Sam Penny (00:00)
Most businesses don't break because of strategy. They break because of behavior, not the big one, not the obvious failures, but the small repeated ones. The conversations that don't happen, the standards that quietly slip, the accountability that gets blurred over time and eventually performance follows. My guest today works exactly in that layer. Jacqueline Orent is the founder of Cultural Catalyst and the creator of the Cultural Contribution Framework.
a model designed to help organizations move beyond values on a wall and into behaviors that actually drive performance. She works with leadership teams to answer a deceptively simple question. What does great actually look like in action? Because if you can't define it, you can't scale it. And if you can't scale it, you don't have a great business. Jacqueline, welcome to the show.
Jaclyn Orent (00:52)
Thanks so much for having me, Sam.
Sam Penny (00:55)
I'm really looking forward to this because I interviewed quite a few people on culture and it's quite often the warm fuzzy things, but really what we're gonna dive into today, a lot of is what makes something great. Now you've really worked deep inside organisations on culture and behaviour, but firstly, tell me exactly what is it that you do?
Jaclyn Orent (01:19)
Yeah, so I've got a couple different titles for me currently. I'm the CEO and co-founder of the Cultural Catalyst Network, and I'm also the frequency architect behind the Cultural Catalyst System, which is an integration over 60 years of science from three researchers, one of which is by the name of Richard Iboiazas, who spent his career studying change. How does change actually happen from the individual to the organization to the community?
It also includes Dr. Benjamin Hardy's scaling science and the foundation of the cultural catalyst system is actually consciousness and consciousness as being the ultimate lever for how we create systemic change. So what we're actually doing is we're integrating these three sciences in a way that's never done before to actually use business as a vehicle for cultural change.
Sam Penny (02:07)
man, I'm looking forward to this because we are clearly going well beyond just the fluffy stuff and diving right into some great science and psychology. Now, like I said just before, you've worked deep inside organisations and working on their culture and behaviour. When you walk into a business, how quickly can you tell if it's high performing?
Jaclyn Orent (02:27)
The fastest way can tell whether a business is high-performant is actually amongst meeting the founder. So whomever is in the primary decision-making, you can actually tell in your nervous system how someone is functioning right when you meet them. And it's actually something that you can meet in their body. And so one of the things that you have to be really careful of and something that I often have to tell myself with is just because someone shows that they're accomplished and have achieved what most would consider impossible, and then they have the money and the success behind it.
doesn't mean that they're functioning at a higher level. And so part of my work is actually calibrating the consciousness of leaders because consciousness can actually calibrate it into what's something called an attractor field. It's something that can actually be measured. This is Dr. David Hawkins' work that he created the scale of consciousness and brought scientific rigor to the study of consciousness, literally. And so when you actually look at the scale of consciousness, you can actually see how it affects productivity.
And the higher up in functioning you go on the scale of consciousness, you literally, you know, at the bottom parts of the scale, I'll just give you a quick overview, because you can tell and you can feel it when people, I'm sure you can feel it with people. And that's what I'm asking is, you know, there's the logical side of things, and then there's the feeling side of things, but where people's emotional home is, is their highest threshold of functioning.
Sam Penny (03:48)
So you mentioned ⁓ consciousness quite a few times then. Explain to me more when you're talking about a founder, explain to me more about consciousness and how it affects their performance.
Jaclyn Orent (04:01)
Yeah, so first of all, the person who is the founders is affecting the entire culture of an organization. And so when we talk about consciousness, let's actually take a look at what that means, okay? And let's look at what the scale of consciousness actually created, because a lot of people are gonna call this woo, and it has been brought scientific rigor to it by someone by the name of Dr. David Hawkins, who was a physician and a psychiatrist. ⁓ He actually helped co-publish a book on ⁓ or molecular something in particular with the Nobel Prize winner.
⁓ and he was even knighted by a specific organization over in Europe before he died. And he created something called the scale of consciousness. And the scale of consciousness was a logarithmic scale that goes from zero to a thousand. And what Hawkins found in his, like literally this is revolutionary research, is that 200 is the critical line between power and force. So what is power and what is force?
Power is associated with things that are life-giving. They are literally, you know, it's willingness, it's acceptance, it's joy, it's happiness. These are all different, literally calibrated levels of consciousness that literally affect one's productivity. And when you go under 200 on the scale of consciousness, that's associated with the shame and pride and guilt and anger and desire. And when you actually look at the productivity of these different levels of consciousness,
was so interesting and I've worked with lots of different founders and you can see it's like, just because they have many multiple eight figures involved in their business, their functioning is actually really low. And you can tell by the people that are around them and how they hold themselves particularly. So let's just start at like shame and guilt for example. If that is their emotional home, that's actually associated with inertia, lack of movement, stopping, stuck, right? And then right above that we have anger, we have desire, we have pride, AKA I'm right, right? ⁓
Terrible place to be as a place in a position of leadership because open-mindedness allows us, gives us the ability to grow and be able to flex given our conditions no matter what they are. And that's actually associated with hyperactivity. And in a culture that focuses on force and push, that's actually not what the science is telling us. The science is telling us that power is actually where most of the energy goes and that's when we get access to happiness and productivity. Peak performance without stress.
and miracles and synchronicities. So immediately amongst meeting a founder, you know where they're hanging out. If you have any level of emotional intelligence, for example, one of the founders that I work with, she's in peace. I look into her eyes and she's just calm as a whistle, right? That is how she's leading her organization, okay? That means she gets access to magic and miracles and synchronicities. And what I mean by that is literally the Jungian term of the impossible becomes possible.
things that happen that could be not predicted. It's outside of linear causality, okay? That's the realm that she's playing in. And for other people, I've worked with another founder who's received $65 million in funding and he's hanging out in righteousness. And he's judging people lot, right? And they have a high turnover on their team. And you also can tell by, who's the people that you spend time with that give you energy?
And who's this people that you spend time with that drain their energy? And that tells you everything about their team and how they're functioning and how they're maintaining their culture and actually even how they're producing results.
