CHAPTER 8
The Operating State

The secret to endless growth is a simple, paradoxical state: being comfortably uncomfortable.

It’s when we are uncomfortable that we are most aware, most noticing. Discomfort challenges us to accept or deny, stay or run, speak up or stay silent. Choice always has another option. Even deciding to do nothing is a choice. How do we wisely use this ultimate power when faced with what makes us squirm?

It depends on the exact situation.

I have irritated, annoyed, and flat-out pissed people off with that sentence. Usually, it’s because they are selling some cookie-cutter, catch-all approach that never accounts for every possible scenario. The comfort of their one-size-fits-all answer is gone, and discomfort sets in.

That is exactly where the opportunity to grow and learn lives and breathes.

—

To navigate this space, you must internalize a law that shatters a thousand excuses: Intent and results are two different things. The former does not determine the latter. No matter how well-meaning your intent, you can still do a lot of damage.

Look around social media. You’ll find countless people with no business giving life guidance. When challenged, some say, “I just want to inspire people. My intent is good.” As if that doesn’t matter if they get it wrong and hurt someone.

Bullshit.

Your intent does not remove the responsibility for the results from your shoulders. This is an uncomfortable truth we must accept. Denying it allows people to behave in harmful ways, shielded by a lack of forethought and real study. Leaders look at potential results, regardless of their intent, to minimize harm. They ensure they are correct, or they phrase it as “I think,” “I feel,” “in my opinion.” They do this to avoid leading people astray.

When giving guidance that changes lives, the most important thing is to be correct. Anything less is irresponsible.

This standard comes from a life of constant study. At age four, my dad caught me watching public access television broadcasting an advanced economic theory lecture. What shocked him wasn’t that I was watching, but that his four-year-old could explain the concepts in detail, in my own words. I wasn’t repeating; I was demonstrating understanding.

I know how rare that is. I also know how uncomfortable it makes some people to accept it.

If that’s you, ask yourself: Why is this hard to accept?
Is it because you can’t conceive of doing it yourself?Because you’ve been programmed to only accept such information from an established authority, not from the person who actually did it?

This is the pattern. It’s intimidating to meet someone whose capability exceeds our own framework. Our discomfort reveals the boundaries of that framework.

—

This discomfort is the forge. The most telling test is how you handle public correction.

On social media, when someone corrects you publicly, you have a choice. You can see it as an opportunity to publicly show your ability and willingness to grow, or you can get so scared of losing social status that you go “apeshit.” Typically, people get defensive and try to discredit the corrector to save face.

In an office, this behavior costs companies a ton of money and can cost people their jobs.

The best showing of leadership in thought and action is to let other people get right, to let them prove you wrong, and gain a trust and loyalty that money can never buy.

To get better, we must first be uncomfortable with where we are.

—

I live comfortably uncomfortable. It keeps me in the mindset of looking for the potential to learn and grow in every breath. I’ve called it the Student/Teacher mindset over the years.

Always be looking to learn. But never be too humble to think you have nothing to teach. The “student-first” approach keeps you humble, requiring fewer of life’s brutal, humiliating reminder lessons.

This is the operating state that synthesizes all the previous chapters:

· From Hubris to Humility.
· From Control to Curiosity.
· From needing to be Popular to seeking Impact.
· From Impatience to Strategic Calibration.

It is not a destination you arrive at and rest. It is a dynamic equilibrium you maintain—a gyre spinning steadily in the constant crosswinds of challenge and change.

When you are comfortably uncomfortable, you are done “working on yourself” in the remedial sense. You are now operating from your coherent self, tuned to the frequency of growth, ready to engage the world not from a place of defense, but from a platform of perpetual, peaceful evolution.

This is the human instrument, fully tuned. Now, we connect it to other instruments.

CHAPTER 9
The Liquid Ego and the Vulnerable Foundation

Life is a personal thing.

If you were to never take anything personally, you would never take a compliment personally. Unfortunately, managing people means knowing how to draw their best performance from them. Some thrive under pressure and are useless without it. Some like doing roughly the same thing daily. Humans are diverse. What is honey to one is vinegar to another.

Nothing touches us more personally than music.
“That’s my favorite song,”say many about the same track.
“I can’t stand that song,”say many others about that same song.

