#044 We need a new future | Carmen Murray

Carmen Murray, guest · [04:56]The first 40 years of your life is research. The next 40 years of your life is implementation. And my first 40 years I I look at everything the map and the plan that I've inherited from my parents from culture and society and I was like hang on this needs to look different. This is not my values. I don't believe in this. I don't believe in the future I'm being sold. I sometimes feel like we're being herded Into a future, and guided into a future that we can see is not a good one. And just participating in the system that is perpetuating all of these, these atrocities that we are seeing in the world. And, and taking a step back and doing an audit of my own life. How am I participating in this? Where in my career am I participating in this? Where am I participating, in the conversations, in the friends that I have, in the products that I buy, in how I voice my opinions? Those self-reflections were so important for me to really realize how deep it goes and how, how every one of us are participating in, you know, what we are seeing playing out in the world. And we might not realize it, but you can't become conscious unless you go out to go and see and go and look and you're curious. And I think for me, that is when I started realizing all these things that we're seeing in the world, and it's almost like I don't know how to explain explain it to you. I see things and my my head starts hurting. Like I'll start seeing things and I think, can nobody else see what I'm seeing? You know, this is like crazy. And then I realized that it's such a outsider journey, and it's so difficult to sometimes say what you see. And then I started making friends with futurists, and I started realizing this is normal. Nobody believes us in any way. Just speak your truth. And Faye Popcorn said it to me so beautiful. You know what, Carmen? You're not just a seer, you're a sayer. To be a futurist, you need to be a seer and a sayer. And I think that was a pivotal stage for me where I realized, hang on, this is really where I'm meant to be because that's the change I can bring into the world, is to say this is what we are seeing in the world, but how can we alchemize these trends and build a better future? Because we're building a world with fear, not with trust. And trust builds bridges, fear builds walls.

Carmen Murray, guest · [08:59]And in the middle of all of this, Carmen is studying her postgraduate diploma at Henley Business School, her PG dip, and studying to become a numerologist. Two very different disciplines. But what I learned through all of this is duality, is nothing in life exists without duality. And in this time, in this moment of complete confusion of who I am, ChatGPT launches and my entire marketing world is disrupted. Because I'm like, huh, the way I'm doing marketing is, this is not looking good for me. I'm going to have to change direction and I just like thought of just like conquer my business and all of that. And I realized, hang on. The future doesn't happen to us, we happen to the future. And this is in that pivotal moment where I said, okay, what is the duality of artificial intelligence? It's authentic intelligence. So in the age of artificial intelligence, we need authentic intelligence. That's obvious. What is authenticity? And I went down this rabbit hole. I think that's the autism part of me, just going deep, deep, deep, deep, like a nerdy into this whole world. And that's how Authentic Intelligence Framework was born. It basically says, in order for us to work in tandem with artificial intelligence, we need to be our best versions of ourselves because technology is a reflection of who we are. It's a mirror to who we are. So you need to work on yourself. And there's seven intelligences that you need to work on in order for you to lead in these times. And it's emotional intelligence, foresight intelligence, it is spiritual intelligence. It is culture intelligence, collective intelligence, creative intelligence, and then learning intelligence, which is all about the curiosity. And in diving into this and just going deeper and deeper and deeper, it has just become very prevalent to me how it shows up in strategy, how it shows up in how I even find trends, and how I look at the future. It has completely shaped the way that I build things and how I build businesses and how I help with marketing initiatives, even conscious leaders. The whole community has, has, has been built on the authentic intelligence framework. Every masterclass, every podcast, every piece of curiosity, every way that we connect as women has all been because of authentic intelligence.

Carmen Murray, guest · [20:29]Conscious Leaders is a movement. you don't need to have a membership or anything. Yeah, you just come. But anyway, I started it. I wanted to do a social media. It's actually how weird this actually worked. I wanted to do a social media post on Women's Day 2023 to say, let's be conscious leaders, happy Women's Day, something in that line. And I was like, there's a ring to this. This sounds great. But I've always in the back of my mind always wanted to start a women empowerment group. Because my industry, we have a lot of women in it, and I think it's a wonderful opportunity for us to network. And I thought, oh, you know what, let me just try and see if I can create a logo out of it, because I'm a creative. I start the other way around. And you know how they say ideas start shaping the moment, or, you know, as you start working on them, this great big idea starts being born. And I was just following the curiosity, and the more I started doing things, the more, and I started, and it was the weirdest thing. And then I get invited to this woman's event and that woman's event, and I haven't even done anything. And that whole energy and motion. Anyway, January, on Oprah Winfrey's birthday, unintentionally, I didn't realize it at the moment, I started Conscious Leaders in 2024. And it just started like, and it just started growing and growing and growing. I was like, oh my word, this is amazing. But my whole thing was, I have no idea what I'm doing. I, I don't, I'm not in corporate. I don't work in those environments with all these big words, intersectionality, and all of these buzzwords that are being used. I just want to create a platform where we as women come together without the roles and the titles, where we can just be human beings and come authentically as we are. I'm building an arc and build the arc and they will come. And now we're almost 7,000. and we, you know, in our database and all of that, it's really incredible. but I think the big thing that I've realized in terms of building this communities, you can't do it alone. Like, I need your voice and your voice and everybody else's voices in order to keep the momentum going. People only have to come and listen to Carmen Murray. They'll be bored. I mean, you'll be very bored. So it's bringing all of our voices to the table. And I, what I've really loved and enjoyed is because I, you know, with my podcast, I decided I'm going to change it from the Carmen Murray show and I'm going to focus on conscious leaders. And we brought so many women onto the show. And then afterwards, they would say, oh my gosh, I've just been invited to my second podcast, or I have just been promoted, or I've just received this opportunity, or I've just met somebody incredible because I was on the podcast. And that made me realize, you know, this is really a movement and it's making an impact. And I think that was basically that is, that is gives me all the courage to go out and keep on going, because I can see the impact that it's making, in the, in the, in the women's lives.

