Journey To Connectedness: From Individual To Collective With Hylke Faber
We are capable of so much more than we realize. Sometimes, we just have to look deeper within ourselves to discover what we are made of, serving not just ourselves but others. This is what Hylke Faber helps people with. As the CEO of Growth Leaders Network, he sits at the helm of his team of facilitators and coaches to help individuals tap more deeply into what they’re truly made of and their true potential. In this episode, Hylke joins Andrew Cohn to share the origin story of finding the connection to his calling—from thinking of himself as a primary client to then discovering that spiritual dimension through meditation and replacing the word ‘spiritual’ with connectedness and evolution. He also talks about how this connection to our deeper strengths also applies to organizations as a whole, especially as leaders move their teams across crises and bring results. Tune in as Hylke takes us on a journey to connectedness and the pursuit of learning more about ourselves as individuals and as part of a collective.
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Journey To Connectedness: From Individual To Collective With Hylke Faber
I am very excited and happy to have my friend and colleague, Hylke Faber, with us of the Growth Leaders Network. You can talk in a minute, Hylke, about what you do and why you do it. I first want to thank you for being part of this. You’ve been part of the setup for this, supporting me over the years to clarify my voice on this topic, and encourage me to do things like this. I’m grateful that you’re with us. I’m looking forward to our conversation. I don’t know what you’re going to say, which makes it much more interesting, fun, and exciting for me. Welcome, Hylke.
It’s great to be here, Andrew. It’s nice to sit with you in this space. It’s very enjoyable already.
Thank you. Before we get into this topic, which we’ve discussed many times in different ways, could you share with our readers what you do and why you do it? Tell us more about Growth Leaders Network and where it’s focused.
What I do and what we do is we work on helping people to tap more deeply into what they’re truly made of and their true potential. We do that through executive coaching, team development, culture development, and anything that helps to work on the mindsets, behaviors, and consciousness of individuals, teams, or organizations.
I came to that because, in a way, I had to for myself. I was a hard-charging strategy consultant in New York City. I made it to the “top” in my head in some ways. I made it to partner at a young age. My inner landscape was screaming. It’s, “No, you got to change something. There’s something in you that is calling for your attention.” It became so untenable for me that I had intense insomnia and then I found out there was something like meditation.
Through meditation, I could sleep again. That was like, “There’s something to this meditation stuff. I should check that out.” As I started to meditate more, I started to become aware that there was a whole sense of being in me and in everyone that’s always there but I had not witnessed or experienced. It has something to do with peace, joy, clarity, strength, and integrity. I fell in love with it. I almost became a monk and decided not to go that way all the way.
At some point, I was being coached by somebody and they said, “Hylke, what are you running away from now going to the monastery?” I was in business already and I had run away several times in my life in a way I didn’t know. Subconsciously, I stayed in New York City in part because I was afraid to come out being gay in the Netherlands for some reason. I had that made up in my mind.
I thought about that. There’s something about the peace, the potential, the joy, and the resourcefulness that I’m discovering in being quiet. What if I help people to access that more where they work? That’s how I entered this field of coaching. That’s a little bit of why I do this. This is not a once-and-done situation. This is a once and always more discovery, more work, more invitation to grow. The primary client that I have is always me.
I hope he’s a good client for you, responsive, open-minded, open-hearted, willing to learn, and does his homework. May it always be so.
Ups and downs, Andrew.
What I find for me is if I think about myself as my primary client, which I certainly could, then there’s always a steady stream of work to be done.
It’s another growth opportunity.
That’s it. Thank you for that. Let’s hear more about what you do as we talk further. By no means, we’re not closing that off in any way. This show is focused on, to some extent, the intersection of spirituality and leadership, but more so the simplification, the de-dogmatizing, and the discussion of how these spiritual dimensions of ourselves can serve our teams, the bottom line, as well as humanity. To make that bridge and form that nexus between our spiritual dimensions and being effective at work both individually and in teams, it sounds like your discovery of that spiritual dimension came through meditation at that time you were sharing. Is that accurate or does your spiritual practice and exposure go back further?