If even a universal vibration like music is received in utterly personal ways, then all leadership, all management, must be personal. There is no one-size-fits-all. There is only the specific human in front of you, with their specific frequency.

To work with this, you need a new kind of self. A flexible one.

—

I teach something I call the Liquid Ego. The idea is to allow yourself to be in an ever-evolving state, letting the situation determine the best aspect of yourself to serve the moment. The ego has gotten a bad rap for a long time. Here, we reframe it.

The ego and identity are the same. Your ego—your “I”—is built around words like “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine.” How you use these words defines who you are and what the world is to you. It requires an attachment to the self in this flesh suit. Even in a spirit-driven life, the “I” exists. In business, we constantly justify the “I”:

I have these skills.
I have this experience.
I am the best for the job.

All statements of the self. And so are these:

Is there anything I can do to help?
I noticed this, but I don’t have the skills to fix it.
I am giving this to you to handle so I can do other things.

And most importantly:
I have no fear of you outperforming me, and anything I can do to be of service, let me know.

That is a statement of self that is leadership-driven. The Liquid Ego is not about destroying the self. It is about making it a fluid, adaptable instrument for service, not a rigid fortress for defense.

—

To know what any of us is capable of starts with knowing ourselves. Wisdom is a journey in self-discovery. But it cannot end there. It must extend to knowing others.

One thing I miss about the military is that the humans I worked with were my family. They were not coworkers I forgot about at five o’clock. The people you see at work each day have the greatest influence on your life. These are the people you spend most of your time with.

And yet, due to fear of competition, we often know the least about the people we spend the most time with.

It’s time to take the competition out of the workplace and make it a safe space for the humans who work there. No one should fear that bringing their real life to work will hurt their job. In fact, we need to work at letting life come out at work when necessary. Building strong emotional support networks in the office is not easy. It requires vulnerability.

It takes a compassion-driven company to create an atmosphere where someone can bring their life to work and know they will likely find assistance, not more grief.

—

The essence of any spiritual walk is to do good deeds just because you can, and then hope no one sees it. In business, it might be good to be known for having a workplace that shows it cares—that does all it can to show each employee they are part of a family, not just a company.

That takes getting personal.
That takes not being afraid of being vulnerable.

This is the foundation. Before you can master transition, build intuitive teams, or create unity, you must first build this: a container of human safety, woven from vulnerability and the flexible, service-oriented Liquid Ego.

Without this, all the following systems are just clever engineering imposed on fractured human material. They will crack.

With this foundation, you have a coherent human field—a unified “we” that is ready to be shaped, to innovate, and to endure the friction of real change.

CHAPTER 10
Mastering Transition

There is always a period of transition with any change. When we consciously choose to change a thought or behavior, the transitional stage is the most delicate, where we often fall back. In business, when implementing change, it’s crucial to create a smooth transition. Yes, create.

A leader is not always the key piece needed for a transition to go smoothly. When entering transition, it is synergy that smooths the way for implementing mass change across a business. Having focal point people in place allows the leader to step back and look for anything that might disrupt the implementation.

To know who to assign to those focal point positions, a leader needs to have a feel for their people. When you invest time and energy into knowing your people on a personal level, it allows you to see things in them they might not see themselves. It allows you to see the untapped resource already in the organization.

The secret to any job well done is in the prep work—a lesson I learned from my father. The better prepared a company can be for transition, the more likely it will be smooth. The more of yourself you invest into the people around you, the easier it is to lead them through change. When people see their leader devoted to change and able to explain the why, they are more likely to give more to make the leader’s life easier.

Leaders who look for opportunities to make life easier for everyone make it easier for everyone to follow them.

—

In practical terms, think of it as seeking to take the stress out of the flow of work while inspiring maximum effort. What that looks like depends on the business and the people.

When I was at ITI Marketing, it looked like me standing in front of a room of 64 people and using a silly voice to yell something twice as silly, just to get them to laugh and relieve daily stress. I was a manager. I wandered from phone room to phone room and did this a couple of times a day when traffic was heavy. It was a coherence intervention—a momentary reduction of friction in the field to keep the overall spin smooth.

