Voices of Athena

Sit down with the highly accomplished members of Athena Alliance, an executive learning community for women leaders, to hear the personal tales behind their professional success. We learn the real story behind their inspiring executive careers — their fears, their failures, and what song they’re singing at karaoke. You don’t get to the top without creating some memorable stories along the way.

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A Force for Good with Christine Heckart

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Christine Heckart
Most people in the planet, maybe not 100%. But the great, great, great majority of people on the planet all want the same things. Love, they want to belong and to be accepted for who they are, they want a chance for happiness, and some reasonable level of prosperity. And then they want freedom, to exercise their free will. And like all of those are good things. And if we can just help people band together to get that for themselves. Everybody, the whole tide will lift everybody, all boats.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Hello and welcome to Voices of Athena, a podcast highlighting the personal stories behind some of the most successful women in business. I’m your host, Priscilla Brenenstuhl. Today we have the honor of sitting down with Tech CEO & Board Member Christine Heckart. She is the Founder and CEO of Xapa, the world’s only personal enrichment engine which is set to launch this year.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Christine my very first question that I want to ask you is how would you describe yourself?

Christine Heckart
That’s a tough one, I said it depends sort of contextually I guess on the situation, I would describe myself as very complex and extremely adaptable, and very driven to make an impact in the world and positive impact in the world and in people’s lives.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
What is your greatest ambition, aspiration.

Christine Heckart
I wrote a personal purpose statement when I was maybe around 32, give or take. And I said, I’m a human capitalist that helps people envision and achieve more than they ever thought possible. And I applied that to companies. You know, people can be a group of people in a company or it can be an individual, you know, just coming into the work world or into the world in general. So I love to think big thoughts and then figure out how to achieve them or help people figure out how to achieve them. Right now my biggest ambition is tied up in this company Xapa which is about helping every person on the planet become filthy and rich. And by enriched it’s, you know, the whole plethora of human experience but through the lens of positivity, you know, how do we become resilient and have a growth mindset and see the world through an optimistic lens and build up our communication and leadership skills and have great relationships in our lives and joy in our lives, like how can we give most of the things that you need to create that kind of enriched outcome are very learnable skills, if you and you can practice them, and you can build that kind of muscle, it’s not, you’re either born that way, or you’re not, these are muscle that you can build. And there’s so many people in the world, especially right now, who kind of are simmering in a social media stew of negativity. And they feel for a variety of maybe rational reasons, but they feel cynical and pessimistic about the future, they may be very lonely and disconnected in their lives. And what I want to do is to help create a world and we all have to do that together to create a world where there’s ripples of resilience and positivity, and we can raise everybody up, raise the state of the world up to be more of what we all wish it would be.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
It’s pretty ambitious. And ambition that, that I believe in and would love to get behind the mission that I can get behind for sure. The session that you had on conscious capitalism, you had two different you did have one on positivity, both some of my favorite in the 300 salons that we’ve done. And what I think about in this positivity, and I don’t know if I’m, this is not thought out question, but it’s something I knew I wanted to bring in. When I think about like conscious capitalism, I think about when I was kind of in my teenage years and early 20s, and this like kind of rebellion, and I’m Eileen loves, like socialism, and we just need to overthrow capitalism, and I was so focused on like, the words. And I love this idea that, you know, you know, capitalism can work with with thought and intention, that, that we make success, not just a measure of profitability, but a measure of well being. And then I think about that in terms for me of feminine leadership. And I just did this, like, kind of a piece on the last episode about feminine leadership. And, you know, I did the disclaimer that I’m not attaching it to gender, but attaching it to an idea of receptivity and inclusivity. And so kind of like this, you said, like positivity, right? So it’s not just this, and it’s not that to like, have a negative implication on negativity or the masculinity, but knowing that there’s like this, this whole picture to it. And, and it for so long, our focus has been so linear and on on one goal. And, and, and that that’s clearly not working, like you said, because there’s so much kind of isolation and disconnection. So I’m excited about what lies in the future of, of leadership and, and in conscious capitalism. And like you said, investing for good, you know, and they seem like, kind of far out ideas, even just five years ago, that are becoming more and more palpable, and I think the way that you talk about them, makes them more and more palpable,

