Recently, CPM alumnus Bruce Kasanoff shared a beautiful reflection on LinkedIn about our founder, Dr. Srikumar Rao, and the impact of Creativity and Personal Mastery on his life.
With Bruce’s permission, we are pleased to share his post below.
Today, I’d like to make you aware of Dr. Srikumar Rao: an author, speaker, executive coach, and former business school professor best known for creating Creativity and Personal Mastery, often called CPM.
These days, his primary role is as an executive coach for entrepreneurs whose priorities include spirituality as well as business achievement.
Dr. Rao began teaching Creativity and Personal Mastery over 30 years ago, and has delivered it both inside and outside of leading business schools. The course became known for attracting students beyond the usual business school audience and for having its own active alumni community.
I am a member of that alumni community, having taken CPM in 2023. I can tell you firsthand that Dr. Rao attracts individuals who not only understand how to build things, but who also seek to connect on a far deeper level with the ways that reality works.
His central premise is that most people do not suffer because reality is unbearable, but instead because of the mental models they impose on reality. CPM teaches people to notice, question, and replace those models. Dr. Rao built the program by collecting insights from Vedanta, Buddhism, mindfulness, and other wisdom traditions. His central insight, however, was to make such works accessible to all, by removing dogma that limited each tradition’s ability to connect with non-believers.
Here are a few of Dr. Rao’s central ideas:
Work can be a spiritual practice. Dr. Rao brought ideas normally found in spiritual or contemplative settings into business schools and executive rooms. He speaks to ambitious people without telling them to abandon ambition. Instead, he tries to help them detach from ego-based striving while still acting powerfully.
You are not your mental chatter. Much of what you call “reality” is actually interpretation. Suffering often comes from the story you are telling about events, not the events themselves.
Do not attach happiness to outcomes. Many people make happiness conditional: “I’ll be happy when I get the job, sell the company, find the partner, win the approval.” Instead, invest fully in the process, while releasing the demand that reality must unfold a certain way.
Your life is not a problem to solve. Resist the temptation to optimize every variable. Instead, experience life more directly, with less resistance and more alignment.
Good thing, bad thing, who knows? Don’t label events. What appears to be a disaster may open a path. What appears to be a triumph may carry hidden costs. The wiser stance is curiosity rather than instant judgment.
Three years after taking CPM, the lesson that especially sticks with me is that last one: don’t label. Our ability to understand the impact and/or meaning of any one event is close to zero. Your business falls apart, you go through a year of hell, which puts you on a path that connects you with your soulmate, with whom you have three children, and then together you solve one of the world’s biggest problems. Nothing that happened was “good” or “bad”.
My sense is that top-level leaders respond to him so strongly to him because he gives them permission to stop trying to wrestle life into submission. He does not tell them to become passive. He teaches a more paradoxical move: act with full commitment, but do not make your inner peace dependent on the result. I love this approach.
You do not need to win every contest in order to be free. You need to notice the invisible assumptions that make you feel trapped. Then you can still build, lead, love, create, and succeed… but with less fear, less grasping, and far more joy.
You can find Dr. Rao at The Rao Institute.
Thank you, Bruce!
Learn more about Bruce and his work, including his Ikigai Explorer self-awareness tool, at Kasanoff.ai
