Unleashing Your Inner Potential Through Mindfulness With Scott Shute

Mindfulness is essential in modern leadership. It helps foster greater awareness of what happens within yourself and how you cultivate deeper connection with the people around you – vital things for someone who wants to lead with inspiration. Tony Martignetti sits down with Scott Shute, co-founder of Changing Work and author of The Full Body Yes, to take a deep dive into the transformative power of mindfulness at the leadership level. Scott shares how his personal meditation practice sparked a revolution at LinkedIn, which eventually gave birth to the groundbreaking Mindfulness and Compassion Programs. He also talks about his transition from corporate to solopreneurship, all while staying true to his values of compassion and joy.

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Unleashing Your Inner Potential Through Mindfulness With Scott Shute

It is my honor to introduce my guest, Scott Shute. Scott is the Founder of Changing Work and a former LinkedIn executive. He's at the intersection of the workplace and ancient wisdom traditions. Scott blends his experience as a Silicon Valley executive with his lifelong practice and passion as a wisdom seeker and teacher.

In his role At LinkedIn, Scott was the Head of Mindfulness and Compassion Programs. He has pioneered workplace mindfulness programs and advanced the discussion around compassion in the work context. His latest venture, Changing Work, seeks to curate the best practice of conscious business and make them more widely available. He's the author of the award-winning book and a wonderful book, The Full Body Yes.

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It is truly an honor to welcome you to the show, Scott.

Thanks very much. I'm glad to be here.

It's so wonderful to have you on. I'm looking forward to spending some time. I've really admired your work over the years. You've done some amazing things, but it is always a journey to get here. I'm looking forward to understanding more about you and what brought you to doing this work. We're going to do that.

That sounds good.

A Career Focused On Mindfulness And Compassion

As we do in the show, we explore people's stories to what's called flashpoint. These are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. In a moment, I'll turn it over to you and you can share what you're called to share. Along the way, we'll pause and see what's showing up. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Let's do this thing. Take it away. What are your flashpoints?

That's an interesting way of thinking about it. It calls to mind a strobe light. Life is happening in a strobe. If you're at a club dancing, a strobe illuminates this in-between moment. Life is there the whole time. That's what I thought about. For me, there are some big things that define my life. On the one hand, I was an executive here in Silicon Valley. I worked for LinkedIn for almost a decade. I had a career that culminated. I was the VP of global customer operations. I handled customer service or all the customer-facing things that weren't sales. That was a big part of who I am.

There's this other part of who I am that started much younger.  When I was thirteen, I started a meditation or contemplation practice. It's a huge part of my life. I've been teaching contemplation practices and leading sessions since I was in college. It’s a huge part of my life that I never talked about at work. The two seemed very separate. I got to LinkedIn and our CEO was talking about meditation, his own practice using Headspace. I thought, “Maybe I could bring some of what I do to the workplace.”

Long story short, I started by leading one session. It was on a Thursday afternoon at 4:30 and there was 1 person there. The lead-up to that was that I was terrified about it. I was like, “What are people going to think of me?” I had all this inner noise, the ego part. I thought, “What are people going to think of me? Will this affect my brand? Will this affect how people perceive what I do?” I finally let that go and led this session. There was one person and I was like, “Fine.” The next week, there were three. The next week there were five, and then it turned into a regular thing.

Over time, it turned into a bigger thing. People knew that I did it so they'd invite me. As an example, the CFO would have an offsite with 400 finance people and invite me to kick it off with a meditation. It could be the chief marketing officer. It’s the same thing. I would lead an offsite. It became natural and I became more comfortable being that person. That's who I've always been, but I became more comfortable showing everybody that that's who I'd always been. It led to a full-time gig. I, with the help of our CEO, created my own role. I was the head of mindfulness and compassion programs. I did that for a few years.

It was then time to leave, do something else, and bring what I was doing to an even broader audience than the LinkedIn employees. I ended up writing a book in 2021 and it came out. I'm on my own and out in the world still with the same mission of changing work from the inside out but trying to do it in a slightly different way. That's what I'm up to.

