Aikido, Embodiment, and Deep Dialogue: Tools for Effective Leadership, with Chris Thorsen
Aikido is more than a martial art—it’s a way of navigating life’s challenges with grace and resilience. In this episode, Andrew Cohn speaks with his friend, colleague, and mentor, Chris Thorsen, a longtime practitioner of Aikido and its “off the mat” applications. Chris shares his powerful story, starting with his use of haiku as a tool for recovery after serving in the Vietnam War. This practice connected him with a Zen master who guided him for 30 years. Aikido, Chris explains, provided him the strength to thrive as a crisis counselor, even during years consulting with guards at San Quentin prison. Later, he introduced Aikido as a healing tool to a business leader and combat helicopter pilot processing trauma, sparking a transformative professional connection. Chris reflects on his journey as a “medic in the corporate world,” integrating Aikido and deep dialogue into leadership development and culture building. This conversation offers profound insights into the intersection of personal growth, leadership, and operational effectiveness.
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Aikido, Embodiment, and Deep Dialogue: Tools for Effective Leadership, with Chris Thorsen
In this episode of the show, I speak with Chris Thorsen. I met Chris years ago in the context of some groups leveraging the martial art of Aikido in the leadership development world. I probably have about a dozen or fifteen years of experience with Aikido training. It is a very important part of my own personal development. Chris has been an expert in Aikido for years, but the stories he tells about the application of Aikido principles off the mat, particularly in leadership development, are remarkable.
He shares a bit of his own experience of how he wound up moving from studying haiku to broader zen to Aikido and then teaching Aikido in a variety of settings, including in San Quentin Prison where he was working with the guards even though he didn't quite look the part at all. He shares about a great experience where a business leader who, years ago, had deep trauma as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam came to see Chris for support. Chris worked with him and invited him to learn Aikido.
Some years after that, when Chris was going through his own personal crises, he reconnected with this man and talked about Chris' intention to be what he called a medic in the corporate world, wanting to work with business leaders to reduce suffering and promote growth and learning. As it turns out, this man was the CEO of a newly fledgling cellular telephone company. He invited Chris to be a member of the leadership team to help grow leaders and grow the culture of this business, which they did for the next fifteen years.
Years later, they came back to another company and worked together on a senior team using Aikido embodiment, deep listening, and dialogue to cultivate awareness, presence, options, and innovation to solve problems. It's quite a remarkable story, and Chris is a great storyteller. I invite you to enjoy all that this episode has to offer. This is an episode that I have enjoyed going back to several times to get a deeper cut at some of the lessons that are available. I hope you enjoy it.
Welcome back to the show. I am very happy to have one of the most interesting guests on this show, Chris Thorsen, with me. Chris is a colleague and friend. We met through some Aikido-based learning events many years ago. Chris is, in my view, an expert in leadership and an expert in people. I'm grateful to have him on the show to share a bit of his experience on this topic as he comes from a somewhat different, important deep place. Before I talk a little bit about your background, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for being with us from your home. You are in Whidbey Island, I presume.
On the Puget Sound.
It's a beautiful place. In fact, we met in that area, as I recall, some years ago. Your work involves leadership in the corporate world and elsewhere. I know a little bit about your work as you've informed me about All American Leadership, which is an organization that focuses on leaders in the Military as I understand it. Is that correct?
No. All American Leadership is staffed by foreign Military academy graduates as well as folks like myself who are not Military academy graduates. They deal primarily with the corporate world and even more primarily with the fire service up and down the West Coast.
That is becoming more important.
It's pretty tough.
From Haiku to Zen: Finding Ground in Aikido
Could we start this conversation with you sharing a little bit about your experience and how you came into this sphere of spirituality in leadership, however you may define it? That is what we're going to get to. What brought you to this place in your career? It’s not that you're old, but you've been at this for a little bit of time. What brought you into this space where you're even talking about spirituality in leadership?
It was initiated by my inquiry into and practice of the writing of haiku poetry, which I began to do in the mountains after I got out of the service as a way of recovering from my Vietnam experience which was not in Vietnam but was certainly influenced by what was going on in Vietnam. I retreated to the mountains after the service and began to write haiku. Without going into detail about it, that led a couple of years later to being asked to read that poetry. I had no idea how to do that in public, so I contacted someone that I had seen in a book of translations who was a San Francisco Haiku poet. He turned out to be the finest haiku poet in the English language in the world.
He invited me to come over. I asked him to teach me how to read publicly, and he did. He also said, “You've tapped into a 10,000-year-old lineage of spiritual inquiry that runs back through Rinzai Zen, Buddhism, and the Hindu roots. It cracked open a sense of spiritual lineage for me that I had not achieved in my own life. I was brought up Christian but I broke with the Christian Church early and was adrift. Haiku, strangely enough, connected me with a Zen mentor. His name is JW Hackett. I'm his literary executor. He passed away about several years ago. James taught me za-zen and meditation. He was a very fierce, loving man. I had a mentor for 30 years in the inner inquiry.
Fast forward, I managed to find a job eventually. That job was functioning as a consultant. The upshot of this was that as I was working, I realized that a good half of the problems I was dealing with were back on the job. I found myself facilitating conflict, management issues, and leadership issues on the job in the organizations where I was working. I was the employee assistance consultant for Marin County, California for a dozen years, which included police, fire, and the hospital.
Getting into that work made me realize how deep I was because I was dealing with suicide, drug problems, and the like with professional people in these worlds. I thought, “I've got to find a way to deal with all this. I don't have time to go get a clinical degree.” I encountered Aikido. I saw a guy doing Aikido. It looked like he was walking to the bus and people were flying off in all directions. I thought, “That's what I need. I need that kind of depth of ground and calm in the middle of the mailing.”
That would be your qualification or your credential that would support you in doing this work. That's what I'm hearing. That's how you spotted it.
From Crisis Counselor to Corporate “Medic”
I don't know if I'd call it a credential or not, but it was what provided me the capability to do the work without having been trained to do the work. I got into Aikido to survive crisis counseling. That was in about ‘75. I started training at that time, and it really did help me develop a kind of presence to handle conflict, facilitate difficult personal situations in people's lives, and help them ground.
It was a referral role. I realized pretty early, “As long as I'm meeting with them a couple of times to refer them on to professional help, I might as well teach them to center. It’d probably come in handy no matter where they go. Whether the counseling works or not, a little centering will go a long way.” I would teach embodied centering and the basics of getting off the line and the conflict. I then realized, “I could provide that as training inside some of these companies I'm working for and maybe do some prevention work.” I began to teach non-falling Aikido in these companies and public employers. I was working with the police. I spent several years inside San Quentin working with the guards.