It’s interesting. As words started to make sense, I always considered myself a person who was interested in something deeper. The first time I remember having some experience that felt bigger than “regular me” was when I was on a farm in the Netherlands. I was looking at the fields around us, smelling the dew or the hay, and sitting in the church and hearing the church organ giving this wave of energy. I was feeling like being brought to tears and then playing music myself and sensing harmony. Not just harmony as the notes make sense, but a deeper sense of harmony of all things. That came early, and I was always intrigued by it.
At some point, I wanted to become a musician or a minister, and I thought they were different back then. Now I understand that they’re the same thing in many ways. I’ve always had that call for something deeper that has to do with harmony and something that inspires. Over life, I have discovered different tools. It’s interesting. It’s probably my ego personality that says, “It has to be music, and then I have to do all this. Now it’s meditation. That’s the vehicle. Now it’s being in nature. That’s it. It’s doing deep introspective digging into trauma.”
As I’m getting a little older and hopefully, a tad more balanced, it’s all of that. There’s a phrase in the good old big book, the Bible, that says something like, “Vanities of vanities. God is everywhere.” From my personality, I have to remind myself that it’s not in the special this or that. It is always, and all of these things are tools, but not the thing itself. How is that for you, Andrew? I’m curious about your practice and discovery in that.
What you’re describing is a sense of what some might use the term supernatural, something beyond us, beyond the senses, etc. I can relate to what you’re saying about recognizing there’s something out there and being unsatisfied with my own religious upbringing as the answer to that. I don’t know if I would consider myself a spiritual seeker. I’ve had the good fortune to stumble upon some things that have changed my life in positive ways, including ways that might be bucketed as spiritual. For that, I’m deeply connected, universal service-oriented, peace-producing, and the like. It’s interesting because even as we throw around the word spiritual, there are some people who may be alienated by that word spiritual.
I don’t know. It’s connected with some religious dogma. It’s connected with family of origin stuff. Both of us have some history of that, history of family of origin stuff. Therefore, the word itself is uncomfortable. What do you do when you’re speaking with people? You might use the word spiritual and it’s uncomfortable for them. How can you be inclusive that way? What do you do? I’m curious.
I tend not to use the word spiritual anymore.
What do you use that might convey something similar for you?
Connectedness. For me, it’s saying okay and I ask myself this. I have to remind myself because my ego is much about specialness. That’s one of my favorite ego hangout places. It’s like, “I’m better than this. I’ve got something special.” It’s a common trap. What helps is asking myself, “How connected am I right now to what is true? What is truly loving? What is truly being of service? What is truly an integrity? How connected am I to the people around me and the task at hand?”
That query into connectedness then starts to unveil how we are far less separate than our minds interpret us to be. We entered this sense of presence or being. These are words I sometimes used, presence, being, or a sense of unconditional love, unconditional groundedness, or authenticity. These are all manifestations of what happens when you connect to your roots.
In workshops or when I work with people, we access that by, for example, saying, “Tell me about something that you aspire to in your life to awaken that sense of something bigger than the mind’s initial interpretation. Tell me about something challenging for you, and how you feel about that. Where do you feel this in your body? When you reflect on the arc of your life, what do you see?”
All of these things, to me, are questions that have to do with reflection. We talk about the metaphor of the balcony, saying, “What happens when you take a step back?” To me, that’s what I understood spirituality to be about when I entered. As I get more into it, it’s like being able to be aware and then staying curious in that space of awareness of what we discover about ourselves, each other, and what is true. I’m often baffled with, “What are the words to use? How do you describe something like this?”
When I hear you describe that and the ways to access that, the words that come up for me are meta like meta-awareness and perspective that as you reflect, I’m separating myself from my feeling because I’m reflecting on it. I’m looking at my experience and hopefully not judging it, but evaluating it, assessing it, or considering it. Also, when you talk about what you aspire to, that taps into my values, and my values are something that’s higher than myself or my ego, for example.
Also, another word besides connectedness is evolution. What are we evolving into? One of the things I’m sensing is that the mind likes to make this black and white, spiritual, not spiritual, evolved, not evolved, authentic and inauthentic. I see it more as a continuum. We’re never quite done. There’s this sense of, “Maybe there’s something for me to discover here that I want to evolve into.” The mind or the ego is also not seen as the enemy but simply as a part of us that I’m learning to work with more. First, I have to unglue myself from my conditioning, which we can conveniently call ego. It’s almost reentering and playing with the personality of the ego. Who knows what happens after? It’s an ongoing journey.
