Shane Metcalf: One Conference Away From Uprooting His Life

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By Bryan Wish

Shane Metcalf is the co-founder and CCO of 15Five, a human-centered performance management platform that creates effective managers, highly engaged employees, and top-performing organizations. Shane and his co-founders started 15Five to help companies bring out the best in their people. Prior to his role as CCO, Shane worked as the Director of Customer Success, and later as the Vice President of Customer Success, where he won the company customers for life by building self-service and high touch programs that helped unlock the full potential of the product.

Before 15Five, Shane was an executive coach in the Bay Area for more than 12 years, where he worked with tech and social entrepreneurs to create new levels of high performance, productivity and organizational health.



Transcript

BRYAN WISH: What is the One Away moment you want to share with us today?

SHANE METCALF: The One Away moment, as I think about my life and the kind of non-linear journey that I’ve been on, is when I was 20 years old, I went to a conference in California called the Bioneers Conference. It’s a conference I’ve been going to for a couple of years. Bioneers stands for biological pioneers. It’s a social, environmental innovation conference. It’s incredible stuff. I met a girl there, and we spent the weekend together. I also met somebody from a radio station in New York. Suddenly, I fall in love with this girl who happens to live in New York, and I get an internship offer from this radio station.

At the time, I had just moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I grew up in Taos, New Mexico. Grew up in the country. Rural New Mexico. Taos is its odyssey and kind of insane, crazy full of contradiction and contrast place to grow up. I’d just moved to Albuquerque, thinking I’d move to the big city. I grew up in a pretty low-income household and hadn’t traveled much. I didn’t see the ocean until I was 16. I meet this girl. She lives in New York. I met this producer for Air America Radio, a liberal talk radio show from the early 2000s. I get an internship offer. Two weeks after the conference, this girl and I are chatting on the phone, and there’s this, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” We were like, “Yeah, let’s do this.” So, two months later, I’m on a one-way fight moving to Manhattan. I’ve never even been to New York before. The farthest east I’d ever gone was Tennessee to visit my grandparents. When I think of moments that radically changed my life, that was at the top of the list.

BRYAN WISH: I went to Taos and stayed in an earth ship last fall.

SHANE METCALF: Earth ships are so dope.

BRYAN WISH: It was a very great experience and a very special time. New Mexico is beautiful. I can see how you completely shocked the system going to New York on that journey. What made you go to that conference in the first place?

SHANE METCALF: I’d been going since I was 15. I’d been there five times or something. The original how I got in was I’d heard one of the programs, an interview on our local radio station, KTAOS Solar Radio 101.9, which I hosted a show on, which is kind of how I got the internship at the other radio station. I hosted a youth talk radio show on it. I heard that they were offering these youth scholarships at this conference, Bioneers. It was Julia Butterfly Hill. She’s the activist who climbed a tree and lived in it for two years to protest cutting this tree.

She’d offered a youth scholarship to this conference for the first time because she said, “Where are the young people at this conference?” She provided this scholarship and me and my friend, Tiffany Elston, were like, “Woah, we should do this.” We applied for the scholarships. We got them. We still needed to raise a little bit of money to go. We went around to local businesses and raised $500 each or something. We flew out to California. That was my first time going to California. The conference is at the Marin Civic Center, North San Pedro Road in Merin, which is funny because now some of my best friends live off that road. There are all kinds of cool stories and history with that road. I went and what was really striking about this conference is it opened my eyes to how possible it is to create a world where life thrives. We have, at our disposal, all the tools, technology, resources that we need to create a world that is deeply beautiful, thriving, sustainable, and oriented towards conditions that are conducive to life.

15 or 16, that was this deep shot of optimism and possibility about the future of the world. I’d be going back every year since and really gaining a deeper understanding of things like biomimicry which is an innovation based on life. Life itself has been doing incredible R&D for 3.2 billion years and has solved every single technological problem that we’re facing as a species right now—energy, resource, production, etc. Life is already solved. It’s just taking recipes out of nature’s cookbook to solve our biggest challenges.

BRYAN WISH: I’m sure, given how you grew up, you going to that conference created a lot of expansion for you intellectually and just a whole new world. You said where you grew up was maybe lower to middle income. Were you not exposed and educated in that way? Did you feel you grew up in kind of a shell?

