What is toxic positivity, and why is it harmful to an impact leader's goals? And what do you do instead of it? These are the kinds of questions that I had the honor of having a conversation with Saen Raja. Satyan is a long term leader in the impact space, and I hope you'll listen to this episode because one of the things we cover is that when you are leading from a place of toxic positivity, it's really hard for people to trust you and lean into your brand. And if you can find some other strategies, you'll be much more effective in reaching your goals. So take a listen, tell your friends, and let's get into it. Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life.

Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could go to Apple Podcasts or whatever app you're listening to the show on, hit subscribe, do a rating and a review. It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thanks so much. Today, I am really, really excited to introduce you to Satyan Raja. And our topic today is toxic positivity and leadership in the impact space. Satyan is the founder and CEO of Warrior Sage and is a renowned teacher, mentor, and guide for his ability to move companies beyond the old business model of struggle into a new paradigm of passion, purpose, freedom, and the magic of flow. Sahin has been founding, building and scaling businesses for over 30 years.

Saeed, welcome to the show.

Paul, a pleasure and an honor to be here and to share with you with our good friends.

Such an honor to be here, and there's a lot to talk about when it comes to toxic positivity and more healthy forms of leadership. But before we get into that really important topic, give, if I'm a listener, I'm like, who is this person, and what have they done before this podcast went live? Like, give our listeners just a little bit about you and your background and your back story so that they could have a sense of who who you are, what you're bringing, the experience you're bringing to the show.

Thank you, Paul. So I come from a business family from my father's side going back generation. So I grew up in all types of business from an Indian family, big businesses and small businesses, medium size. And I've been through the gamut, apprenticing with my family throughout all the years. And my mother's side are all Gandhian advocates and and connected to social service and making positive impact. And so these two particular influences in my life, business and social impact, have really guided my life since I've been quite young, and that has led me to the journey of diving deep into consciousness, personal growth, human potential, spirituality, and then creating organizations and businesses that further the development of our of our consciousness and our inner alignment with the whole. So that's been my journey for many, many years, and I've had the blessing of mentoring many CEOs, founders of various other types of positive impact companies as well as leading my own companies.

Beautiful. So this topic of posit so this topic of toxic positivity, give us a little bit of like, what does that even mean? And why are you so passionate about talking about toxic positivity and what you're seeing in the business world when it comes to this topic?

Well, we've heard for a long time about toxic negativity, toxic negativity. And in the ancient wisdom traditions of the east, we always talk about there's things that come in a duality, come in opposites. And so if you have toxic negativity, there's also its rear ugly neighbor or friend or family or brother or or sibling, which is toxic positivity. Now toxic negativity, we know about it. Someone being constantly acidic energy of a space that draws and sucks your energy away, a a sense of separation and criticism and criticalness. And just anyone who's in that toxic negative state or a space or a culture that has that is very off putting and and really destroys the human spirit and doesn't call upon our best. So we all know this. We've been dealing with this.