When you say you spent several years inside San Quentin, could you be more specific, please?
I was a consultant to the guards, which I found very odd. They did too. I had hair past my waist and I carried a rather large flute everywhere I went. The inmates thought I was lovely. O[1] n the other hand, the San Quentin guards were in an insanely difficult situation. A good number of them were there for altruistic reasons. Some are not so altruistic, but most are altruistic. Yet, what they had done to serve the altruists was put themselves in jail. They were spending 8 or 10 hours a day inside San Quentin. It was not fun.
That's their workplace choice.
My modus operandi on employee assistance was based on a Carnegie grant I'd been involved in years before in process awareness. I learned how to facilitate groups. The way I approached employee assistance was to wander around whatever the employer, public or private, was with the permission of the leadership until I could find the folks that were trusted inside that culture. I would get them together in a group and say, “The company or the employer thinks you need an employee assistance program. What do you think? If we are going to do that, it's probably going to best be done by you rather than leadership.”
I did grassroots organizing and community organizing as the modality to develop employee assistance policies and procedures up to leadership. This is relevant because it became a modus operandi for my consulting and corporations. It was a process of enabling the employees to create their own programs. For instance, I went into the hospital. It was a couple of years in. I said to the administrator, “You need this. I'm sure you understand your employees are experiencing very high-pressure dynamics.” He said, “Let's do it.” I said, “Give me a year inside the hospital, free reign. I'll come back at the end of the year and let you know whether or not it could be done.”
I spent the year doing grassroots organizing with the unions, the doctors, the nurses, and the employees until I could corral a representative group across the organization who then designed the policy and the procedures. Part of the employee assistance process is that an employer can refer you for help but they're trained not to diagnose. The supervisor can only refer based on work performance. It was my job to help develop the diagnosis and get the support they needed. The employer would not know what the problem was.
They would see the impact of that problem and that would be the cause.
That's the referral basis. If the employee chose, I would report back to the employer whether or not they were committed to working on their problem and whether or not they were making progress. That kept the heat off long enough for the employee to recover, get their feet under them, and get moving again. There was either an informal referral through other employees or a formal referral from management. I was in a highly political, highly confidential, and highly critical neutral role.
The Aikido was an ascension. My ability to center under pressure, sense the field of dynamics around the individual, and help them strategize a way to bring their lives back into balance was really the work. It was mostly a referral. I would get them professional help. They would connect up with a therapist or some other kind of consultant or counselor in finance or whatever it was that was bothering them. I would then stay in touch with them and follow through, especially if they had been referred by management. All of this is laying the groundwork for what happened ten years in.
A Call for Help: A Vietnam Veteran's Story
A gentleman came in who was a national sales manager for a PBX manufacturing firm. He had spent a year in Vietnam 10 years earlier in the late ‘60s as a medevac pilot. He had flown 1,000 sorties. Most medevac pilots were killed by 300 sorties because they went flying around with giant Red Cross targets on their ships and the Kong loved to knock them down. There were ambulances.
This gentleman's name was Jim. He had suffered greatly from PTSD without our having the label at that time. I sat down with him and helped him look at what was going on in his life. I said, “You need to get into some counseling to understand what got you into this.” He has given me permission to explain this and share the story. He's gone. He died of Agent Orange several years ago.
Jim was a natural-born leader and he had seen too much. What I said to him was, “You need to do the tracing to understand your own character structure, what your patterns are, and what's gotten you into this. You need to understand what you inherited from your parents and the culture and how you got patterned into this trap, but I frankly don't think that's going to do it. The situation I find that you're in is that you became addicted to the rush of combat. You spent the last ten years of your life trying to get back to the rush in all the most destructive ways you could imagine.”
I won't go into the long list, but let's assume high-risk environments. Gambling would be an example. Cocaine worked pretty well to bring the rush back. He was in deep trouble for ruining his life. I said, “You're going to need counseling. You have to understand what set you up. More importantly, you need direct access to the rush of energy of presence. That's what you're seeking. You need to do it without any middlemen or without any aides. The only thing I can recommend to you is to get your ass on the Aikido mat with my teacher and I,” and he did. He squared away his life.
That was a way for him to reconnect with that rush to satisfy or fill that part of him that was looking for that rush but to do so in a healthy way.
In a direct way, not an indirect way.
Could you say something more about what you mean by directness?
He could have a direct experience of energy, the forces of energy in our lives, and how to open to them rather than close down on them. Suffice it to say that the spirit of Aikido to itself, which is the spirit of love, lends itself as an art to awakening, one's own spirit, to awakening to the spirit. We can make jokes about this, but Jim took it on. He trained with us over the next couple of years and squared away his life. He saved his family and saved his job. He then got a job outside of the San Francisco area and left the area for a couple of years.
The spirit of Aikido, which is the spirit of love, lends itself as an art to awakening one's own spirit.
We found me a couple of years later not having had much contact at all with Jim once in a while but then I was crashing. I lost my family. My marriage crumbled because I was saving the world at the cost of my family. I was Mr. Counselor in the world, and then I'd go home and crash. My family wasn't getting the sustenance it needed from me. It was paying the price that I was paying in these high-pressure environments.
I separated from my wife. I was living in my office on a futon, wondering how I had screwed up my life and what had happened. The upshot was that I had an intuitive sense that came through. Here we are, in my opinion, talking about the voice of the spirit. That voice came through and said, “I got to find a way to work with leaders. I've got to get upstream. I'm a medic in the corporate world. I'm patching people up but I'm throwing them back into meat grinder cultures. This is not okay. This is spinning wheels in the hurricane.”
I made a declaration I would work with leaders and I had no clue how that was going to happen. I had hair past my waist and carried a flute. That seemed an impossibility even though I was working with some leaders in this employee assistance dynamic. I wanted to work with leaders and create cultures that didn't grind people up.
Since the universe works this way, speaking of spirituality and leadership, within a couple of months, I got a call from Jim. Jim called and he said, “I got a job in San Francisco. I'm coming back.” I said, “That’s great.” He said, “I want your help. I'm going to create a company and I want you to help me do it.” In one act, he fulfilled this intuitive declaration that I had no clue how it was supposed to benefit me. To make things even wilder, the job he had was the startup president of San Francisco Cellular One.
Embodied Dialogue and a Culture of Caring
He was stepping into this role and he said, “I need you. Come in. This is a battlefield we can work in together,” something along those lines?