Dancing with the ego in a different way.
I love that.
One of my takeaways from this conversation already is this focus on connectedness and perhaps with connectedness or pursuit of connectedness and awareness of connectedness comes integration. What I’m hearing is this drive for continuous learning and wanting to understand. Maybe that’s your monk coming back, but there’s a seeker piece to this. I want to learn more. I want to reconcile this. I want to integrate this. Does that seem to fit?
Yes. My spiritual coach whom I talk to every Saturday morning at 8:30 Pacific is probably in her mid-’80s. I talk to her every Saturday usually about something for me to integrate. It’s not always coming in nice little packages like, “I got this thing.” It’s more like, “I’m present and I’m feeling frustrated about this. I’m being challenged this way. I’m curious.” She always responds with opportunities for expanding awareness. That’s also how she seems to operate. To me, connected is an evolution to goes hand in hand. The more we connect to what we are big words.
It takes a lot of unpacking for me. It’s like, “Maybe if I get very still, I notice presence, awareness, and a sense of quiet. I notice that I’m not my thoughts and feelings and that these things move through me. These are also of initial steps to discovering what I am, discovering a sense of values, and all these things I’m discovering.” I discovered more and more that there’s so much to discover and that the being seems to expand. It’s like, “I can hold that too.”
You can say that as a way of being redemptively loving and saying, “I didn’t quite know how to integrate this experience. I didn’t know how to be with it but now, I’m going to learn. I’m learning a little bit more about how to integrate that, how to accept this to make it part of me so that I can be with it with greater presence, with more sensitivity and care.”
The dance is smoother. To berate the metaphor, we’re not stepping on the toes of this experience. We’re integrating it and moving with it as opposed to resisting it. If I’m hearing you correctly and this is what I resonate with, resistance in the form of confusion or being held up because I don’t understand or can’t label it or something in the mental pesky neocortex realm.
I’m already thinking about parts 3 and 4 of this conversation but this notion of pursuing connectedness of integration and continuous learning is a significant, meaningful, primary, personal journey for you. Tell me how that plays out in your work because I know you as an executive coach, as a leadership consultant, as a workshop leader, and as a writer. Tell me how these plays into the professional space. Ultimately, these conversations for this show are about supporting people in business. Tell me how this supports your work.
To me, connectedness is the anchor from which I do my work. I can show up in different ways. In individual coaching, I will help people to connect more deeply to their strengths and help them see through what disconnects them from their true strengths, which is in a book that I wrote called Taming Your Crocodiles. These are the best reptilian brain things, mentalizations that get in the way often fear-based. How do I step through that so I connect to something deeper that’s more true, kind, in harmony, and connecting with something that makes you feel taller on the inside?
Taming Your Crocodiles: Unlearn Fear & Become a True Leader
That’s how that shows up in individual coaching. In team development, it shows up as similar to individual coaching and what’s our connection to the greater why we’re here. There’s no group of people in the world that is exactly like us. These are the 10, 20, 100 or whatever people. What about this group of people that makes it so compelling? What’s the why? It’s like a yard. No yard looks the same. What’s the essence of this yard or this group of people? Connecting to the essence of what this group is about goes a little beyond having a mission, vision, and value statement for a group. It goes a little deeper into that. Also, subconsciously, why are you drawn together? What are you here to learn? It’s deeper self. Why are you here and there?
You’re talking about something deeper, certainly than our quarterly business results, sales targets, efficiency targets, or things like that.
It could be like, “We’re here because we like to create joy for our clients. We’re here because we want to integrate different parts of science. We are here because we love to delight people.” How do we want to think about how we want to act together? Think about our values connecting to what’s truly meaningful for us. Think about what’s important to you. We then work on, “How do you live that day to day?” We’re like potatoes with mud. We rub the mud off each other. It’s connecting to the potato or the angel inside of each of us. The better angel is saying, “I know we have this conflict. Can you still see the other person’s presence? Do you still appreciate them?”
