An Interview With Edward Sylvan
I feel that my book makes an impact just by its very title (and existence). We have been so trained to live from our rational intelligence and suppress, mistrust and doubt our intuition. I really believe that we have all the wisdom that we need to meet the challenges we face as a global community but in order to find our way, we must unlock our intuition. It’s like this potential that is there in each one of us, and collectively as a power that just needs to be invited into this world. It opens the doorways to a deeper connection with the earth and the more than human world as well. The history of oppression that has cut us off from our intuition is so violent, so much blood has been shed all over this world to make us fear our power. This is the time of reclaiming that relationship, and cultivating this intelligence so that we can live full, creative and meaningful lives — so that we can co-create a beautiful future.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amisha Ghadiali. She is an award-winning social entrepreneur, intuitive therapist, and the founder of the Presence Collective — an online community for creative, connected and courageous living. Her work is centered around sacred activism, as she inspires international audiences to become effective agents of change and contribute to the collective wellbeing of the world.
Amisha is the host of the globally acclaimed podcast The Future Is Beautiful, which explores the relationship between politics, spirituality, sustainability and creativity. The show offers deep and insightful conversations with fascinating and diverse guests challenging the dominant world story and sharing ideas for co-creating a beautiful future. Guests have included Sonya Renee Taylor, Charles Eisenstein, Polly Higgins, Satish Kumar, Sally Kempton and Bruce Parry to name a few.
Amisha has an extensive background leading meditation, breathwork, yoga, and energy healing. An experienced facilitator, she hosts a variety of retreats, workshops, and online programs sharing tools for balance on a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual level. She currently runs the Beautiful Leadership Immersion, an embodied learning and unlearning adventure for inner transformation and systemic change, and works one on one with clients in her Presence Leadership Mentoring program. Most recently, she held Style and Presence, a global womxn’s summit and reclamation of worth featuring 26 empowering speaker sessions with progressive voices and thought leaders.
She has been featured in publications including The Huffington Post, VICE, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, VOGUE, Rebelle Society, Grazia, and Ecouterre, and has spoken at events and festivals around the world such as TEDx Oxbridge, Bali Spirit Festival, Sunday Papers Live, UnBox, and Burning Man. A selection of her meditations, myths, poems and mantras are available on Insight Timer.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
It’s a pleasure to share with you. I grew up in rural England, a small town in Derbyshire. My parents had met and married in India and then came to the UK in the early seventies. In many ways my childhood felt like being a bridge between very different worlds — the East and the West, the unseen and the seen. My parents worked in mental health, and so I was exposed throughout my childhood to the way in which we as humans suffer and evolve. My childhood was a big education in looking beyond the surface of what was presented, into what was hidden or undervalued that lived underneath.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
As a child, I remember reading Sophie’s World by Norweigan writer Jostein Gaarder. It opened up philosophy to me which felt so resonant that there were these different ways that we could choose to live and see the world. I didn’t know until I read that book that there was language to explain these different ways of being. It felt like I entered a beautiful and magical land through that book where there were so many more possibilities than I saw modeled around me at school. As a student at university, I remember reading Business as Unusual by Anita Roddick and being shaped by that into being a social entrepreneur. This broke me free of the structures and options that I was being offered and forged me to find my own path for my life. To remember that anything is possible, and we can bring something into the world that hasn’t been done before.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?