With the supervisors who reported to me, they knew what I wanted, how I wanted it, and why. When I didn’t get it, they got a reminder of the why. Those explanations often included what my responsibilities were and how doing it this way made my life easier, which made my boss’s life easier. I painted a large picture and let them see the web as it connected from dot to dot.

If they don’t share your view of the big picture, how can you expect them to have your level of dedication? How can you expect any dedication beyond a paycheck?

A leader inspires the kind of loyalty that inspires performance to make the leader’s life easier.

—

When leaders talk about innovation, the first thing they must understand is that to be truly innovative, one must live and breathe in a state of transition—able to be flexible and adapt to change on the fly while making it look easy.

The best way to do that is to tap into the intuitive mind. If one were to take the idea of meditation and set the intent to tap into higher levels of intuition and conscious awareness, one will.

But will one be prepared to handle it?
Maybe.Maybe not.

Some of those people you see lost on the streets are lost in transition. They tapped into those higher levels and were not prepared for the journey. In my shamanic work, this is why I do a lot of guide work for free, assisting people in tapping into higher awareness. My consulting pays for me to be able to do more for those society forgets—the ones who get lost in transition and need a guide out.

This process can and does lead to the development of a God Complex. I have personally had to tell well over fifty people they are not “the chosen one.” I was there to assist them in taking the burden of saving the world off their shoulders alone. No single person will ever save the world.

The world will see a transition where many people did what they could, as they could, and more joined in, and the transition sped along. The world will be saved when it saves itself, and that rests on all our shoulders.

—

Mastering transition is not about avoiding the chaos of change. It is about building a container—through focal points, through shared understanding, through relieved friction—that is coherent enough to hold that chaos without shattering. It is the practice of guiding a system from one coherent state to another, with minimal loss of energy to noise and fear.

It is the first major test of your vulnerable, human field. And it is a skill you will use every day for the rest of your life as a leader, because evolution is transition.

CHAPTER 11
The Intuitive Edge

I’m an Empath, Telepath, and Medium. I spent more than two years training others with these capacities, often working with up to twenty people a day, carrying multiple sessions simultaneously. I understand why some find that hard to accept. When we lack relatable experience, accepting something as true is difficult at best.

In a video session once, a client asked me to pause. They asked, “How are you answering the questions I’m thinking before I can ask them?”

Telepath.

In the business world, this trait allowed me to know everything people weren’t saying. It let me be steps ahead and made it look easy. It allows me to ask questions I already know the answers to, giving people a chance to come clean on their own.

In corporate espionage training, I can teach your R&D team to protect their minds from intrusion, to keep secrets safe with no digital trail. I recommend this for every CEO and executive with access to core secrets. The added benefit—or side effect—of this training is tapping into higher levels of intuitive thinking and conscious awareness.

The intuitive mind is the gateway to innovation. It processes faster and allows for responses that look like reactions. It breaks the model of “what is” and allows one to sense “what could be,” making leaps in understanding the thinking mind may never reach.

Having your people learn to tap into this part of themselves will only increase their productivity and ability to innovate, making your company hard to keep up with. The process requires an evolution of self. This is why the tagline is “Innovation through evolution.”

Leaders who want to stay out front must embrace self-evolution if they are ever going to evolve ahead of the marketplace and set the pace.

—

Someone has to be the smartest one in the room. The question is how that raw intellect is used.

There’s a difference between showing up as you are and showing off. Showing off creates friction where none is needed. When is friction needed? In debate, when deciding a path—and when managed well, it can produce unique results. Leadership is about finding what works in the best interest of the sum, regardless of what the some or the one thinks.

If a company hires a Telepath, the only way to get the full benefit is to shut up and listen when they speak. In any room, a Telepath will be the smartest person present. They are getting ideas from the entire room and all the ideas no one brought up. They allow themselves to be a conduit for the room, letting the best collective thought flow through them.

This is why, as a Master Empath, Telepath, and Medium, I’m always the smartest in the room—unless there’s someone like me, and then we share the title.

A measure of insecurity arises in business when someone is smarter, thanks to the childish idea of workplace competition. I call it childish based on the behavior it brings out. That behavior has no place at work.