Christine Heckart
and they are becoming real. So if you think about the construct of capitalism, in the last 200 years, it has lifted more people out of poverty than any other construct in the history of the world. So there are a lot of really wonderful things about capitalism that we need to hang on to. But it’s not all positive with capitalism. So there are many positive things. Innovation is largely a construct in the modern world that we live in all the innovations we enjoy, including like podcasts. Those are all constructs of capitalism. In fact, the only global changing innovation that has come out of a true socialistic economy is probably the AK 47 rifle. Now, it did change the face of the globe every bit as much as you know, the iPhone den or the cloud did that but not in a positive way. And the iPhone and the cloud aren’t all positive either. You know, there’s been one globe spanning innovation coming out of a non capitalistic system. And there’s been 1000s, you know, from electricity to modern conveniences that have come out of capitalism. So it’s a wonderful, wonderful construct. It’s capitalism, per se, isn’t the problem. The problem is that about 50 years ago, and there were a couple of key turning points, capitalism became became more narrow in its definition of success. There were a small number of people that proposed that the way to measure success in business in a capitalistic system is short term shareholder returns. And that’s the problem. That is the crux of the problem. That’s not any you know, that’s, that’s not part of capitalism, per se. It’s just the way the economy began to decide what success was. And the movement towards conscious capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, ESG, which is an outgrowth of that with very specific focus on environment and socialists, the social systems and government, those things are a broadening of the definition of success for capitalism. And so we can keep capitalism and change the definition of success to go back to really what it was originally, which is, the purpose of business is to balance the needs and well being of all the stakeholders in it, the the employees itself and the community in which you operate in the world in which you operate, and your partners and your suppliers and your customers, then capitalism becomes a potentially very, very powerful force for good in the world and the conscious capitalism movement, specifically states, much, much bigger idea than just ESG. It says, business should be a force for good in the world and in people’s lives. And I believe that in a lot of people believe that way more powerful than meat, your point on the patriarchy and matriarchy is very aligned to the proponents and propositions of conscious capitalism. A patriarchy is typically defined as a male at the top and it’s really male oriented energy. It’s the way you define success. A matriarchy is not the same as a patriarchy. But with a female at the top make treorchy is a completely different system in which energies are balanced, male and feminine energies are balanced. And that really is nothing to do with gender. That’s about the ying yang pole, and balance of nurturing and innovating, competing and helping, that when you get those things in balance, and there’s a lot of men who have way more feminine energy than many women have. So it’s really not anything to do with gender. But I do believe that we need a matriarchal system in the world right now, which is about bringing more balance and harmony to the energies that we’re bringing into the world and that we’re using to manage the world. And that’s where all of that inclusion that you’re talking about comes in. Because in our true matriarchy, you really have a very wide range of points of view, and perspectives and experiences and energies at the table and you’re trying to balance those to increase the well being of everybody.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
So beautifully poignantly said, you just like whoa, I’m over here. If I wasn’t trying to like not cut your audio and say, you know, my, my, like, Southern Baptist upbringing side of an Amen.

Christine Heckart
I mean, this is what this is all about. So obviously, I’m steeped in it and trying to live in and bring it forth every day. And you know, I do believe that we’re, the world is what we make it and we are all instruments of that which seeks to emerge. So you know, how can we help that which seeks to emerge? Find a place in the world

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
instruments of that which seeks to emerge? Yeah, I’m gonna soak that in for a minute. I really like that a lot.

