The Karma of Success: Spiritual Strategies to Free Your Inner Genius

by Liz Tran

Overview

Realize your innermost dreams and ambitions by turning up the volume on your intuition and re-connecting with your Inner Genius


We are all born with an inner spark of intuition—Buddhism calls it seeing Dhamma. Taoism calls it finding the way. But most of us in the Western world are socialized to prioritize external markers of success. Money, status, high powered careers—the pressure to perform superficially drowns out the inner voice. As a result, we barely know who we are and what we’re truly capable of.  
 
The Karma of Success is the professional and personal success you will find once your internal world, your actions, and your values are in alignment. You’ll feel more confident, capable, and enjoy more success as you learn how to access your own inner voice, stop following the paths of others, and redefine achievement on your own terms. 
 
Business coach, tech executive, Reiki healer, and spiritual leader Liz Tran will teach you the Four Pillars of Spiritual Strategy—inquiring inward, manifesting mindfully, enriching your energy, and becoming brilliant. You will also be guided by stories of business leaders, tech visionaries, and regular people who have learned how to access their intuition in order to unlock their full potential.  
 
Drawing from ancient sources of wisdom including Zen Buddhism, the Tao, Reiki healing, astrology, and Vipassana meditation, The Karma of Success shows you how to slow down and look inward to find the meaning and success you are meant to have.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593542446
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/25/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	397,051
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Liz Tran is the founder of Reset, an executive coaching company to CEOs and founders. Before founding Reset, Liz spent over a decade working in the tech industry, most recently as the only female executive at a leading venture capital firm. She is a trained meditation teacher and Reiki Master and studied yoga at the Samyak Ashram. She lives in New York City and Norfolk, Connecticut, with her husband, Dev, and their dog, Grover.

Read an Excerpt

THE FOUR EXPANSIONS

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For most of my career, I've been on the receiving end of well-intentioned advice, telling me how I need to change in order to be successful. Here's some of what I've heard:

You can't be so emotional when it comes to work.

You need to be more polished and professional.

You should dress differently if you want to be taken seriously.

What about you? What have you been told about who you are? How have you been asked to edit yourself? At first, I believed the advice I was given, and I followed it, but as time went on I grew frustrated. I sensed that it was meant to erase the uniqueness of my personality and turn me into someone more predictable and conforming. Plus, the advice didn't even work. Trying to be someone different wasn't making me more successful. In fact, the more I lost track of my true self, the more disconnected I became from my Inner Genius.

That's why, unlike in other books that want to force you into some outdated mold of professionalism, you won't find any rules here. Instead, what I offer in these next chapters are Expansions. They are encouragements to help you reconnect with your unique self and activate the Inner Genius within you. There are no guidelines to follow or principles to memorize. Your only work now is to become reacquainted with the boldest, truest, most alive version of you.

CHAPTER 1: The Changing Self

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Don't worry too much about what's happened (or not happened) in your career so far. The past doesn't matter. None of it is relevant to where you're going. The only thing you must do is choose to see yourself differently from how you've seen yourself before. What you've thought of yourself in the past has gotten you to where you are today. So it stands to reason that if you want something else, something different, something more, you'll have to see yourself in a new way, too.

Expansion #1 | I can change. I allow these changes to be easy and natural.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, a Sōtō Zen teacher, was once asked if he could explain Buddhism in one sentence. The audience laughed. How could a 2,500-year-old spiritual tradition be reduced to a few words? Suzuki Roshi, however, was unfazed. Without skipping a beat, he replied, "Everything changes," and he moved onto the next question.

Change is the fundamental premise of life. The only difference between a dead flower and a live one is that the dead one no longer grows. We must keep growing or we perish. If we knew what was good for us, we'd wholeheartedly embrace change, but boy, do we resist it.

We hold onto the good parts of our lives, intent on ensuring they persist. We even grip tightly onto the not-so-good, unsatisfying parts. We'd rather continue on with a bad situation than risk the uncertainty of the amorphous unknown. Buddhists call this attachment, while psychologists call it loss aversion, the human tendency to feel loss twice as deeply as the equivalent gain.