That’s wonderful. I've had guests who focus on trying to get mindfulness into schools and into young adults. It's such a great thing to see. You're not too young, no offense.

I'm 55. My birthday happened not long ago. I'm a little grayer.

The reality is that for thirteen-year-olds to start thinking that this is something that they want to do, starting to practice it, and then to evolve into teaching, it's really wonderful to see that. My TED Talk is Don't Check Yourself at the Door. It's all about bringing elements of who we are into the workplace. To have that courage to say, “I'm going to do this,” is scary. All those things come up, but it's about not leaving elements of who you are. You never know what that might do. It could lead to a role and a whole slew of things. Look at where you are. You're the case study for what I was trying to tell people to bring your hobbies or who you are into the room.

A lot of people ask, “How do I get this role myself?” Every situation is different but it always starts with doing it. Don't wait for somebody to anoint you. Be that person. I did it as a volunteer for 3 or 4 years. I led a team of 100 volunteers. My opening was when our CEO gave the commencement address at Wharton in 2018 and he talked about compassion. I thought that was pretty brave because he had talked about compassion in more friendly environments. This is buttoned-down Wharton. He's an alumnus there.

The next day, he's on Good Morning America and all they want to talk about is compassion in leadership and compassion in business. I saw my opening. I said, “You told the whole world compassion was the most important thing that they could do and we're not really doing anything about it here for our own employees.” We crafted a role and some things that we could do.

I wouldn't have been able to get that job had I not done the 3 or 4 years of volunteering before that and proved that this is not some hobby for me. I didn't discover mindfulness on a retreat and all of a sudden wanted to do something about it. This is who I am at the core. I'd led over 500, 600, or 800 meditation sessions. I had become an expert and displayed that expertise. When an opportunity arose, I was already there. If you want the thing, do it. Start doing it. No one's going to stop you.

If you want something, just start doing it. No one's going to stop you.

It's the old adage of, “Prepare yourself. When the opportunity shows itself, then you're able to step into it.” That's really important. It’s whatever it is that is your passion or whatever it is that lights you up. It doesn't have to be mindfulness, but it could be something that is your meditation, whatever that thing is.

That's right. I also like this idea because I was a little scared. I was like, “What do I do now?” I always stayed in my lane. What I mean by that is I am the worldwide expert in being me like you are the worldwide expert in being you. As long as we're not pretending to be something else and we start with something that says, “In my experience,” or, “Here's what works for me and I'm here to share it,” then you can't go wrong. If we try to pretend we're something else or that we have more than we do, that's when things fall off the rails.

Transition To A Broader Platform

Maintain that humility but also know who you are enough to be able to say, “This is where I can really thrive in this particular area.” I'm going to venture to ask you about the next part of your journey, in which you decide to go out into the world and say, “How do I take the broad leap outside of a corporate environment of being the comfort or the blanket?” What was it like? Did you meet immediate success or was it more of an, “I don’t know.”

I did have some immediate success in that I signed a contract with my biggest customer to date three weeks after I left LinkedIn. That was a nice pillow landing. To back up, the work I do is that I'm a public speaker, I do workshops, I do executive coaching, and I build things for teams, at least that's what I had started doing. When you start that business, you never know when or how much business you're going to have and where it comes from.

My first gig arose from a free event that I had done. I had agreed to do this speaking event for free. This woman had seen me and I didn't even know she existed. What happened was my next-door neighbor sent me an email. He said, “Our VP at work  recommended your book to the whole company.” I said, “That's cool.”

Shortly after that, I realized that I was going to be leaving LinkedIn and probably could use an introduction, so I reached back out. I was like, “Could you introduce me to this leader?” I didn't even know she knew I existed, but here she was telling the world about my book. Things happen in a strange way. For me, I feel like life provided me with this nice stepping-off point. It wasn't always comfortable but it helped ease the transition from LinkedIn to what I do. From there, you follow your nose.

