The Stuff that Works

Transformational technologies I most believe in

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If you really knew me, you’d know I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery and experimentation for about as long as I can remember.

I suspect the bug bit me early. I was raised catholic and imbued with the idea of being the best version of yourself at a young age. I can still remember chanting our elementary school motto: “We are all stars!!” My young self desperately wanted to believe it, and also quietly and unconsciously held the belief that it was not a fundamental truth but something that I needed to live up to.

This journey has taken me far and wide. It’s driven me to read piles of books and listen to countless podcasts, travel for myriad experiences, and spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars seeking answers.

If you really really knew me, you’d know something about the journey has been changing for me recently. The ride has been slowing. I’ve been less interested in ravenously pursuing the NEW. New ideas, new experiences, and new learnings have all been less appealing to me.

This culminated in taking Joe Hudson’s MasterClass this summer and having the experience fall flat of my expectations.

It’s not that the course wasn’t excellent. It was. I learned a lot. I’d actually recommend it as an excellent beginners deep dive into the inner work. At the same time, I left feeling disappointed. It wasn’t as impactful or juicy as previous explorations of mine.

Just this past few weeks it’s been hitting me. I know exactly why that experience fell flat: my desire to continuously explore new things, including MasterClass, is actually a strategy to avoid the scary edges I’m finding in the stuff that I know works.

All of this learning, this seeking of the new, has been a big avoidance strategy.

Because I’ve found the stuff that works for me. I know what absolutely blows me alive, resonates in every cell, and leads to a deeper and deeper understanding and integration with myself. And that stuff is leading to new, unknown, scary and exciting places.

So here I am. I’ve seen it and I can’t unsee it. I’m going back toward the stuff that I know works, tripling down and confronting the scary edges that emerge. I’m confident it will take me where I’m supposed to go.

Here’s the stuff that I’ve found works. And I mean really works. This is the stuff that has blown me open in ways I never would have expected before I found them. It’s the stuff has been so unarguably transformational for myself and those around me, it feels insane not to shout it out loud.

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

If this isn’t clear, let me say it now: I am a huge fan of conscious leadership. So much so that I paid $25,000 and spent a year training with the Conscious Leadership Group.

If you’re new here, it’s best you know how into conscious leadership I am now. If you’re old here and haven’t yet picked up on it, well good on you!

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership are the most powerful set of psychological, spiritual, and consciousness technology I’ve come across. It’s one thing to read and understand them. It’s something else entirely to practice them, live them, embody them.

My friend and mentor Dave Kashen said it best: they are like a living meditation.

So many of us practice meditation, and then walk off of the pillow and return to the self we are when we’re not meditating. We end up creating an “enlightened” meditating self and a “regular” life self.

For me, the 15 Commitments are the bridge that crosses that chasm. They are a meditation you practice as you live your life, not a separate self you reach for when you sit on a pillow. They are what I come back to in my day-to-day life, more than anything else.

There is enough for a lifetime in the 15 commitments. Jim Dethmer once said you could spend years on commitment one alone and see your entire life transform. I’ve found this to be true—the longer I practice, the more depth I uncover.

There are a few things embedded in the 15 Commitments that I find make their embodiment so profound:

• An emphasis on non-judgmental awareness. Can you identify what is happening in your consciousness right now without making it good or bad?

• A focus on radical self-acceptance. Can you accept yourself for being scared when you show up scared, defensive, and at threat?

• Exploring inner personas or parts. This is similar to internal family systems or parts work. It encourages you to envision yourself as a collection of parts, and get to know and love all of the parts and personas that show up to protect you.

If you want to dip your toe in, I recommend reading the book in it’s entirety. In practice, I suggest focusing most intentionally on commitments one through six. These are foundational commitments centered around ending drama in your life.

If you want to dive even deeper, I encourage you reach out. I work with founders, leaders, and coaches alike on deepening their conscious leadership practice and am a devoted practitioner myself.

Peer Feedback Groups

This is a very close number two in my list of recommendations. Here’s why:

It is impossible for you to see yourself in totality.

Your strengths. Your blindspots. Your evolution. The consequences of those evolutions.

Coaches, consultants, loved ones are all great. But there’s nothing quite like a peer feedback group.

Be it a group of founders, artists, musicians, salespeople, or coaches, having a peer feedback group for what you most care about is invaluable.

In my experience, peer feedback groups are most powerful if they meet certain criteria:

1. Tight curation on the individuals allowed into the group. You want folks who are all invested in playing the same game with each other. This should be based on the group’s purpose.

2. A filter for people who are interested in pushing their edges, inside and outside of the group.

3. A commitment to be radically candid and honest with each other. These groups are most powerful in that you are mirrors for each other, and mirrors are only truly useful when they’re honest.

I’ve put together many of these groups over the years, and I’ve seen more fail than not. The failure mode tends to be the same: a lack of clarity of purpose and a lack of willingness to speak uncomfortable truths. When this happens, the group starts to feel like a generic support group.

