The work

"I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David." - Michelangelo

In the work of transformation we are less concerned with adding anything to you. What we are concerned with instead is getting out of the way what's in the way.

In the way of what?

In the way of your aliveness, your expression, your unhinged participation in life.

In the world out there there are millions of books on how to add things to you, how to have more and better ideas, how to do business, leadership, relationship and life.

Yet at the same time we are observing the following: leaders in the world seem to be more interested in gaining power than in leading, happiness is declining — especially in the younger generations — we have more and more while being less and less satisfied, and distraction has taken hold of the mind of men.

All of that while information is available at rates one could only dream of 20 years ago. You want to know what an expert said? Ask GPT. You want to know the best leadership practices? Google it.

It's all at your fingertips.

And although it is all at our fingertips, it seems to have very little impact on our everyday quality of life on this planet and the relationships we live in.

In my own practice I see how everyone seems to know everything. My clients become coaching experts themselves, and can recite quotes and smart things others have said.

Yet how come it doesn't give them power?

I don't have the answer, but I have a suspicion.

That all the knowledge we gather falls on top of something that already is there. A way in which we know.

That way of knowing makes no distinction between concept and reality, between knowing about and knowing in experience. It leaves us living in a conceptual realm — a realm in which we confuse the books about relationship with having one, a realm in which we confuse our mind with ourselves.

Our ideas of ourselves become who we are, but our ideas are not ourselves.

Our ideas about life are not life, and our concepts of relationship are not necessarily representative of the relationship.

What the work is concerned with is to reestablish a basic distinction.

One in which we can see our concepts for what they are — concepts, and not factual descriptions of life.

Reestablishing this distinction leaves you free not to know, but to not-know.

It leaves you in the possibility of discovery... Of yourself as a leader, a person, a husband or wife, a human being.

You become available again to the possibility of being alive instead of living in the options your concepts allow for.

Then you are free to read the books and live life, instead of trying to live books and read life.

Living from a place in which you have freedom, power and self-expression as a natural state is what the people in our training program — Mastering the Art of Leadership and Self-Expression — are discovering for themselves.

Next cohort starts March 2027. If you are interested to hear when we launch, let us know and we will put you on the list.

Warmly,

BEING INSTITUTE

The Art of Being Human

Being Institute