John Purkiss has many strings to his bow. One of which is being a celebrated author of the book The Power of Letting Go, published in 2020.

1. The World Federation of Mental Health has set the theme for World Mental Health Day (10 October 2024) as: “It’s time to prioritize mental health in the workplace.” How can we take steps to break the stigma and promote a more open conversation at work and amongst colleagues?

It’s time to let go of the stigma relating to mental health. One could argue that practically all of us are mentally ill, because we all have thoughts that lead to suffering. In some cases, mental suffering also leads to physical suffering. Many of our physical illnesses can be traced back to our thought patterns. It may be so long ago that we’ve forgotten how it started.

If you never have thoughts that lead to suffering, then you’re probably enlightened. Congratulations!

If you’re in a leadership role or you have a public profile, you have a great opportunity to promote an open conversation about mental health.

I suffered and recovered from clinical depression in my mid-twenties. My experience is that being open about my mental health is a positive thing.

Many people – including colleagues and clients – have come to me to discuss their own issues. As a result, we’ve built a much stronger bond.

2. In your book, The Power of Letting Go, you emphasize the concept of surrendering control to find clarity and purpose. How do you recommend starting the process of ‘letting go’ alongside reaching your professional and personal goals?

It helps to understand our starting point. There’s a widespread assumption that humans are all separate beings – consisting of a body and a mind – trying to get what they want and avoid what they don’t want. This assumption pervades economics, finance, psychology, law and many other disciplines. There’s also a widespread belief that the world is a random occurrence, and the highest form of intelligence is the human brain.

I suggest we let go of all these assumptions. The Eastern traditions have been saying for thousands of years that there’s an underlying intelligence that’s running the cosmos. You can begin to discover this phenomenon using a technique called unclutching, which I learned from SPH Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam, known to his followers as Swamiji. This is how I describe it to people:

Sit in a quiet place and close your eyes. Every time a thought appears, you have a choice:

1. You can engage with the thought – by thinking about it, resisting it or suppressing it.
2. Alternatively, you can choose not to engage with the thought.
You simply distance yourself from it. You stand back from it. You unclutch from it.
All you need to do is choose not to engage with each thought. Just stand back from it. Unclutch.

Nearly everyone overlooks the second option, which is NOT to engage with the thought. This may feel lazy or negligent at first. We’ve been conditioned to believe that we should think a lot and try to control what’s happening.
We’re afraid that if we let go – by unclutching – our lives will fall apart.
In fact, everything falls into place.

When we let go in this way we surrender to the intelligence that’s running the cosmos. We don’t need to think all the time. My experience is that – every now and then – I receive an insight, or an idea, or an instruction to do something.

The rest of the time I can unclutch.

What about your professional and personal goals? This is how Swamiji defines living enlightenment: “A state of deep inner peace and restful awareness, where one feels nothing needs to be achieved, even while everything is being achieved.”

The second step in letting go is completion, which I also learned from Swamiji. We’ve all had experiences in our early childhood – before the age of seven – which were so painful that we suppressed them. They’re called incompletions because we didn’t complete them. We didn’t live the experience fully from beginning to end.

If we want to achieve our professional and personal goals, we have to let go of the pain that we’ve suppressed. We can do this by re-living the original incident intensely. This will also enable us to let go of any conclusions we came to about ourselves, other people and/or the world. These conclusions or beliefs are still running our lives, decades later. Examples include, “Something’s wrong,” “I’m not good enough,” and “People don’t support me.” It’s like software on a computer. You’re trying to do something, but your software is giving the opposite instructions.

Here’s a personal example. I failed a color blindness test at the age of six.
The optometrist told me it was ‘impossible’ for me to fly airplanes. The cognition ‘It’s impossible’ stayed with me for decades and manifested in other areas of my life.

If we intensely re-live the original incident, we can remove the cognition which is running our lives. In my case, things which had previously been ‘impossible’ suddenly started manifesting.

Swamiji explains the completion technique in his YouTube video “Completion Process: Unlock Health, Wealth, Relationships, & Enlightenment Itself!” I’ve also described it in chapter three of The Power of Letting Go.

3. You mention that letting go can unlock creativity and new opportunities. Can you share a work-related example where embracing this mindset can potentially lead to an unexpected breakthrough?

‘Mindset’ is apt. I’m imagining a mind which has set like concrete. Many of us have become set in our ways of thinking. We’ll be forced to let go of this approach soon, because Artificial Intelligence will handle routine intellectual processes much faster than we can.

The best way to unlock creativity and new opportunities is to let go of the mind. Unclutching and completion are highly effective tools for doing this. They increase the gap between thoughts, allowing creative ideas and opportunities to get through.

When we unclutch we let go completely. We allow things to happen in ways our mind can’t anticipate or understand. I described one example in chapter 4 of The Power of Letting Go. I was running a business in Paris which had ground to a halt. I let go completely and asked to be guided. Within a few months I’d moved to a job in London that suited me perfectly.

Letting go completely – otherwise known as surrender – can feel scary at first. For me it’s the most exciting and fulfilling way to live. I allow the intelligence that’s running the cosmos to run my life. In the meantime I can relax and enjoy the journey.

Some of the most creative people in the world have been labeled as mentally ill or crazy. Think of all the comedians and jazz musicians who are bipolar. Clinical depression turned me into a writer. My friend and fellow author John Spencer Williams has a Substack called Crazy Successful. I see this as the way forward. As Artificial Intelligence takes over the routine intellectual tasks, it’s time for all of us to let go and create new things.