Christine Heckart
Or credit Raj Sisodia, who is the father of conscious capitalism, he says, probably comes from an Indian proverb, but it was Raj who shared it with me and it like you, like you, it’s stuck with me.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
And just what you said this, you know, element of balance that keeps coming up because you know, even with social media, you know, that’s not the problem. It’s what is the focus of social media if we use it to actually bring us together which maybe like these platforms, Instagram, Facebook, you know, for me, I get share with my family and friends all over the world at this, you know, pictures and stuff. And I live in South Africa and I’ve moved several times, you know, but then if I’m sitting there, and I’m comparing my life and these pictures to other people’s lives, and so it really is, really, it does fall to balance. And I think just the idea that, you know, not one thing is necessarily better than the other that, that balance is this really tricky word anyway, like, you’re never just gonna, we’re not gonna, like find a balance and just like stay there. It’s like fighting enlightenment. And just like, stay there. It’s like a constant. It’s something you consistently work for. And the pendulum swings one way,

Christine Heckart
or you have been, right, you’re constantly balancing. as things change, and you’re trying to keep balance in yourself, you know, it’s like, this idea that every day is going to be a perfect balance, no, some days, you’re going to, you know, the energy is really going to slide one way and then another day, you know, it’s going to slide the opposite, so that over a course of time, you feel balanced in yourself, kind of like a child’s diet, you know, you don’t worry about what your two or four year old eats in any given day, because if you look at what they eat in one day, it may look like a very imbalanced set of nutrition. But if you measure it over the course of a week, if they’re getting a reasonable amount of nutrition over the course of the week, okay, you’re happy with that, as a parent, it’s the same for our lives.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
And I think understanding and knowing having that expectation, you know, I mean, I love that you said you’re complicated as a way to describe yourself, because that really resonates with me, when I describe myself the only word I feel comfortable owning is Enigma because, like, I’m still discovering, you know, and just having the understanding that the ownership that my grief is my grief to, and I’ve earned it, and I can find I can, you know, like, even my tears, sometimes I’ll be crying, and I’ll just be so I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like, crying isn’t like bad, you know oh, so grateful for these years for this ability to experience this emotion.

Christine Heckart
You’re savoring. And that’s, you know, if we can, if everybody can learn to savor all of the experiences, and you know, this too, shall pass. So you’re savoring that whatever that authentic emotion is, tears are actually the body’s way to release stress. So if you are good at crying, you can be good at very quickly releasing emotion, where you know, where I think social media has gone wrong, because as you say, the modern conveniences that we enjoy have allowed us to bring the world closer together and bring our families closer together. And that’s all very positive. The problem is, is that a small number of companies have really built their profitability around algorithms of greed. And they are built to mislead. They’re really not designed to engage but to enrage and incite and gaslight. And if you allow yourself and your emotions to be manipulated, because you’re being scrolling, then that sucks you down and the emotion that you’re feeling is no longer authentically yours. It is it is a product of manipulation for somebody else’s profit. And that’s the problem. So when you can you know, if you can separate your own emotion from that which is being handed to you a manipulative why because negativity, path to profitability through a negative route is significantly faster and higher than through positivity. It’s much harder to make money on positivity. And when I started Xapa, I had many people tell me, many professional investors say Xapa will never work. The reason is because you can only make money on one of the seven deadly sins. And it’s like, I don’t believe that’s true. I believe you believe that’s true. And I believe the evidence is there’s a preponderance of evidence to support you in your thesis. But the reason why the thesis is wrong is because it is a product of the decisions that you and many others have made in the past. Most of the companies who have been funded and the trillions of dollars that go into innovation, primarily go to young, typically white, maybe Indian males coming out of college software engineers. And so the great preponderance of the money has gone to fund companies that deal with one of the seven deadly sins. If you put the same amount of money against the same number of innovators, and they were 40 and 50 year old, you know, white and black and Latina females or underrepresented minorities or even If you took the same amount of money and you and you made it equally spread across all people, you would have a very different fact pattern because you’d have way more companies that were started with a positive intent, and therefore some of them would succeed, and you’d have a completely different fact pattern. So you know, we, we have to be careful about our own emotions and being manipulated about looking at data and drawing conclusions. And I just go back to this, the world is what we make it. I’m not a big believer that everything should just be positive. I have a positivity company, but I don’t believe in in toxic positivity. I believe in exactly what you said, Whatever you are experiencing at the moment, the authentic side, not the manipulated, savor that, understand it, accept it, learn from it, process it, grow from it, and then when you’re ready, move on from it. But we do have to provide people enough tools to move on to learn to have that growth mindset, not not the negative self talk and the Doom looping. But the ability to turn the doom loop back to the joy loop, and the negative self talk back to resiliency.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
It’s just that like, whatever you focus on, right now becomes the reality. And it’s just Okay, where’s our focus been for so long? And do really like the outcomes of those focus? And how do we shift our focus and even the fact like, I mean, that should be I feel like a skill, you know, taught that we teach in our children.