In a certain sense. When he gave me my job description, it was quite simple. He said, “Your job is to prevent casualties. We are going to go at a very intense pace. We are going to spend a lot of money fast. This is the most difficult cellular geography that has ever been attempted because of the geography of San Francisco Hills. I know that we're going to need help. I want to create a culture of caring in high performance.”
This was Aikido at work. It’s not that he wasn't a caring soul. He wouldn't have been a medevac pilot if he weren't a caring soul. The loving protection of Aikido really manifested at Cellular One in our declaration for the culture. We began the work. I sat as a member of the senior team with Jim for the next fifteen years. We not only built Cellular One San Francisco, but we built out the southeastern region of McCaw Cellular and then came back and built out Nevada and California for Cellular One.
Jim decided to step clear of Cellular One and went to work for one of our vendors for a while. He then got approached by a company that wanted to build a cellular system in California. He took the role and brought us in again. We were back in play, a few core members of the same senior team and some of the same vendors. Within about six months, the company came to him after we had been working and said, “We think you're the one to build the entire nation for us. We're going to be the first national build-out of a cellular system that's been ever attempted. We changed our name to Nextel.” We spent the next eight years building Nextel from scratch.
The importance here is that from the beginning, we used Aikido and dialogue as our core methodology for developing the leadership and the leadership teams. My job description expanded from preventing casualties to developing the leader, developing the leadership team, developing the leaders on the leadership team, developing their teams, and developing the teams in the field, which were teams of vendor companies plus ours. He added, “Your job is to maintain an open dialogue on the culture.” This was especially true as we got into Nextel because we knew we were going to subsidize whole companies and we needed to maintain the openness of our culture so other cultures could come and find a home inside our culture. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. A great challenge for companies as they acquire as a means of growth.
I said at the beginning of our conversation that leadership, as I understand it, has been defined by my experience with this gentleman. His leadership was forged in Vietnam. Plus, he had Aikido. By the time we got going, he had a couple of years of Aikido under his belt. We knew the value of it in our own lives and realized, “We should share this with our employees.” We began to teach non-falling, slow-motion Aikido as a physical metaphor for dialogue. We taught dialogue as a verbal metaphor for Aikido. What it meant was we taught embodied dialogue. It was Bohm’s dialogue, not just any dialogue.
That methodology of Aikido and dialogue has served me ever since for 50 years of practice. This has relevance to this question about spirit because if you drop into embodied presence, it opens access to intuition. If you sit deeply enough in dialogue, it does the same thing. If you put the two things together so that you are doing deeply presenced dialogue, then not only you as an individual but the members of your team or your circle have access to intuitive awareness and can fold that awareness at the core of strategy and conflict resolution.
I want to keep up with you on this as you get into some of these deep concepts. What I hear you're saying is that by listening at that level, the conversation can benefit from more informed input and diverse ideas, therefore better solutions and better ways of working through things together. It’s that listening, that connecting, that deeper, fuller dialogue, and the results that it can help provide. Am I understanding that right?
That would describe level two. If level one is, “Let's talk about it,” level two is, “Let's get physically and somatically present through breath and centering, and then dialogue.” It would indeed tap the wider intelligence of the group. Level three would be it cracks open the door to intuitive awareness, not just communicating better about what we know but enabling us to sense what we don't know.
It could also be perhaps what we can know.
Understanding the Core Principles of Aikido in Leadership
With a special emphasis on dropping in together for not knowing. The principles of Aikido are threefold. The first is what we'll call somatic presence or embodied presence. The second is harmonizing what we call the blend in Aikido. It’s listening and getting, in a non-resistant way, with whatever is going on before you try to influence. You could say it's deeply presenced listening before you attempt to influence a situation.
That would be step two, the harmony and blending.
Step three is that enables you to release your personal agency into not knowing. That willingness to let go of your knowing enables you to hear the intuitive whisperings of the spirit and to be guided by the spirit.
The willingness to let go of your knowing enables you to hear the intuitive whisperings of the spirit and to be guided by the spirit.
I hear what you're saying. I love how you're describing this as building block by building block. For purposes of this show, often in different episodes and these conversations, when people use a word like spirit, spirituality, or otherwise, sometimes, that can create some type of alienation with some people. I get it. No judgment here on that front. With your description of the ability to open up intuitively to the spirit, how do you describe that in certain ways or for certain audiences for whom that language might not work?
I don't mention spirit.
Do you use another word?
Intuition. Intuition is desired. Intuition is valued. You are dealing with Aikido. The meaning of Aikido is the way of blending with the spirit or the energy of the universe. The fact that I came in with a martial art gave me jurisdiction to talk about the spirit in a way that was acceptable because it’s the meaning of qi. We would teach Tai Chi, Aikido, and Qigong as presencing and grounding exercises. From their point of view, it was to learn how to get present and blend with the situation such that you could intuit what would make a difference and act on that intuitive awareness, not just your knowledge. Am I making sense here?
The meaning of Aikido is the way of blending with the spirit or the energy of the universe.
Absolutely. Part of the reason it makes sense, and I should tell our audience as well, is that I have some experience with this martial art with a few black belts and many years of practice. It's lovely. I will speak with anybody about Aikido at any time. I'm sure you will too and have. You said Aikido was almost the way in. I would assume that that's not through conversation or PowerPoints about the benefits of Aikido but rather the experience and the felt experience.
We taught the Aikido principles experientially by doing slow-motion, non-falling Aikido. It meant that we were able to teach centering, non-resistance, and a willingness to get with the forces of change before we tried to influence them. The ability to listen more deeply before you act and dialogue then became the verbal arena in which we played with those principles we'd learned through the body. The two were two sides of a coin for us.
The embodiment and felt presence coupled with the dialogue.
Bohm’s dialogue, not just any dialogue. It was a dialogue whose purpose was to tap intuition to listen to the deeper voice that's available, the voice of the whole rather than just the knowledge of the individual players. The upshot of this was that at the very beginning of Cellular One San Francisco, we made a declaration for the development of the culture and the company. That declaration was to build the most sophisticated system in the industry in half the time any similar system had ever been attempted and not lose a family. The synthesis on the family was the Aikido speaking. The essence of Aikido is the loving protection of others or the loving protection of your protagonist. He had declared a caring high-performance culture, specifically that was voiced as not losing families.