SHANE METCALF: I’ll do a little more backstory. I was growing up with a family that had basically chosen spiritual awakening over jumping on the capitalist bandwagon rat race. My family, bless their hearts, did not do the rate race. They pursued awakening and truth over making money. There’s a price you pay when you say poverty is purity. We paid some of those prices. Simultaneously, I am so blessed because even though my parents probably never made more than $30,000-$40,000/year, which is its own experience, I was surrounded by love.

I had an amazing education. I had incredible teachers from day one and super crazy alternative education but deeply informative and something I’m extremely grateful for. For instance, my high school was a very innovative high school. We had a four-day school week. The founder of it used to design colleges with Buckminster Fuller. The curriculum was based on Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. We’d make camping trips at Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs to kick off the year. Super interesting, innovative, progressive education that was very intellectually stimulating. There was drug use happening one of our semesters, and they said, “Instead of just going with the drug war narrative, “Just say no,” let’s do some education.”

We studied Andrew Weil’s From Chocolate to Morphine which was a textbook around psychoactive substances. We studied that. When 9/11 happened, I was a sophomore. Instead of saying, “Hey, let’s jump on the bandwagon of demonizing Islam and the Muslim world. Let’s spend a semester studying Islam. Let’s understand it. Let’s understand how we got into this situation.”

Intellectually, I grew up in a very rich environment. That first night of moving to Manhattan and going up onto the rooftop – oh, and by the way, this girl I fell in love with was from one of the wealthiest families of the world. I went from living in Albuquerque thinking I’d move to the big city, driving around my $500 Toyota Corolla dreaming of getting $50 to go spend on groceries to the deep end of Manhattan, billionaire elites. That first night, going up on top of the building that her family-owned, and looking out at the skyline, it was like a fish in water. It was like, “I have been so deeply waiting for this moment.” It was a shock, but it was a shock of awakening, excitement, and alignment.

BRYAN WISH: What’s interesting to me is you grew up so on the polar opposite end of wealth, and then you walk into the completely opposite end of wealth. Then you feel that pull, that alignment. Take us to when you were looking out over the skyline. What about that experience really grabbed you?

SHANE METCALF: There’s a number of things. She gave me an iPod. This is like the first generation of iPod. 2005. It was January of a cold winter. I grew up in the mountains, but in east coast winters, the humidity is very different. I remember walking around listening to the iPod, and it was this great album by Kaada, which is Mike Patton from Faith No More doing much more like experimental soundscapes. I remember walking and feeling such a tremendous experience of my prayers being answered. Growing up in a more below-the-poverty-line community and family and as a teenager realizing, I don’t want this. I want more for my life.

I want to live a more expansive life. I want wealth. I want to create financial freedom. So, studying it and reading books about it. This one book is called The One Minute Millionaire, which is all these millionaire affirmations that I still crack up about—as an 18-year-old, doing these millionaire affirmations and then boom, two years later, whole life changes. It felt like magic. It felt like an answer to my prayers. It felt like freedom and liberation from the struggle of poverty which for anybody that’s struggled there, you can find peace in it, and it can be a very painful experience. It was such a dramatic change to my whole life that it was rapid expansion.

Then there were deep values. It wasn’t like, “Cool. I’m going to be this gold digger.” There was this deep alignment around vision and purpose and spirituality that existed with this person. There was genuine love as well. We stayed together for two years, which is pretty remarkably good for having spent a weekend together and then deciding to move in when you’re 20. It was enchanting. It felt like anything was then possible.

BRYAN WISH: It sounds like this woman was a very deeply connective person for you where you felt the urge to move in with her after barely spending time with her. You guys grew up on completely different sides of the coin from a wealth perspective but maybe some aligned from a value perspective. What created such a strong attraction? You stepped up on that roof and felt that pull. What were your next steps, and how did this woman and the wealth you walked into help play a role in the development?

SHANE METCALF: There are all kinds of fun synchronicities there. Part of what we fell in love around was a shared sense of what’s possible for the world. There was one keynote from that weekend from Paul Hawken, the founder of Smith & Hawken, the author of Natural Capitalism, and more recently, The Drawdown Project, which is a comprehensive look at what it will take to actually reverse global warming. A couple of cool synchronicities there. He actually visited my high school as a teenager and fell in love with our high school so much that he donated the research library he used to write Natural Capitalism to my high school.

