In this focused episode, Dr. Eric Holsapple, Founder of Living in the Gap, shares how he guides professionals to discover success and happiness while helping their organizations improve company culture and create meaningful results impacting the bottom line.

You will discover:

– How to overcome the distractions and chaos to achieve meaningful focus at work and at home
– Why our lives as leaders get so out of balance
– How to generate remarkable profits without sacrificing your health and happiness

Episode Transcript

Scott Ritzheimer

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I am here with an unbelievable guest, someone you’re really going to be excited to meet. It is the one, the only Dr Eric Holsapple. He is a successful developer and entrepreneur who has used mindfulness to transform his life and business and help others do the same. Eric has a PhD in economics and has been a real estate CEO and developer for nearly 40 years. He has lectured real estate at the Colorado State University for 20 years and practiced yoga and meditation for 30 years. This all comes together in a unique perspective on how merging business and mindfulness can be a cattle catalyst in changing lives. Eric is the founder of living in the gap, and his popular workshops teach CEOs and professionals a different way to operate more mindfully while improving the bottom line. Well, Eric again, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here. I’m wondering if you could kind of take us back a little bit. Where did all this come from for you, what ultimately led you to pulling together these worlds of business and mindfulness and ultimately chronicling the two in your new book?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

You know, you go back. I mean, in my 20s, I was really successful in business, almost from the start. Was a CEO in my mid 20s, traveling all the time, and I reached that hierarchy of success, you know, the six figure salary, the Mercedes, the apartment, all those things. But I just wasn’t healthy, happy or satisfied with it, and I was overweight quite a bit. And I just said, just, said just, you know, make some changes. You’re not gonna be around very long. So I started on it. I think the first thing that happened was I stumbled onto yoga, and that was my first entry into mindfulness. I was an athlete. I hadn’t been, you know, doing athletic things for quite a while because I was just working. But I got back into that, and that really was the first entry into it, just one thing from there led to another. I have a older brother that was pretty estranged from my dad. My dad was a football coach. My older brother was a poet, and always were like oil and water. And it was kind of estranged. And my older brother took up meditation, and I just watched him come back to the family, just come back and open up to my dad, and they, you know, started talking again. He said, You want to try it? And I said, Sure. So I tried it, and I had immediate results with it. But for years, I was what I’d call a closet meditator. You know, I didn’t come out. I just did it on my own. I did a yoga practice and meditation for, you know, 10 years or so before I even really mentioned to anybody what I was doing. Later, people started noticing that I worked with and said, you know, what’s what are you doing? I just started sharing with them a little bit. And I also became somebody could slow down and talk to them a little bit, because I was pretty fired up, hard charging, you know, 100 mile an hour guy. Oh, and there, one thing led to another. From there is, we outlined, we rolled out the program at our own company, and later I rolled it into a workshop, and then from there into a book.

Scott Ritzheimer

Wow. So break it down for us. What does being a mindful leader mean?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

You know, our business context, I think the one word that really boils it down is Focus, focus on what we’re doing, who we’re doing it, with why we’re doing it. We just so many distractions that we have. I mean, we try to run meetings with the, you know, iPads open and even with phones on and different things. And if I need to boil it down, one where it’s just, you know, can I focus and can I and so at our programs, what we’re going to do is, sorry, can I focus at work? And then can I turn that off and when I go home? Can I focus at home and not have that constant draw back into checking my phone when I’m supposed to be, you know, having dinner or being with a family? Focus, I think is a word that is really appropriate for business,

Scott Ritzheimer

and I think that’s a really powerful world for connecting those two realities. Because maybe this has been your experience, but it’s certainly been mine. You start talking about mindfulness and automatically woo, woo filters go up. You know, it’s like, you know, it just, there’s this kind of almost automatic turn off in a lot of business environments. Why do you think that is?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