Christine Heckart
These skills are not taught today in school, or in the workplace, and yet they are the most important. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. You can learn resilience. You can learn growth mindset, you can learn optimism and positivity, and still savor authentically, all that you’re feeling. So Priscilla Lilu in South Africa, I didn’t realize that yes, I’m in Cape Town. Oh, awesome. So one of Xapa partners where Xapa fIying. His work is a gentleman named rusty lava Shawn and Rusty is Zimbabwean was in falsely imprisoned in a concentration camp years after who, and just absolutely inhumane conditions. And during that time, he found purpose, meaning positivity and joy in a cell where he had 13 and a half inches of space to himself. And he had about two ounces of water a day for everything. I mean, the most inhumane of conditions and where he found his own joy was inside. So he now has a whole platform called beating chains. And it’s about resilience. It’s about you know, going inside, not expecting your joy from your circumstances in life, but finding your joy from within.

MUSIC

(Voice insert) Priscilla Brenenstuhl
So here we are deep in this philisophical, beautiful conversation and my internet keeps crashing and my patience is getting tested but I chose not to edit this part out because it is a testament to the work we are discussing (getting stuck in the doom loop and focusing on trivial matters) and a testament to Christine’s poise and ability to focus her mindset that allows us to exercise exactly what we’ve been discussing and allows us to shift our focus and perspective…

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Christine, and holy cow, thank you for your patience. Um, I’m flustered. I’m just like this such an amazing conversation. And I really can’t figure out the problem. It just says it’s full bars, and I’m in the great a great spot and my I even have a backup thing that like, hard SD card that’s not pick you up for some reason. And I’m like, Don’t worry, don’t worry at all. It’s just you know, when you’re in the versation Yes, Thanks for the reminder. And thank you for saying that. Thank you for Yeah, not allowing, right what we’re talking about, we’re focused is on? Yeah.

Christine Heckart
These are snacks. And you know, Rusty, he was in a concentration camp for 10 years, you know, the fact that he didn’t have reliable internet for 30 minutes is not you know, who cares?

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
100% 100% It’s really amazing. When you think about it at all, that I’m all the way here and Exactly. Unable to talk. Yeah. And I

Christine Heckart
provide with thinking too, but you know, this is the message it’s helping people, especially young people, who have been through so much in the last 10 years, in 20 years and like unprecedented times and all the black swans and but it’s like, you know, the tiny things, man don’t what what is that book don’t let the small stuff bother You were whatever it was and all stuff.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Absolutely, absolutely. And it just shows like, our custom, we’ve come to, like, instant gratification to and things working out instantly, and how much pressure, you know, even external pressure and all kinds of things have been put on us to like make things happen instantly, which is really like, you know, I mean, it’s not the way that it’s not the it’s not real. Well, not a real

Christine Heckart
move somehow, like lost through technology connecting us we’ve lost empathy or compassion, because these prompts you know, nobody is perfect. No situation is perfect and might look at from afar, but like, you know, learning to have compassion, that stuff happens, and nobody’s fault and even if it is somebody’s fault, people make mistakes and like, how do you just, you know, learn that perspective of seeing things from somebody else’s point of view. And that’s one of the things we need to relearn as a society and kind of increase it goes back to that make matriarchy and the balancing, how do we increase the level of empathy and compassion in the world as a

