The Surprising Relationship Between Internal Coherence and Business Impact

This episode is sponsored by the Soul of Business Experience, A leadership community with curated resources for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and anyone intent on developing their leadership impact and supercharging their careers. For more information, check the podcast webpage or show notes. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Soul of Business with Blaine Bartlett. I am your host, Blaine Bartlett.

Those of you that have been following this podcast for a couple of years now have heard Let me talk about the soul and the soul being that core, that kernel, that thing that provides access to aliveness. And it also is what looks to be expressed in the outer world. That soul, that energetic, that vibrational frequency looks to have a form manifested as a fulsome expression of what it is. And what interrupts that very seriously and very fundamentally and very often is a lack of coherence.

When things start to be disrupted, it becomes difficult for that spirit, that soul, whether it's the soul of the business or the soul of the human being or the soul of the tree that I see out in front of me here. When there's disruption to that frequency, things start to go a little bit wonky. and that external fragmentation is a mirror of that internal fragmentation. I mean, literally, when you look at the Scriptures, as it is within, so it is without.

There is no question about that. That being said, is kind of an entree into today's episode. My guest today, Arnaud St. Paul, is the founder of an organization called TAPUIT, essentially the Heart Leadership Institute, and he's really on the forefront of the heart economy movement.

which is very much in alignment with my work around compassionate capitalism and John Mackey and Rosh Esodia's work around conscious capitalism. So I've known Arno for a while. We reconnected here just recently through a mutual friend, and I've gotten to know and become more familiar with the work that he's doing, and I am fascinated by it. It's a very pragmatic way to take a look at how you can begin to, from a leadership perspective, facilitate effective movement in the organization so that the results that you're producing are in alignment with and are coherent with what was intended.

Intended in the sense of the organization's soul and its sourcing, but also what was intended in the minds and the hearts and the souls of the people that are involved. So there's emotional connection that begins to be a potential possibility here. So all of that being said, Arno, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Blaine.

I don't think I'm necessary. You already got everything. Okay, this will be a short episode. I'm going to just start with a single question.

And then I also am interested in the curiosity piece here because you've got a very extensive background. I mean, you've worked with a ton of very interesting organizations and people. You're entrepreneurial yourself. But I want to start with, and we're going to explore that a little bit here.

So that journey, I think, is worth people having access to. But I'm going to begin by just asking, when you hear the term the soul of business, what's that bring up for you? So much. You talked a little bit about it earlier.

You talked about this kernel, this essence. But if we want to take another metaphor, and the way I usually tend to speak about it, and we're talking about the soul of business, but it is also what we could call our soul, not necessarily in a religious term, but more at, you know, these tuning forks, they emit a sound, and it's precise, it is perfect on its own, and it is the reference for everything. so what if the soul of our business our soul each of them is one of these tuning forks it has a specific pitch it is exactly what it needs to be it's self-referenced right it's sui generis in Latin which means that it defines itself by itself and that's perfect and fine now this is, let's put it that way the manifested vision of the organization of our business.

We're not necessarily there yet. And the journey is towards living this experience of the business being here now in this world in a very pragmatic way, meaning very successfully growing its revenue, helping thousands of clients and providers to do what they need to do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what the tuning fork is about, is living that already. How far am I from living it fully?

That's up to me as a leader to decide that. And how open am I to do so? That's where usually they hit the fan. Exactly.

I got it all over me. Yeah. So, you know, in part what I'm hearing in this, and I'll just kind of unbundle this in my own language, in my own mind here. It's a spiritual pragmatism.

It's 100%. And whether it's spiritual or not, you know, it's more of a judgment in the end. Yeah. One thing that I had to realize very early on on my journey, and it's not easy to realize that in our experience, is that there is only this moment where something is happening and I am there for it.

Period. Nothing else. Whether it is called spiritual material or anything doesn't really matter. So my only focus when I created the Heartership Institute for that very purpose is being in the heart is being in this present moment now.

And therefore, who am I or how am I defining myself in this moment to be the person I need to be to have this experience, whatever that one is. There is no more pragmatic and practical than that. And then at the same time it is a pure vertical integration of myself whether you call it spiritual material or whatever doesn really matter So yes by all means this is exactly what it is Yeah Yeah Partly the reason that I use that language because, you know, in my experience, in the work that I do with my clients, I will bring this particular conversation into the room, onto the table with the teams and whatnot that I'm working with.