Loss may seem like a strange word for your career, but it's apt here. You will lose and change many things when you pursue the Karma of Success. You'll lose the old parts of yourself that are no longer working for you. You'll say goodbye to stale beliefs that pin you to the past. You will shed everything that has held you back from becoming who you deserve to be.

There is a story about a rich and powerful man who wanted to learn from a wise Zen master. He went to the Zen master, full of conviction and used to getting his own way, and said, "I have come today for you to teach me about Zen. Open my mind to Enlightenment." "Let's discuss this over a cup of tea," the Zen master said. He set down a cup for the rich man, started pouring and didn't stop. Even when the cup had overflown, he continued to pour. He poured and poured and poured, and even when the tea spilled off the table and onto the rich man's robes, he kept going. "Enough!" the visitor shouted. "Can't you see the cup is full?"

The Zen master finally set the pot down and smiled at his guest. "You are like this cup of tea. So full that nothing can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind." This story is my inspiration for how I choose the clients I work with. I don't pour tea on them, but I do want to know if they are able to begin with a fresh slate. In the hour we spend vetting each other, I don't ask anything about their achievements or successes-those things don't matter. The only thing I care about is if they are ready for change. It is the only factor that defines whether they will succeed.

The same holds true here between you and me-in our pact as reader and writer. Before we go any further with this work, I invite you to ask yourself: Am I ready to change?

Say yes, emphatically and easily. Remember that you're actually changing right now without realizing it. Your hair is growing, your brain is adapting, and your skin is shedding as you finish this sentence. Every cell in your body is making its way through a life and death cycle. White blood cells live for a year; red blood cells are gone in four months. In seven years, every single cell in your body will have turned over, and you are effectively brand new. We gain and lose memories, change our preferences, and become the people we swore we'd never be. Despite our best efforts at stability, we still change. Imagine where you would be if you stopped fighting and embraced it.

Snakes spend over 10 percent of their lives in an intense state of change called ecdysis, also known as shedding. It's an unpleasant endeavor that involves the snake going blind for a few days and rubbing itself against hard, painful surfaces to try and get the old skin off. Snakes will hide themselves and stop eating during this period because they're so irritated and vulnerable. The whole experience is excruciating, but you would never, ever see a snake reject the process. There's simply no alternative. Snakes shed, birds migrate, and the grass grows. Notice the ease with which all this happens. The grass doesn't "try" to grow, and the snake doesn't force himself to shed. The same applies to you, too. Forget loss aversion. Let go of attachment. Get out of your own way and allow what is already happening to happen.

Your intuition led you here because you're ready for something different now. Your Inner Genius wants you to evolve into the best version of yourself, and now you've arrived at the moment to empty your cup. Your first opportunity is right here, and all it takes is embracing the First Expansion.

Expansion #1 | I can change. I allow these changes to be easy and natural.

As we work through the lessons of this book, any time the idea of change feels overwhelming, just picture the grass growing, the sun rising and setting, the ocean tides lapping the shore, and remember that you were born ready for change. You're already changing, and change is simply a part of your true nature.

CHAPTER 2: The Authentic Self

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If you were to tell anyone who knew me in my younger days that I now advise CEOs and am passionate about spirituality, they'd laugh. There were a dozen places I should have ended up, and none of them would have been considered a success. For my first three decades on this planet, I didn't know about the concepts of Karma or Intuition, and I certainly didn't trust who I was.

Since before I could read, I considered my lack of money to be the root cause of all my problems. As a little kid, I remember days without lights in the apartment because the electricity bill hadn't been paid and feeling embarrassed to tell my teacher I couldn't finish a third grade science project because I didn't have the supplies. The money issues and chaos only got worse as I grew older. In my teens I would scream at my mom, telling her that it was her job to feed us and take care of us. One day when I was fifteen, after one of these fights, she decided once and for all that it wasn't. The next day, I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle. At my new high school, I lied to the friends I made, telling them that the adults I lived with were my parents.

I couldn't have articulated this then, but I was sure that I was broken and deficient. My mother and father had both decided individually that they didn't want me, and I felt ashamed, believing it must be my own fault. It was a self-destructive time. I did well in school, but I skipped classes to drink malt liquor in parking lots, shoplifted from department stores, and developed unrequited crushes on people who got me into even more trouble. There were no benevolent forces in the places I hung out, and by the time I left for college, I was cynical, jaded, and an atheist, and I saw capitalism as my only road to salvation.

