#56: The Psychology of Business Relationships with Monica Parikh, Founder of School of Love NYC
On this podcast, I’ve had multiple guests share their stories about how they left their well-paying corporate jobs to pursue their passion and build their dream company.
My guest this week, Monica Parikh, Founder of School of Love NYC, did the same.
Now, she provides female leaders with the tools and skills they need to build relationships using psychology, law, and more.
In this episode, Monica and I explore topics such as the:
#1 factor of human happiness.
Difference between masculine and feminine energy.
Next level of consciousness.
Like many of us, Monica went through her own life stressors, which she now says has made her a better leader. If this resonates with you, make sure to tune into this episode!
Learn more about Monica here: https://www.schooloflovenyc.com.
Check out my new free new training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
Listen to the Show:
Laura (00:03):
So here's the challenge: so many entrepreneurs dream of leading a life of impact by creating a multimillion dollar brand, but only a tiny percentage of businesses actually scale to that point. On this podcast, we speak openly and authentically about what it takes to scale your business. Following the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts, and leaders, looking at the behind the scenes of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned. My name is Laura Meyer and I'm your host. I'm a serial entrepreneur, wife and mom to three. I love talking all things business, especially digging into the mindset and strategies of scaling joyfully to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond. Let's go!
(00:49):
Hey Monica, thank you so much for being here more.
Monica (00:52):
I'm super psyched. I'm such a huge fan of yours and you're just as gorgeous as you are in photographs.
Laura (00:59):
Well, thank you the first time that you said that I thought, Oh my gosh, you're living your brand. Like you're, I'm feeling the love here and you're bringing it. So I really, really appreciate it. You are the founder of The school of Love in New York city. So you used to be a thought leader and now you're in wellness. Let's just chat about that for a second before we even get started.
Monica (01:18):
Yeah. So I practiced law for 20 years and about seven years ago, I started building my business and three years ago I stepped into it part-time so it really just started out as a side hustle for me.
Laura (01:33):
And then what happened like, so you had this law degree, you're practicing law. Did your family like thank you are absolutely crazy to go into another space or were they pretty supportive?
Monica (01:45):
No, they thought I was completely insane. Of course, because the space I was going into was really about love and psychology. So, you know, really, if you really want to understand, love, you have to understand your own psychology. And that means that you have to take a very holistic view of your own family. So as you can imagine, that was incredibly confronting that they basically had, like, you know, this little savant who from childhood was psychoanalyzing them and then basically started to go into psychoanalysis, you know, under the guidance of psychologists and healers. So, and the very nascent stages of it, they thought I was insane. You know, both of my parents are immigrants and they definitely came from a culture of success. You know, being the top of your game. My parents came here with no money and I went to an Ivy league law school, paid off all my student loans by myself, you know, own my home in New York city. So that was the track that they were like, that's an acceptable track to go on. And then I started talking almost this foreign language. And so they really didn't even understand what I was talking about. And it was super confrontive. There was about, I would say three years that were just really, really rough in terms of family dynamics in my family.
Laura (03:06):
So what is the company that you actually started that created that rough family dynamic? So where did you go from being a lawyer that was so disruptive to yourself and to your relationships?
Monica (03:21):
Yeah, so, you know, what happened, the quick and dirty of it is, is that I went through a really traumatic divorce in 2008. And, you know, I started asking really deep questions as, as we all do, when we're in enormous amounts of pain, why did my marriage fail? And then from that, I started asking the larger question of why is marriage generally not working? You know, because more than 50% of marriages end in divorce and of those people who stay married about seven out of 10 report being unhappy. So just from a statistical perspective, I was like the institution isn't working, it hasn't been working and what's wrong. And so really, you know, the very nascent stages of that were just me understanding my own psychology because we basically attract things to us and we attract things to us based on our behaviors and our beliefs. And I needed to understand why I had attracted this story to me and what I needed to change. So I would never attract the story to me ever again.
Laura (04:26):
Wow. That is so powerful. So then what does the company actually do? Like, what is it, what is the offering, like what, how did you build a business model around this discovery process that you wanted to go through for yourself?
Monica (04:40):
Well, what I realized and, you know, it was really, I think, part and parcel of having an Ivy league education and realizing that the education system is woefully inadequate to prepare us for our most important task in life, which is marriage. You know, the studies conclusively have shown across the board that the number one factor of human happiness is marriage and relationships. And yet our curriculum doesn't support that. We need a lot of different skillsets from learning how to assert boundaries, understanding our own energy levels and when we're able to give. And when we're just depleted understanding how to deescalate conflict, you know, as a trained lawyer and mediator, I was, you know, just shocked that we understand how to escalate conflict, but we really don't understand how to align needs and pull that down. And then, you know, when there's a bad marriage, the effect that has on our attachment style and, you know, that starts at a very early age for our children.