And there's a moment in the conversation where they, the pushback that I get initially is because there's an abstraction to what I'm positioning as a possibility for them. Yeah. And the idea about how do I make this pragmatic? How do I actually translate the notion that everything is connected?

Everything is connected and everything vibrates in some sort of a holistic manner with each other. Sometimes, you know, we end up with interference, you know, which generates chaos. And I mean, I think, yeah, you, you reference this on your website about the symphony. Yeah.

Before the conductor comes in, you know, metaphor for the leader. Yeah. You've got, you know, the strings, the woodwinds, the percussion, everybody, you know, just kind of doing their thing, kind of tuning themselves up and that sort of thing. And it sounds chaotic.

The minute they come in and they tap the baton, everybody, you know, kind of comes to attention and the symphony comes into play and it's that organizing process that then you know taking the varied expressions of different souls if you will and finding a way to you know from a coherence perspective giving them a target so to speak giving them the uh the sheet music if you will here's what we're going to play today here's what we're going here's the symphony we're going to be creating from a very practical perspective how do you do that with the clients with whom you work and you've got a couple of instruments that i want to actually be sure we get into a conversation about because they are cutting edge they are very unique yeah the so just just as a little parenthesis in this metaphor of the classical music orchestra yes The symphony is what we're here to come and explore and live and experience.

But the chaos before the symphony is also part of the coherence of the whole. So it's not that coherence is the aimed experience. It is all of it. And embracing all of it is very important.

But that's a little parenthesis, and we can dive deeper into that if you wish. I love that because, I mean, in that chaos, I can isolate different things and it's kind of like, oh, there's a potential here. There's a potential here. So now it's a question of how do I mix?

Yes. How do I actually call it? And to that, part of the journey that I had is, so in the last 40 years, I created, well, out of my own experience, a series of charts that will help me understand how to be more coherent with my heart. And that became our signature program, which I worked with CEOs and seeing how effective the methodology was and the framework was so much so that I had to find a way to communicate that in a measurable manner so that the CEOs that are in the practice, it's easy because they are living it on a weekly basis.

but for all the other ones, how can I create that bridge for them to be able to touch it? And that's how the Heart Leadership Index was born, which is a way for us to, through answering a series of questions, to assess how a coherent or how aligned an individual, a team, an organization is with the seven pillars of heart leadership, which, funnily enough, characterize very accurately not only the vertical development of an individual, but also of a team and an organization. And the more we see the coherence of that team or organization, how much it grows, the more impact it has.

There is a direct relationship between one and the other. And this is the role of the institute, which is to demonstrate that in the next years because we know it is working. We already have early examples and we're growing that knowledge and data so that we can create a new understanding of that paradigm that has always existed, but nobody was really looking at what the coherence field is. How can we measure it?

How can we map it? And more importantly, where do we go from there, right? So nowadays, to your question, we take a team, they assess themselves in a few minutes with this assessment. We take that same snapshot.

From that snapshot, we determine the pattern that we need to work on for the next 12 weeks. We do a 12-week sprint, and then we measure again. And we do another one, and so on and so forth. And this way we can have a measurable path towards more harmony or coherence within the team and our organization and therefore bring about more alignment that makes the whole business journey easier and more fluid, I guess, flowing.

Yeah. One of the metrics that, yeah, and it's more of a, you know, just kind of stick my thumb up in the air and see which way the wind's blowing metric than anything else here. But one of the things I'll pay attention to with my clients and have them pay attention to has to do with the notion of elegance. elegance.

And elegance in the context of, you know, when I write software code, elegant code is bug-free. It does what it's supposed to do, and I don't have to clean up after myself. A lot of leaders with whom I work, they've got to go back and clean up after themselves a lot. So in the context of elegance, now, the idea of leading through the heart, leading with the heart, You mentioned seven pillars because I'm looking here at the morphology, you know, literally the morphology of the field, that field, that resonance field.

What are the seven pillars that you've identified? And you've done a good amount of research on this to validate the fact that these pillars are, in fact, the pillars. So can you just a brief description of what they are and how they interplay? Let me answer your question.

