The Everyday Mystic

Scaling with Soul: The 5 Pillars of Leadership Evolution

• Corissa Saint Laurent • Episode 125

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The hardest part of leadership isn't the strategy; it’s the psychology. It’s that messy middle ground where your external success collides with your internal reality. If you’re battling burnout, second-guessing your next move, or feeling the weight of your company's growth, it’s time to upgrade your internal operating system.

In this solo episode, Corissa breaks down the 5 Core Pillars of Leadership Evolution. This is the deep, structural work required to scale your business and your life without losing your soul. From operationalizing intuition to navigating the "wintering" of leadership, this is your new manual for the journey ahead.

In this episode, she covers:

1. Strategic Intuition

  • Why intuition isn't woo-woo…it’s actually a distillation of your decades of experience and knowledge.
  • Moving from over-management to feeling into your next strategic move.
  • How to use movement (like dance or walking) to access hidden data in the body, featuring insights from Sue B. Zimmerman and Ting Ting Guan.

2. Sustainable High Performance

  • Why the "eternal spring" model of constant growth is a recipe for disaster.
  • The concept of "wintering" in leadership: taking time to reflect rather than just produce, inspired by Sadie Lincoln.
  • The cautionary tale of Marta Hobbs, who sold a billion-dollar company only to crash into a mental health crisis because she ignored the internal work during the race to exit.

3. Navigating the Unknown

  • How success often acts as a distraction from our shadow selves and inner demons.
  • Insights from Adrian Grenier on exploring his inner demons and finding truth beyond fame.
  • Understanding that your current leadership style is likely a blueprint of your childhood relational upbringing.

4. Conscious Leadership

  • Why the ego prefers familiarity over freedom, and how to break that pattern.
  • Reclaiming your narrative and becoming the meaning-maker of your own life, featuring Tabatha Coffey’s journey of redefining labels.
  • Moving beyond safety to explore the yearning for the unknown.

5. Legacy & Impact

  • Addressing the identity crisis you hit when you reach the summit but feel empty.
  • The strategic upgrade from Hero (saving the day) to Sage (sharing the wisdom).
  • Insights from Viveka von Rosen on shedding past professional identities to step into a new, authentic version of yourself.

Notable Quotes:

  • "The hardest part of leadership isn't the strategy. It's the psychology."
  • "Your intuition is your knowledge base. It's that knowledge bank of information that we don't necessarily see on our spreadsheets."
  • "It's not all growth. It can't always be growth. There have to be moments of reflection."
  • "If you're putting off any of these things, just know that the next level of success is not going to solve any of that. It's all going to be there waiting for you."
  • "Your legacy isn't just the company you built and the stock price, it’s in the actual impact you’ve had on the industry, your people... and on the planet."

Connect with Corissa:

If this conversation awoke or inspired something in you, please consider leaving us a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review to help us reach more people.

Thanks for tuning in!

Corissa Saint Laurent:

