Science, Soul and Strategy with Nikhil Rughani | Ep. 49

On this week’s episode of The True North Show I am joined by Nikhil Rughani, a returning guest, a friend and someone who I am very grateful for.  Nikhil shares with me why he has pivoted from Peaceful Peak Performance to Playful Peak Performance and also what happens to him when his intuition kicks in and he is guided to make changes with the work he is doing or the path he is going down.  Nikhil also explains an incredible Ayurvedic technique that he uses to help him get clear on a new idea or direction – you will not want to miss that!

Bio:

Nikhil Rughani is an Australian executive coach, trainer, and founder of Steel Lotus, where he helps leaders and teams achieve Playful Peak Performance and Executive Intuition™ through the integration of science, soul, and strategy.

With a background spanning copywriting, marketing, coaching, and teaching, Nikhil brings two decades of real-world experience to his work.  He has supported CEOs, government leaders, and ambitious professionals, and currently teaches Masters-level students at the University of New South Wales in advertising, marketing, and branding.  He is also studying neuroscience at the University of New England, adding academic depth to a practice already grounded in both performance and human behaviour.

Nikhil’s method is built on holding opposites in tension, including play and precision, structure and flow, science and spirituality.  That philosophy shapes his coaching, his training programs, and his belief that high performance should feel more coherent, not more complicated.

He is currently focused on building a scalable ecosystem of executive trainings and certification pathways, including NLP, hypnosis, and Time Line Therapy®, with a growing emphasis on corporate and team development.  His goal is to help people create meaningful results without burnout, while building capability that lasts.

Nikhil also teaches taekwondo, bringing discipline, presence, and embodiment into everything he does. His broader philosophy is simple: real success comes from aligning who you are with how you work.

Social Media:

Website:         nikhilrughani.com

Facebook:       https://www.facebook.com/nrughani

Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/nikhilrughani/

LinkedIn:         https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilrughani/

Transcript:

[00:34] Megan North: Hello and welcome to the True North Show. I’m your host Megan North, and I’d like to start by thanking the sponsors of the show: Quantum Awakening, Beth Lewis, and Anne C. Clarke.

Today I am thrilled to be welcoming back a wonderful and inspiring returning guest who is also a very good friend of mine, Nikhil Rughani. Nikhil is an Australian executive coach, trainer, and founder of Steel Lotus, where he helps leaders and teams achieve playful peak performance and executive intuition through the integration of science, soul, and strategy.

With a background spanning copywriting, marketing, coaching, and teaching, Nikhil brings two decades of real-world experience to his work. He has supported CEOs, government leaders, and ambitious professionals, and currently teaches master’s level students at the University of New South Wales in advertising, marketing, and branding. He is also studying neuroscience at the University of New England, adding academic depth to a practice already grounded in both performance and human behaviour.

Nikhil’s method is built on holding opposites in tension, including play and precision, structure and flow, science and spirituality. That philosophy shapes his coaching, his training programs, and his belief that high performance should feel more coherent, not more complicated.

He is currently focused on building a scalable ecosystem of executive trainings and certification pathways, including NLP, hypnosis, and timeline therapy, with a growing emphasis on corporate and team development. His goal is to help people create meaningful results without the burnout, while building capability that lasts.

He also teaches Taekwondo, bringing discipline, presence, and embodiment into everything he does. His broader philosophy is simple: real success comes from aligning who you are with how you work.

Nikhil, welcome back to the show. I am so happy we are spending this time together again.

[02:59] Nikhil Rughani: It is so cool to be back. Thanks so much for having me, Megan.

[03:02] Megan North: You are very welcome. Nikhil’s philosophy is built on a powerful idea: real success comes from aligning who you are with how you work. Stay with us because after the break, we are going to find out exactly what that looks like in practice.

Welcome back to the True North Show. I am here with executive coach and founder Nikhil Rughani, a man who has spent two decades helping leaders perform at their peak without burning out.

Nikhil, when you appeared on the show last season, you were describing the work as peaceful peak performance. But there has been a shift, and now you are calling it playful peak performance. What changed?

[04:37] Nikhil Rughani: That is such a good question, Megan. It came from a challenge someone posed to me. I was having a conversation and they said: peaceful peak performance, why peaceful? And I said: because I am anti-hustle. Hustle almost destroyed my business and took a real toll on my health. What I craved was calm, peace, a sense of bliss.

The question that changed everything was: well, what would you actually do if you were calm and blissful? And I sat with that. What would I do? And I realised: I would make my life more playful. I would have more fun. I would be playing more. And then it hit me. It is not peaceful peak performance I am after. It is playful.