(05:39):
So really what we model for our children really can impact their ability to love long-term. So what I started to do was build a curriculum and then I started to test that curriculum on a global audience. The curriculum is about nine months long and you know, I obviously I coach private clients. I coach very few private clients because my price point is very high. I usually coach self-made billionaires, entrepreneurs, Hollywood celebrities. And so I wanted to democratize education. I felt that this was so important that it should be given to everyone in the world. Everyone should have access to it. So what I did seven years ago is I had already started building a digital business that would allow me to unplug my computer, go anywhere in the world and work, but also reach a global audience that anybody could call into that classroom space live for free, not for free.
(06:31):
Obviously they have to pay for the curriculum, but the cost of entering that classroom would be live. And if they weren't able to come into that classroom live, that what would happen is they would get a recording. And the recording was great because that was basically reprogramming their neural pathways, the way they actually think about the problem. So I started testing several years ago and a lot of my curriculum is also based on psychotherapeutic principles. I wanted to break the out of the box that some of this conversation was happening in private, in therapist's office. There wasn't equal access to everyone for that. And I wanted to, de-stigmatize what actually creates love and happiness. So as I did that, I just got tremendous feedback from these exceptional women around the world. They were telling me they were calmer. They were just more equanimous on a day-to-day basis. They started actually standing up to narcissistic abuse in the workplace and in government that it was having this profound effect. And so, you know, about three years ago, I decided that I was going to step into my company full-time.
Laura (07:35):
Wow. So you were pretty far along in your own development of your company before you even went full time with it.
Monica (07:43):
You know, I was far along in terms of like the building of the platform, but in terms of having the confidence to say that I was going to leave, you know, the benefits of traditional employment and, you know, that was a big hurdle of me crossing over from a fear-based mindset to a faith-based mindset. And the first year I did that, I mean, to be really honest with you, like the last year of my career, so I had a 20 year career as a lawyer that was impeccable. I was a public interest lawyer for the, for the government. And my last year, I actually whistled blew against the heads of my organizations who, because of my study, the psychology, I realized we're narcissists.
(08:24):
So long story short, I ended up getting terminated during family medical leave while my father was dying. And so, you know, after I get fired, I actually was the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the government, which I was funding the legal fees for that case, which I subsequently won. And then I also was building my business at the same time. And I had lost all my benefits, you know, healthcare, vacation, transit benefits. And I was terrified, you know, because have no means of support except for myself. And, you know, before my father passed, my father actually died on my birthday before my dad passed, he had asked me to take care of my mother. So I was feeling so much eustress for lack of a better word, like so much stress, but it actually helped me really develop a lot more psychological principles about how important it is to calm down the parasympathetic nervous system so that you can actually have more creativity and more power and more confidence going forward. So I look at that kind of cocktail of insanity of just like life stressors. And it really actually helped make me a better leader in so many ways.
Laura (09:37):
What I love about what you're saying is there's so many people who are listening, who have been through something similar that is so rarely spoken up, they've been undermined within their own career, or they tried to do the right thing and they were punished for it. And this happens, I think more often than is actually articulated, but what doesn't happen is people turn it into something positive, what do you think was happening for you that allowed you the power to transform it into a new company, to transform it into a curiosity that then became an enterprise?
Monica (10:17):
You know, I think the number one thing to me was faith. I've always had a tremendous spiritual practice. My, my parents are very faith based people. My dad was Hindu. My mom is Catholic. So really like when I say faith in God, I mean that in a very holistic whatever is your practice kind of sense, but I really felt that we're all put here on earth for a reason. And we all have certain gifts that we're being called to develop. And I could start to see as I calmed down more and more that this very strange cocktail of life experiences that I've had many of which are incredibly traumatic was happening to me for a reason. And if I could develop greater faith that I could actually see great opportunities that could really be in service to mankind. So that was really the, I think that was the number one reason. I was able to kind of squeeze those lemons and make a lot of lemonade from it.
Laura (11:19):
Wow. That's so powerful. So why is it important for people for anyone who's listening that whether they're an entrepreneurship or a business setting to learn how to receive and give all of the time?
Monica (11:34):
Oh man, that's such a great question. Well, you know, I think that we have to understand energy, you know, and to me, one of the things I really want to do in building my business is I want to build my business from a place of feminine energy. And to me, that's a response to my 20 year career as a lawyer where I was very grounded in masculine energy. And what I realized is that masculine energy is the giving and feminine energy is the receiving. And, you know, just when we talk about relationships psychology, whether it's the relationship you have with your partner, the relationship you have with your children, the relationship you have with your boss, the relationship you have with your president, really, you have to understand that there is an equal exchange of energy. That's the give and the take. And when that exchange is off, that basically you create global disequilibrium.
