Moments Later: Marketing Lessons from Spiritual Guides

I love to learn from new people with very different backgrounds than me. I read plenty of marketing books like most marketing professionals but I prefer to get new ideas or views from those who aren’t thinking about business or marketing – but life and just being.

Being

An interview with Seth Godin was tweeted several months ago and I thought I’d list to the podcast. I enjoy Seth’s marketing wisdom and irreverent attitude and found the interview valuable. But the bigger gift was hearing about Krista Tippet. She is a host of a wonderful podcast called On Being that is rich with guests with a range of backgrounds from physicist, BuJu’s (Jews who become Buddhist), mathematicians and acoustical ecologist. She has interviewed some amazing people but it is often the titles of the shows that hook me in.

The Poetry of Ordinary Time

A Voice for the Animals

The Losses and Laughter We Grow Into

Whale Songs and Elephant Love

Civility, History and Hope

Translating for The Dalai Lama

Worlds that Shimmer

Compassion: Edge States

Driven by Flavor

Creativity and the Everyday

Restoring our Senses

On Krista
Krista has the ability to find and calmly talk with people who are extraordinary smart, bursting with wisdom and soulful at the same time. Her career began as a reporter and she found herself living in divided Berlin in the 1980’s as a stringer for The New York Times. She received a Master of Divinity at Yale and later began to envision a radio conversations about spiritual and intellectual content of faith and its role in public life. Her show is on many NPR, APM, Serius and other stations although I listen as I walk to her podcast form iTunes. Her voice is calming, intelligent and insightful all at the same time. Listening to her interviews is like a walking meditation with friends.

My weekend walks are now filled with listening to her interviews. She recently talked with Gordon Hempton on Silence and the Presence of Everything. He is an audio ecologist who has spent his career listening in nature. He records the sounds of the quiet in forests, mountains and along the ocean. He had so much wisdom about how the music of a culture mimics these patterns heard in nature.

His calm and wistful voices led you down many quiet and calming paths to help us hear – really hear what is in front of us. He said that in order to truly hear, watch a child who hasn’t been acculturated in school as he or she listens to the world. They hear it all, they don’t edit and judge.

Gordon said something in the interview that really made me think. We are a visual-centric species. We learn from seeing. Yet we have eye lids that allow us to block out seeing the world. However, the same isn't true for our ears. We don't have 'ear lids'. We are always listening and can't turn it off.

Hearing New Ideas

If you aren’t listening to Krista’s interviews, I think you are missing something powerful and rewarding. After each show, I find that it makes me think about lessons that can be translated from these different disciplines of science, religion, art, music and prayer. These are rarely discussions about business but more focused on other aspects of our human experiences.

I think I am a better marketer listening to these insights because like a tuning fork, I’m realigned to some new frequencies of thought.

I get to see or understand things from an every changing perspective as she introduces me to new people, places and ideas. When I wrestle with a perplexing marketing program, having an expanded view of people only helps me to breakdown an issue to get to the human elements.