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
whole? Yeah, and I think I think one of the most important place to start is with ourselves. Under foresight, I examine myself talk, you know, that’s really what my meditation practice is brought. For me, I examine my narrative through storytelling, my own narrative, my own belief system. And I’ve seen how drastically that’s impacted my life, but not just my life, it impacts the way that I treat other people, right,

Christine Heckart
Patrick? Yep. So one of the key things we do in Xapa, is we help people examine and deconstruct their own narratives, and find those self defeating patterns. They might be thought patterns, they might be behavioral patterns, often they’re both identify and deconstruct to figure out what’s not serving you anymore. There’s probably reasons that you have those, and they probably served a purpose at some point in time, but maybe they’re not serving you anymore. How do you jettison what’s not serving, you can just put it in a box, we have an attic, in your house and Xapa RONIS stick that in a box, you can get to it if you want it again. But then how do we reconstruct behaviors and thought patterns that will serve you better now. And it’s exactly what you’re doing in your meditation, just be conscious, and deliberate about how you talk to yourself, give yourself the same level of empathy and compassion that you would give to a good friend, don’t listen to this voice in your head that is saying things that if a friend said to you, they wouldn’t probably even be your friend anymore. So you know, why do you let your own self talk? You know, talk to you in that way. So you know, how do we give ourselves compassion? But then also, how do you give it to others? So it’s easy to sometimes, you know, be harsher on somebody else than you might be on yourself in that situation. So extending the same compassion without letting people off the hook, especially in business? You know, sometimes businesses will say, Well, yes, but you know, we got to keep a high bar. Well, sure. Absolutely. We have to keep a high bar, you have to keep it for ourselves and for others. But and and you have to say, when is good enough? When is good enough? Because that was for me. And I think for many people, probably you that self taught that self criticism is I could have done more. There’s never enough to go around. You’re never good enough. Executive or employee or wife or boss or mother or father or sister brother or friend, like you’re always like, it’s no Oh, I could have done more could have done no, no, flip that around, do your very, very best. Keep the bar as high as you want to keep it. Wherever you ended up. Man. At that point, you say good enough. I’m, I’m thankful and grateful, I’m satisfied. I’m happy with what I’ve done. I’m not going to focus on the gap, I’m going to focus on what I did, and call it good. And if you can flip that switch in your head, to sufficiency to enough and to celebrating what you’ve done. That is a huge change for people. I’ve been through it myself in my 30s I went through that, like, I’m going to just start saying whatever I can do is going to be enough and it’s very liberating.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
It sounds I like I like that. It sounds liberating, because it brings like at least a moment of peace.

Christine Heckart
Exactly. And celebrates

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Celebration. Yeah, we don’t take a lot of time to do that. I don’t think to celebrate our wins and even to, you know, and even to, to sometimes listen to that negative thought and then say wow, like, you know, just what you said unpack the story. Like where did that come from? And also like, like, grief, like, wow, I’ve been so hard on myself for so many years, you know, and I don’t need to do that anymore. I think it would be so powerful. This I thought just came to me now. Like, imagine you had like a video of like, I don’t know, several people, maybe 20, 50 People of like, voicing out loud their negative, soft self talk, I feel like that could be super profound, even like, as I would be even almost embarrassed somewhat to shed some light to say out loud some of the things that I say to myself in my head, and then, you know, for us all to bear witness to each other, you know, and see that, that we all kind of struggle with that. And I think we would all be like, overwhelmed with emotion on the way that the way that we talked to

Christine Heckart
ourselves. I love that idea. And it’s doing exactly what you say it’s being able to notice it, when it’s happening, intercept it and challenge it, right? If if the negative self talk is saying, Oh, you’re a failure, or you never do this, or you’re always do that, like these extremes, stop that challenge it and and find 510 examples that are the opposite of the self talk. It’s like, No, I’m not a failure. I didn’t achieve what I intended to this time. But here are 10 examples in the last month of setting out a goal and achieving it. You know, here’s what I did achieve. Even though I here’s what I learned, here’s, you know, here’s the lining, if you don’t come to think

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
of it, I’m awesome.