Sam Penny (07:28)
It's interesting, Jaclyn, apart from Built to Sell, Built to Buy podcasts, I've also got another podcast called Why Do Think You Could Do That? And the tagline for it is ⁓ ordinary people who do bat shit crazy stuff and say yes to the impossible. And these are the people who are those, they ski solo to the South Pole or they circumnavigate the planet only using human power. You know, those kinds of people. And...
In my eyes, and I think a lot of people's eyes, they are great, but they are just ordinary people who've defined ⁓ a vision and something that really excites them. And then they go through this whole process, but they always seem very calm and very methodical in the way that they go about it. So you mentioned your ⁓ CEO who's just complete bliss and just calm as hell.
I don't know if calm as hell is the right way to call it, but is that the kind of person? Calm as a river, there we go. There we go. What's the difference between calmness and righteousness then?
Jaclyn Orent (08:25)
Yes.
Call me the river.
Yeah, totally.
So the difference between calmness, calmness is literally a physical expression of one's nervous system capacity, right? And when we look at what's the difference between someone's achieving the impossible, literally, we can use the impossible goal framework and timeline based of Hardy scaling science, and who's not able to achieve a possible goal. One of the things that's absolutely necessary and essential and why most founders don't scale is because they're not able to expand their leadership capacity.
And what do I mean by leadership capacity? know, one of the doctors that I go to see, he often talks about people having ⁓ different levels of nervous system capacity. And he talks about how some people are operating in 3G and 4G and 5G, right? Most people are actually operating at 3G. They might even be below 3G, right? Their nervous system really has the capacity of a flip foam right now. But the problem is the amount of information that we're receiving and the decisions that need to make.
be made and the way that they make decisions, they actually don't have the full capacity of their nervous system available to them, which is gonna reduce the quality of their decisions, ⁓ prevent quality outcomes from occurring, and it definitely doesn't necessarily make extraordinary outcomes necessarily given, right? So when it comes to someone who's actually able to achieve the impossible, it really comes down to one's willingness to expand their capacity.
which includes expanding their perception of reality.
Sam Penny (10:06)
Well, I, as part of my framework, I've got the five forces of greatness and one of the forces, which is an identity fusion, it is what you become. So the mission that you're on. you know, everybody needs to have a vision in order to achieve and go after something great that people think that is impossible. But one of the things is this, what I call identity fusion, where that
I am going to be the person who's going to ski solo to the North Pole or I'm going to climb every mountain over 8,000 metres. I am that person. Is that what you see in the people that you're talking about?
Jaclyn Orent (10:41)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so one of the things that the science of change actually talks us, which is that body of research by Richard E. Boyatzis and how does change actually happen from the individual to the community to the organization. Richard Boyatzis is, this is his 60 years he created this body of work. He's a Case Western University researcher, graduated from Harvard University, and he is the pioneer of this body of work. And one of the things that he teaches in what he calls intentional change theory,
is the first step of the change process is something called connecting with your ideal vision or collective shared vision. So for in my world right now, we are part of the Cultural Catalyst Network. So our ideal identity is a cultural catalyst, right? And when someone owns an identity, like an athlete, right? Or I'm a professional athlete or I'm a mother, right? There's certain behaviors that we automatically take because of who we believe ourselves to be.
So when it comes to doing something new, when something impossible, it literally has to be part of what's called your ideal vision for yourself. It has to be part of who you want to become. And it has to be in alignment with what's drawing you forward. One of the key indicators of what's the difference between your ideal self and what's something called your ought self. Your ought self is literally, it's your cultural conditioning, it's your trauma, it's who you should be, it's what society expects of you, it's all that type of stuff. That actually drains you.
So when it comes to doing something impossible, it has to be something that pulls you. It has to create the intrinsic motivation in you so that you can overcome hell and high water. No matter what happens, that you keep picking yourself up and you keep going because that vision for yourself for the future that you want in yourself is so strong within your body that it literally creates something called PEA, which stands for a positive emotional attractor.
And what happens on a neurological and a physiological basis is that your body goes into rest and digest. Literally, your neurology goes into open-mindedness, collaboration. You're able to work together with people and you're able to go into creative problem solving. And that can only be accessed when you have a vision that actually lights you up, that turns you on.
Otherwise, if your vision is something that you think you should do, even if it's an impossible goal, it will literally drain you and it will halt your change efforts.
Sam Penny (13:13)
Well, I see it as the very first catalyst for any move towards an impossible goal. It's the defiant vision. It's a goal that really demands reinvention.
Jaclyn Orent (13:26)
Yes, exactly. Yep, it makes you redefine who you are and helps you simplify your focus so you can scale. That's literally what an impossible goal is and you're absolutely correct. And that's why it has to be so emotionally compelling ⁓ because the re-identification process and the filtering process, what happens when you redefine who you are and you set an impossible goal, it illuminates everything that's below your floor.
the 80%, maybe even the 100 % of what you're doing that is no longer in alignment with where it is that you wanna go. And if there's not an emotionally compelling reason for you to do it, you're not gonna do the hard work of letting go of all that stuff and allowing yourself the focus to be able to scale it. It literally just won't be sustainable.
Sam Penny (14:09)
So one of the things, Jacqueline, is that it's easy to come up with impossible goals, but then being able to have complete alignment in yourself to be able to move towards that impossible goal. How much of it is required prior to coming up with that defined vision of who you are as a person and your core values?
Jaclyn Orent (14:32)
Totally, so there's a couple different ways to look at this because this is really interesting as I've been learning and applying the science and getting to see it in real time. So the first thing is that the science of change when it actually comes to like how does intentional change happen, the vision has to happen first. You actually don't want to put an impossible goal on too early in the goal setting process because what it does is it basically puts blinders on you like a horse and can prevent you from seeing alternative pathways that could really serve you.
And I think that's a huge mistake for people that people make, that they try to put structure, performance goals, process-based goals, learning goals way too early in the process. They have to have a vision that lights them up, otherwise the goal itself is not gonna stick. So that's the first side of things. ⁓ The second side of things is, know, the...
