We’re living through a moment of profound acceleration. AI is reshaping work as we know it. Information comes at us from every direction. Companies are moving faster than ever, and somewhere in all of this, we’ve lost something essential: the ability to pause, to listen to ourselves, to access our own wisdom.
In my recent conversation with Dr. Emma Seppälä, Yale School of Management faculty, Science Director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism, and author of Sovereign, we explored what it means to reclaim mastery over our inner worlds in a time when the outer world feels increasingly chaotic.
What struck me most about Emma’s work is how it cuts through the noise. This isn’t about productivity hacks or doing more with less. It’s about something deeper: how do we stay grounded, creative, and fully human when everything around us is designed to sweep us away?
The Whirlwind We’re Living In
Emma describes our current moment beautifully:
“It’s really easy to be swept away in the current of everything that’s coming at us through the media, through our lives. Lives are accelerating constantly more and more every year. We get so caught up in concepts, ideas, belief systems, behaviors that keep us trapped and keep us unhappy.”
This resonates deeply with my own work. In Hardwired for Happiness, I place self-awareness at the very heart of transformation, at the very center of the Sunflower Model of nine practices. Without awareness, nothing else becomes possible. Most of our suffering is psychological, created by our own projections and stories. And today, with AI and constant stimulation, the noise has never been louder.
Emma’s insight is that we need an extreme act to counterbalance this extreme time: meditation, silence, going inward. Without these practices, we’re being whiplashed by tidal waves of information and demands.
AI and the Loss of Agency
We spent significant time discussing AI. Companies are using workforce reductions as a badge of efficiency, “we eliminated 30% of our people”, while the middle layer of management feels increasingly threatened and powerless.
But here’s what many are missing: the leaders and companies that will thrive aren’t the ones working people hardest. They’re the ones helping people become most creative and innovative. And as Emma points out, we are most creative when our brain is in alpha wave mode, when we’re relaxed, not stressed.
“So many companies talk about innovation, creativity being so important. And it’s like, how are you treating people that are stressed out? What we know from the data is that we are most creative when our brain is in alpha wave mode, which means when our brain is relaxed.”
Ask anyone when they get their best ideas: in the shower, walking the dog, outside in nature. Not sweating with stress at their computer. If you get laid off, you’ll need that creative, relaxed state to think of your next steps.
And in a world where we can no longer trust what we see, where deepfakes are indistinguishable from reality, tuning into our own knowing and intuition becomes even more critical. We can’t just rely on external validation anymore. We need to develop our internal compass.
The Science of Intuition
When we have complex decisions to make, Emma points out that we actually make better decisions when we follow our gut feeling rather than overthinking it. Neuroscience backs this up.
Emma shared a powerful example: Lynn Tilton, owner of the largest woman-owned business in America. After a successful career on Wall Street, Lynn had a vision, an intuitive insight, that led her to buy companies left for dead and save 800,000 jobs while building a billion-dollar enterprise. That success started with trusting an intuitive insight, not a rational calculation.
The military has been studying intuition for decades because so many soldiers have saved lives by following gut feelings. If you can develop intuition, you have an edge. And we’re all wired for it, but we’ve been trained out of it.
As Emma explains:
“We’re wired for intuition. It’s something that has been programmed out of us because schooling is only focused on the rational, the logical, hardly on creativity, which is a form of intuition. Creativity is intuition.”
Leading Through Relationships, Not Transactions
When I asked Emma about practical moves leaders can make, her answer was simple. First, you have to become self-aware. If you’re constantly reactive, you don’t actually know how you’re responding to people. That’s why meditation isn’t optional for leaders, it’s foundational.
Then it’s straightforward: help people feel seen, heard, valued, and appreciated. That’s it. That’s what everybody wants.
When we think about a mentor who has been there for you, at no benefit to themselves, if they called you right now, would you drop everything to help them? Absolutely. That’s real loyalty. No money bought that. They saw you, cared for you, wanted the best for you.
“That is something no money can buy. And that is something you never forget in another person. That loyalty stays forever. And somewhere along the lines, it’s been just completely lost in the modern workplace.”
