SPEAKERS

Nippin, Rosa Carrillo

Nippin  00:01

Welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand. Anand a podcast aimed at understanding and promoting transdisciplinary ways of living and thinking, meaning, assimilating different viewpoints, different subjects, different disciplines, but focused on a very simple question, how do we human beings, learn, unlearn, relearn and make decisions, and how can we tackle risks in an uncertain world? Most of us know us for the sake of this start of this ritual of podcasting. Let’s just welcome you Rosa. Welcome to this today’s episode embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand, yes, I think it’s a wonderful concept. We should talk about embodiment and see where this conversation goes.

01:01

All blurry it’s,

Nippin  01:03

that’s the way the software is designed. It will give you a very high resolution at the end of it. So it’s just recording the background. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Yeah, maybe I should have explained this to you before. But never mind.

Rosa Carrillo  01:18

We can start over again. Let’s start over. No, no, it’s

Nippin  01:21

okay, it’s natural, it’s it’s nice. So let’s just talk about the whole idea of embodiment. What is embodiment, I think, from my point of view, Rosa the and this is a struggle that some people had when you came to London. Also, we talked about the idea of embodiment, and people have difficulties understanding that the mind is in the entire body. The mind is not in the brain. And most people think that the brain is the warehouse that makes the decision, sorry, the control tower that makes the decisions, and the body just basically follows everything that the brain has to say. And I think increasingly we are seeing latest neuroscience, depth psychology has always maintained that social psychology, theology and religion have always resonated with this idea that that the mind is is in the body, that every part of human body has a mind of its own, and every part of the body is involved in decision making. So intelligence did not come from from the heaven, as as Descartes would say intelligence is basically realized through emotions and feelings and the movement that is that every every part of the body moves. Every element of the body has its mind and it moves. So when I meet you and I threaten you, your your hands, your sweat, your palms start to sweat. If I shout at you, your heart will start to race. If I’m if I express my love for you, you suddenly start to draw in. And how much of it is controlled by the brain? Now I’m not suggesting that the brain is not involved. What I’m suggesting it’s not controlled by the brain. A lot of it is actually bodily reactions, which we sometimes call gestures or body language, to be more more generic, but it exists in other ways also, for example, the language that we use, some of the metaphors that we use that become part of the body. They are not conscious. We use words that are totally, totally unconscious. And hence, they are embodied in us. They are embodied in us because they were part of our our childhood. They were part of the way we were socialized, educated. Or when we come to education in sorry, when we come to start to work, some slogans, some metaphors, some propagandas start to become part of our bodies. I’ll give you an example. And this might makes, might make some sense. Rosa, so I, I I came I started driving. Is a classic example, because most people can relate with driving and what, what it means as an embodied person. So you start driving, and somebody you know in a rational mode, which means that you, somebody sits with you, instructs you how to drive, and you follow the highway code, or the motorway code, whichever way you want to call it. And there are some strict rules and processes that you start to follow in a very rational mode, in a very slow mode, until you come to a point where you have cleared your drive. Test you are an independent driver, and the law allows you to drive independently. And through that independent driving, you learn to become little bit more comfortable, and that is because the driving is slowly becoming part of your body. You don’t have to think so much, except when you go on unfamiliar roads or you meet with exceptional traffic or a situation, and then finally, you move into an expert driver, which is where you can go anywhere in the country, and you can drive without any instruction, without any thinking. There is no thinking involved at all. In fact, that’s the highest level of embodiment where the mind starts to do everything on its own. And we call it this automatic mind. And automaticity is makes a lot of sense in many ways, because if you look at the way life has existed on this planet. I mean, the bacteria, which is probably the oldest form of life, came about 4 billion years ago, and bacteria, as much as I understand, does not have any consciousness, it’s totally unconscious. And then life started to evolve, and it’s only about four to 500 million years ago that we started to to see nervous systems coming into place. And it’s the nervous system, actually, that when you put on top of the unconscious, it creates the conscious mind. But the two have to work together, the unconscious and the conscious has to work together and so and and the other thing is that intelligence did not come from the heaven or from the top. Intelligence came from that unconscious, from that bacteria, which we call emotions and feelings, and then ultimately, in the consciousness, it becomes knowledge. So it all works together in order for us to be seen as embodied beings and and to me, that is embodiment. It’s the working of the unconscious mind and the conscious mind when it works together. That’s embodiment. And I think that’s also close to your idea of mindfulness. As you you said, what happens most of the time is that we have a tendency to go back into the automatic mode, which is, which is the unconscious mode. And what mindfulness teaches us to that this the unconscious and the conscious should always stay in sync, or should try and stay in the sync. And I think the more you do that, the more fulfilling life you live, which some people call being mindful.