Actually, one of the things that I find really interesting, and I actually got to meet Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who read the thesis that I applied to grad school with, and he was actually the one who was like, don't read any of my other books besides my science of scaling. So I've been in the depth of studying his work right now. ⁓ And one of the things that I've gotten to see, because I've gotten to work with an eight-figure founder on this, is again, even just 10Xing your current ⁓ business isn't enough ⁓ to be able to create a poll, especially for someone who's already successful. ⁓
Sam Penny (15:27)
Yeah
Jaclyn Orent (15:46)
because it creates a lot of discomfort in that change process. So one of the things that I've actually gotten to see working with high level of individuals is we actually got to pop their version of reality before setting a new goal. And so what I mean by that is actually for me, I use the mechanism of surrender as taught by Dr. David Hawkins and actually a technique called emotional freedom technique or clinically researched technique that's primarily used studied around PTSD, but I use those two things with precision.
to help founders and leaders let go of who they've been and actually connect to a higher experience of reality. So I literally get, we help unlock a completely new paradigm of reality that they don't have access to yet. ⁓ And that is actually where we set impossible goals from. We don't set impossible goals from our current paradigm reality. We let go of our current paradigm of reality. And you also have to understand like the limitations of the mind limit what you think is possible.
So when you think of greatness, greatness is something that often descends through you from a higher level of awareness. So to be able to have access to greatness, we literally have to let go and let God and see a greater version of ourself, a reality than we could ever have imagined ourself. And that is where we set an impossible goal from.
Sam Penny (16:58)
it love it now you mentioned cultural contribution what does that mean
Jaclyn Orent (17:04)
Yeah, so one of the things that we're doing with the Cultural Catalyst Network is we're literally applying the science and specifically for leaders who identify as cultural catalysts and want to create a new culture. And ⁓ quite frankly, we're in a time and place right now where, you know, even if you look at like Ray Dalio and his work on a changing world order, we're like literally in transition from where we are to where we've been. And what we know is Machiavelli, you know, back in 1555 was like, there is nothing more challenging.
than the creation of a new system. And that's because the existing system is literally meant to just defend itself. That's why, you know, when it comes to being a pioneer, there's that statement of like, if you're the pioneer, you're gonna have the ones with the needles, like literally the arrows in your back. So what we're actually doing with the Cultural Catalyst Network is we're actually creating the infrastructure for people who've already achieved what they've set out to achieve to actually create our new culture, which includes new social norms.
Sam Penny (17:46)
Yeah.
Jaclyn Orent (17:59)
new ways of being, new behavior, literally new systems, and then giving them the infrastructure that they need to actually make it sustainable and doable because ⁓ it's a calling to do the work that we're doing specifically in this arena. And we acknowledge that inherently in a lot of ways it is impossible, just due to the nature of the fact that the existing system is designed to literally prevent it from happening. However, for certain people, the impossible is not impossible.
if it's in alignment with who you want to become. It's just a matter of when and what's required necessarily to get there.
Sam Penny (18:33)
I see many founders and meet many founders who say that their culture sucks, that ⁓ it's been led down a path where they're just not happy with it. And clearly, ⁓ a culture that it has been able to create itself, that has changed, means that it can come back and it can change again for the better. When you help companies translate culture into behavior, what does that process actually look like?
Jaclyn Orent (18:55)
Yeah.
Yeah, so one of the things that people get a lot really wrong about changing behavior, right? That's like half, like 80 % of the coaching industry is all around changing behavior. And you could say the same thing for the therapeutic industry is just their goals are different. Coaching is goals oriented, therapy is problems oriented. ⁓ And most people are actually not addressing the root cause of what's actually causing the behavior, let alone the actual culture itself. And so that was actually the research that Dr. Hawkins did in his book, Power Versus Force.
the hidden determinants of human behavior. And before we actually go into the why of that, like let's call on Tony Robbins right now because Tony gets called in for athletes and world changers and people at the top of their field to change their momentum, right? Like we have a professional tennis player who's doing really well and then they go through a slump, right? And then they call Tony in and then he does what Tony does and then he switches them around, right? And that's the exact same thing. So when we actually look at what changes momentum, and in this case you're saying,
What does a founder do if they have a negative momentum loop right now? Well, what is it that causes it momentum? It's four things. So first of all, it starts with belief. Your belief creates your perception of what's possible, your potential. And your potential affects your action, and your action affects your results. And then whether it's a positive result or a negative result literally affects whether that's a positive momentum loop or a negative momentum loop. But we actually got to learn from Dr. David Hawkins and his work in Power versus Force is that all the belief systems that we have
We could be playing whack-a-mole with trying to address all the belief systems, but sometimes even just one emotion can hold thousands or even millions of belief systems. And by emotion, I could even say calibrated level of consciousness, okay? So when you actually change the consciousness of a founder, and I've seen this in my own work, it changes the entire culture of the organization. That's actually why I only work from the top down right now. Because you cannot change the whole system unless you change the founder.
And I'll give a specific example. I was working with a multi-business founder and he, literally his team was walking out on him and I got to do an intervention for him, to facilitate an intervention for him and I used what I talked about earlier which is the mechanism of surrender in addition to EFT and he went from, ultimately what was causing his team to walk out of him was literally a childhood experience. We had him let that go and then on the other side of it he literally was like seeing himself on stages and doing his life's work at a whole nother level.
And within about six months, the results of this were crazy, absolutely mind blowing, which actually part of the reason I applied to grad school with my thesis was because it made me realize that the way that we're developing leaders and the way that we're creating organizational change is actually outdated. And the way that we are focusing on linear causality, we're focusing on this causes that, and we're not looking at the greater context of what we know to be true with metaphysics, literally. And so when you actually address the consciousness field itself, which is causing
their belief systems, is causing their perception of reality, which is causing their actions and their results and whether it affects a positive momentum loop or negative momentum loop. What happens is you literally get to create full systemic change. And that's what I got to see with Rob, literally. Dropped 30 pounds, met the love of his life, expanded his leadership capacity. He could actually listen to his team. He's able to attract and retain better talent. All of his business and legal structures were in place. He was flourishing.
