EvolutionFM Transcript: THE FUTURE OF WORK IS CONSCIOUS (Scott Britton & Tracy Lawrence)

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In this conversation, Tracy Lawrence interviews Scott Britton about the launch of Conscious Talent, a company focused on aligning executive hiring with values such as emotional intelligence and conscious leadership. They discuss the integration of inner work into business practices, the challenges of hiring for consciousness, and the balance between performance and personal development. Scott shares insights on how his own journey of consciousness has shaped his approach to building a business that serves not just financial goals but also personal evolution.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Tracy Lawrence (00:02.937)

Okay, great. Scott, I have been threatening to interview you for months. So thank you for finally making this happen.

Scott Britton (00:13.07)

I call that a welcome threat, Tracy. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, I just love talking to you. So this was a real treat to get the invitation.

Tracy Lawrence (00:15.869)

you

Tracy Lawrence (00:27.805)

Totally. This will be so fun. I couldn't help myself when I saw you announce the launch of Conscious Talent with you and your amazing wife, Saharo. And it really, I think what struck me is it really deeply aligns with what I was building at my startup at Choose. And I wish I had a service like this because we focus so much on employees bringing their whole selves to work.

on good communication on people having inner scaffolding and doing inner work in order to show up as great leaders. So I want to dive into that. But for those of you who do not yet know Scott, he is a seasoned entrepreneur, he's a podcast host, he's a deep practitioner of inner work. He's built and sold multiple companies. And now he's weaving the worlds of after selling kind of

being immersed in his personal growth in his new company called Conscious Talent. And they are the first talent partner that's focused on aligning executive hiring with values like emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and conscious leadership. So I'm very excited to dig into this. And I'm wondering if maybe you could start off, like, tell me a little about the origin story. Like, what was the spark for Conscious Talent and the pain point that you're solving?

Scott Britton (01:54.606)

Yeah, well, thanks for the epic intro. Life is really funny, right? It's like a lot of things don't make sense until hindsight. And when my consciousness journey started, I had this just like kind of knowing that part of the reason that I was here was to bridge the gap between spirituality and business.

Tracy Lawrence (02:00.678)

You

Tracy Lawrence (02:07.165)

Mm.

Tracy Lawrence (02:22.076)

Mm.

Scott Britton (02:24.684)

You know, I was fortunate enough to have a teacher, like my kind of consciousness journey became at the forefront of my life while I was running my company, really for like the last three or four years. And so I was forced to learn how to hold both. And for a while, this was quite confusing how to, you know,

Tracy Lawrence (02:48.765)

you

Scott Britton (02:49.986)

be kind of like I'm an all in type of person. So like I'm going all in on my spiritual growth and consciousness and like also like at the company and like figure those out. eventually I started to realize that the consciousness work was directly supporting my capacity for all types of leadership and new ways of doing things and creativity and simultaneously

Tracy Lawrence (02:58.813)

Bye.

Tracy Lawrence (03:15.773)

Mm.

Scott Britton (03:18.89)

my business was showing me where my growth was. And so there was this like wonderful synergistic loop of like, work is helping me with my awareness, my awareness is helping me at work. And this was a totally different story than the archetype that I first thought that was required to take your consciousness seriously when I got started on my journey, which is like, okay, I guess I should go move to India or I should, you know, go

Tracy Lawrence (03:22.621)

you

Tracy Lawrence (03:31.805)

totally.

Scott Britton (03:48.674)

do an Upstate New York monastery or something like, and I just kind of really realized like, actually like the most fertile ground for me was to be doing business and to be treating it like a spiritual practice. And so I got really passionate about this idea and that kind of set the stage for Founder Satsang, which you're a part of, which is a community of entrepreneurs interested in.

Tracy Lawrence (04:02.193)

Mm. Yeah.

Tracy Lawrence (04:14.053)

Mm.

Scott Britton (04:17.396)

in their consciousness and inner work. This book that I've been writing called Conscious Accomplishment that will be out soon. That's really all about the exact topic that I just mentioned, kind of how to hold both. And what happened was is, and in that book, there's a discrete idea that I became really obsessed with, which is traditionally we've evaluated talent in a very mechanical way, which is, you know,

skills and experience. And it's like, if you literally go on to LinkedIn, it's literally skills and experience. It's like what you see, right? As like the digital architecture to present someone. And as I had my own experience of the consciousness impact, I started to think about how this notion of like awareness, emotional intelligence, capacity for regulation, we'll just put it in this broad bucket of consciousness is, or,

Tracy Lawrence (04:53.595)

Yeah, right.