I devoured as many of those books as I could. Here was this super influential person that had really shaped my sense of reasons to be optimistic about the future of the world. Then this weekend, he gives this keynote about the enormity of how many people are trying to work on solving our problems and kind of the takeaways. If you look at the data, you can’t help but feel pessimistic. Like, “We’re kind of screwed. This is not going in a good direction.” If you look at the people that are trying to solve the biggest problems, you can’t help but be inspired. That was this incredible bonding moment of us sitting there in the theater, “Oh my god.” This kind of revelation vision of a more beautiful world. That kind of fused us there.

Then also, her dad came from a lower/middle-class family. She had more of a balanced perspective than the average heiress. That made a big difference in us being able to relate to some extent. The other cool, trippy thing is ten years ago now. I helped co-found a company called 15Five which I still run. We’re a people and performance management platform. Kind of human-centric, how do we unlock potential at work and do that through traditional HR systems like performance reviews, one-on-one’s, etc.

The really cool thing about the original methodology of 15Five is that Paul Hawken, who has played all these interesting roles in my life, helped develop the original management theory in the 80s with Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins, the founder of North Face. Before I was even born, Paul Hawken helped create something that would then later be the seed of the company I’d help build and played all these other trippy roles in my life. It just kind of blows my mind of synchronicity and the bigger picture when we zoom out that there is some kind of higher fractal order to how life unfolds.

BRYAN WISH: Totally. It seems, for you, it is a merging of people from parts of your life, ideas, and I think you have to give yourself credit. Maybe because of your background, you’re more akin to tuning in to that pull and following it. Maybe the synchronicity of life could line up for you. A lot of people don’t always know when to listen. It seems like, for you, you followed those pulls and things that have come into your life, then taken action around them that have allowed the synchronicity to happen. It’s an interesting dynamic for the story you’re sharing with a lot of intuition but also a lot of action.

SHANE METCALF: The intuition piece. All of us have intuition. I think that our intuition is the key to us accessing our higher genius, our higher creativity. The journey of learning how to listen to our intuition, understand our intuition, and leap when it says to leap, even if it doesn’t make any sense. I really do credit that there has been a lot of luck, and there’s also been a lot of leaps of faith that I’ve had to make in my life and a lot of struggle and perseverance that has ultimately led me to create a life that I’m deeply proud of.

BRYAN WISH: I was listening to a podcast that Gary Zukav was on. I went to his Instagram, and there’s a quote that really stood out to me. He definitely comes from a spiritual realm. You came from a more spiritual, open-minded realm yet have this capitalistic mindset for the human good. Maybe more natural capitalism. The quote was something around to solve the bigger problems of the world. We first have to change ourselves, not other people. Your work is centered on changing individuals for the better to unlock their potential and their performance so that they can go solve the problems of the world.

That really struck, being entrepreneurial, because sometimes we’re so focused on the problems out there that need to be solved or the people that need to change, but when we look in the mirror, if we spend the time focusing on ourselves or the people around us that can then go do that. It’s so interesting to me because your work is at the center of changing human potential to then go unlock and solve the problems of the world by establishing great leaders. There is a lot of connectivity there between all sides of your life.

SHANE METCALF: I love that. That’s kind of what the teachings of alchemy, for instance, aren’t actually about external alchemy and turning lead into gold. It’s about changing our own relationship with ourselves and with the world. That’s how we influence external change. We transform internally, and that, in itself, transforms external dynamics. It is an interesting dynamic because, in many ways, my parents said, “We’re going to prioritize the inner world.” The interiority of the human being is where the gold is. True wealth lies in our hearts. Most people are obsessed with looking out externally for fulfillment. We’re going to say, “To hell with that. Let’s look internally for the true fulfillment.”

That’s a pretty sound approach. But also by not prioritizing creating external structure, there are prices to pay. Your teeth rot. You get evicted. Your car breaks down every time you try to go see a concert at Red Rocks, which we did a lot of. Shout out to my dad also, as a hardcore rock ‘n roller. My first concert was when I was eight years old, and he took us to see Nirvana. It was the last year that Nirvana was touring before Cobain died. Just an appreciation for the no F’s given, rock ‘n roll, freak flag flying family.

BRYAN WISH: Let’s jump to New York a bit. You got to New York, and there was still a connection to her father and how he’d grown up in a similar environment that you did and worked his way up.

SHANE METCALF: To be clear, the wealth was from the mother’s side.

BRYAN WISH: What were the immediate steps that you took once you walked in and felt that pull?