And that was not because I was addressing his behavior. That was because I was addressing his consciousness that was literally affecting his behavior.
Sam Penny (22:29)
My God, Jaclyn, six months and that's the outcome. I think we all need a Jaclyn in our life then.
Jaclyn Orent (22:34)
Yeah.
Sam Penny (22:37)
Now, we're talking about obviously consciousness, we're talking about behaviors. ⁓ When we're talking about the values of the person and also the company, they've always got things like accountability, you know, so those really just painful cultures where they've just gone, we need something that we need five of them. ⁓ yeah, let's just chuck accountability in there. But
Jaclyn Orent (22:49)
Mm.
Sam Penny (23:01)
when they are part of a company, you do still need to honor them. How do you make something like accountability, observable, repeatable, once you've worked on the consciousness of the founder?
Jaclyn Orent (23:15)
Yeah, so it's really interesting. One of the things that led me to do the work I was doing many years ago, I went through an immense awakening journey that had basically caused me to master myself. And then I've gotten to learn how to create ridiculous outcomes in other people and now systems. And so I actually got to bring my background in
sales of over 15 years and got to go and work in a sales leadership position and bring my mastery of consciousness elevation into the organization. ⁓ And the way that I trained my staff was different. ⁓ So we know, at least the people who are at the top of peak performance know that it's 80 % psychology and it's 20 % actual action. And yet most people don't actually know how to change behavior. And if they do, it's short term. I'm not talking.
short-term behavioral change. I'm actually talking long-term lasting change with the work that we're doing specifically. And one of the things that I noticed in my team, because my team was, they were leaders themselves, but they were actually supporting high-achieving women who were leaders, literally stepping into their next iteration. And I knew for them to be able to hold these leaders accountable, that they themselves needed to be in a leadership position. And one of the things that I heard in my sales call reviews for a long time,
was that the fact that they were not able to hold these women accountable. And what is it that really means hold accountable? Well, you know, one of the things that I got to realize is because they were not taking responsibility for their own emotions, okay? And our emotions is actually where our belief systems are. So what I started doing was I started holding accountable to their emotions using mechanism of surrender and EFT, and I started helping reprogram them. And by, literally would have them take accountability for their emotional stuff over and over and have them feel it over and over and over again.
so that they were used to doing hard things, okay? That they themselves became integrists because what happens when you take responsibility for something that is shame or guilt or fear or desire is it becomes whole. It literally becomes integrist, which is literally strength. Integrity is literally like solidity. And what ended up happening was that these women who were not able to hold these leaders accountable to what they actually needed to do that was best for themselves, they were actually able to hold these leaders accountable.
because they have done it themselves.
Sam Penny (25:26)
Love it.
Jaclyn Orent (25:26)
Accountability
is not a behavior. It starts in the emotional body where your belief systems are held. If you want to be the captain of your consciousness and actually be the leader of your team, your leadership is not some outward behavior. It starts with your inner leadership and your ability to manage and be able to ride the waves and be able to be solid no matter what it is that goes through you. And that is where we lead from.
Sam Penny (25:49)
Wow, Jacqueline, love it, love it. ⁓ We're talking about sort of behaviors and culture. A lot of the cultural initiatives that ⁓ go into an organization, they always fail to stick. ⁓ And you're only working with the founder. So how do you get the founder change their behavior to put in some cultural culture initiatives that are gonna stay around?
Jaclyn Orent (26:20)
Yeah, totally. So there's a couple of ways to answer this. First of all, the research on organizational psychology and what actually makes change initiatives work or not is actually really clear. So when a change initiative is focused on fixing something or being problems first, what that literally does in the body is it puts it into NEA, which is called the negative emotional attractor. It puts you into fight or flight and makes you focus on problems. And what it does is it depletes the nervous system. So of course, when a company has an initiative to try to fix a problem,
it's not gonna sustain itself because it's neurologically and physiologically impossible, okay? So that means the way that we actually need to create organizational change needs to shift. And that's why when we talk about connecting to one's ideal self is the first step of change process on an individual level. The second from an organizational level is actually coming into a collective shared vision as an organization. One of the challenges that I know I've experienced in my own leadership journey
is that the leadership team is like, here are your goals and objectives. They do it from top down. There's no emotional buy-in. They're like, this is what you have to do. And that's what literally it's what you should do. And again, that causes NEA. So what you actually need to do is create a vision, a vision for the future. That's why when they talk about leadership, one of the things that you need to be able to do is convey a vision that gets everybody on board. And then some leaders are really good at it. And some leaders are really bad at it. You ever been that way on a team where you're like, that just like totally like.
Sam Penny (27:37)
Yeah.
Jaclyn Orent (27:44)
that did not excite me, that actually made me go anxious and paranoid. then, Yeah, yeah, and you can feel that. And so in a team, when you're actually creating something that changes the whole thing, it's like, gotta get everybody on board with the dream. It can't just be one person. That's why there has to be a collective shared vision that aligns with people's values and purpose. And part of it is, when you're working with a team, they're not just there to help you hit your objectives.
Sam Penny (27:46)
Yeah, I don't feel confident.
Jaclyn Orent (28:13)
They're there to help their own objectives. You need to make sure that where they want to go and where you want to go are the same thing, right? That's where alignment comes in the picture. So there has to be a vision that's great enough that gets people off their seats, that gets them excited, that gets them invigorated as a whole, that's focused on a positive emotional attractor, the future that's PEA, so that everybody moves towards that as a whole.
Sam Penny (28:37)
So then your cultural contribution model, ⁓ how does that unlock an organisation as opposed to your traditional culture work?
Jaclyn Orent (28:47)
Yeah, so one of the things that we're doing with a little bit differently from the Cultural Catalyst Network is that we're actually using business as a vehicle for wider systemic change. Okay, so I'll give a specific example. ⁓ One of our founding members has built an eight-figure business that's been primarily focused on ⁓ solving and helping lawyers specifically. And her next iteration has really nothing to do with lawyers. However, it's an iteration.