Rosa Carrillo  07:51

Well, you have said a lot, you’ve you’ve talked about this before, about automaticity. I love that word, and Senge called it unconscious competence, that you move from conscious competence, which is when you are thinking about everything you do, and then you move into unconscious competence, where, that’s where most accidents happen, because you’re not acting and thinking from about what you’re doing, you’re just acting automatically. So it’s a double edged sword, you know, being in that in that mode, and I think that’s why mindfulness, then, is pulling back to you. The more expert you are, the more skilled you are, the more unconscious competence that you’re tapping into. You have to balance that with the awareness and being in the present, being in the now. So as I’m even, as I’m saying this, I’m wondering if what you’re referring to as the unconscious and conscious working in tandem, if that isn’t the same idea as the unconscious competence being working in tandem with mindfulness. Do you think those two might be interchangeable?

Nippin  09:31

I think the nature has gifted us with unconscious for a very specific reason, because nature understands it’s too well that you cannot always remain in the conscious mode. You know, TED talks are designed for 18 to 20 minutes for a good reason, because we don’t have the attention span to live in that space for anything more than 20 minutes. It’s unrealistic to think along those lines. I think what is important is that still. In that unconscious mode, how good you are at detecting anomalies, at detecting surprises, and coming back to the conscious mode when it is needed. And I think that’s that increasingly comes by practicing mindfulness, that is ability to actually detect I need. I cannot be in that space anymore. There’s an anomaly, and I need to come back to the conscious mode. I think that is something which, if you practice meditation, or you you enjoy what you do, but what some people call it, the flow the book, is wonderful, but I can never pronounce the name of the person. Mihaly. Never mind talks about flow. And I think what what you realize by doing things that you really enjoy, by living your passion, you or or by practicing mindfulness, or by practicing yoga, deep breathing, you increasingly become better equipped in that space you know when to pull into. You know, it’s a bit like the IQ. You’re not in the IQ mode all the time because it will kill you. You cannot do more than an IQ more than 10 minutes. But if you and I were talking just now, and we were not in the IQ mode. We were just having a usual conversation in the automatic mode. And you said something like, you know, I’m having a horrible time, and suddenly I’m sensitized to that word, and I go back into the conscious mode, because I’m I know when to switch over, and I think, what is, what’s what I’m referring to, if, if you learn how to make that switch over, I think that’s, that’s, I would say that’s, that’s, that’s a long way to come.

Rosa Carrillo  11:53

Yeah, that’s definitely, I mean, that makes complete sense. Maybe that’s what Carl Vic was talking about when he said, weak signals. You know you have to be sensitized, but that is also a skill and something that most people aren’t sensitive to. What are what do those weak signals feel like? They’re usually what emotions and feelings, those are the the early reactions that are going to alert you to something happening. But let’s go back to what would allow a person to reach that level of awareness, and lately, I’ve been thinking that it is impossible unless you have worked on yourself and acknowledged that there have been events in your life that have disconnected you from this unconscious and if you’re not willing to do that work of acknowledging that and becoming aware of these things, then they just stay in the unconscious, and they keep interfering with what you’re trying to accomplish. So that would be why I would think mindfulness practice would be, if it were to be adopted as an organizational goal is to develop people’s ability to be mindful. That that would be the beginning of that process. So we can’t, for example, right now, what we do is we take diversity and inclusion programs and we put them on top of the organization, and they don’t work because there’s no awareness. I don’t know how to be aware of when I am maybe I have accidentally insulted you, or, you know, gone to a place where where I’ve created friction, and I can’t, because I’m not connected to that part of me. Yeah,