Tracy Lawrence (04:58.365)

Mm.

Scott Britton (05:15.736)

human development is like this emerging vector that determines who you wanna do stuff with, right? Like it's like who you wanna build companies with, who you wanna hire and also like what those people are capable of because they're not bringing all of their trauma and all of their insecurities into the workplace. And so I started to get really excited about that idea. It was like kind of a.

Tracy Lawrence (05:18.887)

Mm.

Tracy Lawrence (05:23.505)

Right.

Scott Britton (05:43.15)

planned in the back of my head. It's just an emergent graph that is going to be really important for how we kind of decide who we work with. It's not digitally online. And it's largely hard to find. And simultaneously, or shortly after, my wife Zaharo started to get searches for her recruiting firm, Right Hand Talent, which focused originally on the chief of staff and now they do ops and product and tech and a bunch of other things. But

Tracy Lawrence (05:52.912)

Right.

Scott Britton (06:11.714)

there's actually Calvin at the space between who was the first person that came to her and said, Hey, I want you to find I want you to find me a chief of staff, but they kind of need to be on an inner work journey. Like that's kind of core core to our DNA. That's who we are. It's like a huge part of how we show up. And like, if you're not on board, then like, it's going to be not a fit. And, and then that happened a couple of times with different people. And simultaneously,

Tracy Lawrence (06:15.207)

Thank

Tracy Lawrence (06:23.242)

Love this.

Scott Britton (06:41.006)

I was meeting a lot of executives just by putting a lot of content out line and founder sat saying of people being like, you know, I have to kind of keep my spiritual journey. And my inner work is like my little secret at work. Like I can't really fully authentically show up and a lot of people just don't get it. And I totally totally it's compartmentalized and, and

Tracy Lawrence (06:58.019)

okay.

Tracy Lawrence (07:04.847)

It's very disintegrated.

Scott Britton (07:10.656)

I felt that where it was like, you know, I was doing weird stuff, like going on all kinds of retreats and like running to Kundalini Yoga after work and like listen to a crazy podcast about the universe and nature of reality. And like, it just wasn't cool to bring that to my own company, which was like this ridiculous thing because a lot of people just, you know, that just wasn't where they were at. That wasn't what they were interested in. And

Tracy Lawrence (07:21.693)

you

Tracy Lawrence (07:25.693)

you

Tracy Lawrence (07:30.781)

Right.

Scott Britton (07:40.0)

And so like, I felt that pain to myself. And eventually, it just kind of dawned on us that was like, Hey, I think that there's a business here. And like, there's a real service that needs to be provided, which is, you know, traditionally, I think people have thought about conscious leadership as, okay, like, we're going to bring in some, like, practitioner

workshop leader, we're going to do some workshops, we're going to buy everybody the Conscious Leadership book, and don't get me wrong, these are all great things to do. But my experience of that is like, if people aren't genuinely interested and excited about that, it's just not going to go very far. And so what if instead of trying to change people, which is really freaking hard, you just found people that were kind of already on that path? What would that open up for you? What would that allow?

Tracy Lawrence (08:24.893)

Thank

Scott Britton (08:36.03)

And what would happen if we were able to basically help people that were on this path find the others that were building things? What types of new companies could be created? What types of new ways of working could be unlocked? And so, you know, that's the harebrained crazy idea, right? With Conscious Talent is, is like, can we be that connector between...

Tracy Lawrence (08:57.01)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (09:02.254)

between companies where the inner work and consciousness journey is kind of core to the DNA of the founder or the founding team or CEO and the people that they bring on board. And so today that's really what we do. personally, I think this is gonna be a really cool experiment. think there isn't a lot of, the reality is there isn't a lot of...