I had an unparalleled opportunity during this run. On a quarterly basis, we met in retreat and included the senior team's spouses. I met with the spouses and talked about what was going on in the families and what the families would need given where we were headed in the next quarter or couple of quarters. We would call up the strategy for action and the commitments of the senior team members and then we'd ask, “What's the effect of those commitments going to be in our families? What are we going to do to support the families who are going to make the same run with us?”
It included teaching Aikido to them and teaching dialogue to them. The circle of spouses became advisors to the senior team. It was unparalleled. It did create a very caring, high-performing culture. Especially after we got to Nextel, we led the industry for eight years in a row in the ability to build these systems in record time at high quality.
That’s something that needs to be called out by moving into 21st-century Western business practices. Moving back into intuition, a felt sense of presence, and this art with a spiritual dimension, we built a business faster.
More solidly and more deeply because caring was real in this organization. I'm not sure how much more to say about that run except that it was fifteen years handed to me as a wide-open experiment to play with Aikido, Tai Chi, Qigong, meditation, dynamic breath work, you name it, and the use of deeply presenced dialogue as a way of enabling both the individuals and the teams to function intuitively at an extremely high pace. We met quarterly as a team. We would strategize for a while, go outside and do Aikido for an hour, and then come back in and go, “What did we learn out there in the movement of the Aikido that applies to this strategy question we were struggling with?”
What was the impact typically of that Aikido activity when you came back in the room? How did it impact the discussion?
How does the organization do Aikido in the market as an entity? How does it deal with the forces in the industry, the other players, the competition, the vendors, the advertisers, etc.? I'll give you an example from the first run at this, the first two years in San Francisco. I can't remember the name of the company. We were against a cellular company that had been in the market for two years and had built stores all over the Bay Area. They were well-established. They were a very deep-pocketed, large organization. I apologize for not remembering who the heck they were. They're gone. They were the competition, and we were at raw stardom.
In Aikido play, one of the things you do when you're being attacked by multiple attackers is that you step into the open space. You go where they're not. If they're attacking, they have to figure out where you went and come get you. You can line them up. This willingness to step into the open space and not engage immediately with resisting, fighting, and dealing with all of these multiple pressures is a very dynamic movement in the martial art of Aikido.
At one point, we went out and we were doing multiple attack simulations with slow motion and got this principle established. We came back to our strategy question, and the question was, “How do we deal with this giant, deep-pocketed, well-established company?” What came through at that point was, “I get it. We go where they're not.”
The next year, instead of building stores all over the area and all of that expense and throwing tons of money into advertising, since this company was already advertising the heck out of Cellular One so everybody already knew about Cellular One, we went out and developed contracts and licenses with all of the secondary distributors of electronics in the Bay Area like Good Guys, Best Buy, or whatever they were in those days. A year and a half later, the day we opened our doors, we had 70% of the market. They never saw us coming. That was Aikido. That was a company doing Aikido in the market. Does that make sense?
Yeah. That’s remarkable.
Aikido became a strategy tool. In the organizations where I play, that's what we really utilize it for along with personal grounding, centering, and the ability to harmonize with change and influence through deep listening. We developed the capability of moving freely in highly complex environments with multiple forces arrayed against us. Inevitably, it has created breakthroughs. That was an intuitive breakthrough, that realization of, “We go where they're not.” That wasn't in anybody's leadership book. That was one of the direct experiences of what works when you're facing multiple forces coming at you from all directions. That's one example.
Centering and grounding is another example. We were dealing with very high-pressure decisions, but we were doing it from a deeply grounded presence that we had established through practice in the team and in the teams. This became our way of developing leadership in the organization and developing the leadership culture. When we went on to build Nextel, it was a core methodology that we developed over those six years in the Southeast, California, and Nevada that we developed with McCaw. We put all of that to work in Nextel from day one.
Applying Aikido and Dialogue to Solve Complex Issues
If you were to zoom out from there and say, “That was X number of years ago,” or maybe a couple of decades ago if I'm doing the math in my head right, looking forward to this stage in 2024 and looking at business leadership the way it is now, and we've been around these spaces a long time, what are the lessons that you take from this experience in terms of leadership? What makes leadership work? You could really answer that question in any way you like. What do you bring forward from such a remarkable experience of deep leadership and deep commitment to growth and leadership?
In essence, we're talking about an individual's relationship with themselves. I've stepped down from CTO, COO, and, included in my role and my accountability, the directorship of the software factory. They had a front end related to the hospital, the nurses, the doctors, and the insurance company. They had a software company and a hardware company. They’d define the needs at the front end and develop the software, and that would engineer the development of the hardware to produce the IT system that would respond to the need.
I said, “What did you do, Dave?” He said, “The software factory always had a running conflict with the front end because we set our budget at the beginning of the year. During the year when new, unplanned demands appear, we beat each other up about who's going to pay for them. This has gone on for years, like 5 or 6 years. There's been this running conflict and beating each other up every year all year long.”
I said, “What did you do, Dave?”He said, “Since I was concerned about the software factory, I stepped into it to run it while I maintained these higher roles. I decided that Aikido was in order so I gave the front end the software budget.” I said, “What?” He said, “I gave the software budget to the front end. Now, they come to us and tell us what they need and we scope it out and price it. They write us a check and we do the work. No conflict.” I said, “Dave, you got your black belt for your Aikido.” I wanted to share that. That was so exemplary to me. I gave him a sword. Non-resistance and a willingness to really enable others rather than compete with them.
Rather than resist them is what I'm hearing, too. By sharing the budget, it's like, “I can let go of this thing,” which I suppose for most organizations and budgets is your power. It’s like, “I can let go of this. You lead and we'll follow. Our relationship is strong enough that you'll come to us and we'll be able to satisfy this. We'll be able to make it work together.”
That’s exactly what happened. They transformed their relationship with each other. It went from $20 million a year to $20 million a month before the end of the year. It broke through because they stopped wrangling with each other and unified. That was because they had experienced experientially the feeling of unification through Aikido and the ability to play that verbally in the dialogue. Instead of discussion, negotiation, and argument for who wins or who loses a decision, they use their dialogue to develop common sense consensus for their strategic intentions.
Having some experience with the type of Aikido work you're talking about, I'd like to frame it a certain way and you can tell me if that fits. It's almost as if they had the experience of cooperation physically. They had the experience of seeing each other's point of view, understanding each other, and moving together physically. It was no longer simply this intellectual exercise of, “We could understand each other.” It's like, “We feel that we're understanding each other right now.” From that place, which you can do either on the mat or in some modified version of Aikido that you were doing, then that becomes a verbal process of maintaining that connection all artfully guided, I'm sure, by you along the way. They then can carry that unity forward, which is amazing.