Carmen Murray, guest · [23:42]We have a lot of work to do in terms of navigating politics. and be, becoming very good at politics and not under, not looking at politics as if it's what we're seeing in the world, but really knowing that we need to fight for something bigger than ourselves. I think the other thing that we really need to start working on is negotiation. Negotiation is not just about your salary. It is not just about, your own benefits, but it's how are you negotiating for policy change? How are you negotiating for the change that you want to see? and really being fearless, but audacious inside out. And I think that when you do it from that way, if it's audacious outside in, you are building something like, I like to call it, if you crack an egg from the outside, it means death. If you crack an egg from the inside, it means life. So if you build something with courage from the inside out, knowing what you're fighting for is so much easier and you have so much more, courage To see the change and be the change and actually negotiate for it. I think what we definitely need to start considering is doing audits on the people in our circles and know what they are all about, because you can't build this future with people that are all about themselves, only an individualistic. We need to start thinking bigger, because we don't have much time. I don't believe we have much time. We have a lot of work to do in a very short amount of time, and if we want to move the needle, we need to come together. And you can't build a future with people that are, that are only there to exploit, exclude, and extract.

Carmen Murray, guest · [25:54]And I understand that we have to bring our mask and we have to wear them sometimes. But I, I want to go back with this word authenticity because there's different types of authenticity. There's authenticity where you consciously authentic, meaning that I know that I need to work on myself and who I am as a person. But then there is also rigid authenticity. That is, I am who I am and I will show up and be who I am. You just get out of my way. And that rigid authenticity is not the authenticity that we can build with because you have to take your layers of your mask down, not this masked up version. And that's what I was in when I realized I've been masking my entire life. It was when I found out I had autism. So I had to go and do the work. Then there is, the authenticity where you adapt, where you are in certain rooms and you know that you can only bring that part of your authentic self, but everybody must know that when they're in contact with you, you're still the same person. And that to me is important because we have a world that is now, we are in the post-truth era 2.0 society. We have corporate unrest. I mean, we're seeing this in our trends, corporate unrest, the boycotting that is happening, there's a lot of instability, the geopolitics, all of these things, the AI and, and the deepfake world that is exploding. There is a time not so far away from here where we're not going to be able to know what's real and what's not. And we must at least be able to tell who's real and who's not in our circles because we're going to need to have people around us that we can build a new world of trust.

Carmen Murray, guest · [33:43]I think we're doomed if we think that we can be successful the way we've been taught. I think we're doomed, and I think we need to really get rid of that idea very quickly if we think it still exists. And just to go back, it's definitely about the beginner's mindset. I think success building in the future that we are going into is all about being okay not having titles. It's more about the questions you ask than the answers you receive. You see, we've, our systems are all about the answers now. We need to ask better questions. I think that it's the hierarchy, we need to build community. And offline community, face-to-face community, those are, those are the things that are important to create success because success will now only be achieved when we come together. There's a thing called joint up thinking, is when we become smarter when we actually join up our thinking. And we so underestimate how powerful the human mind is. And if you look at artificial intelligence, it's mirroring us. I mean, people keep on forgetting it. It comes from an authentic place. And it's, we're turning AI into a god. And so we're not even realizing how we're giving away our power. I mean, there's so many people out there that are using AI. And I'm not anti-AI. I don't have a problem with the tool. I have a problem how we use the tool. I have a problem with us outsourcing our thinking and not being able to tap into our own humanity and being willing and brave enough to go within. You know, there's a reason why not, we are 80% water, right? How much, we've only explored 5% of the ocean. That is exactly the message that the nature is giving us. You could only explore 5% of me, but you could, you're exploring space like crazy, but you can only take 5% of handling the oceans, the deepest of the oceans. So why are we not going deeper within? And so damn deep, because if you go so deep, it can only get better, and this world would be so different.