The hardest part of leadership isn't the strategy. It's the psychology. It's the messy middle where your external success collides with your internal reality. If you're feeling the burnout, battling inner demons, or second-guessing your next move, it's time to upgrade your internal operating system for the next stages of growth. So today we're going to cover the five core pillars of executive evolution, the deep structural work that's required to scale your business and your life without losing your soul. Before we unpack these pillars, if you're already feeling the weight of your company's growth and some of the issues I mentioned, I invite you to check out my advisory. Learn about the protocols that we install to get at the root causes and set you up for success in your next phase of leadership. Check out the details at carissaintlaurent.com/slash advisory. Now let's dive into your new operating manual for the journey ahead. The first of these five pillars is strategic intuition. If you're struggling to trust your gut over the data and what everyone else is telling you to do, this is where strategic intuition comes in. When we think of intuition, we think of gut feelings, hunches, nudges, urges, and some of it feels really woo-woo. But think about the inception of your company. Where did that thought come from, that inspiration derive from? Most founders got some sort of spark or a download of information from somewhere else for the amazing idea that's at the foundation of your company. So I know that intuition isn't foreign to you, but somewhere along the way, we tend to pack that away as soft data or as untrusted information, or as I said earlier, too woo-woo to use in the boardroom. But if intuition was good enough to conceive of the actual idea of your business, the core product, service, mission that drives your company and the success that you've already had, then why not still use it today? It's that we get into this place of our companies being overmanaged. Layers are put in of strategic governance and managerial oversight and so many components which are necessary to grow to 1 million, 5 million, 20 million in revenue. But let's talk about how intuition can help you in making these more strategic decisions as you grow beyond where you are today. This deep structural work that we're talking about in operationalizing your intuition is moving from the struggle between what you know is true and what you think you should do. So this is going from pure thinking and analysis to feeling into what your next move should be. In a conversation I had with one of my podcast guests, Sue B. Zimmerman, who most people know as the Instagram expert, she built 18 businesses over the course of her entrepreneurial career and she's still going. She builds these businesses and visualizes what she's going to do in her next move through what she calls visual intelligence. This visual intelligence isn't just a hunch or a gut feeling, it's a combination of all of her experiences of being an entrepreneur since she was 13 years old, combined with her intuition. So we could even look at intuition as not just being some nebulous feeling that comes from nowhere, but as being a distillation of all of our experiences and our expertise and our knowledge and everything we've learned and been exposed to and experienced over the course of our lifetime, compacted into a system of deriving information that feels like it just comes from nowhere, but really it's coming from that distillation of all of your experiences. So your intuition is your knowledge base. It's that knowledge bank of information that we don't necessarily see on our spreadsheets or in our data streams. We are feeling it as the right thing to do based on your decades of experience and exposure to market forces, to boardrooms, to your own innovation, and to all the mistakes that you've made and the challenges that you've had that you've overcome. When we start to actually look at intuition as important data, we can start to operationalize it throughout all areas of our business, whether you're using it to make better hires or make better decisions on mergers and acquisitions. All of it is important information. One of the ways that we can access our deeper layers of understanding is through, as I mentioned earlier, feeling into these answers, feeling into this information. One of the ways to get into and tap into feeling is through movement. So our body is this storage place of data, information, knowledge, knowing. But sometimes our bodies can be really stuck. It can be stuck through sitting, stuck through being stuck in buildings, stuck through the diet and the things that we put into our. It can be stuck just through being in our thinking minds all the time. To access deeper layers within the body, movement can be a powerful way to do that, whether it's going for a walk while you are thinking through a problem or not thinking and just allowing the steps to potentially give you the answer and the information that you're looking for. The movement can happen through very specific movements like going to a yoga class or going out for a run or climbing a mountain or through dance, like one of my podcast guests in the past has realized. She was stuck at a place where the career that she had built that she thought would be her legacy crumbled beneath her, and she couldn't figure it out in her analytical mind as to what to do next or why this was all happening. So she went out onto the beach and she started moving. A dance and a movement came through her that she just allowed to flow through her body. This led her to not only her next move as a career, but building out a global brand called the Guanjing Method. Ting Ting Guan followed this instinct that she had in her body. Through it, she channeled this movement method and then paved her next move, which was becoming an entrepreneur and building this incredible company. Now, we don't necessarily all have these movement methodologies that are going to be channeled through us, but movement itself can move us into this hidden layer of information, knowledge, wisdom that we hold in our bodies that guide us to information that's been trapped, stuck, and relegated off into the shadows. And we can bring that up to be that incredible spark of inspiration that can help us through all layers of our business, whether it's product and innovation, strategic governance, who we're going to hire next. Now, if you're feeling the gears grinding toward burnout, which is where many leaders at your level are getting to. The next pillar is sustainable high performance. How do we continue to perform at the level that you are, but sustain that so we don't burn out? I had an incredible conversation a couple years back with Sadie Lincoln, the founder and CEO of Bar 3. They have over 180 studios. They are a global brand. And she hit a point in her leadership where she realized she could not sustain the eternal spring of constant growth and output. She realized that she had to stop and reflect and take time to look within and to simply slow down. You may have heard this concept before called wintering. The wintering of leadership is the season in which we reflect. It's the season that we turn in and spend time not only looking at our systems and our protocols and our frameworks and our strategies and our tactics, but