SHANE METCALF: In so many ways, when I look back, so much of it was grappling with my own deep insecurities. Feeling deeply inadequate. My experience of working with the radio show. I was an intern for Bobby Kennedy Jr’s radio show Ring of Fire. That and several other subsequent professional experiences. The dominant experience was one of inadequacy. I had my first entrepreneurial experience in that chapter as well my partner and I met some other people that were creating a chain of organic fast-food restaurants.

We joined in with them. It was kind of my first startup, really. A lot of that time, it was actually trying to cover my ass and pretend that I wasn’t just deeply incompetent in the way that I thought that I was, which was the dominant experience of all of my professional experiences until I’d met a mentor when I was 25 who was also a One Away moment. That saw my shadow, saw the places where I’d been just pretending to have it together, and saw past the storefront that I was selling the goods at, but the back was totally in disarray. They saw past that, and they actually loved me there and held me there, mentored, and coached me there. That was a life-changing experience as well.

Energetically, I think those two years was expansion. It was falling in love with cities. It was falling in love with big ideas. It was falling in love with entrepreneurship and falling in love with the freedom and the possibility to travel and see the world. When we broke up, and it was all of a sudden, I just went from moving down and marrying into a multi-billionaire family to I’m totally on my own. Another interesting thing about money that you don’t earn is you don’t always feel you deserve it. At that moment, as soon as we broke up, I felt more capable and competent than I had the entire time that I had been kind of a kept man or kept boy, as I’d now think of it as a 20-year-old kid. I had to rediscover my own path. There’s a lot of lessons there around wealth, and money can be a beautiful blessing, but money can also be an enabler to our own lower natures.

The gift of having to hustle and find our own path in life and pay our own bills is that we need to forge through the fires of our own purpose. When you don’t have money as the driving motivator for that, it’s easy to coast. It’s easy not to have to lean into those deeper questions around our purpose. That was then, from 22-27, a five-year chapter of a deep dive into my own journey, to my own purpose, to my own path. Who am I? What are my gifts? I’m extremely grateful for that. Ultimately, that’s what led to being a co-founder, building this company, and creating my own freedom. Taking the best of the things that I genuinely believe about the positive benefits of prosperity and abundance but actually earning them, actually discovering my own value, my own merit, and the prosperity coming from that versus being just handed to me.

BRYAN WISH: So profound. The ripping of the band-aid off of the relationship and then the feeling of “I’m in charge of my own destiny.” I can really appreciate it when you said you have to forge through your passion and purpose when money isn’t there to keep you going. In those times of great financial struggle, if you push through, you can figure out the shell you need to embody and what’s aligned. It’s easy to strip away all the BS. You can subtract everything else around you. Good for you. There’s this theme in your life. You probably had moments where you could go one way or the other. When you hit the fork in the road, you’ve chosen optimism, growth, and transformation over despair and “Woe is me.” You’ve committed to the alignment of the work. You’ve actually done the hard work when shit’s got hard. It’s that core attitude for our own struggle.

SHANE METCALF: I’ve had a lot of struggles in my life. I’ve had a lot of literal physical pain, physical struggle, emotional pain, emotional struggle. I think the difference between struggle and perseverance is I can persevere as I’m still struggling, but you’re orienting yourself towards growth and towards the prayer of your life versus just wallowing in the self-pity of the struggle.

BRYAN WISH: I’m reading a book right now called Letting Go by Mark Hyman, I believe. He talks about the levels of consciousness.

SHANE METCALF: David Hawkins. I know it well. Fantastic book.

BRYAN WISH: Yes. I’ve read it in conjunction with The Power of Now. To me, this is the more practical way of reading it. He talks about the layers of consciousness. When you approach things from a loving layer of consciousness, your ability to move through hardship becomes that much easier opposed to when you’re more prideful. You radiate more when they measure it in the energy field. It’s making a lot of sense to me. It sounds like you’ve approached it from a place of gratitude. You grew up in a loving environment. You’ve approached the struggle in a very loving way and a very conscious, thoughtful way. Maybe because of some of your background, which is another thing to be grateful for. Just a lens into connectivity here.

SHANE METCALF: I love the model of Power Versus Force. The vibrational spectrum of consciousness. Evolution and our own awakening are raising the frequency of consciousness. Frequency is kind of thrown around a lot but actually if you think about the vibrational frequency of consciousness, I think there’s a lot of reality to that. The title of that book is Letting Go because letting go is the path for ascending up the spectrum of consciousness. That’s all we have to do is continually let go. If you haven’t read The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, it’s phenomenal as well. He’s the author of The Untethered Soul. The Surrender Experiment is the biography. All he wants to do is move into the woods and do yoga and meditate. He ends up creating a multi-billion dollar software company. It’s this super cool story of this integration of business and spiritual practice and surrendering to the destiny of our life.

