Have you ever talked about something challenging in your life and said, “Well, that’s just the way things are.” If you have, you might be clinging to a story that no longer serves you, and Nick Egan, author of Shift, believes that the solution to your problem lies in changing your story.

Nick is an award-winning leader and educator who currently serves as head of an international baccalaureate world school in Northern California. He’s also a sought after speaker who uses his understanding of positive psychology in Buddhist philosophy to encourage organizational and personal growth. He’s taught meditation techniques for more than a decade and he’s led educational and cultural tour to places like Bhutan, Mongolia, Nepal and Tibet.

In this episode, Nick will teach you how to deconstruct your stories, so you can open paths to progress. He’ll also teach you how to reduce addiction to urgency, so you can increase your productivity and achieve a flow state that will transform your life. By the end of this conversation, you’ll know how to create a world of limitless possibility.

 

Get Nick’s new book Shift on Amazon.

Connect with Nick Egan.

 

Nick Egan: Like a lot of teenagers, I think that I was very interested in getting to the bottom of what I thought at the time were these big questions about the nature of life, meaning, and who we really are at our core.

I was really drawn to, especially, Asian spiritual traditions. So meditative traditions. I had done brief stents trying different kinds of meditation until I finally landed on Zen Buddhism.

I was very impressed with our local Zen center. There is a Hiroshi there—the abbot, kind of the leader of the congregation—and he was just this unbelievably amazing man that really exuded a sense of calm and insight and warmth that was just palpable.

You will run into people that seem to have one or another of those elements, but there was a way about him that really was impressive to me and still is.

Within Buddhism, there’s an idea of attaining enlightenment and leaving for a better place, not quite like heaven. So it’s like nirvana as a place. There are different constructions of nirvana, but that’s what I was thinking about at the time.

Counter to that, there’s this other idea of being of bodhisattva, which translates as like an enlightened hero, and somebody that could come back again and again, if you believe in reincarnation, to be of benefit to the world. And they commit to doing this sort of endlessly throughout infinite lifetimes, according to the philosophical traditions.

I was having a hard time understanding what would be the goal.

What’s the spiritual goal of Zen and Buddhist philosophy? Is it this kind of checking out escape to the blissful place, or is it staying here and being of service and helping? It was something that I’ve struggled with, pretty intensely, for a while. So I’ve been studying in the Zen Center for a couple years, and I think I was 18 when this kind of came to a head.

I was kind of having a private lunch with the Hiroshi and asked him that in similar terms. I said, “What is the goal? Is it nirvana or is it coming back again and again?” He looked at me, and it was like out of a book. He said, “This is nirvana,” in a very low voice resonant and it pierced me to the core.

I was literally speechless. I don’t think I said another word the entirety...