In this special podcast episode of Stepping In we review three previous conversations about transformative journeys, purpose and calling, hosted by Adam Klein Managing Partner of New Ventures West. Adam weaves together conversations with three guests – Amiel Handelsman, Mo Edjlali, and Lizzie Azzolino – exploring four key themes about finding one’s purpose in life. The themes include: how external life events can awaken inner awareness, how to productively engage with difficulty, how to recognize subtle internal signals about one’s calling, and how to sustain commitment to one’s purpose over time. Each guest shares personal stories of transformation, from Mo’s experience with business failure leading to deep mindfulness work, to Lizzie’s journey and profound awakening through illness, to Amiel’s shifting relationship with coaching as he ages. The episode concludes with a poem about embracing life’s mysteries and continuing forward despite uncertainty. Throughout, Adam emphasizes that while there may be common themes in finding purpose, each person’s path is unique to becoming who they’re meant to be – the importance is staying present to life’s unfolding.

0:00 Key themes about purpose, vocation, calling

2:45 External Events Meets Internal Voice

15:20 Embracing Difficulty

23:27 Whispers or Glimmers of Purpose, Vocation

32:14 The Support of Others, Life and Practices

Full Transcript

Adam Klein (00:05):

Hello, welcome to the Stepping In Podcast. I’m your host, Adam Klein, senior faculty member, managing partner at New Ventures West, and we have a little bit of a treat in this episode. We’re going to be doing a synopsis of the last three. So in the previous episodes I was in conversations with Amiel Handelman, MO and Lizzie Aino, and we were looking at different dimensions of calling or purpose or vocation. And in this episode, I’m going to take a look back at all three of those, pull out some themes. I’m going to give a little introduction on that theme and then play clips from each of those episodes so that you can hear in each of their voices how this particular theme showed up for them. And the hope around all of this is that in looking at these themes and then looking at different ways, it shows up that you might be able to find a thread, a breadcrumb, a nugget that is helpful for you as you discern your own sort of direction in life, purpose calling, whatever you might be in the middle of related to this question.

Adam Klein (01:10):

So I’m thrilled to be reintroducing you to Amel, Mo and Lizzie. And the themes we’re going to be looking at, the first one is what is it like to look at your life sense, the events that are going on? And then how does that then also in turn awaken an inner voice? So it’s looking at external circumstances, things that may happen, and then what happens inside of us and how can we pay attention to both of those things in a way that’s helpful for us? The second theme is looking at how we can really turn toward difficulty or resistance in a way that can be helpful for us. Not to say that it’s going to be easier, but that it might be more generative and help us on our path forward, and how can we orient to it in that way? So we’ll hear from each of them around that.

Adam Klein (02:07):

The third one will be looking for what are the internal signals, the impulses or those little inner whispers that we can help pay attention to that might give us some indication of how to orient our life and discover and connect to really what our vocation might be. And then in the last vignette, or the, sorry, the last theme. And then the last theme will be looking at what are ways of sustaining this orientation of life, of discerning and living into purpose. So without further ado, we’ll start into this first one. And really the first one is, as I was saying, centered around things happen in our life. We lose a job, somebody dies, we get a medical diagnosis. It’s very unexpected, big catastrophic events. And then it’s really looking to see what happens inside of us and what’s our internal responses and how can those two things live together in a way that’s helpful for us. So I’m going to pass it off to our friends, Amiel, Lizzie, and and hear from them about this.

Mo (03:25):

It’s kind of this wiz kid, boy wonder. The company went from zero to 30 people. We were a multimillion dollar company. I was literally a poster boy. Microsoft had a big conference in Washington DC and they put up my picture on posters across the DC Metro. I was literally a poster boy. And then the company collapsed. And in 2009, we were overextended. We were doing ecosystem recruiting. Essentially, I overextended everything. And suddenly I found myself in a position that I had kind of gone through this process of becoming a certain type of leader, operating in a certain way that was very aggressive, very alpha male gangster like, ruthless like reinforced through some of the different coaches and folks that I considered mentors at the time. And when the company collapsed, I found myself still operating like that. I still had this mentality. And when I would look at myself in the mirror, I didn’t like who I’d become, and I was disgusted and I wouldn’t hang out with myself.