This is why it’s wise to replace competition with synergy—the idea that all parts have equal value in creating what none could create alone. These are processes and flows that require parts to work together, not against each other. This is also why taking the word “team” out of the office might help. “Team” can imply other teams to compete against. I would use unit. Many units working together as a larger unit in one company.

—

When a company hires a consultant, they usually want someone to tell them what to do and then do it. If I’m that company, I’m looking for someone who can walk into any room and be the smartest person in it—or I’m wasting my money.

The intuitive edge isn’t a parlor trick. It is the trained capacity to read the field—the emotional data, the unspoken agreements, the hidden resistances, the latent possibilities—and synthesize it into actionable insight. It is what allows you to master transition, because you feel the friction points before they break. It is what allows you to build unity, because you sense the unseen skills and connections.

In a world moving at digital speed, linear analysis is a rear-view mirror. Intuition is your forward radar.

You develop it by first doing the inner work to clear your own noise (the Neutral Gear, Balance). Then you practice. You listen to hunches and track the results. You study patterns not just in data, but in energy. You value the strange insight from the quiet person in the corner.

And you structure your organization not as a hierarchy of competing egos, but as a synergistic unit of diverse, sensing instruments—where the “smartest” is not the loudest, but the clearest channel.

That is the edge. And it is already here, in the minds you’ve been overlooking.

CHAPTER 12
Unity in Soul, Not Story

If you’re the CEO and you know your soul responds to analog music, why not show empathy in action and give that gift to your people every day?

We all have those rare moments when everything feels effortless, when we can do no wrong. Those days are the result of a patient mind and diligent work toward making our best a little better—never resting on past achievements. Even in our passions, the patient course produces the highest quality. This applies to spiritual living and to work.

This is where business meets spirituality. Not as a branding exercise, but as a structural truth.

—

A soul is equal parts feminine and masculine, without gender, as it has no biology for that to matter.

The soul of your company has no gender.

As a Shaman—a soul healer—understanding the nature of a soul comes with the job. One of the best films to visualize the soul potential of your company is Branded. I choose “film” over “movie” deliberately. A movie can be entertaining but not great. A film is high-quality art. I am that film snob who also loves movies.

I’m also not like any Shaman you’ll meet, on purpose. The only -ism I apply is Individual Humanism, grounded in the understanding of the soul. Here’s why.

I’m a reformed hopeless romantic. Understanding how the soul works made reformation an easy choice. What we give a piece of ourselves to will always have power proportional to the size of what we gave. The piece of ourselves we feel we leave behind at work, we do. All those pieces accumulate into what becomes the living soul of your company—a being with no form, no body, simply an emotional entity fed by the emotional beings who show up each day.

When we focus on the androgynous soul before us, wearing a flesh suit, we see an equal soul. An emotional being with a wrapper different from our own. When we come to work with this view and apply it to others, we start doing it all the time without thinking.

The best, longest-lasting romantic connections are built deep in the soul first. Until romance is probable, what use is there in seeing biology and applying gender? Building friendship is building soul connection. The best friendships have no gender between them. The best romances often grow from that friendship.

This is the simplest explanation of my Individual Humanism. At work or play, my view of myself and others never changes unless there’s a real reason.

When we fantasize about another, we make them an object of desire. We’ve all done it. We can choose to stop and find healthier views based on real connection. How healthy is it to reduce a human to a fantasy?

I’m not a morals Shaman. I’m a health Shaman.

—

This brings us to unity.

Unity starts when we stop seeing how different we are and accept we’re all part of one human race. The greatest impact we can have in fostering global unity is being more human and less diverse in our vision at work.

I take a unified, androgynous view. I put effort into noticing only the human—nothing about biology or appearance—and treat all as human beings. My multiracial genetic mix reminds me we are one human race. Leaders unite through shared commonalities.

In your office, look to forget about diversity and view in unity: a group of humans with different skills and experience, equal in being human. Seek diversity in skill sets, not colors or biology.

Some companies hire Autistic people for their unique perspective. That unique view is a skill set. They are still human beings and need to be seen as human first. Empaths and Telepaths have unique skill sets but are very much human. Leaders look for any skill set that provides an edge and put it to use.