There's a slight, she's all about financial liberation actually, because she went from bankrupt to a figure business and has learned a lot about how do you create regenerative financial systems, for example. Now imagine what happened if someone who's actually successfully learned how to create a regenerative system, regenerative financial system, actually started teaching that at scale.
that might actually get us out of this extractive financial system that we're in and actually do something that serves the whole, right? This is kind of where we need to go right now. And so what we're doing with the cultural catalyst network is we're actually bringing together leaders who's already achieved what they set out to achieve. They're already proven. But they want to actualize themselves as a cultural catalyst. And for them, achievement isn't the thing anymore. They've already done that. They've already proven it to themselves. But they want to contribute something that's greater than themselves. They want to leave an impact, right? When we look at the...
five, six basic needs, the human needs. have certainty, we have uncertainty, we have significance, we have human connection and love, and then we have growth, and then we have contribution. So contribution is actually one of our spiritual needs as a species. And so for people who've already achieved it, and they've got everything they need, and there's still the sense of like, if I'm not growing, I'm dying. What it is, is a contribution goal is literally, what is the impact that you wanna leave here? What is the contribution that you make?
And what is the legacy that you want to leave behind? Literally, we're looking at contribution as what is the culture that you're wanting to leave behind? And I'm not just talking organizational culture, although organizational culture can help you do that. I'm talking about what are the social norms? What are the structures? What are the behaviors? What are the ways of being that you want your kids and their kids and kids and their grandkids? What is the world that you want to see? That is what a contribution goal is. And you know, when we look at Hermosy and Tony Robbins interview,
And that's what we literally saw, you know, Tony have him set an impossible goal. That was a contribution-based goal. And it caused PEA and Alex. He got all lit up, right? He got all happy. He went from ⁓ analytical Alex to anabolic Alex. Like literally in real time, we got to see this. And that's because Tony connected his scaling goal to not more money, but he actually connected it to something that was emotionally resonant with him. And that's what I mean by contribution is that...
Sam Penny (31:08)
You
Jaclyn Orent (31:20)
We can contribute in a way that can make money and we can also make an impact and have purpose.
Sam Penny (31:27)
Fantastic. I used to have Tony Robbins as a client years and years and years ago. He is one of the most amazing people to be in a room with, he and his wife Sage. Now, we're talking, you're working with leaders and you're getting them to have this really defiant vision and basically something that's really going to redefine themselves, which takes a huge amount of work and it's a lot of effort.
Jaclyn Orent (31:48)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Penny (31:55)
You're having to constantly work at it every single day and having that path, which is really an engineered path to this impossible goal. You must see during this whole process leaders who are really unintentionally lowering their standards.
Jaclyn Orent (32:15)
Yes, definitely. Yeah.
Sam Penny (32:17)
So how do you stop them from going through that?
Jaclyn Orent (32:17)
Yeah,
one of the things, totally. So yeah, you were right on with lowering their standards, because Hardy says the biggest challenge of people actually not just scaling incrementally, but exponentially is actually ⁓ them being willing to be honest with themselves. And so one of the things that the science of change, i.e. intentional change theory talks about is one of the biggest detriments of how a change process actually happens is our blind spots, okay?
There's like 30 ways that our brain is literally constructed in a way to have blind spots. And so we actually need people around us to actually mirror our blind spots. But what the science actually tells us is we need to make sure we have people around us who have an ideal self in mind. If they don't know where we're going and are on board with that, they'll literally try to keep us from where we are, literally. And so one of the things that we're actually doing with the Cultural Catalyst Network is we're actually creating really small peer forums.
so that these leaders can actually come together and actually mirror each other's blind spots, literally. ⁓ Because that is actually the biggest challenge. There's nothing to be judging oneself about it. And if anyone judges themselves for having a blind spot, then you need to have compassion for humanity because this is how we are literally built. we've actually built into our system to make sure that the leaders can actually see their blind spots be ⁓ illuminated and also...
⁓ The other thing that we've built into the system is something called emotional freedom technique, i.e. EFT or tapping, which is literally based off Chinese medicine and even CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. And again, this is the research-backed technique. And when it comes to actually creating a new identity and creating a new pathway, right, engineering a focus, part of that is letting go of who we've been. And who we've been is literally in our body.
is affecting what we see in the world, it's affecting the actions we take and the results we get, just like we were talking about. And so we actually bring EFT in for the founders in the forums themselves. EFT is a social norm, so they're all tapping together. And they're actually in real time releasing from their nervous system, the belief systems, the conditioning, ⁓ that is actually preventing them from letting go of the things that they need to let go of. So it's not to the founders detriment. It's likely just a lack of skill in actually knowing how to rewires oneself.
and opening up that reality so that change is effortless and not effortful.
Sam Penny (34:37)
Now, obviously, the main purpose of this is to make an organization flourish, to make it better, to keep it on track, change culture, and eventually have success. success in an organization can come in a million different forms. Have you seen where success has actually made a company worse?
Jaclyn Orent (34:55)
Yeah.
I think people's limitations of success are actually what's making a company worse. So when we look about like what greatness is, right, we're going to come back to that because I love that word. ⁓ And for me, I embody greatness. It's been something that's been a value of mine. And I haven't, it didn't come about exactly through the normal way of, you know, I'm going to do this and therefore I'm great. It actually came from letting go of myself.
and giving it myself to a higher power over and over. And what ended up happening, Sam, was that I started getting access to a reality that I didn't have before, right? Like who I've become is not anyone that I ever could have imagined for myself, right? And so when we look at success and the limitations of success, the limitations of the success are literally limited by the logical and the objective and the reasonable mind.
And the greatest challenge that people have and the greatest gift, and I think this is the most exciting part about being human, is that we have access to magic. We have access to synchronicities. We have access to miracles, we do. But most of us aren't playing in a paradigm where we're actually accessing that and actually intentionally being able to use and be able to see a reality that we can't see. And so when it comes to living from greatness, it's really from, can you let life...
flow through what it's trying to flow through you, because it's way greater than anything you could ever imagine. And that is why success is limiting. And that's why illumination, right? And that's why I love Impossible Goals too, because it's often outside of who we think is possible right now. It makes us innovate and change and morph and do all that type of stuff. And things that, ⁓ it literally moves the species forward, these iterations of ourself that we don't even know are possible.