That realisation shifted everything. The branding, the alignment, the whole approach to the work. I went and had a completely new brand identity created. And I feel more aligned with it than anything I have done before. Because look, I am a big kid at heart. And who isn’t? On the inside, all we want is joy. And the earliest memories we have of joy are from when we were playing.

So why can’t we bring that into adulthood? Into business? Into health and relationships and spirituality? My answer was: we can. And the moment I said that, within moments, everything clicked. I briefed my designer and his very first draft was exactly it. That is who I am. Those are my colours, my logo, my whole identity. And it has been play ever since.

[06:46] Megan North: Yes, and having had a sneak peek at the new branding, it is genuinely striking. When we think about play we might think of mess and chaos, but from a mental perspective, when we are playing there is no jargon, no noise. Just fun and joy.

[07:19] Nikhil Rughani: Absolutely. And I have taken it into everything. My Taekwondo teaching has become more fun, and we now have the largest contingent from the smallest training hall heading into a tournament. Our students make up ten percent of the competition. Why? Because of the play I have brought into teaching.

I took the same approach at UNSW. My students were not the strongest communicators, but they needed to give accessible presentations. I played games with them. I encouraged them to enjoy themselves, engage, even tell bad jokes. And then I added one more ingredient: I told them if every single student in the class earned a high distinction, I would buy them all coffee.

That was the most expensive coffee bill I have ever had. But the reviews that came back said: we have had so much fun, we have learned so much, nobody has ever engaged us like this. And I realised there is something genuinely true here. When you can have fun and inspire others to have fun, you retain more, you perform more, and the whole thing becomes an experience. And that is ultimately what we are all after: the best possible experience of whatever we are doing.

[09:19] Megan North: Yes, exactly. And it is infectious. If you are doing business with someone who loves what they do and is having fun doing it, of course you want to be near them. Life does not need to be serious, even when we are pursuing our passion and purpose.

[09:46] Nikhil Rughani: Right. I did not need to be peaceful anymore. I just needed to be playful.

[09:51] Megan North: I love it. So let me get really specific about the idea of holding opposing thoughts at the same time: structure and flow, science and spirituality. Most of us are wired to pick a side. How do you train yourself, and the leaders you work with, to get comfortable sitting in that tension?

[10:28] Nikhil Rughani: Great question. Let me start with the tension piece.

We are so geared toward black and white, right and wrong, yes and no. There is research from a psychologist named Maurice Massey suggesting that everything we know, all our values and beliefs, is essentially imprinted into us between the ages of zero and seven. We are pure sponges during that time, no filter. Around age seven, what modern psychology and NLP call the critical faculty emerges. That is the filter that tells us yes and no, this or that.

As consciousness evolves, it tends to oscillate between creative and logical, right brain and left brain. But there comes a point where we begin engaging the prefrontal cortex. Studying neuroscience, I know that the prefrontal cortex is the front part of the brain that is uniquely human. It is responsible for whole-brain thinking, intuition, and executive function. When we truly engage it, we reach a level where we can hold opposing thoughts simultaneously without judgment.

So when someone says: should I do this or that, I’m torn between the two, my response is always: how can we make it so you have both? Why does it have to be one or the other?

I was on a call this morning with a woman in Thailand. She wanted to work with confidence coaching and also train people to become coaches. She had been told she needed to niche down and choose. My question was: who said you have to choose?

She told me her deeper mission was to help people connect with their greatest potential. I suggested: what if achieve your potential is your big mission? Then confidence coaching is one pathway to that mission. Training coaches who then help their own clients achieve potential is another. She said she had never thought of it that way. And then: can you have both? Absolutely.

That is the level of thinking we need to take. We are so conditioned into this or that. But what if you can have both?

[14:35] Megan North: And does the either-or thinking connect to fight or flight as well? That sense of needing to make a safe decision quickly?

[14:54] Nikhil Rughani: That is really interesting. The fight or flight neurological response comes from the adrenal glands, but it probably starts just before that, at the instinctual level. As instincts develop, we begin to sense whether something is trustworthy or not, which engages the creative, right side of the brain.

This happened in our earliest development as a species too. At a basic level, we were wired for feeding, fleeing, sleeping, and reproducing. Then we realised we could do things better as a collective. Instincts became tribal. In neuroscience terms, we call it group flow, being in sync with our people.

Then as we developed our own independence, particularly through adolescence, the rebellion kicked in, logic engaged, and the left brain took over. Fight or flight really comes from instinct shifting into logic. It is happening at the instinctual level first.