You know, I I love that word because I really think, you know, this current state of the world, divided, distracted, unable to move things forward. You know, an important objectives is what Woo is, and mindfulness is, is focused. I think it’s because we’re really good business is really good at getting our attention. And every little slice of our attention, you know, started with subliminal advertising, you know, has worked its way up to social media and media. And every, every little slice of our attention is trying to be grabbed, and we’re the ones grabbing. I mean, different what I try to do in my business. How do we grab? Somebody said. Attention, and the only way to get it back is for you to put your own stake in the ground and say, No, you know, I’m gonna control my own attention. I’m gonna control where it goes and when it goes there. Well, I don’t know. I think it’s just a state of success in some ways, that we’re so technologically and that advertising and and selling things, but we have to put up some defense systems to be able to actually live a live a life of peace. Yeah,

Scott Ritzheimer

I catch myself wondering about this often, but I wonder how our brains can continue to keep up with the pace of information being sent in their direction, right? It just feels like it’s a constant onslaught and and it kind of brings me to the question, you have folks listening to this podcast, probably listen to dozens of other podcasts. There’s probably all kinds of information coming in. They’re probably finding about 9 million things they should be doing. How do they know that pursuing mindfulness is the thing that they should be doing. How do they know it’s right for them?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

You know, I think you have to experience it. Try it on, you know. First and first of all, are you? Are you ready? Are you? Are you feeling like, you know, the people I find that get the most are people that are fairly successful, but they just aren’t as satisfied, or they’re, you know, or relaxed or stressed, then they think they should be. So I think it’s looking at your current life and saying, Is this okay? Is this, you know, if this never gets any better, if this is my life, if is it okay, and if it’s not, then I suggest, particularly if you already have some of the outer successes, I suggest more of an inner journey to see. You know, can I ever, can I find a different way to view these things? Because our our problems aren’t usually what happens, it’s what we think about them. I mean cancer, health problems, death, divorces, bankruptcy, all of these things happen to us and to others all around us. It’s just part of life. How do we view them, you know? Are we viewing every everything is a catastrophe, you know? Or can we start to view them as just these are just the bumps in the road to life.

Scott Ritzheimer

You said for you that yoga brought immediate results. What did that look like?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

Well, I was an athlete. You know what? I love skiing. I love golf. I love these things. And I had gotten away from a bit, but when I found it, just taught me how to experience my body, how to be in my body. This guy named Ken Robinson that wrote a really good book called The element like please say that, you know, our bodies just become something that carries our head from meeting to meeting. But I find that the biggest, the biggest immediate escape from that tyranny of thought is to be in our body, when our when it when we’re when our focus, of our attention goes down into our body, our thoughts slow down. They’re going to be going somewhere, but then they have a hard time being more than one place at once. So if our attention is in our head, it actually makes it busier. Our attention is in our body, or perhaps on another person or what we’re doing. Thoughts slow down. We come becoming gross and present with what we’re doing. So it’s very, very it’s a very important in the process to start to evaluate yoga. It doesn’t have to be yoga. There’s a lot of different things you can do, but to experience, you know, being able to place your consciousness in different places, and particularly the firstly, into your body, is huge. I think on the road,

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, yeah, that’s so good.So you’ve got a book out called profit with presence, and in it, you outline 12, I think you call them pillars of mindful leadership. Is that right? Yeah. So let’s imagine you’re on a boat, and you know that this boat is going to get stuck on a desert island. And let’s just imagine that these 12 pillars are 12 people. Which three people would you bring with you, if that’s all you could fit on the boat, so that you could, you know, run your business, I guess from a sat on I don’t know how you’d run your business from a desert island, but run your business, live your life as best as possible. What? What three would you bring along?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

