. The norm. It’s the “common man” and it’s a seductive worldview that is dark and simple. He says this with an educated and compassionate spirit, as you’ll hear, and does not call for blind trust but rather, hopeful skepticism where we practice an open mind with discernment and constructive faith. Find Jamil at ssnl.stanford.edu

I hear from more and more people who just enjoy the journey of personal growth. They almost feel guilty about it, especially if they are mostly around others who seem content to just maintain life. They wonder why they have this insatiable appetite for more insight about themselves and life. Of course, I resonate with them. Over the past years I’ve realized that what I value most is not going after any specific goals, but just always having a goal to go after. My experience is most goals we achieve are anti-climactic if we think they alone will finally satisfy us. And again, I’m brought back to realizing what gives me the most fulfillment is having goals to go after, every day, all the time, so that…I enjoy the daily journey of life. It’s the overall hope of discovering some new insight about myself or life that I can apply and find joy in. And then continue the next day on the same path to a new, inspiring destination. I wanted to talk more about it and invited my best friend, Randy James, to join me. Randy is a medical doctor and Functional Medicine expert who you can find at truelifemedicine.com. What drew me to him 15 years ago, I now realize, was how we resonated in a desire to pursue personal growth. Randy is insatiable with new information and always excited to talk about a new idea and concept. Though not just for the sake of the idea. He’s excited about a new insight he can apply to his own life or the life of a patient, his family, or his friends. Like me. Following is our conversation about this concept of growth and the joy in the growth, even more than the goal.

We are all going to work. For most of our lives. We applaud people for their anniversaries. “Oh, you’ve been married for 10 years, congratulations.” Or the big celebration you have for a couple who has been married for 50 years! Well, most of us will work for nearly 50 years. I had my first consistent job at about 13, started my first business at 15, and my intent is to live till I’m 90 and work till then. That would put me at 75 years of working. You will also spend more time with your work than your spouse if you don’t include sleeping. So in essence, the greatest marriage of your life will be your work. What kind of relationship will you have with this primary spouse? My guest is Dr. Tessa West, who is a Professor of Psychology at New York University where she is a leading expert on the science of social relationships. She has over 100 academic publications and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Her work has been covered by Scientific American, the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN, CNBC, ABC World News, TIME, Bloomberg, HBR, Fast Company, and the US Supreme Court. Her first book was Jerks at Work and now she’s published a book titled, Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works For You. In the book she posits the comparison between our work and a marriage. She says at the core we have deep, intimate feelings about our work and it is a primary ingredient in our self image and overall drive for life. This is where I dug in with Tessa. With all the focus on the topic of work I’ve had, I’ve never really gone down the trail of looking to our feelings and emotions and core relationship with it. This conversation will forever change how I view my relationship with my work. Find Tessa at tessawestauthor.com

Not everyone is driven to be an entrepreneur, but sometimes we may need to go down this path in order to have freedom to do what we think is best. My best friend, Randy James, is a medical doctor. When he started he made a pact with God that he’d be a doctor, but he never wanted to be a businessman. Following is a story of why he reluctantly went into business for himself, and now testifies that having to learn the business side of his vocation has helped him be a better doctor and serve his patients better. I have always loved being an entrepreneur, but I’m not a naturally gifted businessman overall. I’m not great at running a business, I just want to do my art, and I feel many of you will resonate with just that. There is a product or service or message you care deeply about, and don’t see how to deliver through traditional channels…as an employee. So you’re looking to set out as an entrepreneur, or you already have. I recorded this show to commiserate with you, and give you some inspiration and ideas on reconciling what you do and how you do it. I also ask for your grace, we had an audio malfunction we totally missed, and Randy’s mic wasn’t working. Our audio team worked to make things as clear as possible, but you’ll notice a stark difference in the audio quality when he talks. I think you’ll find Randy’s story worth the slight audio error. Find Randy and his team at truelifemedicine.com

We look at how our values fuel our drive and how they often come into friction with today’s sociopolitical issues that I feel we are pressured to all have a solid stance on. I see and have felt the tension it can cause. What we grapple with as individuals affects our work and where we work and the corporations that influence and employ much of the population. Patrick Lencioni is someone corporations look to as a guide. He is a highly in demand speaker and the author of thirteen best-selling books with over nine million copies sold. After more than twenty years in print, his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, remains a fixture on national best-seller lists and with most businesses. His most recent book is The Six Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts and I have widely evangelized his personal profiling tool at workinggenius.com where you can find out what your working genius is. I’ve had all my kids take it. Patrick recently wrote a blog titled, “How To Sew Unity In A Time Of

Division.” The article was aimed at CEOs and the issues they and employees are facing. But I took it as an opportunity to talk with someone whose insight I respect, about values overall and the struggle in our current culture to live them out. Patrick says, “The world changed with frightening speed in the past five years. That change wasn’t so much a shift as it was a divide. The emergence of a host of sociopolitical issues has created a massive rift in culture, one that is

unprecedented in the past 50 years.” We don’t get into politics. We don’t get into any specific cultural issue. We do have a conversation about values that Pat said was unlike any podcast conversation he’s ever had. My hope is this conversation helps you consider your values and your stance, or not…which I’ll discuss more in the next episode, on today’s cultural issues. Find Patrick at thetablegroup.com