Mo (04:30):

I was like, who is this guy? But I didn’t have the company to hide behind. I didn’t have a reason to operate that way or be that way. And so I went through a very difficult time, was financially the most successful in my peer group and my family and son and I got wiped out, flipped upside down. And in that journey, just trying to make sense of things, I asked myself, what’s this all for four? Why chase after something where just like that it could disappear and why cause so much pain and suffering chasing after this thing that didn’t really matter? So I asked myself what’s important? And I was open to exploring, very fortunate to be in the DC area and have a supportive fAmiely who really helped me together and helped me as I was sorting these things out, stumbled into a meditation class, which blew my mind.

Mo (05:28):

I have a science skeptical background, and everything I was exposed to in that class resonated. Later. I found out that my teacher, Jonathan faus, was the former executive director at Kalu, the large yoga center, and his wife happened to be Tara Brock, but at the time, he was just an amazing teacher that made a lot of sense to me. I also checked out a bunch of books and went to the Shanandoah Mountains. I’d hate to be cliche, but I actually did do that. And so went to the mountains, got away from everything, spent four days up there with books. One of them happened to be Coaching to Excellence by James, and I was blown away by that book among others. And I remember it was a book on leadership, and it’s been a while since I read it, so correct me if I’m off with anything.

Mo (06:25):

But it started with talking about death, and I was like, I’ve read a ton of books on leadership and death. That’s such a critical component of our sense of life and our understanding just gets overlooked. And I thought it was brilliant and I was very much influenced by that. I signed up for the new Veterans West course, taught in San Francisco shortly after, did my first 10 day silent meditation retreat. Started consuming and looking for anything that might expand my understanding. I just felt that everything I had learned up until then, specifically around leadership and how you’re supposed to be effective and what I’m supposed to be was all nonsense. And that there was another way, and that I just was blown away. It kind of cracked me open. And so that started my journey and to fast forward a little bit, I had bills to pay. So I went back to doing IT program management for Nest and DHS started, did the new Ventures West Course, got plugged in a great deal with the mindfulness community at the time, this is around 2010 eventually we launched our first Mindful Leader Summit in 2013. And fast forward to today, we’re one of the leading voices in the workplace mindfulness field, and we’re the largest provider of mindfulness based stress reduction.

Lizzie (07:54):

Who are you? And the question was so real to her, and it was real to me because I realized I didn’t actually know that answer

Lizzie (08:08):

And so much of who I thought I was and what I thought I was working toward, it just started to unravel from that point on. And there’s a lot that happened. I rolled a new ventures west for all kinds of reasons and new ventures West opened my worldview in a big way and leaving my full-time job, choosing to follow my intuition, to leave my full-time career without really knowing what was next. But knowing I needed to figure that out was a big move. And about four years into that was I got extremely sick and spent a lot of time searching for what was wrong with me, so much time searching. And at one point was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, and this was in my early-ish thirties. And that experience changed me in a really big way because it was, looking back now, it was a gift on my path to allow me to start to pay attention to my body and to start to experience who I was in a different way. And that opened up a lot for me. And yeah, there’s a long version of this story, but I no longer have cancer, and I really healed a lot from that experience. There are a number of these things that it’s like these moments in life meet me, and I actually do take them as openings, which is at the time what New ventures West called them.

Lizzie (10:27):

I really do see them as openings to say, what am I not seeing? What world exists outside of this one that I’ve been living in? So there have been a number of moments where I feel like my world just keeps expanding.

Adam Klein (10:47):

What were you hearing or what were you seeing that had you more directly turned toward these big complex things without feeling the need to thread it into leadership or otherwise weave it into some other topic, but just really turn toward it more directly?

