Ep. 615 – Stoic Empathy with Author Shermin Kruse
Mindrolling with Raghu Markus
Be Here Now Network
4.7 • 542 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2025
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Author and changemaker Shermin Kruse examines the timeless principles of Stoicism and their power to foster mindful, intentional, and empathetic living.
Grab a copy of Stoic Empathy HERE to learn more about living a Life of Influence, Self-Leadership, and Integrity
This week on Mindrolling, Raghu and Shermin Kruse:
- Embracing discomfort and challenges as catalysts for personal and spiritual growth
- Shermin’s powerful story of growing up in Iran during the wartime of the 1980s and 90s
- How Stoic philosophy transformed Shermin’s approach to work, meditation, therapy, and daily life
- The profound relationship between Stoicism and empathy
- Shermin’s Stoic inspiration mother, aunt, and cultural roots
- Understanding the Stoic ideal of the dichotomy of control
- Shermin’s mystical, otherworldly experience while giving birth
- Practicing intentional pause and mindful response to life’s stimuli
- Moving beyond the ego and awakening to loving awareness
About Shermin Kruse:
Shermin Kruse is an award-winning idea curator, global change-maker, complex-system negotiator, lawyer, speaker, and storyteller. Shermin has nearly two decades of experience working in competitive strategy and game theory applications, corporate and community advocacy, brand protection and augmentation, as well as dispute resolution for individuals, public-company boards of directors, international corporations, and Fortune 500 Companies. Shermin also has a decade of parallel experience producing thought-leadership events, including TEDx conferences and a network of salon series. She teaches Negotiating with Tactical Empathy, Global Transactions, Cross-Border Deals, and Leadership at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. In addition to her professional accomplishments, Shermin is a mother of four, living in the heart of Chicago. Her personal journey from the war-torn streets of her native Tehran to the elite corporate boardrooms of the world informs her deep commitment to fostering empathy, control, justice, and global understanding. Learn more on Shermin’s website.
“It’s a kind of resilience and a kind of Stoicism that is very counter to the image of the statue, stoic, white, male figure that we think about when we imagine Greek Stoicism. The interesting thing about Stoicism is all that it has in common with Buddhism, meditation, dance, passion—all of those things.” –Shermin Kruse
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, Ragu, I'm back with Mind Rolling, and I'm just meeting someone brand new, |
| 0:16.1 | and her name is Sharmine Cruz. |
| 0:19.6 | Is that good? |
| 0:20.8 | That's excellent. That's good? That's excellent. |
| 0:21.6 | That's good. |
| 0:22.1 | That's excellent. |
| 0:22.9 | Admirable. |
| 0:23.6 | Yeah. |
| 0:24.5 | And she has an extraordinary book, really, called Stoic Empathy. |
| 0:30.9 | And I'm sure everybody like me, what, ah? |
| 0:34.2 | Stoic empathy. |
| 0:35.2 | First of all, Stoic on its own is scary. And, you know, everybody goes, oh my God, you know, what are we going to have to do, you know, and get into ice baths every day for a couple of hours, you know, I don't know. So, it's actually a frequently used example of still, yeah, building stoic resilience and discomfort embracing. |
| 0:56.0 | Yes. |
| 0:56.6 | Yeah, right. |
| 0:59.1 | I mean, and that's a reality in terms of discomfort embracing is a real thing that I mean, I've spent a lot of time in India, right, over the years. |
| 1:11.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:12.4 | As people listen to this podcast know. |
| 1:15.5 | And I just, and I'm going back there actually in a bit. |
| 1:19.4 | And I was just talking to someone about, just some mundane thing about being in India in a circumstance. |
| 1:28.2 | And I just said, yeah, no, that might be difficult for me. |
| 1:31.6 | For us, as far as the Indians go, they know how to live with discomfort, |
| 1:37.9 | better than most people that I have met around the planet. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Be Here Now Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Be Here Now Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.