[16:53] Megan North: Yes, and I work with the theta brainwave in my healing work, which is where belief systems sit. I imagine that in your work, clearing or identifying those foundational beliefs is often complex, particularly when someone’s beliefs are tied to family expectations or a need for approval.

[17:33] Nikhil Rughani: Yes, and this draws on some important foundational work. Initially from Claire Graves, then developed by Don Beck into spiral dynamics, and more recently refined into values work by Dr. Adriana James.

Values are not judgments of good or bad. They are simply what is important to us. And as we grow, our values change. What once mattered, that sense of keeping mum and dad happy, may later shift to keeping a partner happy, and then to keeping ourselves happy. Consciousness does not stop evolving. Unlike what Maslow suggested, where consciousness ends at self-actualisation, the framework I follow sees consciousness as an open, continuously evolving system. There is no end point. What matters to you now may be entirely different in twenty years.

[19:08] Megan North: Yes, that constant evolution. In the spiritual world we often talk about eventually becoming an ascended master, learning everything across thousands of lifetimes. It is a very long arc.

[19:31] Nikhil Rughani: And here is the truth around that. Clients who want to grow need to be willing to let go of what they once held dear. Not disbelieve it, but recognise that in the context of where they want to go, they may need to start embracing its opposite. The only reason they are stuck is because what is important to them, their values and their consciousness, are being prevented from growing because they are still holding onto past belief.

[19:57] Megan North: Yes. One of the things I do regularly in clearing belief systems is to offer forgiveness as part of the process. Both my parents have passed, and I know that many of my belief systems came from the way they chose to raise me. When I am releasing something, I will speak to them spiritually and say: I am so grateful for this belief, and I am now releasing it, with no judgment. Forgiveness for both them and myself gives the release a different quality of energy.

[20:40] Nikhil Rughani: That is such a beautiful approach. I love that framing: I’ve got this belief, it worked for me, thank you, and now I’m letting it go because I have something different. That is perspective and self-leadership at the same time.

[21:00] Megan North: Yes. And self-forgiveness and forgiving others is perhaps the greatest gift we can ever give, to ourselves or anyone else. So, do you have an example from a corporate context of helping someone hold these dual ideas?

[21:40] Nikhil Rughani: Yes. I worked with a gentleman who was vice president of sales for a large and well-known unicorn tech company doing trailblazing work in AI and cybersecurity. He came from a deeply rational, engineering-focused world. And he was stuck.

Without going into too much detail, he had developed an alcohol dependency because of stress. The work we did together first helped him address that. But the deeper work was helping him stop separating his spiritual and professional identities.

He was a very devoted person to his faith, but he believed the minute he brought any of that into work, people would judge him. So he kept it completely hidden. I said to him: your stress is coming from being out of alignment with who you truly are.

Now when I work with corporate clients, I make spirituality very grounded. I talk about intuition, purpose, alignment. I prescribe grounded rituals: breathing, visualisation. Nothing that would feel uncomfortable in a corporate setting. I am not going to ask someone to burn incense or do anything that does not fit the environment.

So we got him to deepen his own spiritual practices in his private life, not to perform them at work, but simply to be more real about them. He introduced prayer, meditation, and mantra recitation. He began sitting quietly before every client call, visualising, breathing. His colleagues just thought he was prepping.

His team went from two million, well short of a ten-million-dollar target, to nine million within three to six months. Just short of the target, but enough to make the board happy and keep the project moving forward.

Why did that happen? Because when you are out of alignment with yourself, people feel it. They do not think: this person has not done their spiritual practice. They think: something is off, I do not fully trust this person. And trust is gone. When you are aligned, that coherence is felt. People want to work with you. The energy is different.

[27:52] Megan North: Yes. When we do the work on ourselves, our energy shifts and it ripples out to everyone around us. That is a perfect example. And I love that the work was so multi-dimensional. Not just the professional strategy, but the personal alignment, the tools, the practical support around the social drinking pressure as well.

[28:08] Nikhil Rughani: Yes. And something my university students brought to my attention recently was the growing sober curious movement. People are genuinely questioning the cultural expectation of drinking in social settings. That questioning, that curiosity, is exactly where paradoxical thinking comes from. It comes from your willingness to examine what you believe, to think about your thinking. In NLP, we call that metacognition. And that willingness to question is what opens the capacity to hold two opposing ideas without forcing a resolution.