Nippin  14:13

there’s a couple of ways of doing it. One is, like you very rightly said, the idea of meditation, solo meditation, analytical meditation, where you walk, you know, you walk solo path, and you start to think about what you’re thinking, you know, the Buddhist way of doing it. And you become a little bit more clear about a conscious of the unconscious. This is the question, right, how to become conscious of the unconscious? That’s definitely one way of thinking about it, and it works for some people. But the trouble is that a lot of people find it very difficult, and lot of people do not have. A temperament for and patience for this kind of gradual change so that, but that’s definitely one way. But there’s another way, which is to start journaling your dreams. You know dreams are a wonderful way, because that’s that’s one way that the unconscious speaks to the conscious. It manifests itself through symbols in the dreams. And the trouble is that when you start doing that in the beginning, most people have difficulties recollecting and remembering what they saw in their dreams. But if you look at the work of Robertson, for example, his classics books on inner work. One of the things he says is that even if you can remember one image in the beginning from of what you dreamt about, slowly, if you start to journal it, it gets, starts to get better and better each time. And you know, I told you,

Rosa Carrillo  15:56

yeah, I’ve had that experience. The more, the more you recall the memories in journal them, the more dreams that you can you can remember.

Nippin  16:07

That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. And I think one final way of of making the unconscious conscious, which I think should become increasingly become part of organizational life, is that everyone should find at least one person in the organization not if not more, with whom they can they can share their emotions and feelings without the fear of being judged. And if that happens, a lot of unconscious becomes conscious through that. And I know it’s a very, very hard thing for most people to find someone who they can trust, particularly at work, because everyone is in you know you and I both live in very individualist societies, and people you never know what you say and share might turn against you in the future, but that’s if you can find somebody who, who you can share your I know, who can probably just look at you and say, You look very, very disturbed today, or you you don’t look very good today. Or there’s something about you, because the unconscious does not manifest to the to you unless you are a very aware person, the unconscious would easily be seen by other people, but they they’re scared of saying anything, because they don’t know how you will react to it. So if you can find somebody who can, who you can work with at that and this is where IQ is very helpful, because the whole process is very semiotic, is very visual, and as you are doing and as you are writing it for somebody else, you already start to make the unconscious conscious to them. You know what we call it, chasing the confession or chasing the gift. And when that happens, the unconscious starts to the what is in the automatic starts to float up in the in the in the conscious mode. So there are ways of doing it, but it goes back to the same thing that the quality of relationships that we don’t have in most cultures, the quality of relationships where one person will see another person as an equal person, where one person will see another person as a whole person, we are so quick to judge another person and reduce them into objects or a means to our end that the unconscious never reveals, and even if it reveals, it is turned into something that is not good. You know, classic example of being accident investigation, where you make mock of a person, by the way, you even conduct accident investigations. I mean, what sort of a phrase is this loss of situational awareness? It’s very much part of the automatic city, right? And so we reduce that person, that whole person, that organic being, into something so mechanistic in that just one phrase, so we don’t have the quality of relationships where people understand another person as an organic whole being.

Rosa Carrillo  19:13

Yeah, I’m connecting what you’re saying to the gala research, where one of the key questions is, I have at least one friend in this organization, and that is connected. That’s one of the questions that’s connected to all the performance indicators. And I think that friendship has many depths, but if a person can’t say I have at least one friend in the organization, then they aren’t connected. So there is, there is that it’s so frustrating that we have all the information we need to support these ideas that relationships are important. Important that we need to be respected, and yet, businesses do not incorporate it into their way of being. It’s not incorporated into the way that they they do business with their employees. Maybe they’re all saying the customer is always first, and that brings its own problems. The customer is always first in retail. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. So I think if we put it in, I mean, in very simple terms, is to say, do you, do you have a friend in this organization? And then amplify it, this would be somebody that you would be comfortable being yourself, that you could share if something was wrong or that they would notice. They would notice that you are in need of help if you don’t have somebody like that in the organization, you should, you might think about looking for another job, because it’s actually unhealthy. Yes,

Nippin  21:10

and Rob uses the word critical friend, which I think is even more powerful. But do you have a critical friend? Or can I be your critical friend? I think that’s a very powerful way to close it.

Rosa Carrillo  21:25

Well it is, and I think critical friend is is a step above having a friend. Because, I mean having there’s nothing wrong with having an uncritical friend. Nothing wrong is that. But if you want to, you know, move up in your accomplishments and your learning, then you have to move into a critical friend, yes, but our moms, for example, you already bring them up, mothers, you know, some mothers are more critical than others, and which ones make you happier? Yeah, we got to have at least one person that’s not critical. Yeah, yeah. I’m working on that. I’m working on that. I I am a very critical person, most of all with myself, but then I applied it to all my relationships, and till I realized that there’s such a thing as as being overly critical, and You have to move over into acceptance and also building on other people’s ideas. For example, what we’re doing now, I think, you know, I’m I’m not criticizing your ideas, I’m trying to build on them with a different kind of understanding, like, in my case, it’s the feminine understanding, and then you’re going to go, to go back and build on it with the masculine understanding. It’s a good balance.