Amiel (11:05):

That’s a great question. Just to reflect on that, I think since I turned 50, or since I became aware that I was going to turn 56 months before that, which is now going back four and a half years, I became aware of, it felt like it’s more than a halfway point in life, most likely

Amiel (11:32):

Something about that date. And I started to feel quite a bit of anxiety and getting in touch with the fear of death, which Ernest Becker says, we deny death and we even deny the fear of death in many, many different ways. And how we deny it changes from when we’re a kid to teenager, young adult. So I began to viscerally feel it. It’s a terror. It’s an immense terror. And so that feeling, which I still periodically encounter, had me saying, oh God. And then I was, what if I died? And what hasn’t been given? What hasn’t been received and what hasn’t been given. So that was one thing, what really matters. A second is I noticed myself in one-on-one coaching not being as interested as I have been before. Now I’m still coaching, and when I coach people, I’m interested in that. So if any of my clients are listening, I’m interested in you. And something about it has felt different. I don’t have enthusiasm to start with new people, and right now I’m just working with people that I’ve worked with in the past. It’s very different.

Adam Klein (13:10):

Yeah. Often it’s the case where coaches are, how do I grow my practice? How do I get more clients? And I’m hearing a contentment with what your coaching practice looks like these days.

Amiel (13:24):

Absolutely. There’s also been an enthusiasm to speak, and this is really a big part of what we’re looking at here with my writing and my podcast, is that moving out of the place of I’m asking questions, I’m bringing forth other people’s lives and supporting and challenging ’em and growing. And on the podcast, interviewing them and researching them and helping them give the best version of themselves. What’s also merging is, gosh, I have a lot to say and it is killing me. It’s burning me to not say it really.

Amiel (14:04):

It is painful, and it’s not only painful for me, but I am an unpleasant person when I’m not saying things that are coming through me. Thoughts about the world, passions, perspectives, critiques. Those are going into my conversations with my fAmiely and my friends and things are leaking out. Power is leaking out in strange ways. Listen, this is what I’ve noticed, and I’ve not noticed it in that way. I’ve noticed it that when I’m feel like I’m expressing myself, I’m more pleasant to be around. It’s only by writing more fully and sharing my perspective, even in my podcast that I realize for the next hour or hours, a couple days, Hey, it’s all good. I feel great. I don’t need anything from people. I’m just here. And that’s so different because when I need something and I’m not getting a chance to respond with a call, respond with a calling, then I’m looking for it in these other interactions and that doesn’t go so well I think.

Adam Klein (15:20):

Alright. I hope that was helpful for you, listening into their different stories about external events and what happened for them and maybe taking a moment for yourself to think about what’s going on in your life, how is that then showing up internally for you around what you’re thinking and feeling and what sense might you make of that that could be helpful. The second theme, what we’re going to look at is really difficulty, which we all face in differing degrees. Sometimes it feels like it’s all difficulty for a long time, and what is it to have that be something that can be helpful for us? So one of the ways I sometimes talk about difficulty is it’s a massage and sometimes a massage has those moments when it can feel a little intense because we’re really tight. So sometimes difficulty can be that type of pressure point, trying to work something out in us that we’re needing to learn about ourselves or how we are orienting to life that we might be able to let go of. Another way of looking at difficulty is how can we internally find some resourcing, some ease, some stability that helps us feel more supported and at ease as we turn toward difficulty. And then the last one is just how can we keep with some kind of resilience and be persistent about it? So you’re going to hear from Amel, Mo and Lizzie around this idea of difficulty and how it can support us and how it impacted their journey,

Amiel (17:13):