This connects directly to research I did at McKinsey. Being valued by your boss and by your company showed up as the top two things employees wanted, way above salary. The feeling of mattering, of being seen. That’s what drives performance.
The Emotional Maturity Gap
Here’s an uncomfortable truth Emma shared: no matter how educated you are or how high up in an organization, most people have as much knowledge about what to do with their negative emotions as a five-year-old. None.
We’ve learned countless skills, but nobody taught us what to do when we’re angry, anxious, fearful, or sad. So we suppress it. We overwork. We scroll. We drink. We stay busy. And we walk around carrying all this unprocessed emotion that comes out in ways that damage our relationships and our teams.
Research shows that when you suppress emotions, it negatively impacts your relationships and, if you’re a leader, your team’s ability to flourish. But when you can actually feel your emotions, really feel them, you can move through them.
This takes me back to my consulting days, walking into cross-functional meetings. The room would be full of resentment and distrust. Procurement thought marketing only cared about creating work for manufacturing. Marketing thought procurement was cheap. Manufacturing thought marketing was lazy. Nobody would have the real dialogue because we didn’t name what was actually present: you don’t even trust each other.
We’d lose 20-30% of our meeting time because people couldn’t acknowledge and work with the emotions in the room. That’s wasted productivity. That’s lost innovation.
The Breathing Practice That Changes Everything
Emma’s research on the SKY Breath Meditation (Sudarshan Kriya) is some of the most compelling evidence I’ve seen for a specific practice. After 9/11, she was dealing with significant anxiety. Mindfulness wasn’t helping, it just made her super aware that she was anxious. But this breathing practice transformed her life.
Years later, she ran studies with veterans suffering from PTSD. After just one week of the SKY Breath Meditation, most of them no longer qualified as having post-traumatic stress. One year later, the effects held. The practice had literally reprogrammed their nervous systems.
Emma explained:
“It’s not just addressing the mind, you’re also going into the physiology. We live in a time when we need things to work well and work fast. This methodology through breathing reprograms your nervous system, sets it back to where it should be.”
Emma’s research validates what many of us have experienced: these ancient practices actually work, and the science is catching up to explain why.
Five Non-Negotiable Practices
When I asked Emma about her personal practices, how she manages teaching at Yale, her research, writing, and family while staying grounded, her answer was beautifully simple:
- Morning Practice: One hour of yoga and SKY Breath meditation. Non-negotiable. That’s where you gain everything you need to do everything else faster and better.
- Evening Meditation: A further half hour. Consistent bookends to the day.
- Nature: Go outside every single day. We live in little boxes with no light and wonder why we’re down. Even in a city, just walk outside.
- Gratitude: Remember perspective. One trip to a developing country is enough to show you how fortunate we are to have clean water and safe roads. We basically live in heaven, yet it’s easy to fall into negative thought spirals.
- Service: Do community service or simply have the intention to leave every person feeling better after meeting you than before.
The Path Forward
As I reflect on this conversation with Emma, I keep coming back to one central truth: in a world moving at breakneck speed, filled with AI, constant stimulation, and uncertainty, the most powerful act is to master our inner world.
Not through more productivity hacks. Not through grinding harder. But through stillness. Through feeling your emotions instead of suppressing them. Through trusting your intuition. Through building real relationships where people feel genuinely seen and valued.
Our REWIRE Program, here at Happiness Squad, offers us a roadmap for reclaiming mastery over our inner worlds so we can thrive in the outer world. It’s about becoming agents of flourishing rather than victims of circumstance.
The companies that will succeed in the age of AI aren’t the ones that work their people hardest. They’re the ones that help their people become most human, creative, intuitive, emotionally intelligent, and deeply connected.
If you’ve ever felt swept away by life’s whirlwind, I invite you to pause, breathe, and listen to the wisdom within. Your resilience, your creativity, and your capacity for joy depend on it.
Listen to my full conversation with Emma on the Flourishing Edge podcast to hear more groundbreaking research and practical wisdom for thriving in today’s world.
Learn more about Emma Seppälä on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Emma Seppälä below, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.
