In the “What I’ve Learned” podcast, Arianna Huffington sits down with people she loves and admires, in fields from music and technology to sports and business, to explore the lessons they’ve learned over the extraordinary past year about themselves, their lives, and what they truly value.
This week, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff on meditation, unlocking his workforce, and reshaping both himself and his company for the future.
On how meditation helps him lead Salesforce into the future:
“We’re creating this new future, and the future will probably include parts of the past. But there’s many things that we’ve learned in our digital reality that we’re going to keep. And we’re reshaping. I’m reshaping my company, Salesforce. I’m also reshaping myself. And I have new skills and tools as a leader. And as I move forward into the future, and as we all get vaccinated and get back into a more normal society, or a ‘new normal’ society, I will take some of these lessons with me and I will recreate myself again. Look, I realize I’m not the same person I was 22 years ago. But I am here, right now. So I just realized, OK, what can I do right now? How do I come together right now in this moment as a leader? And meditation helps me answer that key question.”
On helping his employees nurture their mental health:
“I had to create a whole new way to run my company. We have to enable new skills for our employees, like mental health skills. We also have to do a lot more communication. We have to really get people out of paralysis like they were at the beginning of the pandemic. Now we have to unlock them and to get them back to being productive and successful and moving forward in their lives.”
On the lessons the pandemic has taught him about what he needs in his life:
“We have to do all the other things in our life to keep our mental health. Yes, it’s about spiritual life, but I need to work out, too. And I also need to spend time with my family. And I need to work, by the way. All of those things are important. And when I do all of those things, I feel pretty good every day. And when I’m all of a sudden forgetting to do one of those things, I’m not. So that’s what I’ve really learned.”
To hear more from Marc, listen to this full episode of “What I’ve Learned,” available wherever you get your podcasts.