Christine Heckart
There’s also so that’s, you know, that’s the intercept and challenge method of dealing with negative self talk. There’s also something called thought flipping. And when I first met Dr. Amy cote, who’s also one of our advisors, she teaches a class on on happiness, it’s a happiness makeover, and she has this thing called thought flipping. And it’s not just her like, this is cognitive behavioral therapy. But, you know, you say, I hate my family, and then you immediately intercepted or I hate myself or whatever, you intercept it, and you flip it around. You say no, you know, I love my family. My family loves me, my family is doing the best. My family is unique. Mike, you just how many different ways can you flip the thought and come up with an opposite way to say it. And when I first heard it, I was like, Well, you know, that just sounds dumb and, and authentic. If if you, if you hate your family, then why all of a sudden saying in the opposite way, it’s gonna make you feel different. But it’s crazy that it actually does work. Because the minute you intercept, whatever the negative thought is, you know, I hate myself, you turn that around, and you’re like, or I’m a failure, I’m not a failure. I’m trying my best every day I succeed, it’s many of the things I come up with. I’m unique. I’m a work in progress, like you just over and over again, how it come up with at least 10 ways. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, it will change your attitude and your thinking, especially when you can root it, in fact, and believe that what you’re saying, you know, is actually based in reality. Yeah, you’re changing

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
your whole construct. It’s like we said, If we taught this at home, we taught this in schools, then you already have that, you know, kind of foundation. And so it’s, it’s like, now we’re going back and re parenting ourselves in a way, you know, like going back to the maybe the wounded inner child and becoming the NF urging mentor to change that, that inner voice, anything. So when you tell me something that you struggle with,

Christine Heckart
oh, man, so I used to always struggle with the never enough to go around problem up through my mid 30s. I was 36 or 37, when I had the epiphany of, it’s just going to be enough, whatever it is, I’m gonna do my best. But it’s so that struggle, I don’t have so much anymore, although my ambitions are always very high. But whatever I can do, you know, that’s one of the things I struggle the most with is self depreciation, humor. Like being able to laugh at myself, I take everything very, very seriously. I’m kind of wired that way. I’m lucky that I have a family who finds me immensely amusing. They laugh at me continually. And that sort of does mean when to laugh. But, you know, I have a hard time. If I’m in an embarrassing situation, I have a really hard time seeing the humor in it in that moment, maybe if ever I’m getting better about you know, being able to maybe see it in hindsight but you know, I take take things so seriously. But I’m also I’ve learned over time that I’m also sort of haptic in some ways where I absorb other people’s stress and anxiety. So like movies that most people think are just hysterical, you know, Something About Mary or like the Meet the Fockers, or like these movies where the whole point of the humor is somebody else says extreme discount. I can’t even watch those movies like they aren’t funny to me. I’m the same way I have so much anxiety for these poor people. Now if I

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
walked like the injustice, yes, like, I’m always waiting for it to like work out and for them to figure it out and like I’m like on my toes the whole time, like

Christine Heckart
xiety provoking, you know, I’m absorbing all the stress. So I have to if I’m gonna watch a movie like that, I have to watch it with somebody whose humor is more aligned to that job. And then I understand okay, this is supposed to be funny. I’m going to try to this is just a movie. Yeah, so I take myself and like everything else a little too seriously.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Thanks for that. So in the vein of not too serious, although I don’t know, maybe a serious response. What song are you singing karaoke?

Christine Heckart
So I’m really terrible at karaoke. I love to sing. And I’m the world’s worst singer. So I have if I have to do karaoke, which I love to do, by the way, and I love to have teams, when I lead teams, I always create a night a theme party where they have to dress up and crazy outfits. And then when we karaoke and I got amazing. Yes, amazing, the bonding that gets created. I don’t care how big the team is, I don’t care how senior the people are. Three, it’s a whole new level.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
I didn’t know I needed this in my life.