Then I'll go back to the elegance because I think this is important. The seven pillars are the following. Presence, inner peace, inner joy, non-attachment, selflessness, unity, and purpose. What the research has shown so far that these lenses, because they are just angles of view in an individual and an organization, clearly clear descriptors of the human experience in whichever situation we talking about And it is looking at how my experience or how am I experiencing my own reality Now that's a good, say that again, how I'm experiencing my own reality.

Yes. How am I experiencing my own reality? And in business, we also have a corporate HLI, which is more how am I experiencing the environment I am in, which is slightly different. And so that gives us a seven-dimension matrix of, in other words, I can start mapping that field that we were talking about earlier and find where the instabilities are so that at least I can regulate further the stabilizers so that the rest grows on its own.

And so, for instance, usually we tend to have more difficulties with selflessness and non-attachment. And what we have seen is when you bulge a notch on one of these two, automatically, poof, all the others grow, which is quite fascinating. To the elegance that you were mentioning earlier, I actually just finished an article. I was invited to a conference in Paris of impact founders and investors and whatnot.

And it was amazing because the MC was talking literally about all the different theses that we are offering to the world, but from an experiential standpoint. And what he was saying in a very short nutshell, what he was saying is that impact founders, but it's the same for any type of founder anyway, or CEOs for that matter, are doing a disservice to their clients or their purpose, their vision, because they are over-investing in that impact and always out of phase between the vision that they have.

And what is unfolding? So it's always at their expense. A.k.

a. again, fragmentation. Yeah. No, go ahead.

That's a very short thing. The elegance, to get back to what you were saying, would be in theory where I, the leader of any type of company, I'm at pace with what and in the rhythm of what my life, my business life in this context is bringing me. And I create with life. So in other words, in the musical metaphor, I am creating the symphony as it is playing itself out.

and I am building up the vision or better said, it is coming to fruition through this new experience of myself, right? Talking about it earlier. And therefore it is, therefore it happens. It's a very different paradigm.

Yes, it is. And I think, you know, I was going to make this comment here. I heard you say an overemphasis on impact and most CEOs, most leaders in organizations, most leaders tend to look towards impact as a metric that is almost the holy grail. Yeah.

If we've got impact, we must be doing it right. But at what cost it comes into play? Impact or revenue is the same thing. Yeah.

Yeah. So impact takes a number of different forms. One of the pillars that you spoke to there has to do with non-attachment. And again, these high-powered, quote-unquote, leaders, they set goals.

They've got objectives. They got investors breathing down their neck. And the idea, and I tend to agree with you here very strongly that non-attachment is a fundamental piece of the experience of living a fulfilled and fulfilling life. But how do we actually, in the work that you do with your clients, how do you actually bring practical ways for a leader to disengage, if you will?

And I use the word disengage as a metaphor or as a placeholder for attachments. so that I don't have a death grip on that goal, that objective. Yes. How do you facilitate that?

Because I think that's a fascinating process and not easy to do. It is. It takes time. It doesn't happen overnight.

That's for sure. It's having a new understanding and a new experience of one's life. So it touches at the very core of what it means to be me or you or whomever. and because at first when we are in that in that i am attached to right there is always that sense of i'm not going to get it the world is here to get me one way or another and so many more i need soul and and the list is super long that's the frame within which we are at the beginning and for us to non-attach.

In other words, to have a vision, to have goals, not to think them, but to feel them is a very big distinction. Yes. And to be clear on what is it that we want to experience indeed in the next month, in the next year and whatever, that doesn't change. However, we are now trusting the path that is building up and bringing us to that place of experience that I am looking for, that I see, that is clear to me.

Trusting that if by any chance the path is different from the one that I saw, it's okay. Yeah. And not saying that we don't want to fulfill these goals. Of course we do.

but then what is more important the destination or the journey both you would tell me we still need to have gold and we still need to sell and what not yes 100% but one thing that I do tell to my clients and I don't repeat it enough yet is that there is absolutely no challenge in the business world that is not tied to yourself and to how ready you are to experience the fulfillment of that goal, for instance. So the real question is, which aspect of me, which fragmented aspect of me was still not ready for that?

For me not to be able to experience that goal. Yeah. And I have so many examples around that. And that ties again to the soul of the business, to the elegance of, is how do we dance with life?

Excuse me? Okay. All good No but that makes perfect sense You know in my study today I was reading some Neville Goddard a fascinating philosopher And one of the things that I came across as I was reading today, and it's here on my desktop, imagination and faith are the only faculties of the mind needed to create objective conditions. Imagination and faith.

