245. Mindful Messages: Leveraging the Power of Presence

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Creative and conscious communication can not only help us resolve our conflicts, but can help us live a better, more connected life. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I am excited to speak with Deepak Chopra. Dr. Chopra is a physician and the leading authority on integrative wellbeing and spiritual intelligence. He's a clinical professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California San Diego, and he serves as a senior scientist for Gallup organization. He's the author of over ninety-seven books, many of which are New York Times bestsellers. He's the co-founder of Cyberhuman.ai and DeepakChopra.ai, a new AI tool available to all. Well, welcome Dr. Chopra. I look forward to our conversation. I have been a big follower of your work for many years.

[00:00:59] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Thank you.

[00:01:00] Matt Abrahams: Shall we get started?

[00:01:01] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Yes, of course.

[00:01:02] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Your work emphasizes the importance of presence and mindfulness. What practices do you recommend to cultivate presence in our communication and our interaction with others?

[00:01:14] Dr. Deepak Chopra: To make any communication meaningful we need presence. Presence is fundamental, but it is overshadowed by the ego mind. Most of us do not bring presence in our conversations. You bring presence in conversations when you have deep listening without judgment. We call it attention. You bring presence when you bring the element of empathy and compassion and joy and equanimity. That's called affection. So attention, affection. Third thing you bring presence is when you have a appreciation for what you're doing, because every conversation is unique, every conversation.

[00:02:07] And every encounter is unique. And finally, you bring presence when you have radical acceptance, when you're not trying to change another person's point of view, you're expressing your point of view, but you're not attached to it, then that's presence. Of course, mindfulness practices, being aware of your breath, being aware of your bodily sensations, once in a while, asking yourself, am I present? Okay. All those things will bring you to the present, indirectly. Just asking yourself, right now, is there presence in this conversation, will bring you to it. 

[00:02:48] Matt Abrahams: I appreciate how you delineated all the aspects of presence. And anybody listening knows that I love things that are memorable. And all of yours begin with the letter A, attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance without attachment, and then the test you just shared with us, which is just asking, is there presence here? You've mentioned that conflicts present a unique opportunity for growth and understanding. Can you elaborate on how we can reframe our conflicts or leverage our conflicts to bring us to a better place? 

[00:03:24] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Whoever your adversary is, treat them with respect because if you don't, you lose them in the first few minutes. I can rob you of your money, and you might forgive me, but if I insult you, if I humiliate you, you'll never forgive me. So you start with respect. You understand emotional intelligence, which means you understand what the other person feels, you understand what you feel. You have compassion for them, and for yourself, because without compassion, there is no healing or communication. And you have the intention that you will resolve the conflict, and therefore, if you use emotional intelligence, you refrain from belligerence. You understand the dynamics of conscious communication. What is my perception right now? What's happening? What am I perceiving? What am I feeling? Okay? Obviously in conflicts, everyone feels insecure and fearful.

[00:04:35] How do I maximize the outcomes so I feel better? So what am I observing? What am I feeling? What is the need here? And how do we fulfill the need for both parties? This conscious communication I've refined in my work, and again, I give credit to an author, Marshall Rosenberg, who wrote a book many years ago on conflict resolution, and it was called Nonviolent Communication. So you use all the principles of nonviolent communication. You use game theory, which says, let's make it a game where everybody wins. We use conscious communication and we now refrain from dogma and being right and all that. All we want is the best outcome for everyone, which means peace, prosperity, abundance for everyone.

[00:05:33] And in the end, a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful world. We can resolve any conflict and we can come up with a creative solution for anything that you consider adversity. So there are now social scientists who say, if you have shared vision, number one, in a leadership, shared vision, maximum diversity of opinion, and talent, and storytelling, a spiritual and emotional bond. And when we strengthen and compliment each other's strengths, as in a good soccer team, everybody's something else, but they're all good at what they're doing. Or in India, in a cricket team, you know, everybody has a role. So you maximize everybody's strengths, that shared vision, maximum diversity, complimenting each other's strengths. And having a platform, even online or offline, doesn't matter, where we share our strengths and compliment our strengths and root for each other.

[00:06:43] There's a creative solution to everything that exists. I learned this as a physician. When we had difficult patients, we had something called grand rounds. So let's say I had a difficult cancer patient. Of course I want the cancer specialist to be part of the solution. They know more about cancer than anyone else, but if I bring in a psychiatrist, a generalist, a dermatologist, a gastroenterologist, a cardiologist, you'd say, what has that to do with cancer? And what that has to do with cancer, or any disease, people who don't know too much think outside the box. And so when you compliment everybody's opinions, suddenly a creative solution emerges. And I call it a spiritual solution because creativity and spirituality go together. 

[00:07:37] Matt Abrahams: That is a very robust answer to the value that conflict can bring to our own personal growth and understanding. What I heard from you is that it's all about conscious communication that's inclusive, that's compassionate, and that's creative. And by leveraging that, as you said, we can find the win-win, and solve any decision.

[00:08:00] Dr. Deepak Chopra: The ultimate win-win. Peace, prosperity, justice, and good health because ultimately, all this effects our health, right? The conflict, it causes inflammation in the body. 

[00:08:12] Matt Abrahams: What I hear is that in this approach to resolving conflict, it's not about my position and me being right and you being wrong. It's about us truly collaborating, connecting, and communicating to achieve the ultimate win-win. And many of us, I believe, entrench ourselves in our position, which work exactly against what you're advocating for.