The same thing occurred at World Disney. This was a single workshop. It was amazing. We went in to work with their senior team for a day.
Disney World in Orlando?
Speaker 1 00:16:21 Yeah. This was in the ‘90s. In the morning, we did Aikido work. They had set it up such that we had mats on the floor in this room and they came in wearing gis. We wear gis to demonstrate. They wore gis and each had a patch on their gi with Mickey Mouse on it.
I wonder if there's a photo they took of that.
I’m sad they didn’t get a photo.
For people who don't know, gis are the white pajamas, if you will, that we train in Aikido and many other martial arts. The senior team came in wearing these gis with white belts or black belts?
White belts. They didn’t presume. We did Aikido work in the morning and taught the presence, the harmonious relationship, and this willingness through a grounded, open listening awareness to enter into not knowing together or not having to know but to discover together to make an inquiry. That was fun. It always is. We did a little physical movement and all. We had introduced dialogue as a way to debrief our exercises in the morning, but in the afternoon, we said, “Let's utilize this dialogue now to do some reflective conversation about what's going on for the team, what's working, what's not, and what you want.” It was incredible.
In dialogue sometimes, you would do rounds to ask a positive question. You'll go around the group and everybody has a chance to speak and not be interrupted. You don't speak until your turn comes, and you have a choice whether you want to talk or not. We had done several rounds. I should preface this. It was because of the morning work that we dropped into presence to do the dialogue. We did centering, breathing, and silence as a precursor to these critical questions they were addressing.
The way the questions were being answered and addressed was different that afternoon, because of what you've done in the morning. They were in a different place.
It was because of the physical sensory work or the embodiment work. Before people spoke to the question, we dropped in together and did some silent breath work. We're in a different state of awareness from which to address. Our principle here is that a deep, centered presence accesses intuition. That's really the basic fundamental purpose behind doing somatic work. It is to open to an intuitive awareness from which to sense the field of play and sense potential declarations for action.
A deep, centered presence accesses intuition. That's the basic fundamental purpose behind doing somatic work.
Within the 2nd round, 1 of the players shared that their parent was dying of cancer. We weren't addressing personal questions per se, but the depth of presence as we had gone around in the question opened this person up. The whole group dropped into another level of empathy and connectivity. Both intuition and empathy are accessed through deep presence and dialogue. We dialogued for the afternoon. It was very deep. People got more personal and willing to share what was going on for them. When we got to the core conflict that they had been struggling with, they were able to speak much more honestly and directly than if we hadn't done the work.
Some of what you're talking about is consistent with what Patrick Lencioni would talk about in terms of establishing a foundation of trust before you can get into healthy conflict, healthy decision-making, real accountability, etc. You are talking about it as being done in a particular way through physical embodiment, which in my experience anyway, you can't really argue with. It's not some conceptual idea. It's something that you feel. You feel it and you know it together.
That's the kicker because it changes the field of energetics in the team. It unifies the energy of the team. The awareness, the energy, and the spirit of the team unify because you've dropped into the physical domain where you are energetically one. There's only one energy. If you drop individually in a group to that energy, you naturally unify and feel it. If you address tough issues, you're coming from a much more deeply grounded domain of awareness. You're able to address those conflicts with more honesty, clarity, understanding, and a better intuitive sense of what's possible.
When we had finished the session, we took off and went back to California. About a month later, we heard from the CEO. He said, “That conflict we worked on late in the afternoon had been bothering us for a couple of years. We had grappled with it and failed over and over. We resolved it that afternoon. It was handled through the depth of understanding we experienced with each other about each other and about the issues.” That's an example of how radical this experience can be and its ability to turn the corner on a tough issue in a quick way. Intel was another example of that and, over time, Kaiser as well.
This work has profound implications for communication, conflict resolution, and the ability to strategize in complex environments. My interest is to really help people understand the value strategically not just in terms of unifying the team, but in terms of enabling a unified team to sense the field of play and see possibilities that no one else can. Others are all coming from their heads and they're not able to perceive the possibilities and the openings that are there.
The Handoff: Empowering Leaders as Facilitators
Speaking of some of the work you're doing now, I'd love to pivot a little bit. With all this experience behind you and all these wonderful stories to tell, I'm curious to know what your focus is. How do you distill these decades of experience into some actionable interventions, approaches, or conversations that you have with leaders? Everybody wants to know, “What can we do? What are the actions?”
Before we end the conversation, I'd love to talk about your two websites and how they're a little bit different. Maybe that's a way in, but I'd love for you to talk about what you're doing. You've mentioned to me that it's more of a focus on how you can hand off some of this work to leaders so that they can facilitate this within their own organizations.
Leaders and leadership coaches. The throughline is somatically engaged dialogue. We used Aikido to develop somatic understanding, presence, grounding, blending, and listening, and then sit in dialogue and manifest those physical principles in the verbal domain. That didn't change over that 20 or 30 years, whatever it was, through the ‘80s, ‘90s, and in a couple of years or so.
What's important to understand is that the same core practice produces these results in these different environments, and that was constant, whereas the environments were all different. The challenges were all different. There were some radical strategy issues, tactical problems, and conflicts here. The core tools of deeply presenced dialogue are what enabled the breakthroughs in each environment. It's important to understand that.
The handoff is the handoff of this awareness accessed through these core tools of embodied dialogue. In that sense, it didn't matter what environment I went into. At the second phase of my work after Cellular One, I was like, “That was really powerful. That generated breakthroughs in the industry. I wonder if it works elsewhere.”
Through the next ten years, I was able to shake it out in all these other environments and find out, “Everywhere we put it to work, it transformed the team and its functions and the leader zone world.” Inevitably, there was a transformation of the leader's personal life that came out of these engagements. Their family relations were improved because the Aikido and the dialogue without format showed up in their families.
It was because they were opening up in these more authentic, grounded ways. This may be saying it too strongly, but correct me if I'm wrong. They couldn't help but open up in that way at home. Is that a fair way to say that?
That's the case. I remember working with the president of Tupperware Japan. I won't tell his story at the moment. It's on the website. The upshot of it was that he had come in new to a team there and was at odds with the team. The work that I've described enabled him to transform his relationship with that team and move from a conflict that almost resulted in his being let go within six months of being hired to, in that same year, that team becoming the sales leader in Tupperware across the world. The transformational impact of this is incredible or the influence of this. I don’t like the word impact. What I wanted to say about that was as an example of the personal transformation, his wife came to me at one point and said, “I don't know what you're doing, but he's not driving crazy in Tokyo anymore.”