One of the things I do is lead this organization called Changing Work. We started by gathering people who were practitioners such as coaches and consultants. We've now included everyone but we started with coaches and consultants. The truth is, for the people who do this work, it's challenging. The last couple of years have been really challenging in this environment, especially in the tech environment where I come from. We're grateful when things come along and we're grateful to have the help of others to get there.

We're recording this around Thanksgiving time. You're grateful for the moments that show up. You have to also be ready for the times when it's not quite as bountiful and you say, “How do we take these times to recharge and maybe look at what we're preparing for as we go to the next chapter?” It's truly a rollercoaster ride.

Life for everyone is a rollercoaster ride. The practice always comes back to what we do anything for. We're trying to have joy. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is we want joy. We want to feel happy. The second part is we don't control anything. Our ability to live in the moment and truly be grateful for that moment, even if the moment is not exactly what we wanted, is where our joy emanates from, and that's hard.

If you rewind, you think about the election. The night before the election, pretty much we all knew that half the country was going to be sad or disappointed and half was going to be elated or somewhere in between. You didn't know which half. That's life. At any given moment, maybe for half of us, things are going well and for half of us, things are not going well on any particular day. Our challenge is to find joy in every moment regardless of if we got the thing that we wanted, and that's a really hard lesson.

I love that you're tapping into this. There's something about this. I had a conversation about joy. One of the things that came up was around how joy is a mindset or a way we perceive the world. If you see it that way, it's very different. Would you agree?

There's a difference between happiness and joy. I like to draw the distinction.

I agree.

For me, happiness is the stuff that happens to us. If my candidate got elected, if I got promoted, or if my significant other is nice to me, then I have a happy day. If all the opposite things happened like my candidate didn't get elected, I got let go at work, or I have a challenging conversation with my significant other, then I'm unhappy. That makes sense. This is how things work. That's the animal part of us reacting to the day. My belief system is we're more than just animals. We're more than a homo sapien. What I think about it is I'm Scott, and Scott has this personality. The personality is the body, the emotions, and the mind. Those are all what I would call lower-world creations in this world of duality, so happy and unhappy.

Beyond all that, we have this true essence. I would call it soul. You can call it whatever you like. There are a lot of philosophies and models out there. When we live life from the soul's perspective, the soul is inherently joyful. The soul inherently doesn't care if things are good or things are bad on a day-to-day basis. The soul is here to learn a set of lessons and learn how to be pure love, which is what it is. When we operate from that perspective of pure love, we can have joy. That's the practice. When we do the practice, whether it's mindfulness, prayer, contemplation, or taking a walk in the woods and communing with nature, we're letting some of that animal part slip away or fade away its attention or its grab on us and allow living from soul to shine through. That's where we get joy.

When we operate from the perspective of pure love, we can have joy.

What you're sharing is so resonant with me. It shows that you've been in practice with mindfulness for so long that it's who you are. You're able to tap into these elements of how we remain in this place of knowing that things are happening and we're able to stay in our place of inner calm in the moment. That's one thing that I am noticing from you in this conversation. It's cool.

Challenges Into The New Phase

I'm going to have to put you off your kilter a little bit. Tell me one of the most challenging situations you've had, especially as you've come into this place of getting out into the world and putting the book out there. You've shared a lot of great moments, but what are some things that have been the most challenging or things that you were surprised by?

Life. Life is challenging. There's the stuff that we deal with in life. I, like everyone else, deal with life and death, losing loved ones, the pain of relationships that don't work exactly the way you want, or the pain of life working exactly not the way you want. That shows up for me like it shows up for everybody else. If I think about the journey as a solopreneur, there are pros and cons. The pros are I have a lot of flexibility and I'm doing exactly what I want, or at least that's the intention.