In my mind, poverty and chaos were intertwined, and I was determined to make enough money that I'd never experience the turmoil of my childhood again. I moved to New York City when I was twenty-three and worked as a cocktail waitress while I looked for an office job. I was a state school liberal arts major with a mediocre GPA and no connections, looking for work during the worst days of the Great Recession, so I cast my net wide, without considering purpose, fulfillment, or even personal interest. I accepted the first job I was offered, ran with it, and turned it into a career, and that is the entirely random reason why I dedicated a decade of my life to the tech industry.

Five years later, things were going well from the outside. I'd come a long way from the empty fridges and housing projects of my youth. I was an HR director at a fast-growing startup and married to a talented filmmaker. I was finally out of debt and financially comfortable. Yet still, I wasn't happy, and neither was my husband. We'd gotten engaged just three months after our first date, and the endorphin rush of the honeymoon phase was already gone. We were itching and restless and recently disappointed by our respective jobs, so we decided to take our savings and leave Brooklyn for a yearlong travel sabbatical. Our dream was to make a film together and coauthor a book. In our minds, this trip would not only rocket our careers, but also bring us closer together.

Halfway through the trip, we faced reality and decided that spending a month apart in different countries might do us good. He went to Thailand, and I headed to India for the yoga teacher training where I'd eventually meet the Irish healer and begin to trust my intuition. The monthlong program was serious work. The day began at five thirty a.m. when I'd walk down the hill to the yoga shala and ended at eight p.m. when I'd walk back up. I was learning at a faster rate than I ever had. Every day was filled with five hours of physical yoga practice and two hours of chanting and prayer, with the rest of the time studying topics like the history of yoga, the Bhagavad Gita, and Ayurveda.

During meals and breaks, I bonded with my classmates, soaking up learnings from their spiritual seeking. Because participation required taking a month away from "real life," the ashram attracted a certain type of person. Every single yogi in the class was in the midst of a major life crisis. Over dinner one night, we counted. Half of the people in the room had just ended a relationship, and the other half were transitioning careers. I was a bit of both. It was liberating to speak so freely and openly with these strangers about the dark questions that loomed in my mind, thoughts I'd never even shared with my brother or my best friend, and to be met with empathy and mutual commiseration.

No one had any idea who I was outside of the ashram. No one knew rebellious-teen Liz, HR-tech-company Liz, or married-to-the-guy-she-met-a-year-ago Liz. Free from any social and societal expectations, I didn't have to hide who I was as I'd been doing all my life. Not only could I be myself, I was even free to go deeper and ask myself who I really was.

From the other yogis in the group, I heard about whole new systems I could explore. For instance, there was Human Design, a new age personality index that asserts that every person in the world fits into one of five energetic profiles. I learned that I, like 20 percent of the population, am a Projector, and therefore extremely sensitive to the energies of others. When a Projector is around other people's challenging emotions like anxiety, sadness, anger, or self-consciousness, they feel it viscerally, as much as the person who first felt it, and it becomes amplified in their body unless they take time to expel it through rest, sleep, and alone time.

I think I'd always sensed this about me, but I denied my need for rest, chalking it up to laziness and pushing myself to work even harder. Human Design let me reframe this part of myself from an embarrassing shortcoming to a valid aspect of my selfhood. I finally felt permission to set boundaries and become the introvert I always was but didn't think I deserved to be.

Along with Human Design, I also became fascinated by astrology, and that was how I found myself, a couple weeks into the trip, huffing my way up a hill to see Dharamshala's preeminent Vedic astrologer. Before this, my experience with astrology was relegated to reading monthly horoscopes online or in the back of magazines. I didn't know it then, but this experience would kick-start my yearslong deep dive into astrological study. Over the next few years, I'd read hundreds of charts for others and consult the planets for all my big decisions. All this richness began with just 4,500 rupees, or roughly fifty-five US dollars, and thirty minutes of astrological insights that introduced me to the second expansion.