Connect to what’s true about the situation for you and what’s true for the other person. Let’s have this conversation and work through it together. We take teams on journeys that go through a couple of stages where they connect themselves first. They connect to each other and get to appreciate their sameness and differences. They connect to others in the organization and how they work with this. They connect with the whole system.
That’s working on the team level. At the culture level, similar to the team level, what’s the purpose of this organization? What are the values that you would like to live by? How do you disconnect from those values? What are the often fear-based mindsets and behaviors that are getting in the way of you living this? What are you going to do?
How we practice together that this organization starts to feel connected inside and out with ourselves, each other, our purpose, our clients, our past, our future, where we’re going, where we were, with society, all of that. Life and work become exciting because we’re on this journey of discovery. That’s a bit of how we do that.
It sounds like there’s a lot of room in there to be creative, specific as needed, modify, and follow the energy of the group where that may be. Follow the specifics of the needs of an organization or a team and that it could serve an organization at various times. Whether it’s a new team, a crisis, a challenging business period, or whatever it might be. There are a lot of ways that could be helpful.
I love crisis. Not because I like the difficulty of it, but I like it because it draws people’s attention to being here. It’s like, “We can’t go through the day-to-day.” This is like, “Wake up. Something is happening.” Usually, in crisis or conflict, my old way of connecting to it or relating to it is not working. Now I have to discover a new way. That is a fulfilling journey for me. I know, Andrew, from your work, you also help people that way. also, that’s helping people through challenges where there’s no friction and no traction. When you have this friction, you get this, “I got to work on this.” That’s how we expand.
There's no traction when you have friction.
Crisis removes us from our sense of normalcy and our habituated behavior. I can’t do what I ordinarily do. That is, on the one hand, the opportunity. We know that Chinese characters with crisis and opportunity are on the same side. There’s that old film, Ferris Bueller, and there was a line in there or something like, “There’s a certain freedom in knowing that you’re completely f*****.” There’s a freedom from crisis. It gets our attention in a certain way. We need to pay attention.
The universe yanks us by the collar. We have these, for lack of a better term, holy-sh** moments where our collar is yanked literally or figuratively. It gets our attention like, “What do I do now?” We’ve lost that contract. We have a supply chain crisis. My partner is freaking out. There’s a health crisis in my family. My technology has fallen off the cliff. Somebody stole my laptop. I’m in deep trouble or whatever it might be.
These are all things you wouldn’t want to wish on anyone. At the same time, I love what you’re saying, Andrew. Part of human life is that they do happen.
The crisis throws us into a state of vulnerability where learning can happen and paying deliberate careful attention can happen, as opposed to how I ordinarily pay attention, which is 20% or something like that. I’d love to hear you talk a bit about a team that’s moving through a process with you that you might lead in some of the ways you’ve described. There are individuals on that team who may have their journeys of connectedness.
As we’ve worked with many people over the years, I know some of the people you’ve worked with. People have their own private practices or personal practices that connect them, whether it be music, exercise, yoga, religion of some kind, spirituality, travel, or whatever it might be. How do our individual experiences pursuing that connectedness or experiencing that connectedness impact our teams and our business? If you think about the groups you’ve worked with, how does the individual experience of those team members, particularly those leaders who cast a wide shadow, impact the conversations that the team is having and the results that the organizations can or cannot get?
It’s like being in an orchestra where the instruments are well-tuned and the musicians are well-trained. When you have exquisitely trained musicians and tuned instruments, you get an exquisite sound that we can’t produce by ourselves. Every person brings their own resonance, vibration, and depth. The more we do that, it’s beautiful.
That can easily fall into judging and comparing and saying, “This person is not doing any work on connectedness.” I sense everyone is on their own journey. It’s more looking at what happens when you put all these journeys together simply by the virtue of people being together. To me, the only two things that are required are people being willing to be honest and play their instrument, and people’s willingness to listen, and the rest takes care of itself.
When people are willing to be honest and to listen, the rest takes care of itself.
I love that you’ve identified these pillars. What’s interesting is how we use the metaphor of the orchestra and I love that. Thank you for sharing that. First, how could you possibly compare the tuning of a violin to the tuning of a kettledrum or something like that? You can’t. They tune in different ways, and that’s the way people are, which is lovely. I love that metaphor. The listening piece is fascinating, because how could you possibly be an effective musician without listening?