As I am casting my eye back on the past 15 years, I don’t see a particular moment but as somebody that has always worked for myself and birthed my visions into the world, the common theme that I see is that I often was way too hard on myself. I did things in a way that hadn’t been done before, without experience (because it was new work). Sometimes when things didn’t work out as I hoped, I took it personally and felt a sense of failure. Some mentors reflected to me that these projects and businesses were ahead of their time and that it isn’t easy to shift culture. My lesson from all of this was to see what I have done, rather than what I haven’t. And to reframe any notions of failures as lessons.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
I feel that my book makes an impact just by its very title (and existence). We have been so trained to live from our rational intelligence and suppress, mistrust and doubt our intuition. I really believe that we have all the wisdom that we need to meet the challenges we face as a global community but in order to find our way, we must unlock our intuition. It’s like this potential that is there in each one of us, and collectively as a power that just needs to be invited into this world. It opens the doorways to a deeper connection with the earth and the more than human world as well. The history of oppression that has cut us off from our intuition is so violent, so much blood has been shed all over this world to make us fear our power. This is the time of reclaiming that relationship, and cultivating this intelligence so that we can live full, creative and meaningful lives — so that we can co-create a beautiful future.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
The book has nine principles of intuition and over 50 practices that help you cultivate it. I didn’t share personal stories in the book, aside from the extra chapter that I wrote and recorded for the audio version. In this chapter, I share elements of my journey with coming into a relationship of trust with my intuition. It’s funny, as even though my father deeply believed in following intuition and encouraged it, I realized when writing the book that I, like so many others, doubted it from my teenage years and had to go on a deep journey into understanding what it was and how I could learn to listen to it and trust it. My father died as I was finishing the book, just two weeks before it went to print. I was trying to finish it to be with him fully, but his passing came first. I felt the teachings of his life so clearly as I was writing the final parts and doing the final edits. I experienced this deep wave of not only permission to live from my intuitive intelligence but also that this was something that I needed to give others permission for as well. There is so much chaos, destruction and violence in this world, and if we are to nurture the seeds of a beautiful future, we need this part of us activated in all of humanity.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
I had three accidents between the ages of 19–24 and they brought me close to death and trauma. Each accident had something huge that I learnt from it that completely transformed my life and showed me another path. Like an initiation that shifts everything you thought you knew and invites you into a whole new paradigm. The first accident in that series really had me asking questions around how I could be of service to the world. And from then on, I don’t know if I ever thought twice about sharing my vision, and actually, The Future Is Beautiful which I started just over a decade ago has been a beautiful space of opening for others to share visions and how they are creating beauty in this world.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Honestly, I have moments regularly through my podcast, The Future Is Beautiful. It feels like each guest comes and through that deep connection that we share in the conversation, something opens up in me in terms of what is possible. I find allies that strengthen my confidence and sense of being on the right track. We explore new collaborations and I always feel mentored. Like each guest offers me some kind of reflection that allows me to evolve closer to my true essence.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Yes, we need systemic change to heal the damage that the systems of oppression — patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism have done to this world, and with it what we have been conditioned to believe is what human life is all about. These three aspects need to be addressed, and there are many ways we can do this. It’s about honouring this world as sacred. Three very specific things could be to end modern-day slavery (https://www.thefutureisbeautiful.co/2021/03/11/e127-nasreen-sheikh-on-modern-day-slavery-womens-rights-and-cultural-change-collective-empowerment-from-the-heart/), transform the economy so that feminine values are seen as necessary and people who do work such as caring or creating are valued and bring in a universal basic income which opens up a whole different way of life.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
For me leadership is an inner and outer process. It’s about being the leader of your own life and understanding how to do this from a place of alignment, balance and intuition. From the outer side, it’s about vision and not being afraid to do something or say something that has never been done before. I offer leadership mentoring where we clear the subconscious patterns that drive you, so that you can be more free to lead in a way that is really of your soul essence and not just do what you think is expected of you or what will get validation. Instead, you can lead with courage and true worth. We also work together to open your gifts, which is always such a powerful process and so many people are scared of their gifts and perhaps the responsibility that comes with them. I host a programme called The Beautiful Leadership Immersion which really redefines what it means to be human at this time and opens us up to living a life of sacred purpose and creativity.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
Trust in the vision that you have — you don’t need to have seen it done before in order to do it. We need more creativity and less regurgitation in this world. With most of the work that I have done, mentors have told me not to do it. I remember when I was starting my podcast, multiple people told me that I needed to do 4 min videos, and I knew that the podcast was what I needed, and then of course they became widely popular.