Tracy Lawrence (09:23.741)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (09:30.22)

And I'm really excited to learn more about Chuzy, like, you're the way that you thought about your company, I would say is, is, is not the norm, right? There isn't like a long storied history of people trying to integrate inner work and authenticity and vulnerability and, and all of these things into business building. It's kind of always been this separate little thing. And, I'm excited about what we will learn as we help support these companies in this kind of new.

Tracy Lawrence (09:32.711)

Thank you.

Tracy Lawrence (09:38.135)

Mmm, yeah.

Scott Britton (09:59.212)

way of doing things that is people centric and hopefully help do our part in redefining how business can look and feel like.

Tracy Lawrence (10:12.497)

so cute as you talk about a new way of doing business and I see your little one running across the screen. It's a new world. Like we can't hide ourselves anymore, especially in the era of remote work.

Scott Britton (10:18.716)

yeah.

It's...

Scott Britton (10:27.682)

Totally, and I would add that I think the era of remote work, like, this stuff is actually more important than ever.

Tracy Lawrence (10:35.067)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (10:36.342)

you know.

Tracy Lawrence (10:39.325)

I mean, I feel like the old model with conscious leadership was you as the leader, maybe it's the CEO, maybe it's the co-founder, you're inundated with consciousness. You go on that path and then you come back and you bring it top down to your organization. And that's kind of how the old model would roll out. But what you're actually saying is instead of doing it that way, which you're right, is a lot harder because consciousness is in a rollout and it's not top down.

How about we connect and we make it a collective effort where you gather people that have already opened the door to their own inner work and you just say, look, let's collect together and let's make it more of a circle than a top down.

Scott Britton (11:21.656)

That's right, and I think that the reality is there will always need to be top-down leadership for setting, putting the compass of the company and the way, the culture and all those things. I just think that it becomes so much more amplified if you have people that are growing in the same direction that are amplifying that as well. And I think it's the difference between having

Tracy Lawrence (11:43.814)

Mmm.

Scott Britton (11:49.856)

it be like a nice cool thing that you do at the company retreat to just like it's in the DNA because the DNA is more than one person.

Tracy Lawrence (11:56.657)

Yeah, right, right. So, you know, I think about my own inner work journey and how do you vet people and executives for being conscious? You know, how do you, is it about the, are you looking through the number of retreats that they've been on? You know, looked at their therapy and make sure that they've had their own coaching. How do you figure that out?

Scott Britton (12:19.862)

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I would start off by saying we're definitely not like the arbiter of someone's level of development. I like to think of us as more of just like an intermediary. And so amongst the companies that we've done so far, amongst the companies we've worked with so far, everybody has a different criteria of and definition of like what a commitment to inner work looks like.

Tracy Lawrence (12:29.744)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (12:49.826)

For some people, it's understanding a core concept. Like we're doing a search right now where it's like, really need people to just understand resonance. And it's like, okay, cool. like, that's, cause that's kind of part of what they're building in another company that we're working with. It's like, I really want people that are just always looking inward first. And so like, these are different.

totally different things, but kind of in this broader container of like, there's an interest and an understanding. And we try to partner with the companies to understand like, cool, well, like how would we learn this, right? Another company we're working with is a very large psychedelics company. And for them, their candidates need to have a relationship with altered states of consciousness.

And so like, that's a question that we ask, like, what is your relationship with altered states of consciousness? And ultimately, you know, I think.

Tracy Lawrence (13:47.035)

Most recruiters would not ask that question.

Scott Britton (13:50.186)

They can't and they don't. And I would also say a lot of companies don't feel comfortable asking these questions or like putting it on their thing. And so it's, kind of like this funny little business where we can kind of go there and like by planting our flag in this way. you know, I think for me, what I would share is everyone is gonna be on like a different.

Tracy Lawrence (13:56.41)

No way.

Tracy Lawrence (14:06.109)

I love it.

Scott Britton (14:16.086)

level of development and level of immersion and level of maturity. But what what I actually like look for and advise is like, what is like general level of interest and commitment? Because and you've heard people talk about things like growth mindset or whatever. But for me, it's like, how can you ask questions that that suss out whether someone's life reflects that?

Tracy Lawrence (14:31.185)

Hmm.