BRYAN WISH: I just bought Untethered Soul. I should read that in conjunction with the other one.

SHANE METCALF: Both of those are top-shelf. I think reading Untethered Soul. First, you’d never know he was the founder and executive of one of the largest medical software companies in the world. You’d never get that by reading it. This is a very accomplished businessman. Then you read The Surrender Experiment, and you’re like, “Woah, that’s crazy.”

BRYAN WISH: This Is a great segue to 15Five because of the internal pull towards business and leadership and approaching things in a very positive, transformational way. I’d love to know how 15Five came into being and how you saw what you’ve built. What you’ve built is incredible. Tell us about the origin story.

SHANE METCALF: It’s full of magic for me. I had gone through that five-year chapter of rediscovering my own purpose. The two years of living in the deep end of Manhattan are billionaires that are trying to use their money to change the world for the better. Really cool, expansive experience. Flying on private jets. All kinds of craziness. Then boom, we break up. I move to San Francisco and get a job in cleantech private equity, which I’m miserable in. Do that for a year. I get fired. It was kind of like, “Oh good. I’m getting fired. Thank God.” I go to Bernie Man the next week for my first time. It completely rocks my world. I come back to the bay and move into this crazy community, experimental living, transformational-focused work.

I do basically four years of hyperintense personal development work. Relationship skill-building, communication, emotional intelligence, landmark, authentic world, yada-yada-yada. All kinds of amazing work. Then it was actually finding a mentor, who I mentioned, who then took me under his wing and trained me as a coach. Coaching was the first time it clicked in. All of the different pieces, all of the ways that I’d been deeply insecure about my own competence, came to a head, and I discovered in coaching, it was the first thing that I felt gifted at. The first thing that was deeper than a superficial layer of me pretending I was good, but at my core, I was identified as a failure. Coaching, falling in love with coaching.

I do about three years of coaching and trying to build my own business with some success but not break away from success by any means. It was actually then going to a ceremony with our community of friends that were doing an experience with a molecule called 5-MeO-DMT, which is the most powerful psychedelic entheogen on the planet. I’m surrounded by 30 of my friends, and I go into this experience, and it’s kind of famous for separating from your ego and putting you into this deep state of non-dual consciousness. What happens when I go in is I tell the entire room my whole struggles with money.

I spill all the beans. As my ego starts reintegrating, I’m like, “Oh, my God. What did I just do? I just told these people my deepest, darkest fears and shadows and truths that I’ve worked so hard to hide from my friends.” It was that experience that then led to one of my friends saying, “Shane, I feel I can’t really be your friend if I don’t help you with this.” We were talking, and their recommendation was to reach out to somebody, a mutual acquaintance that I kind of knew but not really. His name was David. We start talking. He’s super great and receptive and supportive of this webinar I was running called Supercharged about energy management for entrepreneurs. David is helping me with this, and I’m like, “What do you need?” David says, “Just yesterday, I launched my product 15Five, and there are all these people coming in, all these executives coming in, and I don’t have time to coach them. I need somebody who can coach these executives on using the platform.”

He’s like, “Do you know anyone?” Again, a One Away moment. Do I be polite and say, “I’ll think about it if anyone comes to mind?” Or do I say, “Holy crap, that’s me? Let’s talk.” I chose the courageous, vulnerable path of saying, “Hey, that sounds like me.” It felt risky at the time. That led to a couple of days later starting to work together. What’s beautiful about this is for the next three years, I helped David build the company. David, one day comes to me and says, “Shane, you have made such a profound impact on this company.” He gave me carte blanche to basically take all of the crazy social technologies from my coaching training and the interpersonal transformational communities that I was a part of and applied those in building a culture based on authenticity, connection, and truth-telling. He said, “If I had a time machine, I’d go back and ask you to be a co-founder because of the impact you’ve had. So, I’m building a time machine, and you’re now an equal owner/co-founder of this company.” It completely blew my mind. That doesn’t happen.

BRYAN WISH: You leaned in. You kept following that intuitive desire and were so vulnerable in that moment of that DMT entheogen. Wow, boom. You knew it. It was right in front of your face, and that pull again. Chills. Absolutely chills.