But acknowledging I’ve got a physical thing that needs to be attended to, I have an issue. And at one point my wife said, why don’t you talk to so-and-so? He has sleep apnea. And I was so resistant, I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that. I felt like a pathological label. I don’t want to be a person with sleep apnea using A-C-P-A-P machine and putting a mask on every night. I don’t want to be that type of person. Well, when I went and talked to him and heard his story and how it was helping him, like, oh, it’s a possibility here, new possibility. And so I went and got tested and sure enough I had sleep apnea, so I started using it. And I’ve been very compliant as they say, you got to be compliant. But I think that a lot of us have things, as you said, being confronted with. She confronted me with it and my own just moods in the morning confronted me with it. There’s something here that needs to be attended to. And so now that is a practice. I mean, the mask doesn’t put itself on the little water tank, doesn’t refill itself with distilled water. And when I travel to other countries, the hotel doesn’t have distilled water in my room for me to go out and get it. There’s a lot more, but maybe that gives

Mo (18:46):

Very shocking to me. And when I saw that, I felt kind of the spidey sense tingling. There was something there. I was like, Hey, wait a minute. And that feeling of like, Ooh, that aliveness. And I realized that, hey, this has got me curious and if it’s got me curious, maybe others will be curious and if not, so what I’m feeling it. So lemme pursue this. And I did. And I found that the lead plaintiff was this woman by the name of Ken Brown, found out she was a professor at the University of Indiana with a PhD in divinity studies from Harvard. So she was a legitimate, credible person. And I engaged with her over email. Next thing we did a one-on-one interview for an online event that we were doing. She did an article for us. I was just mind blown. It was refreshing and exciting and it got me feeling alive where there was this woman who disagreed with fundamentally a lot of the things that we were trying to do, but that was willing to approach things with rigor and with a level of rational intelligence and a voice that had been silenced everywhere else.

Mo (20:05):

And I engaged her and just found, I felt enlivened by it. It challenged me, questioned some of the stuff that we were doing. And next thing you know, I invited her and she was part of a keynote thing at our summit. We do a couple of different keynote things, and I paired her with Barnaby Spring who at the time was running New York’s Department of Education mindfulness program, overseeing a program that would potentially impact a million students, one of the largest in the world. And they had a debate and no one, one told me that this was a good idea. No one encouraged us, no one suggested it. It was think the opposite advice. Yes, exactly like why. But at the event, the people who experienced that, they felt that spark that I felt, they felt alive. They were energized. They didn’t agree necessarily with everything, but they felt alive. And for me, it was a sign that, hey, there’s something here.

LIzzie (21:14):

I had this unconscious belief that my life was supposed to be hard, that I was the person who that my value was because I could experience these miraculous things through the hardest moments, being diagnosed with an incurable cancer, the countless things where I’ve overcome through really hard things, real transformation. And this was something that was programmed in my early childhood. And so my move to New York made a ton of sense because it’s a really hard city to live in. And everyone who I met there reinforced how hard it was. They’re like, yeah, it’s hard. And I started to realize everyone that was there, it was like they loved it because it was hard. That’s a part of the culture. I was like, wait, I’m saying it. I’m laughing. Everything is laughter. But it was incredibly painful to realize that, oh, that was my safe zone, is things being really hard. And so I ended up writing a letter to myself that I am now trusting that the things that are truly meant for me will happen with ease, which doesn’t mean it’s not hard work because it’s a different kind of hard, but it’s a trusting in the process and meeting life in each moment and just a completely different embodied experience. Yeah,

Adam Klein (23:27):

Welcome back. So hopefully that’s giving you something to think about and reflect on as you navigate whatever difficulty showing up in your life. This third theme we’re going to be exploring through different vignettes is the emergence of purpose or calling and how do we pay attention to these subtle clues or internal impulses along the way that can help us navigate our life? One of the things that I was struck by in these conversations is how purpose is really an ongoing emergent phenomenon, meaning it’s something that happens over time and that we’re continuing to discover as we go on. So I’m excited for you to listen to how this showed up for Lizzie and Amel, and then in turn how it might be showing up for you now.