The first three pillars are foundational. They’re, you know, be present and practice mindfulness. Identify your purpose in life and find vision. Purpose, vision, commitment, intention and habits. Those three, the rest of them are really different, mindset, tools, pillars, four through 12. You know, gratitude and some things that we can do in that. But really, if the start is to experience present and have some it’s usually anything of worthwhile as some practice involved to it. Formal meditation is one that’s not for everybody. There’s some other options. It is really in the heavy professional world or busy professional world. It’s some of the other things, like time and nature and. Is is difficult. So I think meditation for a lot of people is going to be the most accessible, but a lot of people resist it. So I try not to say it has to be, but for busy people, it can be one of the one of the most impactful. And also, I think people don’t realize, you know, we start people with two minutes of meditation. You build up to 10, that’s a substantial practice. It doesn’t have to be a half an hour sitting, because, actually, I found if you sit too long with it in the beginning, it’s counterproductive. You just get discouraged a few minutes. And once you get sow it, you bought a little more, plus you get more efficient and other things so you have more time. And then second would be, identify your purpose in life. You know, just Why are you doing? What you do? What is the, you know, what’s the underlying thing? And at different times in life that might be different, you know, my 20s, it was to make money, you know, and to be successful. In my 30s, it was to, you know, start a family, you know, in different, different times, and now it’s been more, how do I share mindfulness actresses and try to help, you know, business community operate a different way. So it may change over time, but it’s pretty important to look in and say, Okay, what’s just really driving me right now? Really came out of teaching at the university and meeting with a lot of seniors. Why are you here on that? Well, I don’t know. You know, Mom and Dad said they’d pay for it if I studied business or engineering, I chose business and say, Well, next thing is, you know, job, wife, house, responsibilities, you wake up, kids, you wake up and you’re 50, spend a little time figuring out why you’re here, because we spend so much time at work, you know. And if you can find, if you can find employment where you have a purpose, just gets a lot easier. So it’s worth spending time on, on that. And then vision. Peter Drucker said, you know, the best way to predict the future is created. We can actually, you know, Vision things people are some people are familiar with the sports it’s can be done in business too, and it can be done at home. You know, you can actually use visualization techniques. And then finally, I just end with part of that is habits. You know, we are our habits. Spend some time, you know, watching yourself, calendaring your time when we they say something like 95% of our time is just the next habitual thing that we do, our intention actions are like 5% so if we can form those habits to be consistent with our vision, then those things work even when we’re offline or working with, you know, subconsciously, or alternatively, often the subconscious is sabotaging us. What we think we want and say we want is inconsistent with our habits. So if habits and our commitments and vision are inconsistent, it’s really difficult to make a lot of progress, because we go backwards a lot.

Scott Ritzheimer

So true. It’s so true. So Eric, there’s a question I like to ask all my guests, and it is this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

Yeah, I would say it’s that. You know, mindfulness doesn’t mean not making money, or not making profit or sacrificing that mindful. It just means there’s a different way to do it. It, it can be more effective than just getting we’ve got busy down in America. We’ve got busy, you know, running and stressed down, but it can just make us a lot more focused and and making money has to be okay in a capitalist society. So it isn’t like just not doing that. It’s just finding a different way to do it, different way to be in business, a different way to make I call it profit with presence.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah. So good,so good. So where can folks they’re hearing this, they’re in that state. They’ve had some success, but it’s just not checking the boxes like they thought that, like, where can they find more out about your book and even connect with you on?

Dr. Eric Holsapple

Our website, Living the Gap spelled out.org and also the books available Profit with Presence: The Twelve Pillars of Mindful Leadership on Amazon.

Scott Ritzheimer

Fantastic either way. Thank you so much for being on the show. We’ll put both those links in the show notes for anyone listening, go ahead and grab a copy of it. Highly recommend it. Appreciate you being on the show. Thanks for being here, Eric. And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care you.

Contact Dr. Eric Holsapple

Dr. Eric Holsapple is a successful developer and entrepreneur who has used mindfulness to transform his life and business and helps others do the same. Eric has a PhD in Economics, has been a real estate CEO and developer for nearly 40 years, lectured real estate at Colorado State University for 20 years, and practiced yoga and meditation for 30 years. Holsapple has a unique perspective on how merging business and mindfulness can be a catalyst in changing lives. Eric is the founder of Living in the Gap. His popular workshops teach CEOs and professionals a different way to operate more mindfully while improving the bottom line.

Want to learn more about Dr Eric Holsapple’s work at Living in the Gap? Check out his website at https://www.livinginthegap.org/ You can also grab a copy of his book on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3SeoO8y

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