SHANE METCALF: The journey of building a company – I’ve been doing this for 9+ years. It’s such an evolutionary hero’s journey. We are building a company, being an entrepreneur. Just being a human being and getting up every day and showing up for our lives is a heroine’s journey. Then we’ve definitely had some great success. We have hundreds of thousands of people whose product helps them to be their best selves. It’s not like the hero’s journey is over. I feel like just these last couple of months. I’m uncovering deeper layers of my own entrepreneurial confidence.

BRYAN WISH: Such as?

SHANE METCALF: Just owning the success that we’ve had. Also thinking about the lessons learned in this whole journey. I was thinking about how I would do things differently. Being a first-time entrepreneur was almost an accidental entrepreneur. I didn’t actually start the company. David did. I’ve been incredibly blessed to get to be a co-pilot. The layers that I’m speaking to is that uncovering of the continued confidence of being able to apply the lessons that I’ve learned both in the continued growth and expansion of our mission as well as the continued dreams and aspirations and ways that I think the world can still be improved. I’m still at the beginning of my journey. I’m still an infant compared to who I will be in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years if I’m so lucky.

BRYAN WISH: How special of a realization. You were in it at inception. It was fully aligned with who you were. You clearly rode the wave and helped be a part of building something significant, which will probably financially enable you to go build something fully that might be your original idea. It’s neat to hear the way you talk about it and how there’s such a long road ahead for you, and the endeavors that connect to that road will be super meaningful and vast. Your work is rooted in a lot of meaning and purpose. Where do you find meaning within your work of helping others develop and become better leaders themselves?

SHANE METCALF: When I was coaching, one of the things I really loved was that when I sat down with a client and put my full attention on them, I disappeared. My agenda, my story, my problems were gone. All that existed was this person. That’s the gift of service. That’s the beautiful thing about attuning to other people and finding what their highest need is? I get to step out of my own self-obsession, which, while it can be intoxicating, can also be a prison. I can see somebody get what they want. I can see somebody become more of themselves. I can instigate and inspire brave choices that the person still has to make. I don’t make those choices for anyone. We’re all in this alone. We’re all completely alone on our own journey, and yet, getting to stimulate and activate somebody to make higher-order choices and to follow their own intuition, discover their own knowledge is good entertainment.

Whether we choose to tune into the dystopian side by entertainment of the news cycle or tune into the tragic comedy of our own dramas, we get to choose the genre that entertains us. There’s a lot of complexity and nuance to this conversation of the claim that all of reality is an illusion, and this is just a trick of the light that’s a projection, and we’re paid actors in a staged drama. At some point, the lights will go off, and the curtains will come up, and we’re going to remember, “Hey, I’m not Shane. Shane was this character I was playing. And wow, all the things I took so seriously and all the sense of life or death about making 15Five successful or not, that was all just part of the drama. That was all just part of captivating the story so that the audience would get enraptured.”

BRYAN WISH: I’ve not done an interview in probably two months. I backlogged a lot and have been getting them out. The irony of this is that it’s the first one I’ve done in a couple of months and just everything we discussed. Your story, it so aligned. I feel like my life is very similar to yours in opposite ways but in some very similar ways. I just want to say thank you for bringing your full self to the table here and speaking about your existence. It was beautiful. It was so great. Where can people follow you?

SHANE METCALF: Thank you for that reflection. This was really fun for me because I mostly don’t talk about these stories. I’m not writing on LinkedIn about my use of 5-MeO-DMT and how I quantum leaped my life forward. Thanks for the opportunity to recollect and shed some light on my own journey. You’ve got great listening that elicited that. People can find me on LinkedIn. I’m really in the conversation, thinking and contemplating how do we build more authentic companies? More human companies that are still committed to high standards of performance and execution and results but that actually lift the human being up in the process so that it’s soul-awakening versus soul-crushing work.

That’s where I’m at. You can also follow our podcast HR Superstars, where we’re diving into a lot of these conversations with some of the most progressive people leaders from the coolest companies around innovating and reinventing HR. HR has had this bad rap. It’s going through a whole rebrand, and companies have never been more aware of the need for supporting the whole person, whole human development versus punitive, top-down, command and control management, HR exists only to prevent us from being sued, and cover the bottom rung of those hierarchies of needs.

BRYAN WISH: I’m excited for you in the journey ahead, who you’re serving, how you’re serving people, and who you’re becoming. I am excited to stay close. I’m sure it will be a meaningful friendship for the long haul.

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This post was previously published on BW Missions.

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