The Gold Standard | A 12 Week Coaching Experience For the Perpetually Unsatisfied
For anyone yearning to raise the standard of quality our world operates at.
“With fire we test the gold, and with gold we test our servants.” ~Baha’i proverb
“All models are wrong, some are useful.” ~George Box, statistician
“There’s only one thing more powerful than building the thing: burning it down and building it back better.” ~Victoria Washington, entrepreneur
For many years since designing the “Design Thinking Activity Map,” a framework over 100 people from all over the world and across industries have used, I had the desire to create my own creative and personal transformation methodology.
“Design Thinking” is an engineering model founded by the Stanford Design school created to help engineers work with and for real people. It has been adapted into business and education to further emphasize inspiration, creation, testing, and perfecting rather than building-to-complete based on assumption alone.
“Design thinking” emphasized the importance of process in a world that more often seeks product.
In the years after studying and leading design and systems thinking, I had long been reflecting on how the business model, scientific method and design thinking framework could be more well integrated. I helped inform the Innovation Scholars Program at Michigan State University, which infused a systems approach to educational design.
It wasn’t until I stepped away from formal work altogether, however, that a new image came to me. I was studying meditation and yoga in India, feeling my body change through motion, movement, rhythm. I could feel how spaciousness was created through pause and attention. This emergent process was not built on action alone but on attention and intention.
Here, I realized how the inclusion of voices in the design method, the inquisition into parts and their relationship, the change in focus itself, transformed the outcome.
I began sketching, throwing out images from all kinds of business and design models and reformatted them with two major changes to the linear design model:
- I put choice at the center.
- I formed the process in a circle/cyce pattern, contrasting the linear ways I had learned it from Stanford and IDEO.
It would be another year before I posted this online. Since then I get emails from people every couple weeks from across countries and industries asking for the model.
So why does any of this matter?
“All models are wrong, some are useful.” ~George Box, statistician
All models were wrong.
Yet, images and equations underlying our social systems shape group and individual behavior.
By example, our economic fixation on infinite growth propels our entire economic and social system.
Despite all models being imperfect, our society and culture are built on imperfect models and use these models get used. to justify decisions even when the outcomes are horrific (prioritizing infinite growth when our world and human bodies are in fact, finite.)
We need better models.
As an artist and creator, looking to nature, I began to look to nature. Here I did not just see limits, I saw and experienced much that is infinite.
What it might it look like to hold the both-and of being finite (though extremely moldable) physically, and infinite mentally?
These questions deepened my pursuits in both scientific, spiritual and religious disciplines. I loosened my grip on fixed models but continued to look for patterns.
Over and over a shape emerged: the spiral.
A spiral expands directionally, and can also deepen inwardly and outwardly.
We are at a precipice of such radical change and possibility as a human species, and yet more distracted than ever.
“With fire, we test the gold, and with gold we test our servants.*” ~Baha’i Proverb
(*servants in the Baha’i tradition meaning those in service to the oneness of humankind.)
We are a world blazing with new possibility, and a world endangered of burning itself alive in our own greed.
What if the antidote to such a transformation was not just moderation, but the refinement of our appetite, the redefinition of wealth?
The above proverb reflects a sentiment echoed by spiritual traditions around the world and throughout history: true wealth survives the test of fire. And humans, will always be tested by money.
And yet, choice remains at the center.
Our world is thirsting for genuine wealth right now. A wealth, that challenges our overflow of cheap and destructive goods, with rich and innovative quality.
The standard needed is not just one we need to create, it is one we get to embody.
Only in fire, do we glimpse the phoenix within.
Let us glimpse.
Because the fire does not only burn, it burns away.
Aren’t we in need of this?
In creation — process makes product.
Perhaps in our re-creation, as a people, as a world — becoming really is everything.
To design a better world, to have the persistence and wisdom available for sparking creative destruction, to align the scientific method with values that reflect life, and to have the courage to stand up to the equally unique and perverse values and practices standing in the way of true human glory, depends upon our ability to trust our individuality, tap into our collective synergistic power, and turn up creative intuition.
We must navigate the waters of fearful attachment to find true internal knowing of what we are made of, what this life is made of.
Going through our own fires and building the capacity of our own mind and body to hold hardship, meet our human reality, and expand the multi-dimensionality of what is possible for us both individually and together beckons to all who quiet themselves enough to listen.
Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, who served victims of oppression from Mexico to Russia to Rwanda, spoke frequently of our worlds global health issues as a: “failure of imagination.”
The human imagination, fueled by its heart of gold, is still lying dormant.
Alas, I’ve always wanted to build a superhero team. So here goes.
This Fall & Winter, I’m building a fire.
A place of pain, of power, of process. A place of meeting ones own mental, emotional, philosophical and physical blocks as we journey toward our expansive potential.
This fire is limited and will take only 9 participants in each season.
This fire is a space of personal and creative transformation through 1-on-1 coaching and group sessions. I’ll be using the Fibonacci Sequence, Visual Thinking, Somatic Healing, and Systems Change to help you work on diving deeper as a person and leader focused on holistic transformation at the seat of change. You will have the option to work on one of 3 main areas of change or over 3 cycles we will move through as a program:
- inner wisdom & creative intuition
- mind-body integration & somatic healing
- and erotic aliveness & relationships.
This program will start in mid-October and go until the end of the year and include high-level attention to what you want to change and bring forth in your life and in the world around you.
If this interests you:
- Schedule a Free 30 Minute Discovery Call Here (more info on the cohorts below.)
- Register for Free Workshops Thursdays 7–8 pm Up Until Then: Here
- Continue Your Own Personal Design Learning: Here (Updates to come).
Take care everyone.
Be gentle with your bodies.
Stay skeptical. Stay brave. And strive for true quality, in your products, your systems, your being — God knows our world needs it,
Libby
Additional Details About the Coaching Cohorts:
Start Dates: Fall Cohort: Oct 15th | Winter Cohort: Jan 14th
Length:
Cohort 1: 10 Weeks/ 10 Sessions
Cohort 2: 12 Weeks /10 Sessions
Discovery Calls as named above will be available: Sept 27-Oct 13 and Nov 30-Dec 15.
Want to connect with me elsewhere?
I’m (slowly) building a presence on Tiktok, Youtube, and Instagram centering digital wellness as a form of social and personal activism. Let’s collaborate.
