The Inner MBA

TAMI SIMON is the founder of multimedia platform, Sounds True, and the educational program The Inner MBA. Tami has grown Sounds True into North America's leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings, and one of the world's very first organizations to operate along genuinely integral principles, with the emphasis on "multiple bottom lines" of purpose, profit, people, and planet. In part 2 of an interview with EMILIE MOGENSEN, she speaks about the competitive instinct, celebrating the successes of others through the practice of sympathetic joy, and what it means to be human.

- EMILIE MOGENSEN

Q: You talked about your competitive side in another interview. It resonated with me in terms of entrepreneurship, as we are often rather competitive people by nature. When you are a spiritual seeker and you are running a rather big business in the USA, having to look out for competing companies I assume, is there a conflict here?

Well, I want to be 100% truthful with you, Emilie. I think this is a growing edge for me. I am not there yet. I'm in the middle of working this whole thing out myself. One thing I know is that there is a healthy and an unhealthy side to competitiveness in me. The healthy side pushes me to constantly innovate, to go for extreme excellence, to always be inventing, and always a step ahead. So, it's a creative force and that's good. I think the negative side is when I compare myself with other people. There is something about that which isn't true, and it isn't helpful. Everyone has a right to express their best.

The Inner MBA program at Sounds True is a nine-month immersive training program. Lately, we added Spencer Sherman to our faculty, who teaches the inner mastery of money. It's about bringing dharmic meditative principles together with the world of money.

I learned from him a practice rooted in Buddhism, which you can apply in business and as a competitive person. I noticed a huge transformation through this practice. It's "sympathetic joy," which is one of the heavenly abodes. You practice sympathetic joy when other people have terrific successes. When your business competitors have huge successes, a lot more money to work with, or they get a huge account; or when someone writes a New York Times Bestseller while you're still working on your book; practice actually feeling their joy as if it were your own. You can take this even further and imagine their success becoming bigger! Imagine their face on the cover of a huge magazine, and so on.