Yeah, is, you what I'm trying to speak to is that there is a greater place than one can imagine. And that is where greatness is found.
Sam Penny (36:50)
behaviors of your real high performers that you're working with, they can really get away with some pretty poor ⁓ behaviors that can damage a business long-term. What is it that you usually see in there?
Jaclyn Orent (37:04)
Well, it really, it depends on one's willingness. So when we actually look at the scale of consciousness, how does one go from ⁓ leading from force to power or from happy and productive to peak performance without stress, right? Well, part of it is actually one's willingness to take responsibility for their consciousness and the behavior that is coming as a result of what they are holding in the mind, literally. What they are holding in the mind is what is being caused in their organization.
And so the difference between someone who is going to flourish and to be able to, you know, take whatever life gives them and whatever life brings them is the people who are actually let life in, whether it be good, whether it be bad, whether it be painful, whether it be, you know, you know, the worst of the worst, whatever it is, there is wisdom and absolutely everything. And so I think the difference between people who make it or even make it really well, or the people who actually learn and do better.
like Ray Dalio's success loop really comes down to one principle and it's reflection, i.e. mindfulness. You have to reflect on where you've been to be more conscious of where you're going. And life will continue to show you what you don't see. If you're open-minded enough, you can actually learn from it and be able to live more consciously and lead more consciously.
Sam Penny (38:20)
Obviously, if we're trying to change the culture of an organization and create great change in a company, we can't just work with the leader because quite often the leader just isn't that person who is able to convey the rest of it to their leadership team. So when you work with the leadership team at Cultural Catalyst, where do you actually start?
Jaclyn Orent (38:27)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. So the first place that we start is with the founder themselves, because ultimately it comes down to the primary decision maker, even if with the other C levels, right? Especially with a founder, because if they own like majority of the business, even if one of the leaders like that is my responsibility and it comes down to like the livelihood of the business, it's still going to be the founder, right? So we have to start with the founder. Otherwise, we're not going to be able to create exponential change. And the second thing is that, you know, the science of change actually tells us is that fractal change, which again,
is from the individual to the dyad, to the team, to the organization, to the community, to the country, all the way up to global processes. Change on a fractal level actually occurs across all different parts of the system. So what we actually have is we have a partnership with someone named Sonia Sophia, who's spent the last decade creating the World Tapping Circle, which is an on-demand EFT platform, anywhere from five minutes to 90 minutes, to use that clinically researched technique to actually help, ⁓ whether it be their C-suite or even someone on their team.
actually use real-time nervous system work to actually let go of what it is that is actually preventing them from expanding their capacity and meeting the moment with mindfulness. So that's actually a scalable system. And for the people who actually come into the network, that's actually part of what they get is that, yes, the founder gets the forums with the other leaders to help see their blind spots and come into a collective shared vision. And they also get, you know, EFT on demand for their entire team. So we make sure that everybody is addressed because we know, especially when the founder is doing something impossible,
it's gonna move some stuff around. It's gonna cause some triggers. It's gonna cause some people to move and leave and stay and everything in between. And it doesn't have to be hard. We have the resources we need. We just need to create a culture. And that actually starts with the leader, right? My base leadership tenet is to lead by example. So if you're wanting a team that can actually move agilely and quickly and effectively and respond instead of react, first of all, you need to do that. You need to be the captain of your consciousness.
You need to have the inner leadership so that you don't react but you can respond. ⁓ And then of course having the tools that you need to be able to expand your capacity because when a leader does it themselves, that's actually what creates the culture norms. So if we have a leader who's tapping and doing all that stuff, she'll go into an organization and say, this stuff's amazing, you guys have to do it. And of course they do because we have access to it for them. So it's got to start from the top because the one holding the vision is the one who's literally driving the herd.
So, you and that also comes down to if a leader is not able to do that, then maybe they shouldn't be in a leadership position, right? There is an aspect of taking responsibility that is inherent to leadership and having one's own inner leadership of their own reality is just step one. And once you have that, then you're actually able to lead a team and lead by example and create the cultural norms that you wanna see.
Sam Penny (41:30)
All right, so then Jacqueline, what are the key components of a culture that really is going to perform at a high level consistently?
Jaclyn Orent (41:39)
Yeah, it's interesting when you look at the difference between like inertia hyperactivity happiness and productivity and peak performance without stress It's actually where people's emotional home is so we can grab that turn from Tony Robbins So if someone is hanging out in anger most the time Like their biggest leverage is actually going to be to let go of what's causing them to be and hold that negativity because that negativity is what's be affecting their behavior in the culture around them It's also affecting who they attract
and how they function and whether or not the team is coherent and effective. And when you have someone who's already happy, so that's when we're talking about using a tool like EFT, which is a nervous system technique, we need to be able to make sure that we're expanding our capacity. So for example, when I moved to Boulder last year, two years ago now, I was operating in 3G. I am now operating in 4G at the moment.
and I'm moving in the direction of operating in 5G. What does that mean? What was the difference between those cell phones? 3G, we had flip phones, not much functionality. I could call you and text you, okay? 4G, we started being able to move the internet. We were able to have apps. We were able to do all this stuff. 5G, can do, I don't even think there's, we can run AI and we can do, like there's so many things we can do. And so when we look at capacity, it's literally the difference between how much energy can actually move through the network. And the same thing is true for leaders. So we actually get to see the biggest domino
And that was the thesis that I went to go to grad school to create. And what Hawkins has already researched is that the biggest determinant on the effectiveness of a culture is actually the leader of themselves in the consciousness that they calibrate. And I'll give you a specific example of Winston Churchill versus Hitler. Or we have ⁓ Gandhi versus the British Empire. He used no force. Why is it that Gandhi was able to, you know,
take down the British Empire. It's not like he fought his way through it. That's the opposite of what he did. And so when you actually look at what did these people calibrate at, ⁓ Churchill was in the 500s on the scale, which is associated with love and sacrifice, okay? And then Gandhi was at peace, right? That's at like 600. That's like enlightenment on the scale, basically. And then Hitler was like shame. He was calibrated at shame on the scale, which is associated with death, right? Even though Hitler had the strongest army at the time,
He was actually able to be taken down because of the prevailing consciousness of these leaders. And so what I'm saying is, know, for an organization to actually, you know, become all they can be, it is not what most people think. It's in the nonlinear, invisible domain that is the hidden determinants of human behavior ⁓ that actually is what create the greatest change, which is why that experience with Rob, for example, you changed his consciousness and he had all these ridiculous outcomes. That wasn't a lot of work, Sam, for me.
