Joy, Surrender, and True Self | Mike Huggins S04-EP10 "A CEO’s Self-Discovery Behind Bars"

The Bloom Living Podcast

Mike Huggins is a Wharton MBA graduate, CPA and former COO who ran a $2 billion business but ended up going to prison for a Responsible Corporate Officer misdemeanour for illegal activities that occurred under his watch, without his knowledge. He’s the author of Going Om – A CEO’s Self-Discovery Behind Bars.

Coming out of prison he turned down lucrative job offers and started the Transformation Yoga Project, a non-profit organization, and goes back into prisons working with incarcerated men to provide practical tools for them to help navigate life’s challenges both inside prison and when they are released back into the community.
He also works with executives about being a Responsible Corporate Officer to live a full and balanced professional and personal life.
"The thing that I took away from that experience is to follow your heart. You know, some people believe in the universe and how things happen, and I would tell you, Thomas, that there were a lot of signs out there that I wasn't happy with what I was doing. I'm not saying illegal things, that's a whole different story which we can talk about, I'm just saying in the general sense of unhappiness. Meaning, that the career that I loved so much for over 25 years, having the success doing that, I think, I think you need to have the passion, the skill set, and maybe some luck for all those things to come together.

I had all that, and yet, towards the end, maybe the last three years, I started feeling a sense of discomfort. That I wasn't as fulfilled in the job as I had been previously and there were reasons for that. Partly because the company got so big and I’m not really a big company kind of guy if you will, so managing a multi-billion-dollar business was outside of my area of comfort.
I also had stumbled across this thing called yoga because I had back problems and I came to realize that those back problems were all due to stress. I was on my way to surgery and working for a medical device company I had lots of good advice about what kind of surgery to get and I wasn't so interested in that. It was also putting pressure on my marriage, and so all these things were coming together, and I didn't pay attention to it, even though I had this yoga practice that tells you to follow your head and your heart. I was following everybody else's thoughts instead of my own and going through this, this process which I admit is pretty extreme, there were a lot of life lessons in there. Like how to deal with life circumstances in a way so we can navigate and connect our passion and our skillset in a truly fulfilling way; even if it's not, maybe what's seen as conventional to others or a certain group."

Connect with Mike:
GoingOmBook.com

MDHuggins.com

TransformationYogaProject.org
Mike on Social Media:
Facebook
LinkedIN
Instagram

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Music Credit - the Shademakers, Pocket of Heaven

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