There's a marker of success right there. Your work is saving lives.
My question became, “I'm now 81. I'm not interested in flying around the country and the world doing this work directly. Can I work this through others? Can I enable others to do this work?” The handoff has become the goal of my present phase, which is phase three, if you will. I've been really fortunate to be invited in to help a set of leaders in their own organizations. Some are actual CEO leaders who are moving this work forward as leader facilitators of the work. They're utilizing this methodology as facilitators of their team and their culture. Others are the individuals in the senior teams of corporations or multinational nonprofits who are accountable for the development of culture and leadership.
That’s the cross-section of these half-a-dozen-plus folks that I'm playing with individually primarily through phone or Zoom engagement on a monthly basis. Based on direct experience these leaders have had with me in retreat settings, they come up here to Whidbey Island and spend three days immersed in somatic work and dialogue and inquiry about what's surfacing in that somatic work.
In Aikido, you're usually paired up with someone. One of you provides the energy of change and attack and the other responds. Some of the most powerful work I do in retreat settings is to function as the source of the pressure of change. In other words, the challenger. Since I've got enough years in, I can experience through the touch of that engagement how much they're ready for how deep the challenge needs to be such that they can really go in and develop these skills in two days because it's intense.
Correct me if I'm wrong. For lack of a better term, you can sense how much they can handle.
Exactly, and intuitively sense the pattern of their conditioning. Under pressure, everybody's conditioning shows up, their reactivity or the fight or flight. Through controlled sensitive engagements over and over, their pattern appears. We can work with that pattern over and over until they're able to come from a better place, a less reactive domain, in the face of that challenge such that by the second day, I'm putting some heat in there and they're doing fine. They handle it really well.
It sounds like through these sensitive engagements, you help them desensitize, for lack of a better term.
That's probably a valid way of putting it, at least enough for them to have repeated direct experience of being able to come from a deeper, more authentic, empowered, or powerful domain of awareness from which to operate.
Also, less reactive.
They've had repeated experiences of what that feels like. We develop in them what we call their own mastery practice for carrying that forward. That is after the retreat. They're going back to Poughkeepsie. How can they maintain what they've experienced? Their challenge beyond that is if they can maintain it for a while, they go, “I can do this on my own.” That’s number one. Number two is, “I can share some of these principles and practices with my team.” It begins to move out into their organization.
That's the handoff work. It’s not just enabling them to do deeply embodied awareness and dialogues with their team or their organization, but enabling their direct reports to do the same thing with their teams and move it out as a cultural change agent. That's the work. I'm working with an international conservation nonprofit. I'm working with the CEO of an observatory in Hawaii.
Don't you think it's interesting that you're working with an observatory?
Absolutely. I was invited to provide retreats for a leadership development cohort system or company. The gentleman that's running that observatory came out and worked with me and three years later was picked to direct the observatory that he was COO for prior to that. I'm seeing transformational dynamics. He’s challenged as the new CEO to bring that awareness into a team of very highly skilled directors of this observatory.
Highly skilled scientists.
He's right on the edge of the experiment. His work is fairly new. The conservation organization is fairly new in its engagement. The two individuals have done some transformational work themselves. They're experimenting and utilizing it to develop culture and change their leadership cultures. I had a similar situation with a gentleman who's on point for developing leadership and culture at a very large construction firm in Texas. He had worked with me in another environment in a leadership development MBA program at the University of Texas. He was one of the faculty. He later got picked up by this company that had come in and been part of their leadership cohorts. He was hired out.
He contacted me after he got hired and said, “I saw what you do. You shared it with the cohorts when you came in.” We worked with them for fifteen years in a row. He was there for the last three or something like that. He said, “I want to do whatever the heck you were doing.” I said, “Come on up to Whidbey. Spend three days. I'll immerse you, and then you can go back and start experimenting.”
He came up, did the work, went back, and immediately started to teach Aikido. Physically, he was doing Randori. He was doing multiple attacks with these folks. These are construction folks. These are the managers. They're former roustabouts. They’re physical guys. They love it. He's working on the physical work and the dialogue as a way to transform their culture. Their leader who has hired him for it is loving it as well. He's worked with the senior team. It is exploding, the acceptance, the interest, and the commitment.
The last one I'll share that I'm working with and probably the highlight of this work at the moment is that gentleman running a facet of the San Francisco Homeless Program for the city of San Francisco. This is a guy who has given me permission to use his name. His name is Chris. He was running a leadership cohort in Silicon Valley. I don't know if you're familiar with the American Leadership Forum. They have chapters in probably eight cities around the United States. It was started by Joe Jaworski after he met and experienced Bohm’s work in England. Jaworski had been the head of strategy for Royal Dutch/Shell and then went private into consulting. He met Bohm and then came back, wrote his book, Synchronicity, and started the American Leadership Forum.
This leader of the American Leadership Forum in San Francisco in Silicon Valley, which was the top program in the country, had brought me in to do Aikido with his cohorts for several years in a row. I got a call from him and he said, “I want your help. I've decided I want to know who I am without my position, my salary, my team, my authority, my business card, and all of those dependencies for power. Will you help me in the transition?” I said, “I'd be delighted.”
He resigned from the spot he was in in Silicon Valley leadership development. He stepped away from it and took a sabbatical from it. My job was to help him resist taking the first offers because I knew they were going to come in once people knew he was free. He lasted about nine months. Finally, he went to work for the Episcopal Diocese and took over their homeless program.
He was picked up about a year and a half later by a foundation in San Francisco that was doing homeless work but with a much bigger scope than he'd been working with prior to that. He put in about 1 year and a half or 2 years there, and then the city called and said, “We've blown the 1st year of a 3-year program for the homeless. We're dead in the water. We don't know what the heck to do. Will you come in and take this over?”
They've had a terrible year with very poor results and they needed a turnaround.
They were in the commitment and housed 2000 people that they had formerly housed in hotels. They needed to move them into permanent housing. They were a year into the project and they were getting nowhere.
They needed help.
Chris came in and immediately put this work to work, the Aikido and Dialogue, which is what we worked with at ALF. He began immediately to experiment with this work. He is my exemplar for what I've come to call these leaders I’m playing with. I call them free radicals because all of them are evidencing the ability to move freely through very complex systems and bring high influence for breakthrough change at a systemic level through the embodied somatic dialogue and Aikido. Chris utilized this basic methodology sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. The somatics were more implicit at the beginning and he's going explicit. The dialogue was explicit from the beginning.