Get support on the management and admin side of things — when I started my socially conscious jewellery label, I attended various business support courses and then was very hard on myself for not managing everything. It’s not easy to be the creative, the salesperson, the supply chain manager, the accountant, and the secretary. Although you may not feel you have enough resources to outsource or bring in help, make this a priority as it will bring in more ease and flow — freeing you up to focus on the bits only you can do.
You don’t have to follow a set path — my career has been varied and I have broken many rules of what makes someone employable. It forced me to believe in myself more and more as an entrepreneur where we don’t waste time doing things for the sake of it — and instead can really focus our energy on what matters.
Have a celebration team — I have found that working alone means that I often don’t celebrate when things are going great in the way that you would in a traditional team. Find the people who you are going to check in with and celebrate with on a regular basis so that you don’t just keep going, never looking up, taking a breath and letting what you have achieved sink in.
Make rest a part of the way you work — there is such a hustle culture and I fell into workaholism and always feeling that I had never done enough fast enough. I now truly believe that we need to rest regularly — as a daily practice as well as taking time off away from even our phones. This is key to staying creative, and to not burn out.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Stay true to your core value system. In a dominant culture that is about power over. It can be easy to lose track of your values. I believe that we need to live from this place. So our values are what we take action from in this world. At any moment in my work where I haven’t believed in myself or felt jaded by how hard it was to inspire a change, I always came back to this. It’s the work of a cultural futurist. See what’s possible, stay aligned and bring it into this world, gently.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?
Maybe it’s you, reading this right now!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find out more about my book Intuition, my mentoring work and the Beautiful Leadership Immersion at www.amisha.co.uk and listen to the podcast at www.thefutureisbeautiful.co
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
About The Interviewer: Growing up in Canada, Edward Sylvan was an unlikely candidate to make a mark on the high-powered film industry based in Hollywood. But as CEO of Sycamore Entertainment Group Inc, (SEGI) Sylvan is among a select group of less than ten Black executives who have founded, own and control a publicly traded company. Now, deeply involved in the movie business, he is providing opportunities for people of color.
In 2020, he was appointed president of the Monaco International Film Festival, and was encouraged to take the festival in a new digital direction.
Raised in Toronto, he attended York University where he studied Economics and Political Science, then went to work in finance on Bay Street, (the city’s equivalent of Wall Street). After years of handling equities trading, film tax credits, options trading and mergers and acquisitions for the film, mining and technology industries, in 2008 he decided to reorient his career fully towards the entertainment business.
With the aim of helping Los Angeles filmmakers of color who were struggling to understand how to raise capital, Sylvan wanted to provide them with ways to finance their creative endeavors.
At Sycamore Entertainment he specializes in print and advertising financing, marketing, acquisition and worldwide distribution of quality feature-length motion pictures, and is concerned with acquiring, producing and promoting films about equality, diversity and other thought provoking subject matter which will also include nonviolent storytelling.
Also in 2020, Sylvan launched SEGI TV, a free OTT streaming network built on the pillars of equality, sustainability and community which is scheduled to reach 100 million U.S household televisions and 200 million mobile devices across Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung Smart TV and others.
As Executive Producer he currently has several projects in production including The Trials of Eroy Brown, a story about the prison system and how it operated in Texas, based on the best-selling book, as well as a documentary called The Making of Roll Bounce, about the 2005 coming of age film which starred rapper Bow Wow and portrays roller skating culture in 1970’s Chicago.
He sits on the Board of Directors of Uplay Canada, (United Public Leadership Academy for Youth), which prepares youth to be citizen leaders and provides opportunities for Canadian high school basketball players to advance to Division 1 schools as well as the NBA.
A former competitive go kart racer with Checkered Flag Racing Ltd, he also enjoys traveling to exotic locales. Sylvan resides in Vancouver and has two adult daughters.
Sylvan has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and has been seen on Fox Business News, CBS and NBC. Sycamore Entertainment Group Inc is headquartered in Seattle, with offices in Los Angeles and Vancouver.
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Author Amisha Ghadiali Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.