Nippin  23:08

It is. And I think a lot of it, I mean, this whole idea of what you just said, hinges upon something very important subjectivity, which is that you are a unique life, and I am a unique life. There is no way our our the way we see or we perceive the world is ever going to be the same, no way. But at least we can learn to appreciate that we will have those differences. And it’s important to I mean, there’s no escape from those differences. In fact, it’s such a good thing that we are different. It would be a disaster if we were not, because then it we would be robots, then we would be artificially intelligent. But the real intelligence never works or moves towards perfection. It stays in the imperfect even that’s even a word in the fallibility. In the fallibility lies our unique, uniqueness. And I think going back to to the idea of friendship, Can friends really accept each other for their fallibility? Because one of the most powerful way to kill somebody’s being is to criticize their fallibility. UK, I used to play such good music when I was a kid, and the parents never accepted it. That was not important, and so I lost any ability to play Tabla. I used to be so good at it at an early age in life. But you see, the thing is that intelligence has such a narrow, narrow definition that if you’re not good at Academia, or you’re not academic enough, then you’re not you’re not acceptable as a good son. So. So we chase for things that that we we don’t have, and we never actually nurture things that we actually hold. But true friends realize that how important it is to nurture and to embrace this, this, this imperfect person, this fallible person. So it’s very, very important to have friends who can, who can embrace who you for who you are.

Rosa Carrillo  25:28

Yes, I think that might be a good when you’re doing a workshop. That might be a good exercise to remember a time when you did something that could have hurt or offended a friend and they forgave you, they accepted your fallibility, but could tap into that as a as a way to reconnect with why it’s so important to be that way for somebody else, right? You’re not going to be that way for everybody. No, I just want to be that way for your kids, for your family.

Nippin  26:09

I just wanted to bring this visual or this semiotic to this discussion, because, you know, this is a nice way to anchor or to finish off this podcast, that when you This is Ravana, by the way, the 10 headed demon in the Indian mythology. By the way, we don’t have the concept of devil or evil, and this is another aspect of friendship. So when, when you study Ramayana, the Indian epic, you study Ramayana, 360 degrees. So you try to understand this person from different angles, as a brother, as a father, as a sibling, as a son, as a devotee to Shiva, everything. So you’re not just latching on to his one behavior, which is he kidnapped the wife of the god. You try to appreciate this person from every angle. If you look at the Greek mythology, Athena always carries the owl with her. And the owl has the ability to twist 240 degrees, at least, if not more, which means that he can see the whole picture, or you can see close to the whole picture. And that’s wisdom, again, that when you meet a friend, a friend sees you more than just what you did in that moment, or what, what, what you what the problem that you landed in, whether you you you were involved in a theft or or a crime, or you screwed up and you were not able to to provide for your family, whatever, the friend sees you as a 360 degree as a whole being. And that’s why, that’s what friends do in an organizational life. They see you much more than what you did in that moment for which you are being put into trouble. And I think that wholeness is a wonderful metaphor. Ravana is a wonderful metaphor for that, or Athena and the owl that can be looked beyond a particular attribute of a person and see them as a whole person. And I think friends do that so well.

Rosa Carrillo  28:20

Yes, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful symbol that I love, Indian concept. I say it’s philosophy. I mean there, it’s so deep, and I don’t know, but I I’ve always thought of the Indian civilization as as being at least 5000 years old, and I think that they’ve learned something that was 5000 years that the rest of us in the world should pay attention to and listen And as just to tie this back around to the work that both you and I do, which is to try to develop let’s call them facilitators, or people that can go out into the world and become good listeners and help people develop solutions that are helpful to prevent accidents, rather than blame or guilt or any of the other associations. Anxiety produce more anxiety that we are talking about ideas that a practitioner could look into and examine in order to develop their own ability first be a good friend before you can expect someone else to be a good friend to you, and build those kinds of relationships to different levels in the organization.