We should make this distinction that where he really put this to work was in his strategizing how to play into this system to develop the relationships such that he could develop the influence to change the system to deal with this radical commitment that they only had two years left to achieve. In a year and 3 quarters, he had housed all 2,000. He blew the socks off the folks that had been struggling with it.
The Free Radicals: Agents of Systemic Change
When you talk about this, there's a quotation that comes into my mind that I'm sure you've heard from. Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve the toughest problem in the world, I would spend 55 minutes clarifying the question.” To me, what you're talking about is a bit of an embodiment of that. It's to listen deeply, question, wonder, be curious, connect, set aside one's agenda, and spend 55 out of 60 minutes to connect. From there, stepping forward is something that could be done connectedly and purposefully. I want to know. What do you think? Does that make sense?
That’s accurate. What these tools develop is the ability to develop relationships, which is key to all of this. If you want to unify a culture into a cohesive whole, it's all through relationships. Everything's through relationships in our world. Aikido and dialogue are tools for not only accessing intuitive awareness but also deepening empathy and the ability to sense what people need. You could say in Aikido that your response to an attack is to enhance the attacker rather than fight them or enable them. That is what a free radical does. They move out into the system. They touch and deeply listen. Whatever they find, they help people get where those people want to go.
If you want to unify a culture into a cohesive whole, it's all through relationships.
They attach to something, someone, or some other molecule and accompany that molecule on its journey.
They enhance its journey and earn jurisdiction to make requests. They earn points. When it comes time for them to want to make a systemic change, they've developed the connectivity, trust, and jurisdiction out in the system such that when they trigger the change, there's already acceptance to make. That's what generates the breakthroughs at a systemic level.
In a certain sense, what he has demonstrated and what all of these players are experimenting with is a three-part process for generating coherence in a culture. There are some systemic requirements to make it possible. One is a complex human system. The second is an intractable problem with very high stakes. The third is the jurisdiction of the senior leadership based on their commitment to provide financial resources for experimentation.
If those three things are in place, then the tools we've been talking about can make a difference. Without that contextual commitment of senior leadership and the extremity of a problem, there won't be enough jurisdiction to make systemic change. You can make a change inside the system but it's much more difficult to change the system.
The folks I'm playing with are all accountable for making systemic change. They've followed some basic phases. Each of them seems to be naturally following this process of doing some early systemic sensing of what's out here and we'll visually map the system. For instance, in San Francisco, we did a visual map, which is another intuitive exercise. We did a visual map of the power entities in the system, like the city, the nonprofit providers, the state and its monies, and the corporations. We mapped all of this visually as it was when he inherited it. With his team, we drew a map of what we wanted that system to look like three years out. It shifted the power center in the system from the city department to the nonprofit providers. That's what he achieved.
The systemic change depends a bit on the ability to do systemic sensing. In other words, what's going on in the system? Especially intuitively, what's not being noticed? What's not being addressed? What are we not seeing, this not knowing and inquiry dynamics that the somatic dialogue enables? Once that sensing is done, then you start some initiatives. You do some experiments.
What we've found, and this is based on physics, is that you don't need to change the whole organization and get everybody on board with your breakthrough ideas. You need to develop some coherent examples of it in the system. After a few of those take hold and that coherence starts to develop, the whole system will flip to the next level of play. That's, in fact, what he has experienced.
The Enterprise Covenant and the Inquiry Agreement
All of this is based on these core tools that I've mentioned. I've talked about somatic dialogue as the essence of it, but it also is a function of two other dynamics that enable the systemic shift. One is what I call the enterprise covenant or a living systems view of the culture and open networking in that culture. I call it the role of the free radical. It is the ability to move through the system, develop relationships and jurisdiction for change, and develop enough personal grounding that these individuals are able to take risks and try new innovative actions to experiment.
There's a key sleeper in here by the enterprise covenant, clarifying your leadership agreement about mission, vision, values, strategy, and how we're going to manage accountability. It is a development commitment or agreement based on, “How are we going to develop the systems, the people, and the teams to achieve the strategy? What's the gap between our present capability and where we need to be to get out in front of the strategy?”
Third is what I call the inquiry agreement. The first two are usually existent in most organizations, some kind of covenant about mission, vision, strategy, and culture. There's usually some kind of development plan. The inquiry agreement is usually missing. That is, “What is the nature of our discourse?” This is where the distinction between dialogue and discussion for closure comes in. It is the dialogue for inquiry and discussion to make decisions and closure.
What's the level of process awareness in the team? Do they have a language of process, a language of accountabilities, a language for commitments, a distinction for dialogue, and an ability to conduct dialogue? The inquiry agreement is, “How are we going to conduct our discourse? From what depth of presence are we going to function in that discourse?” It reiterates this focus on embodied presence. When I say covenant, it is those three agreements, leadership, development, and how we are going to make inquiries together. You need that covenant. You need good development and somatic dialogue so that your dialogue has depth.
Lastly, I really think the leader has to have a personal covenant. They're committed to an exploration of their own inquiry into the spirit, who they are, their core identity, and where they're coming from, not just where they're going. That has developed the depth of the leaders that I'm playing with and has been the key in the past as well. That has become the formula for these free radicals.
Aikido: The leader has to have a personal covenant—a commitment to an exploration of their own inquiry into the spirit, who they are, their core identity, and where they're coming from, not just where they're going.
The kicker is the leader's willingness to make inquiry into spirit to experientially engage in the energy of awareness and the awareness of energy, the somatic work personally, begin to play with intuitively sensing the field of play, understand what the options are and what the possibilities are, see what's not being seen by the majority of folks, and then step into an intuitive declaration for change that cannot be proven.
I'm going to make a distinction here between three kinds of commitments, a guarantee, a stretch, and a breakthrough. A guarantee is, “I've done this before. I'll do it again.” A stretch is, “I haven't done this but I’ve got most of the resources. I can see a path. It's vague but I can see it. I think I can pull this off.” It's not all lined up. A breakthrough is a declaration or commitment made to produce a result for which I have no evidence and have not done it, and there is no path. As I said last time, “We will develop the most sophisticated cellular system in the industry in half the time it's ever been done before and not lose a family.” That was a breakthrough intuitive declaration. We had no evidence technically for what we were trying to do and no evidence for how you involved the families. Those things had not been done.
That became a modus operandi for my work through the years, the enablement through the somatic dialogue of the ability to sense the field of play, make intuitive declarations for a breakthrough, and not only declare it but fulfill it. When we make a declaration in the verbal world publicly, it changes the energy of the system. It may be months or years before that result unfolds, but it begins with that declaration. It sends the ripples out into the energetic field and the universe responds. I'm talking about fifteen years of proof where this has worked over and over again and is working for these folks.