The con is there have been times, and it has been three years since I left the corporate environment, when I woke up one day or realized that I wasn't doing exactly what I wanted to. As an example, there was a period of time when I wanted to do speaking gigs, coaching gigs, and teach workshops. I'm a teacher, a coach, and a speaker. This is what I want to do. The truth is in order to get those, sometimes you have to do business development.

I found myself 2 or 3 months doing so much business development. I was trying to do a certain thing. I was doing twenty sales calls a week that were all the same thing and I was disgusted by it. At the end of this one quarter, I went, “I'm not doing that anymore.” That happens. It happens with each of us. We have these intentions. When we start doing the work towards our intentions, we kick off a whole series of activities. Sometimes, we look back and go, “I'm not doing anything I want,” or, “I'm not doing things exactly how I want,” whether it's in our career, our relationships, our health, or everything. It's part of being human. I am not immune to that at all. It happens in cycles.

The last word you said was so important. They’re cycles. We have to be able to recognize the cycles that we're in over a period of time. We also have to be able to step away and have these moments of like, “I'm on this path. Do I like the path I'm on right now? What do I need to change? What do I need to lean into? Was this a season that I needed to go through to then let this pass and move on?”

It’s to be able to let go of our fiercely held opinions. As an example, you might have had a set of beliefs 3 years ago, 30 years ago, or 3 minutes ago and that kicked off a set of actions. You found yourself in a place where it's like, “Is this really making me happy? Is this giving me joy? Is this how I want to serve?” Sometimes, they're in misalignment. T o be able to say, “Looking at my intentions, objectives, the things on my calendar, and what I'm doing, is this still it?” Maybe a few years ago, I loved a certain activity and now, I'm like, “I'm done with that. It's time to do something else.” It’s to be okay with that, let go of it, and say, “What now?”

The Full Body Yes

I love that phrase, “What now?” That's fine to be able to let some things pass. Call it an experiment. Call it a thing that serves its purpose to get you to a certain place. It's okay. Let it go. I love where we're tapping into. It's a great natural progression to talk about the book. Let's talk about The Full Body Yes. You've already sprinkled a few of them in there. For those who haven't read it, tell us what you want people to take away from that book. Before you do that, writing a book, was this something that you were like, “No big deal,” or was it like, “It’s not an easy process for me.”

I knew I was going to write a book ever since I was fifteen. I'm a writer. It's one of the things I like to do. I'd never written a book but I always knew that I was going to. For the last couple of years, every once in a while, I checked in and it was never quite right. I was driving home from this event with one of my friends in December 2019. My friend is driving. He has this funny look on his face. He looks at me and says, “The universe has told me to tell you it's time to write your book.” We both laugh like, “Oh my God.” I then went quiet and checked in internally. I was like, “That feels right. It feels like it's the right time.”

He introduced me to a few editors. I chose one and I sat down with the editor. I had all these stories but I had never put a book together so she helped me put together an outline. Once I had the outline, I was good. I started writing in April 2020. Remember where we were in April 2020. We had all been sent home or I had been sent home. I traded commuting time for writing time. I got down all the stories that I'd been telling in anecdotes or when I did speaking gigs and it flowed out. I wrote the book in ten weeks, which is extraordinarily fast. What I'd say is that it was pregnant. I was pregnant with this idea and it was the exact right time. It was getting ready to bloom for 30-something years.

What is this book? At that moment in time, I was the head of mindfulness and compassion at LinkedIn. People would ask me, “What does that even mean? What does it mean to be compassionate at work or generally?” I have this four-part thing about compassion. That's how the book is laid out. Let me give you my definition of compassion. For compassion, there are lots of good definitions but I like this one. It's our capacity.

Our capacity ebbs and flows all the time for three things. The first one is to have awareness of another person or a group of people. The second one is to have a mindset of kindness towards them or you could go all the way to say unconditional love for them. The third is to have the courage to take action. What I realized as I was thinking about my own journey is that our ability to do those three things is highly dependent on our own development. That's why mindfulness and compassion go together. In order to have compassion, we have to develop a practice of self-awareness.