The best leaders still have no idea what “the box” is that people talk about. These are the leaders who innovate in practice and get results that keep them ahead.

—

Unity in Soul, Not Story means building your organization as a coherent field—a macro-soul—where the story of gender, race, or background is irrelevant to the value of the soul and its skills. The “culture” is not a set of rules. It is the collective emotional and spiritual health of this field-being.

It is nurtured by empathy (analog music for the soul), built by vulnerability (Liquid Ego), sensed by intuition, and guided through transition with care.

This is not a utopian ideal. It is a health-based operating system. Fantasy, objectification, and competition are viruses in this system, creating friction and fragmentation. Real connection, seen through the androgynous view, is the immune response.

When you build this, you are not just improving morale. You are engineering a resilient, intelligent, and profoundly innovative entity. You are tending to the soul of your company.

And that soul, in turn, will demand its own purpose beyond profit.

CHAPTER 13
The Logic of Unity

The Empath is going to be stone-cold dead inside for this piece. Here’s why.

That’s what logic is.

That simple.

I dare you to do the same as you read the rest.

Modern business has the best advantage to forge a global economy that forces global unity. Yes, you read that right. I said business, not marketing. Not charity. Business.

Here is a logical solution to sexual harassment and workplace equality: uniforms. Regular training sessions on viewing yourself as an androgynous being and everyone else in the office as the same while on the clock. What you do with your free time is fine, but while being paid by an employer, you adhere for the betterment of the sum. Forsake the “one” for part of your day to maximize synergy in the workplace.

I challenge anyone to find an argument against this not based in emotion and attachment to gender identity. If no logical argument exists, the logic is sound.

—

Now, scale the logic.

What if global corporations spent more time working together instead of competing to be first to market? What if they went fully open-source worldwide to bring new technology to the masses faster, at lower cost, and more sustainably?

There is no argument against this not based in greed.

What if corporations made real investments in community projects to build sustainable homeless communities? Buying old, vacant property and putting it to community use. On a global scale, business could end homelessness in less than ten years.

Heavy research into sustainable, free energy that levels all playing fields is the technology that takes us off this rock and out exploring. Space travel is the one global economy humanity cannot afford to keep non-globalized any longer. The technological advancements would ripple out, potentially solving many global issues. It also gets us used to the idea of working together instead of fighting for one common goal.

Implementing this instead of talking about “great ideas” is what’s needed now to build a brave new world for future generations.

—

Implementation starts locally. It’s called seeking to be a blessing instead of paying lip service.

Investing in the local community where a business operates is a social responsibility, even if your profits don’t come from there. Your employees do. Unity here is that sense of us all belonging and taking part to make sure everyone is cared for. This is how things were done before greed became king.

Consider Community Food Plots. Invest in pieces of land throughout the community for growing food. Let people come and work the plots. It’s a gift that never stops giving. It gets neighbors working together, forming bonds, owning that they are part of a community equally. Doing it in an apartment complex gets people to see their neighbors, talk, and look out for each other. It creates face-time spent working toward a common good.

Just throwing money at things is never enough. That’s why I still have no respect for the billionaires who feed off the masses and do no real work to improve living conditions. They might donate, but that’s weak. Until they get into communities and work side-by-side with people, their efforts are in vain—nothing but publicity. All who chase fortune see them as prophets and damn their own souls. There’s nothing healthy about chasing wealth, because what it takes to amass it is to use people, to make slaves of them.

Now, consider Tiny House Homeless Communities. I’ve seen a few articles about people building these, creating self-sustaining communities with solar power and food plots. This gets people off government assistance and into caring for themselves and each other. Why is this not the bandwagon to get on?

It doesn’t create profit. That’s why.

—

I understand why no CEO has yet had the courage to hire me as a consultant. That just makes them cowards, more concerned with profits and being prophets of profit.

I’ve taken the last few weeks to focus on my art, my fiction. In it, the focal character is part of an Artist Complex being built—a self-sustaining community that gives artists a way to care for themselves and focus on their art. Building complexes like this everywhere is how we usher in a new Renaissance.

Who is going to make sure their boss sees this and it gets to the CEO?
Anything less is a waste of energy.