When we make a declaration in the verbal world publicly, it changes the energy of the system.
The Websites: Quantum Edge and Inquiry Into Consciousness
In the few minutes we have left, I'd love it if you could talk about the two websites that you have and that you've shared with me. One is QuantumEdge.org. I understand that's more of the organizational work that you've done in the past with the cellular run and some of the other organizations. Forgive me if I'm oversimplifying the binary, but you can clarify. The second newer website is InquiryIntoConsciousness.com, which as I've seen and I was describing to you is almost like a clearing house of information, approaches, models, etc. Could you say more about those two websites in case people want more?
Yeah. The first website is a set of parables or stories about what occurred during the cellular run at Kaiser, Tupperware, and Intel. Those are the stories of the past up until several years ago.
That is QuantumEdge.org.
InquiryIntoConsciousness.com is a site with materials on it that I've utilized to make the former run and that I'm using with these free radicals. It’s a site that’s devoted to the inquiry into consciousness. The cure here for leaders is their willingness to make an inquiry into the core of their own identity, which is the spiritual practice. What is the nature of their true spirit? Can they experience that, and can they then operate from that integral wholeness of spirit rather than just from the intellectual knowledge that they've been able to amass?
Inquiry into consciousness is an experiment in whether this can be handed off. The principles that underlie all this work, the principles of Aikido and dialogue, are explained. The somatic practices and dialogue practices are delineated and explained, not only the exercises that we utilize that I've made reference to but also how to facilitate those exercises. Lastly, it also includes all the haiku I've written in 60 years.
It’s a lot, although fortunately, haikus are pretty brief.
It's in little booklets so people can take it on a little bit at a time.
That's very cool. I appreciate you putting that in there because it provides beauty and universality to some of this material. Let me ask you. If people are new to this material and these ideas, new to talking about presenced dialogue and somatic dialogue, and new to Aikido, Tai Chi, and even Haiku and they look at InquiryIntoConsciousness.com, what would you recommend for people to look at certain tools and understand them or to get on the mat? How would you invite people into this space if it's new to them?
It depends a lot on where they are in their own path as to how I might recommend they utilize the site. If they have experience as leadership coaches but they’re interested in having somatic work, then it would be a way for them to investigate somatic exercises they could experiment with. If they're doing somatic work or have done it, maybe not in their leadership practice but in some form like yoga or some other somatic practice in their own lives, then it will enable them to begin to share it. The more somatic experience they have, the easier they can use these materials. Even someone who hasn't could begin to play with centering and breathing, that's not that big of a deal.
In terms of Aikido, someone who's never trained, especially if they're getting on in years, might find that too big of a jump. We’ve never in our conversation so far described Aikido per se. It's a gymnastic art. You're throwing and being thrown. When you're thrown, you roll. I say to people who are interested in the art, "Take your time at the beginning and the beginning months to learn to roll. Don't be in a hurry about that. If you get that, then you'll have ease learning the art.” If they jump into the tougher parts of the art before they refine their roles, then the history of most folks is they get hurt in a roll and they leave the art.”
If you jump into the tougher parts of the art before refining your role, then you get hurt in a roll and leave the art.
It sounds like good career advice.
Exactly. Learn how to roll. Whether or not people engage in Aikido itself, they can view videos of the art of Aikido. I would claim that simply seeing Aikido is a visceral experience. People feel the difference between most martial arts and Aikido. In Aikido, you're enhancing your attacker rather than fighting them. It's non-resistant listening rather than manipulation and power-tripping. Watching a video of the founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba O Sensei, will give people a visceral experience of the art even if they never get on the mat.
Are there links to any of those videos on InquiryIntoConsciousness.com?
There are a few. There is a video by my teacher called Aikido in Three Easy Lessons. That's quite demonstrative. There’s also a video by our teacher, Robert Nadeau Sensei. It is a very brief video in which he really focuses on this shift in consciousness. He's demonstrating a basic move in Aikido and says, “I can train the right physical positioning and repetition of the technique over and over and never transform the spirit of the engagement.” It’s a learned rote demonstration of the power of the mechanics of the technique but you haven't changed who you are. You can do Aikido and never transform.
I used to say there's a difference between high craft and art. A high craftsman in Aikido could be a very high-ranking teacher and be effective at the mechanics and techniques of Aikido but have never let the Aikido dissolve their own conditioning. They can demonstrate really powerful Aikido. They can tell you before an attack by a partner where they're going to put them and how. The person comes in and they do exactly what they said they were going to do. That's high craft but it's not art. The difference is that the high craftsman knows what's going to happen and the artist doesn't. In high-craft Aikido, the attacker is surprised but the practitioner responder is not surprised whereas if it's the art of Aikido, both of you are surprised.
That reflects back to leadership. You can learn all the techniques of leadership, but if you haven't let go of your agenda and even your knowledge of how to manipulate situations, haven't dissolved and sunk open into the truth of your being and the truth of your identity as the spirit itself, and haven't let go, then you'll develop high craft as a leader but you will not be playing in the domain that we've been discussing in which you value presence, harmonious relationship, and sensitivity as a way of opening to the unknown, including not knowing who you are. That generates transformations in the world, in you, and in the people around you.
That seems like a beautiful place to wrap this conversation. Y[2] ou have landed that plane for us. Thank you so much. It’s QuantumEdge.org and InquiryIntoConsciousness.com. You also have a non-prolific profile on LinkedIn.
I need to change that.
You are findable that way, which is the important thing. It's important for me to let people know how to find you. T[3] hank you so much for this discussion. I appreciate your stories and the way you bridge the concepts and things that may seem out there. What's really clear is that they're in here. That's the work.
I would say one last thing, and that is I have been gifted over the years by a series of visionary leaders who were willing to risk playing with this before there was proof. It's those leaders that made this possible. That goes through the present players as well. It's still an experiment. It’s like, “Thorsen has stories, but can I do this? Will my people respond?” More kudos even to these folks who are out on the edge of it experimenting with this and they can't claim fifteen years in the cellular industry. They're on the raw edge themselves,
Perhaps even more brave in daring in what they're doing.
I'm seeing profound results across the board with these folks who are willing to do the experiment and go at a pace that works for them.
Thank you again. I appreciate your being with us.
I enjoyed it very much. It was lovely to see you. It's been fun.
Thank you.