Christine Heckart
Yes. You know, like, leadership, good leadership is about authentic vulnerability as well. None of us are perfect. So but then I always have the problem of Alright, well, now I’ve, you know, have to karaoke, what do I sing because I can’t really sing. But one of my favorite karaoke songs to try to sing is Gloria Gainer’s, I will survive because I can hit the keys and then it’s a little more and like my range. Plus, I just love the song. It’s a great karaoke song. I can’t write karaoke Psalm. One of my favorite movies is the replacements. And they may do I will survive in the jail scene. And it’s just, they’re all dancing a line dance together. It’s great. It’s great moment.
MUSIC
Priscilla Brenenstuhl
What is your biggest fear?

Christine Heckart
Oh, failure in any in all forms. And explicitly right now, the failure of Xapa in part because it’s tied to my other biggest fear, which is, you know, the world not evolving into a kind and generous and humane place, but devolving into kind of this negative chaos. So right now, my personal ambitions, and fear of failure are very tied to you know, what, how I see the future of the world shaping place, or taking place in taking shape. So yeah, so I’m, that’s a heavy, yeah, very focused on trying to contribute something meaningful, and positive to the planet. I spent my life my early career running around the world, helping to roll out these infrastructure, services and systems that now connect us together. And when we, in the 90s, we really thought as you know, the Internet was rolling out and early cloud, and we thought it would bring us all together, like you say that the positive side, I can talk to people, you know, and it doesn’t cost a fortune, and I can see them on video. And I can share my photos. And this is going to when you know, when the web came along, and anybody could be a publisher, it’s like, oh, we will hear the perspectives of other people. And it will give us more empathy and understanding for each other, and it will bring unity. And the opposite happened. It didn’t do that it created these horrible echo chambers. And these, you know, Doom loops, and the Doom scrolling and all of this negativity. And again, it’s just really a small number of companies who have tried to profit by making us the product. And then because of that the algorithms seek to keep us engaged and to keep us engaged. They make us angry, and it’s just this horrible, this horrible domino effect that has been created, unfortunately. And so to what extent can we turn all of that around and use technology to bring people together, I hope that Xapa becomes the first app to win the Nobel Peace Prize, because it is designed to help bring people together and sort of shed the negative side effects of some of the businesses that have been built and created these unintended or maybe intended, you know, created these consequences that are not positive. How do we get past that and get back to that understanding in unity that really was the original All purpose of trying to connect everybody? That’s right.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
That’s a lot, um, a lot of weight to carry, though, Christine.

Christine Heckart
Yes, it is. But fortunately, I do not bear that alone. I am the most amazing team and most people who learn about what we’re trying to do, they’re moved by it. If they’re conscious leaders, they, you know, they want to help, they will invest, or they will advise, or they will introduce, or they will adopt, you know, say, I’ll be a beta test. So, there’s a lot of just amazing, wonderful humans in the world. And if they all band together, then the lift becomes very small. You know, the lift is hard when you try to do something alone. But when,

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
and dare I say when we all band together? Because I think it’s just, you know, I believe in collective consciousness too. I think we’ve all kind of realized that we’ve swung the pendulum too far, and focus too much on the negative. And, like I said, when we when we’re able to see in our own inner workings, our own quiet riots, our ability to change that patterning within ourselves. I think the possibility of seeing it on a global scale, feels ever closer and give us gives us that energy and inspiration to continue forward with a mission that is, could otherwise seem impossible. Yeah,

Christine Heckart
currently, and it’s our own self interest. You know, I am an economics major, I believe in Adam Smith’s invisible hand, like do what ultimately is in your own best self interest. And the world as a whole will be better. And most, most people in the planet, maybe not 100%. But the great, great, great majority of people on the planet all want the same things. Love, they want to belong and to be accepted for who they are, they want a chance for happiness, and some reasonable level of prosperity. And then they want freedom, to exercise their free will. And like all of those are good things. And if we can just help people band together to get that for themselves. Everybody, the whole tide will will lift everybody all boats

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
100%. So I’m sorry for giving you nine minutes for my last question. And it may may may alter the way that you answer. But please, will you tell me about a life changing or life defining moment?