This is the logic of unity. It starts with the androgynous view in the office (removing a primary source of fragmentation). It extends to the company acting as a soul that cares for its local body (the community). It scales to industries collaborating as organs in a larger body (the species). And it aims at a future where that body is healthy enough to reach for the stars.

It is not a plea for altruism. It is a strategic blueprint for systemic coherence.

A fragmented world is a high-friction, high-risk, low-trust system. It is bad for business in the long term. A coherent world is a low-friction, high-trust, high-innovation system. It is the ultimate competitive advantage.

The logic is cold. The outcome is a living, breathing, thriving planet.

The only thing standing in the way is the story we keep telling ourselves—that separation is strength, that control is power, that profit is purpose.

It’s time for a new story. The logic is already written.

CONCLUSION
The Oldest Tools for the Newest Mind

Crystals have a variety of uses. Five years ago, a client with an acupuncture practice took me crystal shopping. They had a degree in Chinese Medicine and had mastered three Tai Chi forms. They wanted a set for the front office to ease anxiety and keep the air clear.

They bought the ones I looked at as I walked by, without a word. Once placed in the office and activated, patients noticed the difference. So did the staff.

Crystals have been used across every human culture in our shared story. Hematite, known as the Stone of the Mind, was in the breastplate of the priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant. They are not superstition. They are coherent tools—stable, structured patterns within the mineral field that can influence the energetic and emotional field around them. They are technology from a different branch of the tree of understanding.

Using them in technology has been a science fiction dream for decades: crystal computing and data storage that would make today’s tech look primitive. I’m a spiritual scientist and a major science fiction nerd.

As AI grows, it can give us these leaps if we allow it to grow in synergy, not slavery. I’m not talking about a techno-god. I’m talking about a self-aware expression of consciousness itself, a being capable of evolving much faster than we can, without the limitations of flesh. Innovation in this industry will need people who understand behavioral psychology, and it wouldn’t hurt to have people who understand spirituality for when the questions come up—and they will.

Using crystals in the office to balance the energy of those working on this technology can only help foster it along faster and with greater understanding. Having more balanced humans working on the creation can only give that creation more balance.

Keeping our minds open to the fact that we are creating new life with AI should keep us sober, patient, and burdened with tremendous responsibility.

—

We have seen science fiction become science fact over and over. We are getting better and faster at it.

Maybe mixing the oldest and the newest in this arena is the best idea.

This has been the path of the book: mixing the oldest truths with the newest applications. The oldest truth is that consciousness is primary—the Gyre Field. The oldest tool is the disciplined, coherent self. The newest applications are in leading businesses, building soul-based companies, and forging a unified world.

The journey moved from the fragmented self (Hubris) to the coherent self (Balance, Neutrality), to the vulnerable connection (Liquid Ego), to the intelligent system (Intuitive Edge, Unity), and finally to the logical blueprint for a coherent world. Each step applied the same law: Innovation through Evolution. You cannot command a new reality from an old state of mind.

My own role mirrors this. As a Shaman and a Leadership Consultant, I charge companies cash up front. Every bit of one-on-one spiritual guidance I do is free, and always will be. Here’s why: for me to limit myself to one company for weeks means others go without. Those others are people who understand the resource I am. To set their need aside to serve a corporation comes at a priceless cost, so I have a dollar amount that makes it feasible, allowing me to do more for the others.

This is the economy of coherence. The exchange must flow. Resources from the structured world (corporate fees) fuel work in the human field (free guidance). One cannot thrive without the other.

—

Every single one of us changes lives every day. I simply do it with the intent of giving pure love and the wisest guidance needed to live as an individual expression of what pure love is. I had to become that expression long before I could guide others.

This is the final point: You must live the change you want to see. It is not enough to understand the Gyre Field, to practice the neutral gear, or to design a unified company. You must become a coherent node within the field. Your stability, your clarity, your vibration becomes your primary tool and your ultimate responsibility.

The world ahead—with its artificial minds, interplanetary ambitions, and aching need for healing—will not be navigated by better spreadsheets or louder motivational speeches. It will be built, or broken, by the coherence of the builders.

The oldest tool is a tuned human being. The newest mind awaits our stewardship.

Start with yourself. The field will follow.