[31:35] Megan North: Yes, and that curiosity connects to intuition as well. That experience of meeting someone and sensing something is off, or noticing a relationship shifting, and trusting that signal even when you cannot fully explain it.

So I cannot wait to ask you about this. You are developing new work around executive intuition, and you are weaving tarot into it. Can you help us understand what that looks like in a boardroom or leadership context?

[32:11] Nikhil Rughani: Yes. Executive intuition is itself an example of paradoxical thinking: executive and intuition together in the same phrase.

If you look back at the arc of leadership development, it was once all about numbers and data. Then emotional intelligence entered the picture and was considered quite fringe. Now it is mainstream. Then creativity was introduced. Once seen as irrelevant to business, now considered essential. I believe intuition is next. We are right at the beginning of that shift taking hold in corporate leadership and high-level decision making.

There is a part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that is responsible for intuition. Executive intuition is about bringing the scientific and the more esoteric together in a grounded way.

From an NLP perspective, there is a structure to intuition. You chunk up to a bigger picture, you move across to something related, and you bring that insight back down and apply it to the current situation. That process happens in seconds for experienced people, but it can be broken down and practised.

From a neuroscience perspective, they call it neural pattern recognition combined with interoception. Interoception is simply an internal felt sense, part of your nervous system working. When your brain recognises a pattern, it creates an internal feeling. That is the intuitive signal: go down this path, make this call. Neuroscience has validated intuition as entirely legitimate and essential for peak performance. When you enter a flow state, your intuitive capacity increases significantly.

Now, what I tell clients is that they can use focus tools to develop their intuition. A focus tool could be numbers, diagrams, or a deck of cards. That is where I introduce the tarot. The deck I teach with is the Rider-Waite, which is rich in symbolism and colour. What it does is break down patterns, which stirs the unconscious mind and produces an interoceptive response, a felt sense that points toward the next right step.

I have worked with non-believers who were deeply sceptical. One example was an allied health practitioner with no spiritual background whatsoever. We did a short session with the tarot. Her question was: am I on the right path to reach seven figures this year? What came through was: make it simpler, make the decision now. She calculated that if she acted immediately, she could reach her seven-figure target in five months, not twelve. She did it.

That is not fortune telling. That is interpretation triggering an unconscious response. She chunked up, recognised the pattern, applied the strategy. The tarot was simply the catalyst.

What I am now building is a full course in executive intuition as part of my certification program. The coaches I certify will be able to offer this at practitioner and master practitioner level. It is practical, it is grounded, and I believe it is where leaders are heading.

[39:18] Megan North: I love it. And I think the visual element is important too. For people who are visually oriented, or whose logical brain tends to override everything else, having something tangible in front of them can create a completely different kind of access point.

[39:48] Nikhil Rughani: Yes, and the tarot works for both a logical and an intuitive read. If your gut is quiet that day, you can read the cards logically and still receive valuable direction. If your analytical brain is foggy, you can read intuitively. The two approaches are both available, depending on where you are.

And I should mention: twenty-six years ago I actually trained under a professional psychic and worked as a tarot reader. So there is something playful and a little cheeky about bringing this into corporate contexts now. Who said executives cannot use tarot? And again, that is the paradoxical thinking. You can embrace the curiosity without committing to a fixed position on it. That is enough.

[41:11] Megan North: Yes. And from personal experience, when I was working in corporate, every single one of my first paying clients for readings was someone I worked with. Nobody talked about it publicly, but privately, it was absolutely happening.

[41:51] Nikhil Rughani: Nobody talks about it, but it is there. And I believe leaders are going to start normalising the use of intuition in decision making. It will become what emotional intelligence and design thinking have become. And I want my coaches to be the ones who are already fluent in it before that shift fully arrives.

[42:25] Megan North: Yes. And then we will all be sitting back saying: we have been doing this for years.

[42:31] Nikhil Rughani: Exactly. Come on, catch up.

[42:37] Megan North: So, talking about training the next generation of high performance executive coaches, what does the world need more of from them, and what do you hope they will do differently?

[42:56] Nikhil Rughani: What a powerful question. The world needs real. Authentic. Not just someone who is going to ask the standard Socratic coaching questions. It needs people who have access to a genuine toolkit and are willing to be partners with their clients, to lead when that is what is needed and to support when that is what is needed.

And I am going to be a little controversial here. There are two types of coaches in the world right now. Those who are genuine leaders and those who are primarily marketers looking for a quick result. I do not want to produce the latter.

The real coaches, the ones who are truly leading in their field, are too few. That is what the world needs right now. Authentic leadership from coaches who are not one-trick ponies.