LIzzie (24:27):

I would say a really significant shift for me in every chapter of my life has been learning to trust what I know is real

LIzzie (24:43):

And express that and manifest that. And in early childhood, and then in early adulthood, most likely leading up to the point that I met you at New Ventures West training, I knew the truth, but I shared it out of fear and out of a need to control out of a need to protect myself from more of a place of lack. And now I have come into this gift of seeing the truth in people and in systems and in our world, and sharing it when the time is right, when the invitation is there, and from my heart entirely. So from a place of wholeness and so much of what I know about myself as I’m here to be a storyteller and to help us all through this collective transition to really know and be ourselves individually and collectively in a new way. And I do that through stories, and I do that through personal stories, and I do that through helping people and groups change how they’ve seen their path.

Mo (26:28):

There’s something here worth exploring. And so to fast forward to where mindful leader is at now, exploring the critics and taking a critical view has been really essential to how we’re looking at mindfulness and looking at the future and really providing a vision for mindfulness with the work that we’re doing where we’re able to look at the past and look at the wonderful contributions of people in the past, the frameworks and the different areas and for us particular MBS are, but then also looking to the future and figuring out how does this work evolve? How do we create the right atmosphere, structures and frameworks where we’re able to carry this work forward for generations and generations to come and address some of the baggage and address some of the unaddressed things from the past and create something that truly, I believe connects with the original passion and reason I got involved with mindfulness. And I think a lot of the original promise and excitement around mindfulness that maybe has been lost with some of the things that people have experienced in seeing out there now,

Adam Klein (27:39):

What were you hearing or what were you seeing that had you more directly turn toward these big complex things without feeling the need to thread it into leadership or otherwise weave it into some other topic, but just really turn toward it more directly?

Amiel (27:57):

Amiel (28:24):

Something about that date. And I started to feel quite a bit of anxiety and getting in touch with the fear of death, which Ernest Becker says, we deny death and we even deny the fear of death in many, many different ways. And how we deny it changes from when we’re a kid to teenager, young adult. So I began to viscerally feel it. It’s a terror. It’s an immense terror. And so that feeling, which I still periodically encounter, had me saying, oh God. And then I was, what if I died? And what hasn’t been given? What hasn’t been received and what hasn’t been given. So that was one thing, what really matters a second is I noticed myself in one-on-one coaching not being as interested as I have been before. Now I’m still coaching, and when I coach people, I’m interested in them. So if any of my clients are listening, I’m interested you. And something about it has felt different. I don’t have enthusiasm to start with new people, and right now I’m just working with people that I’ve worked with in the past, just very different.

Adam Klein (30:02):

Yeah. Often it’s the case where coaches are, how do I grow my practice? How do I get more clients? And I’m hearing a contentment with what your coaching practice looks like these days.

Amiel (30:16):

Absolutely. There’s also been an enthusiasm to speak, and this is really a big part of what we’re looking at here with my writing and my podcast, is that moving out of the place of I’m asking questions, I’m bringing forth other people’s lives and supporting and challenging ’em and growing. And on the podcast, interviewing them and researching them and helping them give the best version of themselves. What’s also merging is, gosh, I have a lot to say, and it is killing me. It’s burning me to not say it really.

Amiel (30:56):

It is painful, and it’s not only painful for me, but I’m an unpleasant person when I’m not saying things that are coming through me. Thoughts about the world, passions, perspectives, critiques. Those are going into my conversations with my fAmiely and my friends and things are leaking out. Power is leaking out in strange ways. Listen, this is what I’ve noticed, and I’ve not noticed it in that way. I’ve noticed it that when I feel like I’m expressing myself, I’m more pleasant to be around. It’s only by writing more fully and sharing my perspective, even in my podcast that I realize for the next hour or four hours, couple days, Hey, it’s all good. I feel great. I don’t need anything from people. I’m just here. And that’s so different because when I need something and I’m not getting a chance to respond to a call, respond to a calling, then I’m looking for it in these other interactions, and that doesn’t go so well I think.