Scott Britton (14:43.318)

And so we have a couple of very simple questions on our network. We have this talent network you can join if you want to work at this type of company. And the three questions are like, what is your relationship to inner work? Like how does it show up in your life? Another one is what's something that happened to name experience in the past year where your inner work played like a pivotal role in how you respond to the situation?

And then how does inner work show up in your leadership style? And they seem like basic questions, but like you'll actually get like really, really insightful information, right? Like you will, somebody will be like, what's your relationship to inner work? It's like, I'm a big journaler and I'm not trying to shit on journaling, but that's fine. That's fine. But it's a very different answer than someone that's like, I've been a

Tracy Lawrence (15:32.861)

Ha!

Scott Britton (15:40.878)

practicing like Mahamudra meditation every day for two hours for the past year. I use every situation as a way to see myself like, and you just see that, you you kind of see the signal there, right? And I think ultimately like, that's one data point that needs to be accounted for as a part of like a very, a according process and the interview process and starting to work together and things like that.

Tracy Lawrence (15:47.09)

Right.

Tracy Lawrence (15:54.513)

Yeah.

Tracy Lawrence (16:09.479)

Have you been surprised by how many people have, how many like executives have stated that they have a relationship to inner work? Is it a high percentage? Is it lower?

Scott Britton (16:18.52)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (16:22.176)

Yes, I think what I've been surprised is there's a lot of like, what we're doing is a polarizing concepts right now. And and some people don't get it. But then there's a lot of people that are like, Fuck yeah. And the people that are kind of have made that there's been a lot of people that have come forward that I had no idea that this was a part of their life. Like people like VPs of sales who are like reiki healers.

And I'm like, dude, you had this component of you, nobody knows, this is crazy. so, I don't think it's a incredibly high density, like if I had to put a guess on it, like maybe like 20%, 10 % of my network, I don't know, something like that. But the people that it is important for, they're so passionate about it.

and they're so committed. And I personally believe we're on the very, still in the early stages of a wave where this stuff just becomes, it just becomes woven into the fabric of our culture, much like working out or fitness or all these things are. We're just kind of earlier on that wave right now.

Tracy Lawrence (17:40.413)

obviously a huge fan girl of this, so I need to give voice to the other side. I noticed it chews when we told people you had to bring your whole self to work. And so we kind of made space for people to talk about their emotions. We would use a system of red, yellow, and green to kind of talk about how are you, how are you really. And we had to watch the other side of it where the manager knew that they weren't a therapist.

right, because we still had to drive performance. And it's kind of this, it was this fine line that we always had to, we always had to navigate. And so I'm curious for you, what are the risks or misconceptions of kind of bringing your inner work to your outer work?

Scott Britton (18:30.422)

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that there is a certain arc of this inner work journey that is very under discussed that really has a big fact is a big factor in performance. And so I think like, this is the art, this is this is what I've seen a pattern that I've seen. Someone starts doing some inner work, maybe therapy, meditation, they start to it starts to help them.

Like it starts to become a little bit more calm, they're more regulated. And then there's this like, as that kind of becomes a bigger thing, there's, I don't want to call it a dark night of a soul, but there's actually like often a prolonged period where like this stuff, like they get their ass kicked and like they're just like drowning in their work stuff. And

And then that could be a multi-year period for me that was at least two years. And I was worse at my job then because I had so much shit going on in my interior world that I was working through that I had not seen that I actually was not as good at my job because my attention was elsewhere and my system wasn't regulated. But then as I came out of that, I started to see a much bigger increase in creativity.

in intuition, in my capacity to like see multiple perspectives, like all kinds of very positive things for leadership and performance. And I now, you know, I'm a much better performer than I was before. And so I think the key is, is like, the risks are hiring someone who's like, not at the right stage of that cycle is that's a real thing.

Tracy Lawrence (20:20.762)

Mm.

Scott Britton (20:25.382)

And you know, I also think a risk is is over indexing on it, where you just lose sight of performance. And the company becomes a I don't know, just like a emotional, like place to hang out. And I I I love and I love the idea of like businesses actually being like spiritual dojos. But if you take that

Tracy Lawrence (20:35.206)

Mm-hmm.

Tracy Lawrence (20:44.657)

Yeah.

Tracy Lawrence (20:51.069)

Thank you.

