The Hidden Advantage
The Hidden Advantage: How Nikhil Rughani Is Bringing Science, Soul, and Playful Peak Performance to the Leaders Who Need It Most
There is a particular kind of relief that comes when someone finally gives themselves permission to be all of who they are.
Not the version shaped by what the industry expects. Not the version that leaves the spiritual self at the office door, or keeps the neuroscience separate from the intuition, or chooses play over precision because nobody told them they could have both.
Nikhil Rughani has spent two decades working with leaders, and the shift he keeps seeing, the one that changes everything, is not a strategy change or a mindset shift in the conventional sense. It is the moment a person stops dividing themselves in two and starts operating from the full spectrum of who they are.
That is the work of Steel Lotus. And it is anything but ordinary.
From peaceful to playful
When Nikhil last appeared on the True North Show, he was describing his work as peaceful peak performance. The word peaceful made sense to him. He had seen what hustle did. He had lived what it cost. He wanted something different, something calmer, more sustainable, more humane.
Then someone asked him a single question that changed everything. If you were already calm and blissful, what would you actually do?
His answer came without hesitation. He would play more. He would have more fun. He would bring more joy into every area of his life and work.
And just like that, the positioning shifted. The branding was redesigned. The philosophy deepened. Playful peak performance became the frame not because it was more marketable, but because it was more true.
Nikhil’s belief is both simple and radical. The earliest memories most of us have of genuine joy are memories of play. As adults, we have been conditioned to leave that behind in the name of professionalism, discipline, and seriousness. But what if we did not have to? What if play was not a reward for finishing the work, but the very quality that made the work exceptional?
He tested this across every context he operated in. His Taekwondo students. His university classes at UNSW. His coaching clients. In every case, introducing more play produced more engagement, more retention, more results, and more loyalty. His class of master’s level students, who had never been the strongest communicators, went from average passes to an entire cohort earning high distinctions after he invited them to have fun, tell bad jokes, and enjoy themselves.
Play, it turns out, is not the opposite of high performance. It is one of its most reliable engines.
The architecture of either or thinking
One of the most distinctive features of Nikhil’s work is his focus on what he calls paradoxical thinking, or the capacity to hold two opposing ideas at the same time without forcing a resolution between them.
Most of us, he explains, are wired for binary thinking. This or that. Right or wrong. Science or spirituality. The filter that creates this tendency emerges at around the age of seven, when what developmental psychologists call the critical faculty comes online. Before that, we are simply absorbing. After that, we are sorting everything into yes and no.
As consciousness continues to evolve, something more sophisticated becomes possible. The prefrontal cortex, the distinctly human part of the brain responsible for executive function, whole-brain thinking, and intuition, allows us to hold opposing thoughts simultaneously, without judgment and without needing to resolve the tension. This is not indecision. It is a higher order of thinking.
The practical implication of this for leaders is significant. How many decisions are made poorly not because of insufficient information, but because of the underlying assumption that only one path is available? How many talented people suppress parts of themselves at work because nobody told them they were allowed to bring all of it?
Nikhil’s question to every client who arrives at a crossroads is always the same. Who said you have to choose?
The VP of sales who brought himself to work
The most powerful illustration of this in the episode is the story of a vice president of sales at a unicorn technology company working in AI and cybersecurity. He came to Nikhil stressed, drinking too much, and significantly short of his ten-million-dollar revenue target. His team had reached two million with limited time remaining.
He was also a deeply spiritual man who believed, firmly, that his faith and his spiritual practices had no place in the corporate environment. So he kept them hidden. He walked into work every day as a partial version of himself.
The work Nikhil did with him touched multiple dimensions. It addressed the drinking. It introduced grounded mindfulness practices, breathing, visualisation, quiet preparation before client calls. It helped this man find ways to bring subtle expressions of his authentic self into his professional interactions without compromise or performance.
And it produced results that surprised even him. The team moved from two million to nine million in under six months. It was just short of the target, but more than enough to satisfy the board and keep the project alive.
Nikhil’s explanation of why this happened is worth sitting with. When you are out of alignment with yourself, people feel it. They may not have the language for it. They are not thinking: this person has not said their morning prayers. They are thinking: something feels off. I do not fully trust this person. And when trust erodes, everything else follows.
The reverse is equally true. When a person is genuinely aligned with who they are, there is a coherence to their presence that others experience as magnetic. Not charisma in the performative sense. Something quieter and more reliable than that.
The neuroscience of intuition
Perhaps the most forward-looking part of Nikhil’s current work is what he is calling executive intuition, and specifically, the introduction of tarot as a corporate focus tool.
He is careful to frame this properly. He is not doing predictive readings. He is not telling people what will happen. What he is doing is using the rich visual symbolism of the tarot as a structured trigger for pattern recognition.
Neuroscience has given this a name. Neural pattern recognition, combined with interoception, the internal physiological sensation of knowing, is the mechanism that underlies what we experience as intuition. The brain recognises a pattern at speed, below the level of conscious awareness, and signals that recognition through a felt sense in the body. That gut feeling is real. It is measurable. And it can be trained.
The tarot, in Nikhil’s hands, functions as a catalyst for this process. By presenting a visual pattern, it bypasses the analytical filter and invites the unconscious to surface what it already knows. It creates new pattern connections or applies familiar patterns to unfamiliar situations. The result is often a clarity that clients describe as sudden, even though the insight was always available.
He shares the example of a client in allied health who had no spiritual background and was openly skeptical. After a short tarot-based session around the question of reaching a seven-figure revenue goal, she realised she could reach it in five months rather than twelve if she made one decision she had been avoiding. She made it. The timeline changed accordingly.
Nikhil believes intuition is on the verge of entering the corporate mainstream the way emotional intelligence did a generation ago, and creativity has done more recently. He is positioning himself and his certification program to be at the front of that shift, training executive coaches who can work with intuition in a grounded, science-informed, practically useful way.
How to know when it is time to pivot
When asked how he identifies the moment a direction has run its course, Nikhil’s answer is embodied and specific. There is a hesitation, he says. An inability to take action on something that used to feel natural. It is visceral, like standing at the edge of a cliff with your hands on the keyboard and simply not being able to move forward.
He has learned to read that signal faster over time. What once took months now takes hours.
His practice for working through it draws on an ancient Ayurvedic technique involving a specific pressure point on the right hand, combined with breathing, a visual anchor, and the repeated question: what do I want? The process triggers an unconscious response that surfaces as both a feeling and a visual image. He then journals from that place.
By page three, he says, the answer is usually clear. The writing changes. The energy shifts. What begins as confusion resolves into direction. It is, as he describes it, a form of self-coaching. And everyone he has shared the process with has reported the same.
Give yourself permission
The lesson Nikhil names as the one he is most grateful for in recent months is both simple and quietly courageous.
Give yourself permission.
He had been holding his different worlds apart for too long. The neuroscience and NLP on one side. The esoteric, the mystical, and the intuitive on the other. Each kept separate, as though one would invalidate the other in the eyes of whoever was watching.
The moment he stopped waiting for external permission and gave it to himself, everything opened. The branding found its shape. The mission became clear. The work became more coherent and more him than it had ever been.
His vision now is not to change the world himself, but to build the coaches who will. A growing cohort of high performance executive coaches certified across six modalities: NLP, timeline therapy, hypnotherapy, coaching, executive intuition, and business neuroscience. Each one equipped to think across the full spectrum. Each one trained to bring the hidden advantage to the leaders they serve.
Not this or that. This and that. Always.
To learn more about Nikhil Rughani and Steel Lotus, including his certification programs and executive intuition work, find him through Steel Lotus.