we are taking a look within at our own leadership protocols. How are we approaching every day, every quarter, every year? How are we approaching our team and our people? How are we approaching the problems and challenges that our business faces? If we don't turn in to reflect on what we've been doing up to now, we miss incredible information. We miss opportunities to learn from our mistakes and we miss out on the data that is sitting right in front of us as we push forward at all costs toward what we hope is growth, but can often be a cliff that we fall over through that constant push. Because it's not all growth. It can't always be growth. There has to be moments of reflection. And if we ignore these signs, whether it's the signs of growing pains within our company or signs of burnout within us, if we ignore these until the race ends, these things can catch up with us. There was really no better example of this than a conversation I had with Mark Ta Hobbes, who is the co-founder of CheapCaribbean.com. They built a billion-dollar company, sold it, she retired at age 39, only to be met with panic attacks and anxiety and a heart issue that she couldn't explain. What she realized was that in the feverish growth of the company and her heads-down approach to building and succeeding and getting to where they got to, which looks like incredible success on paper, what she realized she was doing through that was avoiding so much of her own pain, distress, and for her, childhood trauma. So she had packed that away and exchanged it for the pace at which she was working. And when that pace was over, when the race was done, when they exited, only then did that all catch up with her. And she wasn't able to avoid it anymore or distract herself away from it. So her picture perfect retirement, age 39 in Paris with her family, with a place in St. Bart's, and this incredible life that she had built all came crumbling down through this mental distress that had been held at bay, which she could not ignore anymore. For those of you who are waiting for the next stage of growth, waiting for the exit, waiting for the next title, waiting to hit a certain amount of income, whatever it is that you might be waiting for, that you are putting off your own mental health, your own nagging issues in your body, your own relationship issues at home. If you're putting off any of these things, just know that next level of success is not going to solve any of that. It's all going to be there waiting for you. So you might as well deal with it now, handle it now. It's only going to make everything better now, rather than waiting for that inevitable cliff drop that's going to happen once you do hit that level of success. And that's the whole thing about us looking at these things now, creating a sustainable high performance methodology that you can have now. Let's move into the third pillar, which is navigating the unknown. This is largely tied to what we were just talking about of going deep into and facing what is invisible, what is unseen, what has not been explored in order to unpack and find what may be lurking in the shadows. I had an incredible conversation with Adrian Grenier. You probably know him as the star of the TV show Entourage. And we had an incredible conversation about his spiritual awakening and what he needed to do to lose that identity of celebrity, actor, Hollywood fame, and everything that comes along with that in order to find his truth. And when he found his truth, he realized that he was hiding from, running from so many demons in his life. It's so easy to do that when you've got these treasures of fame and money and fortune in front of you. Even if you're not a celebrity, but you are the CEO of your company, you still have all of that to distract you from looking within. Navigating the unknown means that we are going deep within and we don't know what we're gonna find. We don't know what might be in the shadow parts of ourself. But in those shadow parts lie the ignored aspects of self. Maybe it's that perfectionist that got you to where you are now, but that was born of a childhood home of trauma. The only way that we can face these issues is by traveling into those places that may seem scary, that may seem unknown. Some of us might just think, you know, it's not even important to go there, that we don't have to go there. But just remember, those things are waiting in those shadows. They're there waiting, and they may be, and most likely are, coming up in the boardroom, coming up in your conversations with your partners, coming up in the work that you do, or even your ability to have satisfaction and a sense of deep meaning around the work you're doing. So all of those things, they're there. The leadership style you've built, even is built on your childhood relational upbringing. Now, if you don't think that's true, take a look at some of your closest relationships and see where there may be a reflection of one of the relationships within your childhood home. I bet you you will find at least one of those relationships that's almost an exact reflection of the patterns that you were exposed to and that you then built as a ways and means of relating. We all do it. There's really no way of getting around it. I talk about this in one of my posts called The Blueprint of Connection, the blueprint that was built in those early childhood relationships and in those formative years. That blueprint is carried with you until we decide to change it. So if any of your relationships are suffering at work or home or within your friendships, it's a great time for you to go within, explore some of that internal patterning that you may not have explored yet, so that you can have better relationships, more effective relationships, more impactful communication. And that's only going to help you grow this next stage of your company and this next stage of your life in a better way. All right, moving on to pillar four, which is conscious leadership. When we are conscious of our own patterns, when we are conscious of the deeper layers of the unseen within our teams and within our company, when we're conscious of and see past the spreadsheets and see into the deeper layers of relationship, market forces, and trends, we start to have awareness around things that seem like a mystery before. That consciousness built into our leadership requires taking new actions. I talked about this with one of my guests, Zach Bodenweber. He is a double board certified coach, an incredible voice in consciousness expansion and awakening. He's written a book called The Notes on Awakening, and we had a beautiful discussion where we talk about choosing freedom over familiarity. And the way he put it is that we make choices that keep us safe, the choices that are familiar because we're working from the confines of our ego. Our ego wants to keep us safe, and that's a really wonderful thing. But we've moved beyond being in fear of being excised from our tribe or being out in the wilderness where we're in danger. We no longer need to worry about that type of safety, and yet we're operating in our biology this way. Our ego creates patterns of familiarity, and we're making choices every day that keeps us within that frame, that keeps us within the safety of what we already know, what we've already tested and proven, what someone else told us