Nippin  29:55

And you know, it’s interesting. You say that because a lot of people think that this is. An idealist view of the world. And I always say this one thing, let me tell you this one thing, that if you want to discern risk, if you want to understand risk, you can only understand risk by stepping into another person’s shoes in the way they see the world. And there is no way they will. They will give you the gift of their unconscious mind, which is the source of all decision making if they are threatened by you. The flaw, the fundamental flaw with most audits and investigations that it’s done in Rational mode, it’s done in a mode of defensiveness, and people often struggle that, why don’t people engage with us? Engagement come from the comes from the unconscious mind. And to engage with another person, you have to take the position of a friend, not an investigator, not an inspector. It’s very daunting. So as you are struggling to understand how that person made a decision, and you want to understand and improve risk management or decision making in your organization, it is so, so important. You’re not doing charity, you’re running a business. And if you know the captain of the ship of Costa Concordia is cruising at 0.5 nautical miles from the islands. He’s because it’s he receives a pressure, both from the company as well as from the customer services. There’s no way he’s going to tell you about all that until you develop this ability to become a friend. So you’re doing yourself a service by turning into that position and this 360 degree understanding of the whole person that people you know, we talk about normalization of deviance and understanding what is normal work, it is what is normal is not an agreed upon notion. What is normal to you is so different from what is normal to me and but when we write standard procedures, we don’t create space for that those differences. So people give you what you want to hear rather than what they actually believe in not even doing what they really believe in. And the funny thing is that they don’t even know that they believe in it. It’s so unconscious in them. And this Captain struggles to explain, after the accident, that why is the world making so much fuss about this thing? I’ve been doing it for so long, and that’s precisely the point that we struggle to understand another person’s normal, because we judge them through our eyes. If, before this accident, somebody would have gone on the ship and said, Okay, let’s have a conversation about, you know, there is all sort of customer expectations and expectations from the hotel staff and whatnot. And there is a procedure there. Don’t tell me you are just following that procedure all the time. Let’s have a conversation how you actually what, what you believe needs to be done in order to counter all these these things. And that’s when things start to come to surface. But we don’t have friends. We don’t have critical friends in auditing and investigations. We have controllers.

Rosa Carrillo  33:33

Controllers, yes,

Nippin  33:36

interrogators, investigators. Daunting words, you know, daunting words. And the thing is that Rosa just one more thing, and I write that in my book, just by calling it something else, does not change anything. Just by shifting the language, saying today we are going to do a learning review, does not change anything. Because people don’t care about the words. What they care is, what is the outcome of this investigation. What are your actions?

Rosa Carrillo  34:05

Yeah, I used to in my first article, I said you, if you paint the alligator pink, that doesn’t change the alligator. Yeah, and I think we’re coming upon a new word that’s going to cause even more concern than the word relationship based safety, which is friendship based safety, but it’s it’s more. It guttural, right? It’s more gets you down, deeper, deeper into the self than the word relationship. It’s friendship, and there’s probably other words we should explore as well that capture that idea. But I like it, and I’m so glad that you and I are friends.

Nippin  34:54

How would you like to summarize? Or do you do you want to say a few words before we close it? Not to summon. I said, but do you want to, you know, we started off with with the idea of unconscious and conscious and automaticity and mindfulness, and we came to this beautiful place that we call critical friendship. How would you like to to, to close this conversation?

Rosa Carrillo  35:20

I think I did before, when I was saying that we’re going to, it’s going to be an uphill battle, because we are not even accepting of the word relationship and safety. I mean, there’s still a big gap in recognizing the humanity, because we say human factors, we think we’re talking about people and we’re not. It’s humanity, it’s it’s being a friend, it’s being a critical friend. But you can’t get to the critical friend level until you’ve been a friend, right? Because you have to develop that trust in order to come in and and offer critical advice, or, you know, ways of improving. Yeah, I Yeah, so I look forward to I’ll start it out on LinkedIn, and I will tag you. Well, it was really your idea. So you should, you should do it about the friendship. That was your idea, yeah.

Nippin  36:29

Well, no, the conversation. And I think it will be great, because very soon we are going to meet our Brazilian friends in Rio de Janeiro. We are having a workshop there, so it interesting to see what they have to say about it. Yeah, looking forward to it. They’re going to love it. Yes, I had a conversation with Jill Val today, and they’re all buzzing about it. So, yeah, great.

Rosa Carrillo  36:51

Oh, yeah. Also, good,

Nippin  36:55

great. Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to seeing you again. And you’re looking good, by the way, looking beautiful as always.

Rosa Carrillo  37:04

Thank you. Thank you.

Nippin  37:10

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