And you mentioned earlier in the conversation about it's one thing to imagine something. It's another thing to imagine the feeling associated with the thing. And for this conversation around attachment, that's, I think, one way that I've found actually begins to loosen that death grip. Because if I can feel it in here, I'm not worried about it manifesting out there.

Yes, indeed. And then it's just a question of understanding it's already happened. It just hasn't shown up yet, or I haven't met it yet. Completely different paradigm, completely different process of walking that path.

Yes. The idea of having a codified way to map my coherence, my leadership coherence, can be, I mean, I've done a lot of behavioral work, a lot of instruments, a lot of things that I've used with clients as I've coached them and whatnot. And disk and whatnot, yes. Yeah, the disc, the strength deployment inventory, the Myers-Briggs.

I mean, you pick your poison. The difficulty that I run into oftentimes is that people, when they get their results, they put themselves in a box. This is who I am. And my experience in my conversations with you in the times that we've had conversations about your instruments and how you're working, there's not a box to go to.

A little bit because we do offer a coherence persona. So in other words, you become an aligned warrior or a silent flame. It's not like, what's the name? You cannot label yourself as the one that is smarter than the others or the one that doesn't have value, self-value and so on.

A bit unrelated, fortunately. But the label is what the mind wants to create a box where I can put myself in it. Yes. But the thing is, who we really are is so much more than that box.

And, you know, if we look at it from a place of fragmentation, when we are, we have the habit of being fragmented, hence the boxes. That's great. Now, the journey is towards integration. Integration.

Absolutely. Towards living that famous symphony we were talking about earlier. One day, maybe, we were there. Once we recognize it, because it's already playing out.

we're not looking at it yet it's we're not valuing it and so in the symphony world there is no label whatsoever it cannot be because then there is no more symphony there's not even a melody there's nothing there's one one note and that's about it so that's why we're talking about fields a coherence field it's that space that is existing that we do not necessarily look at nevertheless exists and that is always absolutely perfect to the T. Yeah. But again, we're going back to non-attachment.

Because we are judging the situation as being not to our liking to say it's a good example. Exactly. Because we're judging it so strongly because we are so accustomed to have the world being at odds with me. That's the core belief.

Therefore, I need to be in a box. That's where my identity comes from. Exactly. What if we offer ourselves the opportunity to transcend that identity and be really connected to the now moment at last without the different layers that we have added, which are all these boxes that we have collected for so long that are always impacting negatively your leadership.

You know, Rumi, I'm reminded here as we're having this particular part of the conversation, Rumi at one point in time said, beyond right and wrong, beyond issues of right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there. And that's, I think, what we're talking about. There's no right, wrong, good or bad that exists in that field.

There's just a presence that looks to be expressed. Yes, exactly. Beautiful. Where can people find out more about what you're up to, Arno?

Very simply, tapwat.com, T-A-P-U-A-T.com. They can take the HLI there.

It's complimentary. And they can even invite their team to it if they want to. And then we can have a conversation and see how we can help people on their journey. Excellent, excellent.

Well, I'll be sure that all of that is in the show notes. Folks, you've been listening to Arnaud St. Paul, the founder of TAPOAT, and more specifically, the Heart Leadership Institute. And I've loved this conversation.

I could continue this conversation for another hour very easily. Okay, my friend. Folks, as I sign off here, I just want to invite you to take a look outside and see what nature is doing. Nature, as you look at it, there's nothing in nature that serves as a center of accumulation.

Everything in nature is giving. Everything in nature in some way, shape, or form ends up serving as a center of distribution. Yeah, it's unique in its own way. It gives what it has to give from that uniqueness.

So pretend you're a part of nature today and go out and be a center of distribution with the folks that you meet, with the interactions that you have with your reality, with your world. And until next time, I want to thank you for listening. This is The Soul of Business with Blaine Bartlett, and I will see you on the next episode. Take care.

But I'd also like you to give a rating. Ideally, a five-star rating would be greatly appreciated. But I think more importantly also would be just some comments. That helps with the algorithm and it helps build the audience with this.

And more than anything else, if you could invite somebody else to listen, just share this episode with a friend, with a colleague. And I'd like to see how we can grow the soul of business. I think it makes a difference. Thanks.

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