(12:29):
You're not in equilibrium. And from my perspective now, you know, because we are living in a world that was built by patriarchal institutions, we've been trained to be givers without being receivers. And I think that's creating a lot of the disconnect that you're seeing, you know, in a global world, because what I recognized with myself was that the more I allowed myself to receive, the more calm I was, the more creative flow I could get into the better relationships I was able to build with my clients. And, you know, as any entrepreneur knows, especially, let's say now during COVID, you know, there's so much financial stress on us, there's so much health, physical stress on us. There's emotional stress on us. There's living, you know, with our families or our partner full-time or not living with somebody, there is a cocktail of stressors. And so you really just have to understand how to take care of yourself at this very different level, which requires that equilibrium of giving and receiving.
Laura (13:34):
And I love how you brought up feminine energy. And this is something that I will admit I hear all the time, but I don't totally know. I don't totally understand. And so when we think about feminine energy, is there a certain, is it about how you respond to problems and issues differently? Is it how you manage conflict? Is it all the above? Like, is there any way to give me a concrete example about like what that actually means?
Monica (13:59):
Yeah. That's such a great question. We, as women have enormous amounts of power and we have enormous amounts of power over, I mean, pretty much everything. Right. But what happens when we're in masculine energy is we're kind of giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, and you get very depleted from that. So what ends up happening is the giving starts becoming from a place of anger or resentment, or just a feeling of almost emptiness. You know, you can see that, especially now, you know, with, uh, women traditionally are leading employment to basically homeschool kids. Full-time usually the domestic tasks fall very heavily on women. And so it's very hard to be happy. So just take it from a mental perspective. It's very hard to be happy when we're depleted like that. So one of the first lessons that my coach who basically trained me in all of this was basically had to teach me was that we, as women need to give from the saucer, not the cup.
(15:08):
And what that means is that we have to give from the overflow of energy within ourselves, as opposed to kind of ratcheting that cup down because when it goes down, we don't have as much power. We don't have as much influence because we're coming from such a place of depletion. And you can even see, I think on a global world stage, how a lot of women, you know, are forced to adopt more male paradigms and in terms of dress and behavior to be accepted, you know, on a global stage. And it's very rare that you see a female leader, who's able to talk about sort of that feminine energy, which is, you know, grounded in empathy and grounded and sort of like a holistic view of mental health. And even when, when you talk about just a leadership, you know, creativity, to me, the deeper I got into feminine energy and the way that you do that is, you know, for me, it's a really robust self-care practice.
(16:10):
The more I take care of myself. So I start every single day with an hour of exercise and about 45 minutes of meditation. And that's kind of like my grounding place. And then, you know, I have all these paradigms that I teach my clients, including moving away, toxic people who are more toxic away from your energy fields, even your diet that you eat, the music you listen to your sleep protocols, the perfumer and the clothing that you wear, the way that your home looks, all of it influences our energy. So, you know, really the more that I was able to take care of me, the more I could get into a flow state and a flow state is wonderful because what you're doing is like basically you're creating the conditions for greater creativity, but you're also able to basically attract more serendipitous events. You're able to enter into a quantum field where like more things are happening for you more quickly. And you're also calming down your subconscious. So, you know, that's kind of like my quick and dirty. I hope that wasn't too complicated, but it is a practice to understand how to tap into it because we so live in, you know, a place of masculine energy.
Laura (17:22):
And it's so fun because if you're watching the video, you're watching me smile. If you're hearing the audio, you can't actually experience what's happening here. Right as Monica is talking about the law of attraction, she has a really adorable creature that I assume belongs to her. That's crawling all over her, which is really, really fun.
Monica (17:40):
And you say creature because he kind of looks like a hybrid between a cat and a dog.
Laura (17:45):
It's one of those situations where it was like the Saturday night live episode, I can't tell if it's a cat or dog. So I'm just going to go with creature.
Monica (17:56):
He's like the cat of dogs, he is actually a dog. But when I tell you I get stopped on the street all the time and people like your cat is on a leash. And I'm like, he's my dog.
Laura (18:05):
It's a really sweet looking dog. But he'd started to sort of walk around and start getting on her shoulder and then jumping up behind you right as she was talking about the law of attraction and consciousness.
Monica (18:18):
It is energy. And I'll tell you something like I do now in my home, you know, Yoda every morning. And when I'm done, he's all up in my face and I it's like energy, you know? And so that's really what we're talking about. We're really all we're talking about is energy.
Laura (18:30):
Yeah. And what's so fascinating about this is that many times we respond with our amygdala brain, our animalistic brain, right. And probably our animals do the same thing. So they're reacting and responding to energy in the same way that we do. It's just that we're probably more subconscious about it. Totally. Yeah. And so this is a great segue into my last and final question, which is when we are looking at this next level of consciousness, what do you think it does for people who are scaling companies and are looking to get them into escalated levels of entrepreneurship?
