I’ve always been obsessed with growth. When I was CEO, this obsession went into hyperdrive because startups are all about growth and I kept telling myself, “I have to prove I can scale.” For 6+ years, I went through dozens of executive coaches, CEO groups, and coaching programs, read 100+ business books, all with the aim of continually exponentially leveling up in life so that I was bottlenecking my company’s growth as little as possible. Every coach has their own framework, and I went through different types of coaching: productivity/ accountability coaching, therapy-like communication/ group dynamics sessions, skills coaching (from media training, to operational leadership like running meetings, KPI’s, hiring, management, 360’s, etc). After $100K+ in coaching and self development services, what did I learn about how to best level up?
I concluded that increasing in self awareness is the ultimate power. No matter how much power and resources and money I have, I’m restricted to reacting at the level of awareness I’m operating at. At the lowest level of consciousness, I’m a slave to my desires, a beast, easily manipulated by external circumstances, my body, my emotions, my biases, my ego. At higher levels of awareness, I can notice and appreciate my patterns, and I can change them.
The best way I found of improving self awareness is Conscious Leadership forums. I want you to do it. It’s ~$10K+/ year and if you can’t pay for it, I will pay half the fee for 5 people who ask me.
I’ve been in many founder/ CEO groups, often because I was excited to join something exclusive. Each time it was fun onboarding onto a new framework and meeting people, but then we’d fall into the same patterns. We’d whine about engineering/ executive hiring, fundraising, engineering management. We’d end with exchanging intros for recruiters or doing arithmetic around SaaS metrics. I’d start looking for a new coach/ group to join. I’d wonder, “Is there more? Do I really know so much already? Are these fields just not that deep, or am I an idiot, or are these learnings experiential and unlearnable through abstractions like language?”
I’m a writer, I love the science of story structure, and I often look at my life as though it were a movie. Waking up is a key part of my favorite movies like Fight Club and The Matrix. I love the moment of revelation that unlocks and repaints the story. Going through CLG has been one of those fundamental shifts for me. Now, I look back on my experiences and can tell a more insightful story about them, not just a simple villain/ victim story of blaming someone / circumstances for the conflict, or with a deus ex machina event where that new hire or my great idea swoops in to save the day, but a philosophical story that changes how I see the world.
I love being able to dissect the story of my life on a meta level so that it’s not just an episodic sitcom that keeps repeating and glorifying how great the protagonist is at fighting or seducing people while everyone else acts as an antagonistic/ comedic foil. This is my life we’re talking about- I want to build a deeper arc and unveil my wizards of Oz. I don’t want to sweatily re-live my favorite scenes again and again, the same pornography of impressing the highest status whatever, getting into the most elite thing, being the most desirable/ successful/ smart. I want the story of my life to be mind blowing on a totally different level. I want to grow substantively, repeatedly. The movie of my life doesn’t need expensive special effects so long as it’s thematically rich. The wonderful thing about theme is that it’s free. It’s all in the writing, in the awareness of the writer, and the writer is me.
What entertained me for hours when I was naive to story structure- Wile-E Coyote endlessly chasing the roadrunner with bigger and bigger explosives- left me hungry for capital-M-More once I understood the cartoon’s underlying structure. When I learned the tropes and how the conventions of genre work, the patterns unveiled themselves to me, I could predict how the movie would go, and I could choose how I wanted to innovate on the script. Isn’t that more fun than continuing to watch the same thing unfold forever? It remains literally world shattering to see the stories I unconsciously tell myself about my world, to gain the lucidity to affect the script instead of blindly continuing to chase my roadrunners with bigger and bigger explosives. Do you want to learn the underlying structures behind the stories you tell yourself about your world every moment? Isn’t awareness of story structure key to experiencing the most exquisite movie, the movie of our lives that we’re currently casting, writing, and acting in?
Writers learn that in the most powerful stories, underneath your protagonist’s conscious, voiced drive, they have an unconscious, subliminal need (ie. Ricky Bobby consciously wants to win car races but unconsciously wants his dad’s love). The arc of the story requires bringing the unconscious into the light so that the protagonist can grow and their world can change. A well structured story circle feels surprising, revelatory, satisfying, and inevitable. It’s so cheap to insert substance- if a story doesn’t have theme, the only reason is a lack of awareness. Why blow millions on special effects if your story doesn’t explore a heart shaking, deep truth?
Anyway, that’s what I realized was happening in my life- the movie of my life was exciting in a shallow way, with $ and stakes and drama at various moments, but it was a fleeting story that had limited depth of meaning. I had the conscious drives of proving I was the best XYZ, all the while being driven by unconscious desires for love, to be worthy, and I kept missing the turn that would break the story. Until I brought my unconscious desires into the light, my story would keep feeling like Act 1. I’d keep wondering, “Is there more?” and, so long as I wasn’t seeing the truth, “more” would just seem like more of the same old thing, which isn’t actually more of anything. People gain awareness through repeatedly unveiling the unconscious desire driving their conscious actions, and after they see the unconscious, they can finally change the pattern and go a layer deeper to find a new pattern. We can control patterns that we can see, but not the ones we can’t see.
Without awareness, we’re repeating the same thing again and again, an episodic, masturbatory tv show of Sherlock Holmes solving crimes again and again, showing how dumb everyone else is, how he’s always right, never learning, never changing. And that’s fine as entertainment- it’s fun to be right, it’s celebrating and embracing an event that we enjoy and want to see again and again. But that’s not our highest art, that’s not all the meaning there is, that’s not our full potential, that’s not how I want to experience my whole life. I want to change and figure out how I’m wrong. I want to see the meta pattern and tell a full story of my self and my world in a way that doesn’t blame anyone. When we talk with each other and tell each other the stories of our lives, let’s not masturbate the whole time. Let’s go deeper and birth something new and magical. Let’s always keep leveling up. Let’s not keep cycling through our narrative patterns without curiosity.
TLDR; I would love to invite my wider network into CLG. They have forum openings right now. If your company won’t pay for it, I will pay for half of it for 5 people so long as you are in the program for the full year. Contact me if you want my support in doing CLG. I’m excited to commit to leveling up in consciousness together.
Self awareness is the key to easing suffering. Without self awareness, we’re slaves to the patterns in our brains. The universe reflects our unknown biases, so we’re caged within our own blind spots, trapped in patterns that reinforce how we’ve learned to see reality, missing the richness of the infinite other possibilities. It’s easy to read stoic/ buddhist philosophy and think we’re enlightened, but there is a huge gap between theory and practice. CLG takes it beyond theory into structures that make it easier to see when we’re reactive and blinded to higher levels of awareness. Let’s level up so the movies of our lives can become more thematically deep.