It starts with our own selves, the same three things. Do I have awareness of myself? Do I have a mindset of kindness towards myself or unconditional love towards myself? The third part is, do I have the courage to take action? Once I know those things about myself, am I willing to do the work to become a better person? Am I willing to do the work to operate from the soul or love part of myself instead of the animal or fear, anger, and survival part of myself? The book is laid out in that way. 90% of it starts with our own journey. A lot of the stories are my own stories of where I've messed things up and a few times where I got things right. That then lets us start to operate with other people and be able to be of service to other people once we get it right.

There's something about the way that you shared that. I love the framework. There's something about this. Even looking at your journey to getting to do the work you were doing at LinkedIn, you modeled the way that framework. It’s your awareness of, “I do this thing. This is mindfulness,” and having the courage to be able to go in and say, “I'm going to step in and do this.” You model the way for this practice. You are the embodiment of your work.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

What I also love is that you said you were pregnant with this book, which is an interesting thing. A lot of authors find themselves in this place of you know when it's time because you start to feel this urge of like, “I got so many thoughts in my head and they're starting to take shape into this one body. I need to start to put them into that framework.” One of the messages that I often say is, “Collect a lot of dots and then start connecting them. What's the theme that you start to see? How do they come together?”

Another thing to think about is to go where the energy is. For 35 years, I didn't have the energy to write the book. It wasn't the right season for me, and then it was. That is true of so many things in our life. If we feel like we're pushing a rock uphill, reevaluate. It might not be the right season for that particular thing.

If we feel like pushing a rock uphill when doing something, we might reevaluate. Perhaps it's not the right season for that particular thing.

What Scott Learned During His Journey

As we come to near the end of our time, I want to ask this. What's something that you learned about yourself in this journey that you haven't shared? It may be a lesson or something that you haven't tapped into. It may be something that is in the book or elsewhere, something that you want to share about your journey.

At a high level, my whole journey is moving from me to we. I was an achiever. Everything about my life since I was a kid, a young adult, and even now probably is shaped by a desire to be a high achiever.

A high-achieving mindfulness person. It almost feels counterintuitive.

Exactly. That's a huge part of my personality and strengths and weaknesses. I'm working on moving from, “How do I win?” because everything in achievement is about winning, or it used to be for me, to, “How do I serve?” I'm not saying I'm perfect at that. I'm trying to get to this place where I’m like, “How can I be of service?” I've learned a lot of things. I have talents but I'm more interested in how I use those talents to be of service instead of being on the path of winning.

When you are programmed to be a certain way, it's hard to change. The best I can do is to leverage those same skillsets and those same desires in a way that is of more service than just to myself. As part of that, I'll give you an example. I've been doing the solopreneur thing for three years. When I first started, I was like, “I love closing a deal. I love getting a speaking gig or a contract with a company. I love it.” My whole life, I've been trained on how to make money and how to win at business. I still love doing that.

The interesting thing is the latest incarnation of what we're doing, this Changing Work thing, is I've shifted it to be a nonprofit. It's a community. It's a nonprofit and I am not taking a share. It's a movement and a community. It feels a lot better to say, “Come join this movement. I am investing. I've built it for you. I hope that you come and play with us,” which feels a lot different than saying, “Come join Scott’s startup.” Energetically, I'm trying to put my actions where my mouth is. It also is more energetically aligned. I'm not going to say it's always comfortable but it's where I'm at. That's what I'm learning. That's who I'm trying to be.

It's a wonderful thing that you shared. There's something that I've started to tap into a lot, which is this idea of creating together. As solopreneurs, you think you have to close down and be like, “I can't share.” One of the quotes that drove me early days was, “Amateurs compete and professionals create.” That element of how we can create together by sharing with each other and finding ways to make a bigger pie, for me, has been one of the best ways to navigate the world. However, the challenge is when you run into people who don't feel that way or who say one thing and do the other, then you find yourself burnt out. That’s life.

We learn with each one of those scars, right?

In life, we learn with each one of those scars we get.