That was like three hours of my time and then it's been that way ever since. I haven't had to do anything else. So when it comes to creating systemic change, it's how are we, what are we calibrated at? Where am I functioning on that scale? What is my emotional home? Because that will tell you directly how your leadership is. And yes, don't get me wrong, strategy is part of that. But we also know from Einstein that the problems we have are created from the level of consciousness that created them.
This is Einstein saying that. So the same thing goes for organizational change, that the leader is the one that is causing the whole ⁓ organization to have a calibrated level of consciousness, literally. And whether it's life-giving or life-taking, whether they create exponential results or incremental results, whether they're able to do the impossible or whether they're able to not even get off the tarmac, right? This is all based off of one's, literally, it's called an attractor field.
Just like, you know, we have a 3G, 4G, 5G, which makes that the biggest job of the leader is actually to elevate oneself, increase their level of functioning, make them expand their capacity so that they can expand and hold more and more and more and get to actually lead from a place of power and not from force.
Sam Penny (45:47)
How much of a company's culture then is simply the founder scaled?
Jaclyn Orent (45:51)
I believe that the founder is the crux, literally we can use the crux from the science of scaling. The founder is the crux about the entire thing. Because if you imagine if you went into an organization that was driven by purpose and had love as a foundation principle and they also had a positive bottom line, right? Or integrity as a principle, they're gonna attract people with integrity. It's really that simple, right? You want accountability, you become accountable and you'll attract accountable people. It's really that obvious. ⁓
And people say this too, even though they might not know what the science of consciousness literally is saying is like, why do some people have a good vibe and a not good vibe? Okay, how good is your vibe? That actually affects your productivity. That affects who you attract and who you retain. That affects your effectiveness. That affects your bottom line. So it literally comes down all of the founder. And don't get me wrong, you want people on your team who can match you.
But if you're not, if you want a peak performer, you yourself have to be a peak performer.
Sam Penny (46:52)
Are there any behaviors then in the leader that really quietly cap the performance of the business?
Jaclyn Orent (46:58)
I think the biggest challenge that leaders and all people have is denial. So accepting what they won't accept or not accepting what they won't accept, ⁓ resisting reality. And I actually think that's one of what I love about Ray Dalio's work. It's like, if you are willing to accept reality as it is, you have the ability to actualize yourself. If you do not, and you will not accept reality as it is, then you will not actualize yourself. That's literally as simple as it is. And so,
The skill and the practice of open-mindedness is the practice that we get to make there. As soon as we think we know or that we're right, we are literally in closed-mindedness and we're not able to listen to what it is that's being offered for us to be able to actually meet reality with what is needed.
Sam Penny (47:46)
Then what's the most difficult shift that leaders need to make as they grow?
Jaclyn Orent (47:52)
Probably not settling. I think we live in a culture, and I'm not just talking organizational culture, where most people don't actualize their potential. It's just not normal, right? For people to go after their dreams, it's more of like the, you're the outlier than the norm if you're the one who's actualizing your potential. And so I think the principle of actually making your floor your floor and not being willing to lower your standards for things.
⁓ And people being dishonest with themselves ⁓ is the denial. It's the, won't accept what I won't accept, right? If we're not able to accept reality as it is, we're not gonna be able to change it. We're gonna deny what's happening specifically. And so just like everyone already says, the biggest thing that's between you and the thing is you, as it turns out, and that's true. And so when it comes to actualizing an impossible goal or even creating a new culture on this planet, which in itself seems kind of impossible by some standards,
It has to be an emotionally compelling vision so that no matter what it is that we find in ourself, whether we like it or not, or we don't want to look at that, that we're still willing to do the work and go through the inherent challenges of ⁓ being a human being in an animal body and wanting to actualize our full potential.
Sam Penny (49:09)
Jacqueline, this really brings us back then to your core idea, which is contribution. Because this is really where your work separates from traditional culture thinking. Now, most businesses, always focus, as we all know, they all focus on performance metrics, but you focus on contribution. Why is that?
Jaclyn Orent (49:21)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so there's a time and a place for a performance metric. OK? I want to be really clear on that. And that's what I'm talking about ⁓ in regards to when you've done something before and you have the competence in being able to do something, that's a performance metric. But when it comes to doing the impossible, like in this case being a cultural catalyst,
you know, we're actually driven by vision. So when we're talking about contribution, what is the vision of one's contribution? You know, when we look at Tony's and Hormozi's thing, he was like, scaling businesses, cake, but making sure I feed a hundred thousand people who like, we couldn't get any food to, and I had to hire this seal team and they had to go in there with guns and drones to make sure all those people didn't go in there. And he was like, my fulfillment went through the roof, right? That was a contribution goal.
that was greater than Tony, that made him help redefine who he was, helped him find, and like, we didn't know the path, right? They kept trying all these different things, and that's the thing with Impossible Goals, ⁓ you know, there's an illuminated path that we might not see off the bat, and so when it comes to contribution, again, you know, we primarily work with leaders who've already achieved success, so for them, another performance metric isn't gonna light them up. We're talking to Tony, right? He's like, whatever, I can scale a business, I already know I can do that.
but like feeding 100,000 people and the people we kept feeding the food to kept dying, that's a contribution goal. And so it's something that pulls one forward. It's greater than themselves. And we get to, it gets to reframe the way that we use business, which is yes, we can serve our clients. Yes, we can make money. Yes, we can, you know, ideally make the world a better place for whatever it is that we're doing here. And so what is the higher purpose of the business?