Adam Klein (32:14):

Welcome back. So the last piece we’re going to be exploring is what does it look like to find some support or some sustenance or some way of feeling encouraged along this path of discovering vocation, purpose calling? And in each of these different vignettes, you’re going to hear really distinct ways that each of these three found support or have a life of practice that helps them continue forward, continue noticing the events of life, continue to pay attention to that internal voice, and really in a way keep saying yes to life. So for me personally, this is a particularly powerful point in each of these conversations where the three of them point to how to stay in it really, and keep going,

Mo (33:08):

But there’s something here worth exploring. And so to fast forward to where mindful leader is at now, exploring the critics and taking a critical view has been really essential to how we’re looking at mindfulness and looking at the future and really providing a vision for mindfulness with the work that we’re doing, where we’re able to look at the past and look at the wonderful contributions of people in the past, the frameworks and the different areas, and for us particular MBSR, but then also looking to the future and figuring out how does this work evolve? How do we create the right atmosphere, structures, and frameworks where we’re able to carry this work forward for generations and generations to come and address some of the baggage and address some of the unaddressed things from the past and create something that truly, I believe connects with the original passion and reason I got involved with mindfulness. And I think a lot of the original promise and excitement around mindfulness that maybe has been lost with some of the things that people have experienced in seeing out there now.

Adam Klein (34:18):

And the other thing I’m appreciating as you’ve been talking, because you’ve been talking about this time span of 20 years, 30 years, 25 years, it’s a long-term commitment, and there’s small evolutions of listening and shifting and changing, and some of them are micro, and then they kind of lead to a big change or a more noticeable pivot. But that noticeable pivot didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s been supported by small things along the way, little ways of listening, little ways of turning towards sleep or diet or food or intake practices in the morning. So I guess what I’m getting to is consistency over a long time really supports some of what I’m feeling in this more now, more externally noticeable shift or pivot in how your work is showing up. But it didn’t just appear.

Amiel (35:27):

Yeah. So interpreting my story as a case for ongoing long-term, deliberate practice would be a and hopefully useful interpretation. I want to just say a couple things about that because I have dived into deliberate practice as not taking it from Buddhism or something like that, but taking it from sports, music, performing arts, math, that reps matter, getting in your reps, whatever, it’s your practice really, really matters.

LIzzie (36:02):

Yes. And you don’t always have to believe the yes. That’s another thing. Sometimes you can just say the yes and just do it, and then all of a sudden you realize it’s happened or you start to catch up to the yes. So one of the things that I always do when something becomes very important to me is I share it with as many people as possible.

Adam Klein (36:29):

Beautiful.

LIzzie (36:30):

And by words create momentum. Words are energy. It’s like the act of sharing is creation. And so sharing what it is, you’re up to a dream you have. It really does create a lot of momentum. And then people love to support you with

Adam Klein (36:55):

Dreams. It’s true. I believe that’s true.

LIzzie (36:58):

Yeah.

Adam Klein (37:02):

So we’re coming to a close for this particular episode. Again, the intention here is to really draw out how in each of our lives, this question of purpose or vocation is going to be very distinct. So in ammo and Lizzie’s stories, there’s yes themes and also lots of particularities. So sometimes we can maybe have questions about, well, why isn’t it working like it worked for that person? Or how can I learn from them so that can apply directly to me? So while there may be themes, there’s also uniqueness. So one of the questions I invite you into as you’re discerning this for yourself is how do these themes become helpful for you? And then also, what’s particular about your life and how do they show up in a unique way given who you are and the circumstances of what you’re living in? And in closing, I want to leave us all with a poem by ko, which I think speaks to this.

Adam Klein (38:10):

Ko writes, the mystery, speaks to each of us as it makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear you sent out beyond your recall. Go to the limits of your longing. Embody me, flare up like a flame and make big shadows. I can move in, let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror, just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. So I’d love to hear from you about how you’re being impacted by either this episode or previous episodes. You can email me, step [email protected], and until we touch base again, take care, friends.

Key Lessons About Purpose