[00:08:37] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Creativity never comes if you entrench yourself, then it's an algorithm. You're a biological robot, and I can press the button and get the right response and manipulate you to my advantage, which the world does with people who tend to be narcissistic or self-important or bully. 

[00:08:58] Matt Abrahams: You highlight the power of intention in your work. How does one set a clear intention and how does that impact how we interact with others and communicate? What's the role of intention in all of that? 

[00:09:11] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Intention, by the way, is part of the conversation in the hard problem of consciousness. So when you say intension, your brain actually records that somewhere as a neural correlate. However, at its source intention is not orchestrated by the brain. It's also orchestrated by consciousness. Okay? And if it is done with integrity, with authenticity, with responsibility. So these are very important words. Integrity means you're not pretending to be who you're not, and authenticity goes with it. And if you make an intention, you promise to live up to it authentically, integrity, authenticity, but the intention has to have a higher purpose. It's not because I can win the conversation, but if it has a higher purpose, if it has integrity and authenticity, okat? Integrity means I live up to by word. Authenticity, I'm not pretending to be who I'm not. Once you introduce the intention, then consciousness takes over and organizes its fulfillment without any effort on your part. And how it does that is through synchronicity, through meaningful coincidences, through good luck, through what is called being at the right place at the right time. What the spiritual traditions call grace. 

[00:10:40] Matt Abrahams: So forming that intention from the right place opens up the possibility of the very things that you are hoping to achieve? 

[00:10:49] Dr. Deepak Chopra: A hundred percent without much effort. It's called do less and accomplish more, and ultimately do nothing, accomplish everything. 

[00:10:58] Matt Abrahams: I love the idea of accomplishing more with doing less, and just taking the time to have a genuine intention to help. I wanna share something I'm very excited about in the work that you're doing, beyond the writings and the posts that you do, you've created a new AI tool, Deepak Chopra AI. Can you share a little bit about this tool and what its purpose is? 

[00:11:20] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Yeah, so DeepakChopra.ai, which you can access just on your browser. And it's not a large language model. So you know, large language models give you a lot of information and then you have to sort it out, and some of it is useless. You might occasionally think a lot of it is useless. It's too much information. Large language models tend to hallucinate, which I like by the way, because hallucination is a way to tap into creativity. Every time the large language model hallucinates, I get a creative idea. That's not a bad thing, but my DeepakChopra.ai is a small language model, which is ninety-seven of my books, all the books I've written. It'll ultimately access this conversation too. So when you ask it a question, it uses my material. Furthermore, the answers are very personal. The more personal you ask the questions, the more personal the answers will be to help you. And now, we've trained the model to speak in my accent, in my voice, in Arabic, in Spanish, in Hindi, soon in Portuguese and Chinese. So you could ask the question in any language globally and you would get a personal answer and you could engage with, even engage it with a meditation.

[00:13:00] Matt Abrahams: What a wonderful tool to help people around the world. I personally am benefiting from speaking with you directly, but can see many uses when I don't have access to you. Well, Dr. Chopra, before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions. One I create just for you, and one I've been asking people across this podcast for all the many years we've been doing this. Are you up for that? 

[00:13:22] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Yeah. 

[00:13:22] Matt Abrahams: So my first question is, you are a very articulate communicator yourself. You use several tools to help. You use analogies. You position things that start with the same letter or things that have some rhyming to them to help. Can you reflect for us for just a little bit about what you do to make sure that your messages are clearly understood? Because you certainly are an expert at it. What do you think about when you think about how can I clearly communicate this? 

[00:13:53] Dr. Deepak Chopra: I sell words for a living, so my profession is selling language and words, so I have very carefully, over the years, cultivated my communication to be articulate and clear and helpful. If it's not helpful, I don't bother with that. I want it to be helpful. I want it to be correct, so I don't misstate any facts, and that is easy to check up now on facts. And number two is clear, articulate, and number three, it's helpful. Otherwise why bother? Okay? So with those things in mind and bringing presence to my communication. 

[00:14:43] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that helpful answer. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:14:50] Dr. Deepak Chopra: I have admired communicators like Obama. Admired communicators in the past, like Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln. You know the Gettysburg Address. If you wanna be inspired in the time of a crisis, then listen to the Gettysburg address, right? These are amazing communicators and I've studied them and I try to model them and even improve on them. 

[00:15:25] Matt Abrahams: Wonderful, all very good, effective communicators who have had very challenging topics to communicate. My final question for you, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:15:41] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Number one, is it necessary? Whatever I'm going to communicate, is it necessary? Because half the time we just shoot the breeze and it might be entertaining, but it's not necessary. So number one, is it necessary? Number two, is it true? And number three, is it helpful?

[00:16:00] Matt Abrahams: Purposeful, truthful, and helpful. You have been all three of those in our conversation today. Thank you very much, Dr. Chopra. The understanding of presence in conscious communication is profound and can really change not just our own lives, but the lives of those around us. Thank you for giving us some insight and helping us understand the value that communication truly can have.

[00:16:28] Dr. Deepak Chopra: Thank you.

[00:16:30] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about self-actualization and communication, please listen to episode 138 with Graham Weaver. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offerings for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more, at fastersmarter.io/premium.