And that's what contribution is. What is your higher purpose as a leader? What is your higher purpose as an organization? Why are you here? What is the contribution you are here to make that no one else is here to do? Why are you a cultural catalyst and what are you catalyzing?
Sam Penny (51:26)
So then what changes when people move from compliance to contribution?
Jaclyn Orent (51:32)
Well, it's expansive. Like even just look at the difference between those words, compliance again, when we put a performance-based goal, again, it creates NEA. It's a numbers-based thing. when you go to contribution, it's that when, I don't know if you're ever familiar, ⁓ I mean, when we speak of the word higher purpose in regards to contribution, one of the things that always comes to mind is like the 12 step program. And one of the steps is actually to devote one's will over to God, literally. And I didn't know what that meant the first time I read it, to be honest. ⁓
And what they're saying is you have to surrender yourself over to God, basically. And that's actually where one's power is. It's not in oneself. There's actually a much greater, there's a much greater, ⁓ much greater reality of power available to oneself. And that's where purpose is found. That's where contribution is found. What is it that is wanting to express through you? And I'm not saying something that you have to make yourself do. That's actually a lower level of consciousness and it's got its time and its place, but what is it that is like your calling?
That's the difference between a contribution goal and a compliance goal.
Sam Penny (52:34)
Jacqueline, before we wrap up, ultimately, what kind of organization does all of this create?
Jaclyn Orent (52:40)
Yeah, so what this actually does for ⁓ an organization is it creates a new paradigm of leadership and a new way of actually doing business. ⁓
John Mackey created conscious leadership and that was a great place to start. I'm talking after that right now. That's like baby steps compared to what we're talking about right now. And so again, just like we are in our country or in this world right now, we're at a place and a precipice between where we've been as a species and where we're going. And so the way we do business literally needs to change if we're going to survive as a species. We're not gonna be able to just keep extracting from each other and from the earth and.
not create a regenerative system. It won't work. We're gonna go instinct as a species. So that gets to mean that there are ways of leadership that are gonna open up within people that are actually gonna reorient us to what's possible. And I'll give you a specific example. I actually was working on this this morning was remembering when I was really young, probably like seven or eight years old, was in bed, like hanging out with a friend of mine and there was Mia Ham on the wall and she was a professional soccer player for.
Team USA specifically, and I looked at her and I was like, I wanna be like her, okay? And then that led to this dream of becoming a professional soccer player, okay? ⁓ And that's what we actually get to do with leadership right now. So when it comes to what are these organizations gonna look like who actually do this work, we actually get to see what is this new version of leadership actually look like? Because it's different than me, right? I'm embodying a new type of leadership just through.
me being catalytic in who I am, same thing with our founding members. They all embody different codes of leadership. And what actually happens in the body, when you see someone like that, like I did with Mia Ham, I literally, that my mirror neurons went off. And I was like, I want to be like her. And that's the same thing we get to do for the new type of leadership that we call a cultural catalyst right now, is that you actually get to set the precedent for what a new type of leader looks like. And that actually makes the neurons go off in other people to want to be like you. And that's actually how we create a new culture.
But that doesn't come from the type of leadership that we've had. It comes from a place of leadership by power and not from force. And when we do that, people are gonna see new ways of doing things, new ways of doing business, new ways of operating with money. These are the new cultural norms that we actually get to create. We can keep what we like and what's working, but we also get to replace things with things that are working better and actually create a new culture, organizationally and at large.
Sam Penny (55:08)
So then Jacqueline, if someone wants to build the best business in their industry, and I'm not talking about just, you know, successful, I'm talking about exceptional, what is the first behaviour they need to define?
Jaclyn Orent (55:19)
Yeah.
Well, the first thing that I would actually go below behavior and found out, why is it they're really doing that? What is the reason? Seven levels deep. Why are they really wanting to build the most exceptional business in their industry? And one of the things that I find in everyone is that the reason they're doing something is actually because of a reaction of something that happened to them in this lifetime and is often not positive. So for example, someone will go through this thing.
And then they're like, I'm gonna go change this thing, but they're doing it and they didn't process through and let go of the negativity from the thing. So they're actually creating that new thing from a negative belief system. And I've seen this in a powerful founder that I met. the reason why he was trying to scale the business had nothing to do with service. It was because he was trying to prove something to himself. That is not a good enough reason to do it. And we actually have to make sure that we bring purity and make sure the intentions, the reason behind what we're doing is actually for something higher.
It has to be from love or greater, right? It has to be from something greater than ourselves so that it actually pulls us so that it's actually whole serving. ⁓ And it actually creates a positive ripple and not a negative ripple.
Sam Penny (56:27)
Most businesses don't have a strategy problem. They have a standards problem because over time, what you tolerate becomes what you get. Jacqueline's work is a reminder that culture isn't something you talk about. It's something you design. It's something you define. And ultimately, it's something you enforce through behavior because behavior is what scales and what scales becomes your business. And if you want to learn more about Jacqueline's work, cultural catalysts
or her Cultural Contribution Masterclass. We'll link everything in the show notes. Now Jacqueline, what is the best place for people to get in touch with you?
Jaclyn Orent (57:01)
Yeah, so there's two different things. If you're a cultural catalyst and you're listening to this right now and I'd like, totally feel the call, I wanna take the next step, you can go sign up for our masterclass at culturalcontribution.com. And if you wanna learn more, you wanna find out our social links and find out anything you wanna find out about us, basically, you can go to culturalcatalyst.net.
Sam Penny (57:19)
Jacqueline Orent that was fantastic. And I'll make sure I put all of those things in the show notes. I'm Sam Penny and this is Built To Sell, Built To Buy, where we're learning how to build businesses that don't just grow, but operate at a standard most never reach.
