There’s a specific kind of conversation that makes you want to pull over the car. Or text someone. Or sit with it for a few days before you can fully articulate why it rattled something loose in you.
This one did that.
Nisha Moodley — founder of the Center for Devotional Leadership, guide for women leaders, and someone who has been doing this work for nearly twenty years — came on Left Standing and we went places I genuinely didn’t expect.
We started, sort of accidentally, with late-stage capitalism looking like a South Park episode. (She said it first. I just agreed.) And then we went to the exact moment I found myself looking at a bill for $14,000 in car depreciation attached to a sympathy card eight months after my father died. And then somehow we ended up somewhere much more tender than either of us anticipated.
This is an episode about a lot of things:
What leadership actually is — and why most of us who care the most have been opting out of a word that was never meant to describe us in the first place.
The difference between marketing that triggers shame and desperation and marketing that speaks to the deeper calling in people. Nisha has a way of naming the mechanics of bro marketing so clearly that you’ll never be able to un-see it, and then immediately offering you something real to plant your feet in instead.
What she calls putting two feet in — and why the wobble between paradigms is exactly what’s keeping so many of us unclear.
Women in midlife, postmenopausal table-flipping, and why culture’s story about who we’re becoming is opposite land from the actual truth.
And then — because grief has a way of finding its way in — we talked about death portals. In business. In life. In the specific kind of season where you don’t know how long you’ll be in it or what’s waiting on the other side, and the only honest thing you can do is nourish yourself and fall back into community.
Nisha is the kind of person who has won national sales competitions and opens ceremonial space with altars. She holds both with such ease that it stops being surprising about five minutes in and starts feeling like the most obvious thing in the world. I wanted to put her on mic specifically so that anyone who feels like their work is too spiritual or too “woo adjacent” to market could hear what it sounds like when someone has fully integrated those things — not as an aesthetic but as a foundation.
We also built an altar for my dog the night before this episode went out. I didn’t even realize until we were already recording. The divine keeps tapping me on the shoulder.
Go listen.
Find Nisha at nishamoodley.com — she has a guided meditation on her homepage for connecting with the soul of your work and an ancestral gift waiting to come through this season. She’s also on Instagram @nishamoodley.
The Ethical Sales Method, mentioned in this episode, is linked here.