Scott Britton (20:54.006)

If you take that approach, it doesn't mean that you sacrifice performance. And it doesn't mean that you take your eye off the ball. It just means that you integrate this added component. And I think it requires a leader who has the skill and ability to hold both simultaneously to pull that off. I think this is where it's, know, honestly, like leaders kind of have to get honest with themselves, like where they're at in their journey.

Tracy Lawrence (20:58.994)

Right.

Tracy Lawrence (21:22.493)

Mmm. Yeah, we used to talk about we started off as a love company and love culture where it was very much about bring your whole self to work and caring about other people and then we saw that bite us in the ass because we were almost too much family and too much love and So we we modified that we evolved it to be love and excellence the yen and the yang Where you couldn't drive excellence?

from people who didn't know that you cared about them. We felt you had to know that there was genuine care and expression of that. But in a work context, to truly express love, you had to hold people to high standards. And it was this kind of interweaving that we found to be, we found a nice balance with it. Because a love, know, an inner work company still fires people. At least my love culture did.

Scott Britton (22:19.0)

That's right.

Tracy Lawrence (22:21.435)

because ultimately we were a company, but we didn't want to do it in a way such that people didn't know that, yeah, we care. We care about you deeply as humans.

Scott Britton (22:31.768)

That's awesome and yeah, think like, you know, what comes up for me is like, the universe loves us and yet it kicks our ass sometimes and that tough love is actually benevolent and it's helping us in the long run. And I think it's a big macrocosm of this stuff and ultimately like, you know, if you love everybody at your company,

Tracy Lawrence (22:51.005)

Right.

Tracy Lawrence (22:54.961)

Hmm.

Scott Britton (23:00.46)

it has, you want it to do well, right? And so you can't just be a nice guy and hurt everybody else. Like that's not love either. And so I think there's, I think there's caring and compassionate and kind ways to simultaneously drive performance and make people feel the love.

Tracy Lawrence (23:19.975)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's such a fine balance, but I found that if we were too soft, then people, you know, these are people joining a startup. They've made their decisions. Usually they're very qualified to join corporate tech companies where they can be making way more, but they've decided they want to be in a faster, higher performance culture. And so if we were too soft, they were going, wait, why did I join a startup? If we're all going to be here singing Kumbaya.

Scott Britton (23:48.654)

Hmm.

Tracy Lawrence (23:51.013)

So they're also kind of looking for the right amount of challenge. And there's always this balance of how do you offer the right amount of challenge and safety? Enough safety. We're not going to guarantee 100 % safety at work because again, if you don't perform, then we're going to have to let you go. But enough safety such that you can challenge us and you can still grow. There's always the balance.

Scott Britton (24:18.124)

Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's such a fine line. You know, and it's an art form of leadership, think, for sure, to strike that.

Tracy Lawrence (24:24.497)

Yeah, totally.

Tracy Lawrence (24:30.727)

So for founders and leaders who are listening to this, who are thinking about hiring more for personal development and inner work, what advice would you give them about how to screen for that?

Scott Britton (24:45.247)

Yeah, I mean, I think you gotta get clear on first, how do you want that to show up in your company? Because it's kind of like, are you familiar with the Who hiring method? It's a really cool book. Basically the idea is like,

determine the attributes that are important for someone to be successful at the job, whether it's hard skills or soft skills, and then determine how you would test for them. And so, I think that applies here because again, everybody's gonna have a different version of what...

Tracy Lawrence (25:13.169)

Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Scott Britton (25:24.652)

What about inner work actually do you care about? Do you want a more resilient team? Do you want people that are more empathetic? Do you want people that are just crazy, intuitive, creative, that are visionary? What are you looking to get out of this? And I'll give you an example. One of the things that's important for me is just this look inward first concept. I believe most people's upset and frustrations and all these things is just like,

Tracy Lawrence (25:49.341)

you

Scott Britton (25:52.334)

an entry point into their own consciousness patterns that need to be like investigated. And so like I, I care a lot about that. And for me, like if that was something that I want to imbue in the fabric of our culture, I would test for that. And so I would be like, all right, like let's come up with some questions and interview questions that we could look at like.

Tracy Lawrence (26:00.381)

Right.

Scott Britton (26:20.398)

when's the last time that you were really pissed at your boss? Like, what did you do? Or there's a big agreement, like what happened? Like, what did you do? And like, I'm looking at like, if they mentioned anything related to their own responsibility in that situation. And so, you know, I think that's kind of like how I would approach it.

Tracy Lawrence (26:24.647)

Mm-hmm.

Tracy Lawrence (26:36.507)

Nice.

Scott Britton (26:45.97)

And ultimately, you know, what I, we did this, here's, here's a funny anecdote. We did this, we originally had this application form to work at Conscious Talent and we created a scoring matrix of like, and ours wasn't to assess someone's level of development, it was to assess someone's commitment. And so we were trying to understand like how, what is your level of immersion? How important is this to you actually?

Tracy Lawrence (27:07.837)

Mm, okay.

Scott Britton (27:15.054)

We had all these like, we had to use a Likert scale of like one to five. Like how often, know, I take responsibility for my actions, like never, like all the time, right? And like, we had this compute score and like this whole fancy thing and everybody rated themselves really good. And then we had these like questions that were essentially kind of like the qualitative ones that asked for evidence and.

Tracy Lawrence (27:15.121)

Yeah.

Tracy Lawrence (27:23.685)

That's funny.

Tracy Lawrence (27:32.669)

Of course.

Scott Britton (27:43.726)

people's life, there was a huge spectrum of how much someone's life actually reflected that. And so, I think that's a really important thing to tune into as well, not just listen to what someone's saying, it's like, oh cool, I meditate every day, great. But how much does your life actually reflect whatever benefit you're getting from that? And how can we kinda try to suss that out? And so that was a...

a good learning and that we threw out that whole like, like self self reporting thing and yeah.

Tracy Lawrence (28:18.461)

That makes sense. We used to, yeah, for our hiring, you never ask someone, you know, are you reflective? You always ask them, when was the last time that you had to be reflective about a tough situation? Like you always ask for evidence and hear how they talk about it, because they can still fabricate it, but it's a lot harder to fabricate a story than a yes or a no.

Scott Britton (28:32.781)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (28:41.102)

Totally, 100%. And I think things like, if you've ever heard of top grading where it's like, you go through someone's like, kind of trajectory and you look for the patterns, like looking for those patterns is really key too.

Tracy Lawrence (28:52.125)

Yeah, yeah. So I've been noticing you writing on LinkedIn about kind of you building this time around and what's different for you and how you're doing it differently. And you and I have talked about our journey through not just inner work, but like chronic health issues, you know, and how that's shaping how we work. So how has your inner work path affected how you build conscious talent?

Scott Britton (29:18.232)

Hmm, great question. The first thing that comes up for me is like, you know, living to work versus working to live. I think, yeah, my hardcore venture backed startup was just like, all or nothing balls to the wall. And there was this feeling of I constantly sacrificed.

so many things in my life because then it was going to be all worth it. Right. And this idea that like when I get the exit or I get to the outcome or whatever, then like all the sacrifice be worth it. And, you know, this time around, I'm not doing that. Like, like this time around, I'm like, no, like my life is now. Like, like, like life is now and like

Tracy Lawrence (30:00.045)

Hehehehe

Tracy Lawrence (30:04.178)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (30:08.268)

you know, if that means like, I want to take an hour out of my the middle of my day to like, just hang out with my daughter and watch frozen, like, I'm gonna do it. You know, if I and and I think so there's like this like, reprioritization of just not only I wouldn't say just like things outside of work, but like how I'm feeling in the moment. And seeing that as a compass and a source of intelligence.

Tracy Lawrence (30:31.612)

Hmm.

Scott Britton (30:38.572)

And so just doing the things that I wanna do and like, you know, being okay if that isn't the best for the business. So that's a big one. I would also say, I think about it, I think about my company in a much more kind of emergent fashion. So, you know,

my last startup was a very intellectual a lot of the time where I was trying to get the answer by like figuring it out. And I think with the way I think about it now is much more like what is what is to come forth based on the signals I'm seeing around me with this company? You know, like, yeah, it's like I'm in this like fluid dance with life.

Tracy Lawrence (31:31.975)

Yeah, much more responsive, much more in flow.

Scott Britton (31:37.43)

where I'm just like, whoa, okay, this is kind of my way. What is that saying? okay. And it's just fun. You know, it's just like fun to read the tea leaves. And I also think it's more productive. And I'm a big fan of Taoism. And, you know, the idea is really simple. The core idea is like, you want to align yourself to like the way.

Tracy Lawrence (31:48.231)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Britton (32:07.502)

Like the Tao is the way, it's like the natural flow of the universe. if you align to that, both internally and externally, internally being like, how are you feeling in your body? Inspiration, ease, is it like friction? And externally being like, where is there friction or lack thereof? It's the difference of going with the river versus swimming against it. And so I actually think,

Tracy Lawrence (32:07.812)

Hmm.

Scott Britton (32:37.336)

you know, our success is probably a bigger factor of our capacity to align to that than like me, like making the most intelligent decisions all the time. Like I think there's actually a much higher order of force determining the outcomes of reality than my intellect and me figuring everything out.

Tracy Lawrence (32:46.599)

Mmm.

Tracy Lawrence (33:00.797)

One thing I've noticed as a theme as I coach founders is that founders often begin the journey of their company in deep connection with their desires, with that fire, with that passion. And then something trips them up along the way and they stop following the flow. They stop surfing the wave and they start fighting the ocean. And what usually happens is they lose connection.

Scott Britton (33:23.212)

Hmm

Tracy Lawrence (33:29.617)

with that other form of intelligence. That's not just rationality, but that's based off of their desires and their longing. They lose relationship with longing, and because they see it as a distraction, as emotional, irrational, and painful. But what I've started to realize in my own work is that my longing is a source of some of the deepest intelligence out there.

Scott Britton (33:37.166)

Hmm.

Tracy Lawrence (33:56.431)

And so if that is that, huh, I want to spend some time with my daughter, that's, there's an intelligence to it that maybe I can't rationalize, but if I can really pay attention to it, I'll, I'll figure out that I needed to watch frozen because there was actually some lesson in it that inspired me, you know, back at work. And so I've, I've learned to tune into that for myself and training founders to do that as hard because they often grew up.

not having their needs respected, usually due to some sort of trauma. And so they learn to just subjugate their needs to their teams, their clients, their investors. And that part of it is just like recalibrating, what do you want? What do you long for in this moment? Because that's smart.

Scott Britton (34:26.744)

Hmm. Yeah.

Scott Britton (34:41.848)

Totally. And I think there's also like a retraining of like following those impulses is safe. And, and like, I, know, it just, there was a really like, was your classic type A where it's like, I made a matrix of like high impact, high urgency, and like the high impact, high urgency things are like where I start my day and like, I stick to that until I finish, you know, I was that dude. And I, I realized like,

Tracy Lawrence (34:48.477)

Mm.

Scott Britton (35:11.774)

There actually, there's a much greater intelligence inside of us. And it is inspiration, it is love, it is longing. And our capacity to attune to that in the moment expands as we do the inner work. And this happens to me all the time where I just like, have something I was gonna do. And it's like, dude, I really wanna write this thing right now. And I've just had enough reps of just like dropping everything and going with that.

Tracy Lawrence (35:23.837)

you

Tracy Lawrence (35:35.314)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (35:41.784)

to see the evidence that like, not only is that safe, often produces much better outcomes to now, I like, I always prioritize that. You know, like it's not only safe, it's optimal. And I think that's only something that you will not only know, but embody through measured experimentation.

through actually giving yourself the permission to do that, seeing what happens, okay, doing it more, doing it bigger, doing it more often, and over time it just becomes embodied.

Tracy Lawrence (36:19.133)

Right, and I was just gonna talk about that embodied feeling. I think before I used to see the desire to do something that wasn't on my task list as a threat, and so it was almost uncomfortable. And now I can feel it often as sort of like, it's almost like a cone of air that moves up my chest and through my throat. And that's like, there's a levity and sort of a pointedness that tells me like, there's something more important here.

Scott Britton (36:45.774)

Mmm.

Tracy Lawrence (36:46.705)

And I've started to tune into sort of like somatic and embodied signals of like, I, okay, there's some, something intelligent. I don't know why I'm going to listen to it.

Scott Britton (36:56.758)

I love that. I love that. And it is, it is a, it's not like an overnight switch that, that, comes online, right? It's like this thing that you kind of have to like start to play with and cultivate and recognize and you get better and better at it over time.

Tracy Lawrence (37:11.229)

Totally, Okay, well as we start to wrap, is there anything that you want to share with the founders and the leaders who are listening or watching?

Scott Britton (37:23.564)

Yeah, I think. Well, man, there's so much.

Tracy Lawrence (37:30.205)

Hahaha

Scott Britton (37:32.686)

I really think the biggest thing I would, the biggest seed I would plant is what if your business was there to serve something more than just your bank account or your career? What if it was there to help serve your evolution of who and what you think you are? And for me, like,

Tracy Lawrence (37:49.147)

Mm.

Scott Britton (38:01.976)

That's the last thing I would say about the way I'm building it differently is like, yes, I want my business to be successful. Yes, I wanna have a nice house. Yes, I wanna send my daughter to like all the things. I wanna be successful. There's no doubt about it. But I know that this business first and foremost is here not to serve all of those things, it's here to serve my evolution and my consciousness.

Tracy Lawrence (38:15.259)

Mm-hmm

Tracy Lawrence (38:30.599)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Britton (38:31.086)

And through that process, actually, like that orientation, like really impacts how I show up day to day and what I choose to prioritize. And it also, I also think it impacts the success of the business because I think the evolutionary prerogative of the universe is our evolution of consciousness. And so, you know,

The more you align to that, the more you are aligning to life itself. And that to me is like, can't tell you, and I'm sure you've had the same exact experience, Tracy, where like, know, it's like friction after friction after friction in something you're doing in your life or your business. And then you finally get the message that you were supposed to see. You finally get that awareness of what life was trying to show you. And then the situation shifts. And then things start to come into place easily.

And so like, I just think there's a higher level game to play in business. When you start to orient it towards that, like what is this business trying to teach me and show me about myself and reality, then just like how to make it successful. And the irony is, and the paradox is, is when you treat it that way, you often achieve more success because you're aligning to life itself.

Tracy Lawrence (39:44.957)

Thank

Scott Britton (39:45.132)

And so that's the, I'll get off my soap box here, but like that's the idea that I'm so passionate about is people treating business as a spiritual practice and treating it as a core dojo for their consciousness. I challenge everyone to run an experiment of like, would it, just for a week, like what would it be like if you did that?

Tracy Lawrence (39:48.573)

allowed

Tracy Lawrence (39:55.069)

you

Scott Britton (40:14.828)

you know, what would change, what might happen? And ultimately, like, these are all things you have to learn for yourself to really believe them. And I wish you nothing but just joy and success on that journey.

Tracy Lawrence (40:28.978)

I just saw my co-founder at my wedding and he, we were talking about looking back on our journeys of founding a company together and he goes, you know, I think I'm a better husband because of it. I think I'm a better person. And I said, well, I think you spiritually reparented me. So I feel healed through that journey with you.

And I don't think we'd ever really said those things to each other before. And it was so funny to see that of all of this, you know, the exit, all of it, that actually what we keep was the personal development and the spiritual growth.

Scott Britton (41:08.802)

That's right. That's right. It's what we keep and you know, believe what you will. It's not only keep what in this lifetime, it might be what we keep across a broader continuum of many lifetimes, which to me, if you really want to play the long game, you're working on your consciousness. So that's.

Tracy Lawrence (41:24.701)

Yes.

Tracy Lawrence (41:29.031)

How can people find you? How can they find conscious talent?

Scott Britton (41:33.134)

So, ConsciousTalents.com, you can come to our site and learn about working with us. You also, you're an executive looking for greater alignment and a role at the type of companies that we work with, you can join our talent network. Me, LinkedIn's probably the best place. You can just search my name, Scott Britton. You also see links to some writing I do online, some podcasting, and you can find me. You can find me. I'm out there on the internet.

Tracy Lawrence (42:02.045)

Blessing Scott to you and Zaharo for doing this for the world. I can't wait to tell all my founders about it.

Scott Britton (42:12.77)

Thank you so much, Tracy. Blessings to you for helping us spread the word and for just being a beautiful person.

Tracy Lawrence (42:17.821)

Thank you.