Yeah, exactly. It’s opening up that world of let's have the intention of a movement that is meant for everyone, not just one person.

That's right. That's where we're starting.

Impactful Books In Scott's Life

I could talk to you for hours but I want to be mindful of your time. I do have one last question for you.

Tell me.

What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why? If you want to cheat and go with 3 or 4 books, that's okay too.

The one that I keep coming back to is Hafiz. Hafiz and Rumi were both Persian poets, spiritual seekers, and perhaps even spiritual masters and teachers a long time ago. Their work has been translated, in the case of Hafiz, by Daniel Ladinsky. I find those words two things. One is to be very open regardless of your religious or spiritual traditions. It has been so long ago that they're not exactly tied to a specific religion, so people let go of their feelings about a certain religion. Two is that their words are so alive with the truth, which resonates for me deeply in terms of a higher thing. I love sharing quotes from both Rumi and Hafiz because they get straight to the point.

For me personally, the work of my spiritual teacher. My spiritual teacher is Harold Klemp. He is part of the spiritual path that I follow. I appreciate his work. It's a practical spirituality and it resonates with me. I'm clear that everybody has their own path, including me. I like my path. I appreciate what I have learned along the way.

One of the things I always come back to, and what you shared is amazing, is the timelessness of some of the wisdom that we take with us. You think, “In our current time, there's no way that this can still be applicable,” and yet it is. It still stays true.

In writing the book and doing some research, one of the things I've come to believe deeply is that there's nothing really new. As an example, I love James Clear's work on Atomic Habits. It's very simple and practical. 1 of the 2 main things in the book that he says is, “Our lives do not rise to the level of our goals. They fall to the level of our systems,” which is genius. The other is, “Our lives don't rise to the level of our intention. They fall to the level of how we operate.” That's genius. He's not the first one to say it. Archilochus said it many years ago with different words and in Greek or wherever he was.

If you look at every single philosopher, it's the same stuff. On the one hand, as a seeker and then also as a teacher trying to share, you could give up and go, “There's nothing new,” but it's the same point. What's new is the incarnation of it. The consciousness is different for James Clear in our time now than it was for Archilocus’ contemporaries many years ago.

Like it is different now, if I tell a story in the same vein, it is different than it was 20 years ago, 50 years ago, or 2,000 years ago. Our consciousness is different. Our consciousness needs different stories. It needs someone who can captivate our attention and our imagination and connect the dots for us. On one hand, there's nothing special about anything I have to share. On the other hand, there is. Everything's special about what I have to share because I'm a unique individual like you and everybody else is a unique individual.

That's brilliant. I love that you shared that. I read a ton of books. Sometimes, I'm like, “This isn't landing,” or there are some books that cut through the noise. The reason why is that some people tap into the right stories and context to make that point that has traveled through time and they've been the torch bearer for that message to come through to us. That's what makes the difference. It's not like, “Say the same thing over and over again.” It's about saying it with the right point of clarity and the amount of context to make it ring true.

It's resonance. Someone has that clear resonance of the divine flowing through them and can translate into the resonance of what's happening in the world to connect the dots. Think of it like a radio station. You have an old-time radio and you move the dial. It goes from static to your favorite song playing on the radio and it's super clear. That song is always playing. It's our ability to tap in to be that conductor so that we can all hear the music. Each of us is capable of being that conductor.

With the visuals there, the kids will never know that experience. They’ll never know the static of the radio. That's so cool. Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for the stories. I'm really inspired by all the things you do. Continue to do the work because it's making a difference.

Friends, if you care to join us in this movement to change work from the inside out, come check us out at ChangingWork.org. If you want to know more about me or if you want to reach out and get in contact, I'm at ScottShute.com.

You took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to invite you to do that but you did it. There you have it. Thanks to the audience for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving with lots to take in. Go pick up Scott's book as well. That’s a wrap.

Important Links

• Changing Work
•  Scott Shute
• The Full Body Yes
• Atomic Habits

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