is the safe choice. So all of this is a deep set of programming that happens. Egos get together and they create this set of patterning that then we all unconsciously agree to. But within your subconscious, within the deeper aspects of you, there is a yearning that exists to explore the unknown. Even if you've suppressed it to the deepest, darkest levels of you, the yearning still exists and it creates a feeling of meaninglessness or directionlessness or purposelessness. When we are moving forth, even looking extremely successful, but not necessarily feeling that sense of freedom within, whether it's the freedom to create or to make mistakes or to live the life we truly want to live. One of the ways that we can start to do this is to reclaim our narratives, deprogram ourselves from the stories that we've been told and that we've been taught and that have been implanted within us. A great example of this comes from a conversation I had in my very first season of the podcast with Tabitha Coffey. She had a show called Tabitha Takes Over, and she went into businesses and told them everything that they're doing wrong, looked at the leadership and told them where they were essentially bullshitting themselves and then therefore their company because they weren't willing to look within, willing to look at who they really were. What she learned from all of this was this ability to rewrite her own narrative. Her arc was that she got this show because she was a character in another reality TV show before this. She was so popular within that show that she was given her own. Show. Unfortunately, the way that reality TV goes is that even though it's unscripted, a lot of it is still very highly produced. And she was given this persona of bitch that ended up carrying over through all of her TV life. And although she was doing incredible work for these businesses and these entrepreneurs, she still carried the weight of that term that carries so much meaning. So what she did was create a different meaning out of that word. So when someone yelled across the street, hey, you bitch, hey, bitch, she was able to go, yeah, yeah, I am, because she had given it new meaning. So if we want to act consciously in our life, it means that we're exploring both the deep dark places, exploring the meaning of the narratives and the stories that we have carried all of our life, and then wielding new meaning out of them. We become the meaning makers of our own life and our own leadership, and we get to lead with a whole new sense of authority, an authority that's built on our own authenticity rather than what we thought we should do or what was given to us as the path to do or what other people tell us we are. Our last pillar is legacy and impact. If you're ready to integrate your whole story, the authentic you into your leadership, which is what leadership at the highest level really demands, then this is where we bring in everything that we've explored, everything that we've discovered, all the challenges that we've overcome and weave them into our leadership. So our legacy isn't just the company we built and the stock price, it is in the actual impact that we've had on the industry that we're in, the people that we've worked with, and on the marketplace as a whole, and on the planet. One of the conversations that stands out for me was with Vivika von Rosen. She built a personal brand as the LinkedIn expert. She went on to co-found a company and exited that. She had built her own legacy, but it wasn't what she wanted to leave. She has a deep spiritual background that was hidden from the business world. And once she reclaimed that and actually realized the power that held, she was able to pivot into a new place where she's now coaching executive women in their 50s into this new stage of their evolution. She has started to work within the space of the silver ceiling and these late stage realizations that so many founders, leaders, employees have when they hit this age, this midlife of where they're in their 50s and they've achieved everything that they ever thought they wanted. And they hit a ceiling where they're uh unsatisfied and unhappy and feel meaningless in what they've achieved. They are feeling less and less impactful within the confines of where they're working. As we start to reach this level of realization, we're often hit with an identity crisis. I reached the pinnacle of success. I reached the summit. And I was promised all of these gifts. And usually those gifts are gifts of feeling. We want to feel like we are enough. We want to feel like the hero in our own story. But within this pillar of creating a lasting legacy and true impact, what we're really doing is using this identity crisis that you may be experiencing or that you may go through in a few years or a decade from now, using that as an opportunity for a strategic upgrade from that hero that you thought you wanted to be to the sage, the wise leader who knows that all of these external markers of success aren't actually what life is about, that the internal satisfaction and sense of deep meaning and even higher purpose is what you're here for and is what should be driving the steps that you make in your life, the decisions that you make within your business and your career, guiding you into a sense of deep belonging to not only the people around us, but to a deeper sense of your higher self and all that connects you too. So within the pillar of legacy and impact, we talk about the opportunity that we have to start to look at life and ourselves more deeply, look at where we can pivot and where we can start to put our focus. It's never too late to change where we are deriving our sense of satisfaction from, and therefore where we're actually living from, where that point is within us that we consider the starting point. This is when we can start to create core values for ourselves that are truly meeting our actual needs, not just the needs of our ego, but the needs of our soul. You can find out more about all of these pillars and the conversations that I've had over the last few years within my podcast, the writings that I've put out. Go to carissaintlaurent.com/slash insights, and I've organized them by these pillars so that you can get some quick hits and information and maybe some deep inspiration on where you're gonna go, what your next move is, how you might pivot and move into this new phase of your leadership, into potentially even a new way of operating completely. If you're interested in operationalizing all of this, going deeper and actually applying it within your life and your leadership, check out my advisory and all of the ways that we actually install these concepts into your working day, creating new patterns for you to operate from so that you can hopefully avoid all of those common issues of founder fatigue and burnout and meaninglessness that so many of the leaders that I've talked to over the years run into when they hit a certain level of success, a certain level of growth, or a certain time in their chronology. A time really when we can say enough is enough. Time's running out. Let's face these things, let's go deep and do structural work that's gonna help us build a new foundation for this next level of success and the next level of our own evolution. So jump on over to carissaintlaurent.com and I will see you there.