In a recent Fast Company article, Harvey Deutschendorf, an emotional intelligence expert stated that the strongest leaders find “meaning and purpose in bringing out the best in their employees.” By connecting with their team in supportive ways, leaders build trust, pave advancement opportunities, and garner loyalty.
Gopi Kallayil, a chief evangelist for brand marketing at Google, takes this sense of outward connection a step further, suggesting that the best leaders start by turning within before they connect with others. Kallayil’s new book, “The Internet to the Inner-net” gives insight into connecting with inner technologies or the “combination of our brain and our body and our breath, our consciousness” that supports us as work. As Kallayil describes in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, these inner technologies drive human innovation and creativity, contributing to breakthroughs in the business world.
Here he describes the most important lesson of his book:
In the midst of all of this, one thing that has not changed is that the most important technology every single person gets to use every single day is inside of us — starting with our brain, starting with our breathing. The quality of our life is determined by the quality of how that technology functions, how that inner technology is optimized. How to do that has been available to us human beings, developed over the years, a set of great wisdom traditions. My main message is: Use those practices, use those traditions that are available, to manage your inner technologies and move them into a state of peak performance. Move them into a state of optimized performance that then allows you to live a conscious life of joy and fulfillment and high accomplishment, as we take advantage of these outer technologies, the Internet.
Through a simple gratitude practice, meditation routine, or even by listening to calming music, leaders can balance the constant demand of 24/7 technology and give themselves the tools to optimize work performance.
Listen to Gopi Kallayil the podcast: