Business Growth Architect Show

Ep #127: Rachel Rider Explains How Spirituality Can Make You a Better Boss

• Beate Chelette • Episode 127

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Feeling stressed at work? Join Rachel Rider as she shares how spirituality can help you feel calmer and make better choices. Tune in to learn how connecting with your inner self can transform your work life and boost your confidence!

In this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, we go deep into a transformative conversation with Rachel Rider, an Executive Leadership coach who works with C-Level executives who is known for her integration of spirituality and holistic practices into her coaching methods. 

Rachel’s approach challenges the conventional image of Executive Leadership coaching, which often focuses solely on performance metrics and strategic goals. Instead, she emphasizes the importance of a spiritual practice, noting that most successful people she knows have some form of spiritual grounding. This, she believes, is essential for tapping into deeper sources of wisdom and resilience.

Rachel's approach combines cognitive awareness, somatic experiencing, and shamanic principles. Rachel discusses the critical importance of understanding our basic survival mechanisms—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn—and how these deeply ingrained responses can either hinder or enhance our leadership abilities. 

Rachel shares her early start with Zen Buddhist practices at the age of 13, highlighting how meditation and mindfulness laid the foundation for her understanding of how the mind works. She emphasizes the value of meditation in noticing thought patterns and discerning which thoughts serve us and which do not.

Rachel integrates somatic experiences to address the nervous system's responses. She discusses how understanding where our nervous system is stuck due to past trauma can help you to resolve feeling paralyzed and unable to make decisions or push through anxiety faster.

Adding yet another layer to her Executive Leadership coaching approach, Rachel explores her training in shamanism and her work with crystals. She shares how her connection to the natural world and understanding of energy dynamics have profoundly influenced her coaching practice. Rachel's relationship with the natural world, guided by her training under a Taoist stone expert, underscores her belief in the palpable presence of energy and its impact on our interactions and decisions.

If you are curious about Rachel’s methods and looking to start your own journey, she offers practical advice on connecting with your authentic selves. She suggests a simple yet powerful exercise: reflecting on moments during the week when you felt most like themselves. 

Rachel Rider’s unique blend of cognitive, somatic, and spiritual practices offers a transformative path for leaders seeking more than just conventional success. Her insights and methodologies provide a holistic framework that integrates mind, body, and spirit, paving the way for a more balanced, authentic, and effective leadership style.

Resources Mentioned: Website | Instagram |

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Rachel Rider:

Hi. This is Rachel Rider, author of Who You Are is How You Lead. I am also the founder and CEO of Meta Works. And on my episode for the Business Growth Architect Show, I will discuss how the fundamental key to unlocking potential as a high powered executive is spirituality. Check out the full episode right now. And

BEATE CHELETTE:

hello, fabulous person. Beate Chelette, here I am the host of the Business Growth Architect Show, and I want to welcome you to today's episode where we discuss how to navigate strategy and spirituality to achieve time and financial freedom. Truly successful people have learned how to master both a clear intention and a strategy to execute that in a spiritual practice that will help them to stay in alignment and on purpose. Please enjoy the show and listen to what our guest today has to say about this very topic. Hello and welcome back. This your host, Beate chelette, today, I'm talking to Rachel Rider from Meta Works, and what we're going to talk about today is a really kind of critical conversation. When you are wanting to develop spirituality, passion and purpose. How do you do that, especially when you're in maybe a job where people don't expect you to be how would I put it? Rachel more on the fuzzy side. So Woo. Woo, exactly. Welcome to the show, Rachel,

Rachel Rider:

thank you. It's so good to be here.

BEATE CHELETTE:

So for somebody who doesn't know who you are or has never heard about you, what do you do? How do you help your clients? So

Rachel Rider:

I'm an executive coach. I work with high net worth clients, high profile clients. We the Meta Works is the company that I run. It's a small boutique and coaching firm, and we grew up in the world of tech coaching, tech executives and leaders, and really have been moving in this very natural direction of folks who are really hungry for what we have to offer, which is an alignment of mind, body and spirit and helping you unlock your stuckness, particularly for very successful, very high stakes, high profile clients.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Excellent. So would it be fair to say that people that come to you are not necessarily on the woo, woo side, because a lot of people in tech, there's a lot of IQ. There is a lot of intelligence, there's a lot of logic, coding systems, processes. So tell us a little bit sort of what happens when you're in this hard charging world of tech where you know things have to make sense. They either are or they aren't.

Rachel Rider:

It's interesting, because my clients don't, wouldn't I, none of them would identify as Woo, and they have a searching heart, and I say that because they wouldn't work with me or the coach who works for me otherwise. But there may not be language around that yet. So usually the thing the opener is desperation. Now I say that in a very interesting context, because most of my clients are incredibly successful. They don't come to me to make more money. Most of my clients are very well known. They're very well respected. They come to me because someone's having a panic attack, or someone is completely immobilized by making a very high stakes decision. And so my clients get confused. They're like, Wait, everything is fine on the outside. Why is it not working on the inside? That's why they come to me. And so that's kind of the yearning desperation, the yearning heart of I have it all and something's not working. And I do believe that that's the way in to connecting to that which is bigger than you. I

BEATE CHELETTE:

like that definition. So it's not necessarily a rock bottom, but what you just described is almost like there's a disconnect. There is I have this persona over here, and then there's a disconnect to how I feel inside, to the persona I feel I feel inside,

Rachel Rider:

you nailed it. You're good, yeah,

BEATE CHELETTE:

thank you. Well, I mean, I always say there's, it's a perception question, because there is on the outside, the perception other people have of you supersedes how you how you see yourself, because that is the persona you are successfully portraying and but what happens to me as a person, to my mental, emotional well being, if I have a disconnect between how I feel about myself and how the rest of the world sees me, what goes on,

Rachel Rider:

I think that's exactly you've described. The issue of when a client comes to me, I'm having a panic attack, or I'm immobilized by a decision or everything feels so big, I'm not looking at my calendar for the next day, and I'm not waking up for my meetings with very important people. You've just described what's happening, that the way I feel inside is not the way my life looks outside. I'll tell you a very common connective thread that I see with a lot of my clients, which is who. Am I without Exactly? Who am I without the title? Who am I without the well knownness? Who am I without the respect or the money? And so the reason why that's such an important question is because that's the pull like, oh, there's a lot of money on the line. So I can't make a decision because I'm I don't know who I like, What if I lose the money? Who am I? And so that so that Who am I without becomes so big that it immobilizes behavior, and so that's the piece that's so important in the work that I do, and why I deeply believe that spirituality is what's going to get you through as a highly successful person, because it allows you to let go of the stakes. It allows you to surrender into the bigness, so that you can make a clear decision, so that you can feel whole with your big, beautiful life and not feel victim of it.

BEATE CHELETTE:

What would you say to somebody who who is now starting to be a little bit confused, because they are, they're very strategic. And they say, are you saying spirituality is a strategy?

Rachel Rider:

I mean, I hate to commoditize it, but I think that the most successful and happy people in their success are deeply spiritual. And I want to be very clear. I mean spirituality in whatever way that means to you. In the end, I'm saying you feel connected to something bigger than you, even if it's all of the other human beings on this planet, even if it's to the tree outside your door, or God or your ancestors, or you know, or Mother Earth. The reason why this is so important is because it allows you to feel less alone. So let's get concrete. I have a CEO who came to me debilitating panic attacks, getting in the way with his Ford, trusting him with his leaders, feeling like he was okay, and had it together. And so he came to me, and we did a lot of work on his nervous system and connecting to the divine. The first time I did a meditation with him around connecting to the divine. At the end of the 30 minutes, he looked at me and he said, that's the first time I didn't feel alone in this. The power of that meant that he felt like he had his back. He was held by something bigger. Everything he was holding was held with him so that he didn't feel crippling anxiety around it and could actually move forward with a clear decision. And through this work, his panic attacks stopped. That's the power of this work. So

BEATE CHELETTE:

for me, right, as I think there is a common assumption that spirituality is woo, woo. I believe that we need to make a distinction between religion, organized religion, God, a spiritual mindset. I like calling it one source. And I like calling it one source because it's a non confrontational term. I have friends that, unless you believe in Jesus, they think you need to, you know, repent and spend some time in penance. But I believe that the connection to something that's outside of yourself ultimately helps us to stay in a better mental state. Because, as you just said, this feeling of alone, that it's all on me, that I have no power over anything, is the key component for, I think, a lot of this depression and the mental health crisis that we're seeing. But at the same time, there is the issue of control. So if I'm the CEO of a company of a high level position, I'm an entrepreneur. I run the company. I am trusted to make decisions for other people. Other people's lives depend on my ability to make decisions. That means that I need to be in control. But spirituality, a lot of times, is about letting go of control and surrendering to a larger, a larger thing as we're diving in sort of the more spiritual aspect of the show. What would be a way for you to explain that? Because I literally just got a LinkedIn comment on one of my interviews yesterday, and somebody says, well, if, if I need to be in control, how do I like how does this even work? How do I connect with the spirituality? So, how do people tap into that? How do we even start? How do we explain it? Yeah,

Rachel Rider:

that's such a wonderful question. So the first thing unfortunately that I would challenge for those saying I need to be in control is, unfortunately you are not.

BEATE CHELETTE:

You heard it on this podcast first.

Rachel Rider:

That's actually one of the things that really makes someone crazy who is in a position of power and influence and running organizations, the more you think you're going to be in control, when you squeeze tighter or manage closer, the crazier you will become, the more exhausted, immobilized and burnt out when you were at the top of an organization. I guarantee I know it. I'm speaking to even you the most control freaks that you have been in moments of flow, where you have seen your organization running and buzzing and humming without you doing anything but sit. In there and connecting with your people, that experience, that moment, even if it was a micro millisecond moment for you, is what we're talking about when we talk about spirituality. It's that. It's that experience of being in flow and trust. And I want to be very clear, this does not mean you abandon you, wash your hands up. This means that you stand in the places that you are best and then trust the rest, allow for flow. It's funny as I'm talking, I actually feel like spirituality is the more sophisticated level of leadership. 101, leadership, 101, we talk about delegation, empowering your people, Fostering Connections spirituality is taking that and trusting that on such a deep level that when you are in alignment and you are doing what is best for you, everything else

BEATE CHELETTE:

flow so powerful. You and I, we had we will had spoken about this when we spoke for the first time, is and I keep talking about it because was such a profound experience for me when I did my Ayahuasca journey. And I feel that was a rough, rough, rough ride for me, going in and dealing with things that, as an adult, a logical adult, I can't explain away. I said, Well, you know, other other people had a tough childhood. Other people have been abused. I wasn't the only person that was hit. I mean, these things are logically to explain. Does the trauma come up in your work and does the trauma show up in how people lead

Rachel Rider:

without question? I mean, you bring yourself to work. I wrote a book called Who you are is how you lead. And I say work is where your demons go, to hide. They love to nestle themselves and work. Because when you're in therapy, you're looking at your relationships, your mother, your daughter, whatever your demons get to just nestle into your work without being attended to. And so one of the pieces that I love about really examining how you show off as a leader is it kind of approaches that trauma from a different lens. And in my work, we're not going to talk about your trauma, and it still will be addressed it may arise. So I had a client once where this was years ago, and I was coaching all different kinds of leaders, and he would start to dissociate when his boss walked close to him, and we were like, what's going on? And he would become disorganized and like, he was a really high profile client companies hire me to work with their people. And he was like, I don't understand. And we had been working, and there was this moment where he was like, Oh my God, my boss reminds me of my alcoholic father. This was a woman, but she had the essence of his father. And so we I told him, Okay, I want you to take the relationship you had with your alcoholic father, to your therapist. You guys work on that. What we're going to do is work on the way your nervous system responds to your boss. We're going to help educate your nervous system about how she's not your alcoholic father. We're going to help you orient to who she is and what you're picking up on. Because your nervous system is smart, she is aggressive, she is intrusive, she is demeaning publicly. So how do we help you navigate that as your adult self, without thinking you're dealing with your father? And so that's really the beautiful piece I think about this kind of coaching is, without fail, those traumas arise and translate into the workplace, and we can work on them from a different angle. So powerful.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Thank you. We'll dive a little bit more about how to manage your neurological response in just a moment. Right after this message. Rachel, I feel like we're going we're going really deep here today in the podcast and talking about some of these things. So to just recap what we talked about, I do believe that our trauma shows up how we lead and as a trauma traumatized person, I will be a traumatized wife, traumatized husband, traumatized partner, traumatized parent, and I'm going to be a traumatized leader, because what I did not get, I am going to try to create, to get from those around Me, because if I've never felt that way, I need to get it from somewhere else, because I can't feel this for myself. So you had said that the nervous system has responses. So give me some ideas, or give our audience a couple of examples. How do I recognize if my nervous system is freaking out?

Rachel Rider:

So this may be very well known to most folks, if you're in this area, I've been trained in somatic experiencing, which is regulation of the nervous system after trauma. And it talks about how the nervous system has four responses, fight, flight, freeze or fawn. They all sound what they are like. You either fight, you are incredibly reactive and defensive. Someone says something to you, you go for the throat. Flight. You run away, whether you can physically run away or dissociate, you are gone freeze. You're like a deer in headlights. You cannot speak, you cannot respond, you cannot move and fawn. You're overly complimentary. You over accommodate anything you want. You've got it and your sense of self disappears. These are all survival mechanisms of the nervous system. And so one way to start to understand which one is your favorite, minus fight and flight. I love to dissociate and I love to attack. I'm really good at

BEATE CHELETTE:

both. I'm an excellent runner. I think I run further and farther than most. Talk to me about some of the modalities that

Rachel Rider:

Yes, congratulations. That's a great survival mechanism. So I would say, first start to pay attention to what's your fave what's your favorite way to respond. The other thing that I would say, that I write about in my book, and also just we do so much work with this when we work with our people, is there are such nuggets of wisdom in whatever response you have, it's often one of your superpowers, and the piece of the work is understanding how that survival mechanism isn't in charge of you, but you can be in charge of it. It becomes the red flag, Hey, Rachel, check watch out for this person. They are not safe for you instead of so that when it's the warnings like you get to say, You know what, that's true, but in this moment, I need to talk to them. I need to show up for this meeting, or I'm walking down a dark alley in this moment, that is true, and I gotta get out of here, but I am the decision maker. That's when we are in charge of our survival mechanism. When we are not in charge, the survival mechanism is reacting immediately. That's when we walk out of me and we're like, why? How did that happen? What just why did I do that? That's when the survival mechanism is in charge. So cultivating awareness around this is very powerful, because you're using. I know that you like crystals, that you've done when you become in charge of your survival mechanism, it come becomes a superpower. a tremendous amount of different courses and continuous education. What are you finding works? I mean, and just for full disclaimer that what we talk about in the show is obviously not all that there is, but I am talking Rachel for her personal opinion on what she has seen work in her in her experience. So go ahead, would you mind sharing some things of what can I do? It'd be my pleasure. So I've been on a path for a very long time. When I was 13 and became a Zen Buddhist practitioner, very serious. I've been doing week long silent meditation retreats for a very long time. I would say that was my beginning work with the mind. So if you are a very cognitive person, and that starting with the mind appeals to you, I would say, start with meditation. Start noticing your thought patterns. Start paying attention to which thoughts do you want to believe which thoughts are unhelpful. I think meditation can be a very powerful tool when you add to that somatic experiencing, which is understanding the nervous system, where is my nervous system stuck responding from a place of trauma? Where am I in flow when the mind and the body work together, that becomes a very powerful tool, and so in the nervous system, first step, let's identify your favorite survival mechanism, fight, flight, freeze or fawn. It's a great first step. So I would say that's mind and body. I'm also in training for the past year. I was well three past year, seriously in shamanism. That's my connection to the spiritual. That's where I've really cultivated and understanding relationship to crystals. I've been trained by a Taoist stone expert. I'm not sure what the terminology is, but he 81st generation, so in his family, he's been an 81st generation Taoist priest who trains in crystals, pairing the crystals to the shamanic work, which, in my experience, is the relationship I have with the natural world, has been incredibly powerful for me, because it has been able to articulate what I've always known, which is, even if you can't see energy, you can feel it. How do you work with that? How do you work with the energy between you and me, if it's sticky or funky or if it's wonderful, how do we stay in flow. And so to me, that's the spirit piece, that's the surrender piece, that's the trust, that's the not check out. You stay present in your life, but then you trust when you show up. It works. And so I think dependent on what resonates when you hear that list, I'd say, start there. That's a beautiful place.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah. That brings us up so much. I think if we, if we take it home for the beehive, I will say that you recognizing that when you walk in a room and you talk to someone say, oh my gosh, I feel like I've known you forever. I feel like you're my sister from a different mother, or brother from a different mother, that you have this automatic connection. You can't really explain it. That's energy when you walk out of the door and you have a weird feeling. That's energy when you are concerned that something's going to happen today, and you kind of don't know, and then you know, your nephew calls you, says he's in a car accident. That's energy and to open. To happen, to step into it, the more you do, the more the connection receptors are open, and the more this energy, this energy kind of flows. And what fascinates me about you, Rachel, is because when we, when we think executive leadership coach, right? I just want to make sure that we really, really covered this on the show today, when I think about executive leadership coach, I think about, forgive my bias here, high heels, the tight skirt, like in billions, the TV show, that clarity and little bit confrontational, better performance type of thing. Executives come to you because they're looking for something that they cannot find somewhere else. Once you start sort of going into that, and I don't even know how to formulate this question, but what is it that makes them have that recognition that they're ready for this? Because they're probably not looking for this. They're probably looking for the other right?

Rachel Rider:

Yes desperation. Usually. People come to me with impossible situations. It feels impossible. They've tried a lot of other things, or they don't even know how to articulate what's going on. You know that CEO with the panic attacks came to me not with that because I'm thinking about where I want to take the company, and I just want to make sure I show up well, and I feel like something stuck. And then in our first session, he was like, Oh yeah, I'm having panic attacks, and I think it's getting in the way of everything. So even cognitively, his heart was saying, I desperately need help. He couldn't even articulate it exactly. Usually, folks come to me. I had a client come to me. It was a multi hundreds of millions of dollar contract that was at his door, and he could not sign the paperwork, but he couldn't say no. He was completely immobilized. And he was like, I do not understand what's happening. It's like, it's good money, but I have to relocate my family like he and he was like, I make huge decisions every day. I don't know what's happening. And I'll tell you, we barely talked about the pros and cons of the decision. We did meditations to help him to connect to spirit. We pulled thing energies out of his body, like his mother's voice and his dead father, you know, like this was deep work, and he came to me because it felt a possible situation, and he couldn't think his way through it. So I think you nailed it. People don't come saying, Oh, hey, I want to connect with

BEATE CHELETTE:

Let's go, woo, woo. And so they come to you for something else, and then somehow, that's where the path ends

Rachel Rider:

up. Yes, that's the magic that we offer. Yeah.

BEATE CHELETTE:

I mean, I love this magic, and I think it's an important conversation to have. I agree with you. I don't think there's any. There are very few successful people that don't have a spiritual practice. Most people that I speak to that are successful have a spiritual practice, and they believe in something other than themselves. I always think about Princess Leia quote, and somewhere around that, you know when she says to Han Solo, if money's all you want, money shall be all you get. But I do believe we are in a different moment in time where I see this less and less and less. I mean, yes, if you go to online marketing, you still see the Ferraris and the guys with a stack of cash, but it feels really trite and and unimportant. I think people are looking for for something deeper. What would you say? I mean, you said meditation understanding your four responses. Is there anything else that somebody who's listened to your interview now. Can take away and say, Okay, I have a feeling that there might be something I need to look into, but I don't even know where to start.

Rachel Rider:

You know I would even begin with checking in with yourself and asking yourself, When was the moment this week you felt most like you not having to think about what that means, but just feeling in your body, when was a moment this week, you felt most like you. That experience is usually connected to your internal compass, the place that is your authentic self. And when you tap into that, you can make decisions, think from this deeper place. And so I would ask yourself that question, where do I want to begin to that place that has felt most like you? That's

BEATE CHELETTE:

a wonderful way to start. This has been just so powerful, and I feel very deep conversation about stuff most people don't really want to talk about, or they want to talk about it, but they don't know how to talk about it, because those two things seemingly don't go together, but we know that they do. So Rachel, for somebody who's listened to this and says, I need to speak to her, maybe she can help me with what I'm going through. Where would we want them to go

Rachel Rider:

Find us@metaworks.io that's m, e, t, t, a, W, O, R, K. S.io you can also find me on LinkedIn or Instagram@meta.works, excellent.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here. And you know this, we we've gone Woo, woo, and loved every minute of it. Agreed,

Rachel Rider:

it was such a pleasure.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Excellent. All right, and that is it for us, for today. Thank you so much for listening to or watching these, this episode of the business growth architect show, we appreciate you. We appreciate you your time that you hear, that you're listening to this, whatever you want is out there. It's possible for you, as you see in this and other conversations, spirituality and strategy do go hand in hand and until next time and GOODBYE. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, give us a five star review, a comment and share this episode with one more person so that you can help us help more people, thank you again until next time. Goodbye. You.

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