That is why when I certify coaches, I train them across six modalities: NLP, timeline therapy, hypnotherapy, coaching at an NLP level, executive intuition, and business neuroscience. Because leaders need someone who can think across the full spectrum, from science to spirituality, from black to white and every shade in between. Someone willing to go where others are not yet willing to go.

There was a time when bringing science into business was considered unusual. Now consumer psychology and employee behaviour science are mainstream. I believe spirituality is going to break into business in the same way, starting with intuition, alignment, and purpose. The coaches who are ready for that are the ones who will make the biggest difference.

[45:34] Megan North: Yes. And I love that you are building coaches who think across the whole spectrum. My clients love that too, that from session to session I might pull out a card or put my HR hat on depending on what they need in that moment. It is never one thing. People need different things at different times to keep transforming and uncovering.

[46:12] Nikhil Rughani: Exactly. And that is the hidden advantage. Using spirituality, using science, combining them in service of the person in front of you. If you can help the people at the top, there is a trickle-down effect. That is how the world changes.

[46:30] Megan North: So how do you know when it is time to pivot or make a change in your own path? What actually happens for you in the body or the energy?

[47:11] Nikhil Rughani: I have been thinking about this myself. What I notice is a hesitation. An inability to take action on the current path, even when I know what needs to be done. It is almost visceral. Like standing at the edge of a cliff. My hands are on the keyboard and I simply cannot move forward. That inability to act is the first signal.

I have learned to read it faster over time. What used to take months to recognise now takes hours. And as soon as I feel it, I know: this is not the right path. My gut is telling me something is off.

The second thing that happens is I need to step back and take a big picture view. Am I aligned with where I want to go? And to help me access that, I use an ancient Ayurvedic technique called a marma point.

What I do is place a visual anchor, a white frame, just above my right eye. Nothing mystical, just a visual focus. Then I press a specific point on my right index finger six times and ask myself, out loud: what do I want? I do this six times. Then I close my eyes, breathe, and pay attention to what arises.

What comes up is both a feeling and a visual image. When I did this recently, I saw myself in a white linen shirt and blue shorts walking along a beach. I had to decode that. The feeling it gave me was calm, stillness. Everything around me at that moment was anything but calm. So what I was receiving was an indication of what I actually needed, not necessarily a literal instruction.

From there, I pick up my journal and I write. By page three, the answer is usually clear. My writing changes. The energy in what I am writing shifts. What begins as uncertainty becomes direction. And then it arrives: yes, this is it.

It is essentially a form of self-coaching. Everyone I have shared this process with has reported the same thing. It works.

[51:40] Nikhil Rughani: And sometimes the answer does not come immediately. But you will get a direction. Your intuition will offer a possibility. Sit with it. Try it. And if it feels like you are walking off the edge of that cliff, it is probably not the right direction. Trust that. And journal. The journaling is gold.

[51:57] Megan North: Wow, that is incredible. Thank you for sharing that so generously. We only have a couple of minutes left and I feel like I have asked you about three questions. As always with us. So, because you are a returning guest, I am going to tweak the final question: what is one lesson or truth that you have learned over the last few months that you are truly grateful for?

[52:30] Nikhil Rughani: The first thing that comes, straight from my gut: give yourself permission.

For too long I had been hiding. Hiding the mystical and esoteric side of my work. But also, interestingly, hiding the science. The neuroscience, the NLP. Because in my mind, I needed permission to bring those into the context I was working in at the time. And I was no longer in that context.

So I asked myself: if I could wave a magic wand, and as a copywriter, this pen is my magic wand, how would I create my life right now? And everything that came up was this. Bring science and spirituality together. Do not try to change the world alone. Create the change agents. Build an army of high performance executive coaches who will carry this into the world with a trickle-down effect from the top.

In giving myself permission to do that, I became more free. More open. I could talk about it without holding back. I could play with it. And that is where the excitement lives for me now.

[54:04] Megan North: I love that so much. Thank you, Nikhil. As always, our conversations are deep, inspiring, and go far too quickly. I am so grateful for you.

[54:21] Nikhil Rughani: Thank you so much for this opportunity, Megan. It is always a pleasure. And if even a small part of this makes a difference to someone listening, then I am truly glad.

[54:39] Megan North: Absolutely. I’d also like to thank all of my amazing and dedicated audience, supporters, and sponsors. I hope you all have an amazing rest of the week and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thank you again, Nikhil.

[54:54] Nikhil Rughani: Thanks, Megan.