Monica (19:05):
Well, one, I think it is really important to develop your masculine and your feminine self and have that balanced. You know, I think that one of the problems I see with entrepreneurship and you see it all the time, like you hear leaders like Elon Musk talk about, you know, working the 15 hour day, or you see what happened with the founder of Zappos, you know, who had a drug and alcohol addiction is what you see is people who are visionary, who get burnt out, stressed out they're unbalanced, and they drive their workforce, you know, to the ground. And to me, you know, I would hate to think of the American workplace as the new plantation system where we have like no empathy for labor and where we don't realize that people are, they perform better when they're healthier, they perform better when they're balanced. And I really feel like that's the marriage of the feminine and the masculine.
(20:00):
And then I also think like, you know, the marriage of the feminine and masculine in terms of the next level of consciousness for entrepreneurship asks deeper and different questions, you know, it's not enough to sell shoes. It's more like, you know, where does the human need lay? And, and for me, what I see is, you know, with my business is that you want there to be very happy relationships in marriages. You want people to have peaceful home lives because that models for children and you want to give them the skills for emotional health so that they know how to take care of themselves, even if they never had parents that modeled that behavior to them. So, you know, to me, that's really feminine because coming at a problem from a deeply empathic place and saying, how can I scale and actually make the world better through my work that I'm doing?
Laura (20:56):
That is so powerful. And I am seeing also that rise in consciousness as a result of what the pain and suffering and struggle that so many people have gone through in what I call the year of our Lord 2020.
Monica (21:10):
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, like when I talk about consciousness, I often talk about the shift from third dimensional to fifth dimensional consciousness and fourth dimension. It's kind of like, it's all going haywire and it's all coming undone. And that's coming to teach us these really profound lessons that a lot of the old paradigms, they just don't work anymore. And some of like talking about masculine and feminine energy, like one of the things I saw was that, you know, masculine energy is very much like pushing through pain. Like I am exhausted and depleted, but I'm going to get up and write my business plan. I'm going to do in any way. And for me, when I was going through that period of time, that was just kind of insane. What I realized was that actually, no, like I need a nap today, you know, or I need to go walk in the woods and then take myself for a smoothie because I'm filling up my energy again, to give from the saucer, not the cup, meaning like, then I'll come home and write my business plan because I'll have more energy to basically knock it out of the park faster.
(22:19):
So to me, that feminine paradigm is also just more efficient, like time efficient, because remember the eight hour workday or the 12 hour and a 15 hour Workday, those are constructs from patriarchal. Like, you know, those are patriarchal constructs. The fact is the average American worker works less than three hours a day. So why not just make those the three most productive hours ever, and then not work?
Laura (22:46):
Yeah, I totally agree. I think that it's, it's, especially, people are realizing it this year where they're, they're finally coming to terms with the fact that without a commute, without the pleasantries, when you first go into a workspace and talk to people without the breaks and the interruptions actually don't need to work quite as hard to get quite as much done.
Monica (23:08):
I mean, and that was the biggest revelation for me when I stepped into my company full time. And, you know, you can see my home office behind me. Like I realized like a lot of it was just wasted time and energy, whether it was the commute or it was the getting dressed up for work, or it was the like pack my lunch. And I, Oh, I always felt like, I couldn't understand why companies weren't letting everybody be remote when the technology existed to allow it. And then I, I thought that perhaps it was built on some kind of paternalistic, like we don't trust them. And I think now there's such an opportunity. It's like, well, of course we trust them because the work is actually, it's going ahead without problem, without incident. But we also have to create new models to, you know, create balance because they're new, they're new tasks now with homeschooling kids are cooking for a family, an entire family at home, you know?
Laura (24:04):
Yeah. Yes. Well, innovation definitely comes from that pressure. So if people want to find out more about you, if they want to just learn more about the school of love, New York city, where should they go and what, where can they connect with you?
Monica (24:19):
So the only place they can go is my website and that's www.schooloflovenyc.com. They can also email me at monica@schooloflovenyc.com. And, I reach a global audience. So even though there's NYC in the name, it's for everybody, yeah.
Laura (24:36):
NYC is a is a global city. So that makes sense. So thank you so much for being here. I know that people who are listening so much out of your interview and I invite them to come visit your website, if they want to learn more. And I just, again, appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today.
Monica (24:51):
Thank you so much for having me. I had a blast.
Laura (24:56):
Hey there, before you head out, I want to let you know about a free new training I have right on a brand new website called yournextmillion.me. It's yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses, to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond. And I have to tell you, it is not what you think. So check it out at yournextmillion.me. And if you loved this show, will you subscribe to it and share it with a friend or just say something nice about it to someone, you know? I'd really appreciate it so much. Thanks so much for being here and I'll see you next time.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.