Christine Heckart
Let’s see, there’s been many. But I’ll pick, I’ll pick one that I think a lot of people can identify with, especially now I’ll actually, I’ll pick two, but they have the same end result. So there’s been a couple of times in my life and career where I’ve either been laid off or fired. And in each case, I look back at that. And I am so incredibly grateful that that happened for me. In one case, I was laid off right after the the.com crash and 911. Three kids, I’m the only income earner nuclear winter in my industry. And that’s what ultimately brought me out to California, I became CMO at Juniper Networks completely changed my life, and the trajectory of my family’s life and all of the things that I’ve since been able to do not just for myself and my family, but for many, many other people. And then fast forward. 20 years later, I got fired from a job not because anything I did actually was doing a pretty darn good job. But somebody else in the company wanted my organization and they wanted to take it from where it resided and put it into a completely different part of the company. It was a big company. And I needed to be out of the way. And so you know, they don’t call it firing at that level. It’s just like, Okay, we don’t need you anymore. We’ll pay you to go away. But you know, I got I got fired from a job. I was let go. And I had always always wanted to be a CEO. And that was the impetus gave me you know, a nice severance package and just the sheer desire to say, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m going to go run a company I’ve always wanted to do that. Fortunately, a couple of men who were looking for a CEO had the courage to hire a first time female CEO into an industry she knew nothing about but if it hadn’t been for, you know one person really being an a****** sorry if you’d I’d say that weren’t on a podcast. But, you know, I think, like the stars every single day, that he was that way that he was so politically motivated that he got me fired, because that also was a huge trajectory change in my life, I became a CEO a couple years later, we had an amazing exit from that company. And if it wasn’t for all of that, I wouldn’t have started Xapa. And now everything is completely aligned my, my own personal purpose, my vision for a better world, the people I work with every day, what we’re working on, everything is completely in alignment. And none of that would be true, if it wouldn’t have been for those, you know, very difficult moments where everything changed.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Yeah. And it’s such a great, such a great example, when we talk about focus, you know, because in the way that you said that this happened for me instead of to me, because even just having that attitude allows possibility and opportunity. I love it.

Christine Heckart 46:05
I mean, huge believer, you cannot control the world, but you can control how you respond to your circumstance. So your response, your emotional response, is 100%, within your control.

Priscilla Brenenstuhl 46:18
Totally. And, you know, I see almost, I see almost everybody as a teacher for me, and, you know, great, I prefer loving teachers, or, you know, and I might think of them more fondly but my a****** teachers are the ones that have saved me the most.

Christine Heckart
And it’s such a great attitude, you know, even even knowing people on the road that cut us off or that, you know, come into the meditation class, 10 minutes late and disrupt everything, it’s like, these are these are teachers, what can I learn from this moment?

Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Yeah, can I say thank you, and then thank you for, for pointing out how anxious and how, you know, you’re not in my center. I am. Christine, this is I’m gonna just admit to you that this is a little bit of a fan girl moment for me. You know, I mean, with privilege to work with and meet with so many fantastic leaders and women leaders and but like your mission is so true to my heart and and it’s, you know, this focus on not just rising to the top or whatever but but changing what the top looks like and changing the paradigm along the way and the inner struggle and finding joy and happiness and so I’m just saying this to say that I have been kind of watching what you’re doing and really excited in the background listening in always at Athena and just excited for whenever you were showing up and sharing out and so just really, really grateful to have had to have that you carved out this time to share and stand with me and I’m truly truly grateful. Yeah, just Yeah. And it’s been it’s been very inspirational.

Christine Heckart
Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you and I’m going to steal your quote, I absolutely love what you just said. Don’t just rise to the top, change what it means to be there. And that is around I love it. Right. I’m gonna buy that I’m,
Priscilla Brenenstuhl
I give it away.

Music
Priscilla Brenenstuhl
Thank you for tuning in and sharing your time with me. Leaning into Christine’s wisdom- as you carry on through the rest of your day, are there opportunities to notice when you’ve become stuck in a doom loop and what happens if flip those thoughts, turn them on their head and take a different perspective?
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