Let’s say a person is much into sports. Part of their instrument is attuned probably to resilience, grit, moving through challenge, discipline, and balance potentially. All of these things might be part of what they are familiar with so they bring that to a team. Let’s say they interact with a person who is a great arts person who loves maybe making art or watching art. This person is going to have intuitive flashes, “This could work with this. Have we thought about that? Look at the broader pattern here. This might be going on.”
I’m simplifying this. The marathon runner knows that they have to train X, Y, and Z hours. The painter says, “I know you’ve been running this track for five years. Did you know that there was a whole set of woods if you turn left? Let’s explore that together.” You get a lot of creativity that starts to happen. At another level, the foundation of the team becomes so much stronger when you are with people who are different because it starts to challenge you with all your beliefs about what’s true. It creates a sense of humility and with humility like the movie quote that you used comes a sense of connectedness. It’s like, “I don’t know. We don’t know.” Within that sense of, “I don’t know,” comes a sense of acceptance and reverence for each other.
The foundation of the team becomes so much stronger when you are with people who are different.
Reverence in the sense that we’re in this together and there’s something deeper going on. What I’m hearing as I process what you’re saying is I have to question my own thinking in a more deliberate way.
My team of two at home is my husband and I. My husband is African-American. I’ve learned so much simply by being around him, besides the relationship, which is a whole other area of learning. These are some small things to learn but use different languages and ways of prioritizing. Our values are quite similar. At the same time, they’re shaped by different experiences. I learned a lot about trusting in the collective, for example, from this experience, which is something that I think about.
Now we’re making it some color of skin, but my experience of the Western world, as I learned it, was much more about individual achievement. What I learned from him is much more about how the collective moves and how are you part of a collective. That’s a beautiful experience. That’s how we all run into each other and say, “Want some of this? Got something?”
It sounds like the way you’re describing this, that’s where the willingness to be honest and to listen comes into play. Those two key attributes, capabilities, gateway skills, and mindsets come into play. That’s beautiful. What’s fascinating too is if he’s African-American, that’s Western. This is where I grew up. The notion that we’re growing up in different cultures in the same culture is another good attention-getting reminder which I appreciate hearing again. It’s certainly one of those dimensions of culture that you are more familiar with than I am in terms of working globally and growing up where you did.
I have a different familiarity. That’s true. My sense of working with people and this work is to help catalyze this fascination for the journey we’re on. It comes in all kinds of shapes and forms. Aging is a journey or touring your career is a journey. Finding a way to balance your work, life, and relationships is a journey. When we can enter it from a place of discovery, it can be quite enjoyable.
Finding a way to balance your work and your life is a journey. When we can enter it from a place of discovery, it becomes quite enjoyable.
When I hear about that journey, for me, it relates to what you were saying about connectedness, integration, and continuous learning. Many people would label that journey something spiritual, something bigger than satisfying the ego, the learning line as opposed to the goal line, or as I’ve heard it the soul line as opposed to the goal line. It depends on one’s orientation. That’s how this plays out in the day-to-day. We don’t need to use the word spiritual if we can use connectedness, journey, pursuit, and learning. That’s the challenge I have as I’ve talked with you about this topic. How do we talk about things spiritual without making it necessarily spiritual by definition? That’s not important in my view.
I love that you landed on the word important because that to me is a core question that we can ask. What’s truly important? What’s truly your priority? Whatever that is, trust that. Even with that question, what is truly important for you will open the gate. Whatever that is. Forget about whether it’s ego or not ego. Other people think it’s spiritual or not spiritual, it doesn’t matter. What do you think is important? The only person that can have that thought is you. What do you think is important? We humans have only been here for a couple of hundred thousand years, so our discovery has just started. Our voice and our inquiry in that collective discovery is very important or can be much bigger than we think it is.
At the same time, it’s much smaller. I always get in that pair. On the one hand, I’m this infinitesimally small person, and that’s something I have to learn because my ego still thinks I’m important. I have to shake off. At the same time, you’re part of this human evolutionary movement and you’re here for 50, 70, 80, 120, or 100 years. Do your piece and then be the piece of it. The world gets a lot more beautiful when everybody keeps asking themselves, “What’s important to you?” Listen. There’s honesty in listening, and then listening to others. “What’s important to you? How do we honor what’s both important to you and me? Keep walking together.
The world gets a lot more beautiful when everybody starts to keep asking themselves what's really important to them.
If we’re honoring, then we’re living well in this space of inclusion and sustainability. Obviously, it’s all important areas of focus for businesses in addition to individuals. What came up with me as you were sharing that is if I’m a drop of water, do I consider myself as this puny drop of water? Do I consider myself part of the most powerful physical force on Earth? That’s my choice as to how I define that.
Whatever that leads to. Part of my work now is about climate change, feeling connected to what is true, and what’s important to me. For a while, Andrew, I thought, “If I wake up, meaning I realize my true essence, I’m good and I’ll help others with that.” For better or for worse, I’ve also noticed that our society isn’t upheaval. There are a lot of challenges in the climate. Our environment is sending us definitive signals like, “What are you going to do? If you don’t do something about this, humanity’s expiration date has been pulled forward by thousands of years.” By the way, I do think we have an expiration date. Physicists say that we are going to burn up as Earth moves towards the sun for billions of years. Anyway, there’s that.
To talk about a challenge, this is a challenge that we’re in right now. We’re seeing that our ways of thinking are not working. Part of me is then drawn to saying, “Let’s think about what we can do to work with that.” Not from a place of punishing ourselves, judging ourselves, or being like doomsday, which I don’t think has any function, it’s more like, “What can I do about this then?”
This question, “What’s important to you?” is whatever that leads you. Maybe you become a person who becomes a strong advocate in your team for truth. You make sure that in your work, there’s sanity. You make sure that people who have babies have time off with their children or you are interested in making sure that people are becoming reflective or conflicts become opportunities. Follow whatever is important to you. That’s my greatest reflection when I think of all the people I’ve worked with over the last few years. We are muffled, including myself. Finding your voice, being able to speak your voice, and doing that with care is a heck of a job.
Finding your voice, being able to speak your voice, and doing that with care is a heck of a job. It’s a full-time job.
It’s a full-time job. As they say, it’s good work if you can get it. The ability to honestly express what’s important to me and in the context of my team to the extent that I can encourage others to do the same and listen effectively is a beautiful intersection of what might be called something deeper or more connected. Certainly, the practicality of teams working better together and leaders working individually more effectively. By the way, I need to reflect this back to you. Taller on the Inside perhaps could be the title of your next book. I love that expression that you said, “Taller on the inside.”
Thank you for suggesting that. That’s great. I love it. Thank you for being a mirror, Andrew. It’s lovely to explore this together.
This is what we do for each other. The metaphor of a mirror is a beautiful one to the extent that it’s incredibly powerful to look in the mirror. It can be scary to look in the mirror. The mirror is a fragile thing. The mirror requires maintenance. It’s a little bit of that expression. I’ve read that you can’t see your reflection in boiling water or raging water. That mirror requires tending. It’s fascinating, yet it’s extremely powerful and sometimes scary. What a gift it is to be able to hold that mirror up to our colleagues and companions on the journey.
You gave a beautiful definition, Andrew, of what this work is about. I’m paraphrasing it. It’s being the quiet, cool mirror. I call also a warm mirror, but not a boiling mirror for others and ourselves so people can see who they are and what they’re about. That’s what you do.
That’s what we do on our good days and that’s important to me to answer your question about what’s important. It’s what I’m here to do and what I’m here to use. Thank you.
You are welcome.
I feel like we can continue this on a Wednesday. We’ll see you next Wednesday. It’s Wednesdays with Hylke would be the name.
My delight. What I’d like to say is that words cannot say what this work is. Words can help. If there’s one thing that I take from this conversation, and if you’re reading, you can take from this conversation, is take a moment to be with yourself and ask yourself in that quiet, “What’s important to you?” It’s not a discussion. It’s more of an inquiry. Let that bubble up so that speaks to you. Maybe there are no words. It can be a feeling, an image, or whatever. Trust that. Our mind and body are sensing instruments that have made different ways of expressing what is true, not only the ways we’ve learned. Thank you for creating this space for this, Andrew.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom and doing it joyfully. As always, to be continued. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. I appreciate your being with me and being with us, whoever may read this down the line.
Great pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you.