I’m currently spinning down a group that fell prey to this trap, and when I revealed it to the group, everyone else shared they were also feeling lukewarm and bored with the group. My story is that this happens because while most of us are afraid of challenge and being challenged, we all also secretly want to be challenged. And so the best groups form around an agreement to lean into that, especially when it is most scary.

So go get your mirrors. Form an agreement to be a quality mirror for them and for them to do so for you. In my experience this is a radically explosive thing for long-term growth.

Enneagram

I still to this day am surprised by how much of a proponent of enneagram I am.

There is a rigorous and scientific one in me who rips into it: “It’s so unscientific! Imprecise! Lacking in credibility!”

And still, here I am, a huge fan.

There are a few reasons why I think enneagram works so well.

First and foremost, I don’t actually believe enneagram is unscientific. I actually think it is scientific in what I’ve heard described as “first-person science”.

When most of us say science, we mean third person science. Science that explains the physical world. Things like chemistry, biology, and physics.

First person science is something else. First person science is the study of what we are, what we truly are, at the level of consciousness.

First person science is deeply personal. It doesn’t abstract to everyone else. It is the study of self, of consciousness, of awareness. You can’t take anybody else’s word for it. All you can do is run experiments and see what comes up.

First person science is studied through things like meditation, internal family systems, breathwork, hell even the arts!

I have found enneagram to be a profound lens to experiment with in first person science. My pitch for experimenting with enneagram goes something like this:

Enneagram claims that, over the ages, we’ve found that most people’s personalities tend to correlate with one of nine personality types. The types aren’t perfect or all-inclusive, but they tend to do pretty damn well. Additionally, all of us have all of the nine types within us, but there’s one we tend to lead with when we are threatened and scared. By knowing that type you can see that ways you limit and restrict yourself and, given that, there’s a series of practices and experiments you can run to come into a greater sense of wholeness with yourself.

It is, by far, the most useful personality framework I’ve found. Most personality frameworks serve to put you in a box. Enneagram shows you the box you’ve put yourself in and the path to breaking out of it.

I recently heard Ross Hudson, renowned enneagram practitioner, put it another way: The idea with enneagram isn’t to put you into a category, it’s to use the category to illuminate what’s going on inside of you.

If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend you checkout the podcast I did on enneagram, where I explain the system in more detail.

If you’re interested in discovering your type, I highly recommend you pay to do so with a typing professional. You can’t trust assessments to get it correct, and self study can take a while to find your type. I’ve personally greatly enjoyed my experience with The Enneagram Group.

Nervous System Work

Nervous system work has been a constant for me for so long that I nearly overlook it. But I can’t help but believe it has been fundamental to my evolution.

At the end of the day, it wouldn’t be hard to argue that you are, fundamentally, a nervous system. Or at the very least, how you show up is most highly determined by your nervous system state.

Your nervous system oscillates between two states: Parasympathetic, which is commonly characterized as rest/digest, and sympathetic, which is commonly characterized as fight/flight.

Much of how you respond in a moment is determined by your nervous system state. Your capacity to regulate your nervous system state will hugely determine the quality of your life. And unfortunately, most of us are walking around with highly dysregulated nervous systems.

If you want to work on nervous system regulation, the most reliable method I’ve found is the Fajardo Method of Holistic Biomechanics. As a shameless plug, my wife is a trained practitioner and has a unique genius in her capacity to make the work understandable and drive profound results. If you want to learn more, there’s no one else on the planet I would recommend you speak with more. You can find her here.

I’ve also heard wonderful things about The Strozzi Institute from a few friends of mine, as well as Jonny Miller at Nervous System Master. I haven’t directly experienced either, but would suggest Jonny if you have remote limitations and Strozzi if you are able to travel in-person.

For me, only doing nervous system work is limiting. I think working through your cognitive and other embodied pathways is a must. And I think adding nervous system work to other realms of work can pour gasoline on the fire of your evolution. For folks who struggle with nervous system dysregulation, I think it is an absolute must.

Plant Medicine

By plant medicine, I mean hallucinogenics or psychedelics.

One of the biggest kicking off points for a huge transition in my journey of self-exploration was an experiment with LSD in my early twenties.

During it, I found a tremendous separation between myself and my beliefs about reality. I had an experience where my fundamental beliefs about reality were not only challenged, but demonstrated to possibly be the opposite of what I believed.

Ever since that moment, the vice grip of protective beliefs and personality was permanently loosened.

I believe that plant medicine is one of the single most transformational things on the planet. I also believe that, due to it’s explosive and uncertain nature, it’s one of the easiest things to get wrong. It happens in so many ways: The set and setting is off. The medicine isn’t respected. Administrators aren’t properly trained for what could come up. There isn’t adequate support and so the learning never becomes embodied.

I am such an advocate for plant medicine (I was a donor to MAPs, in meager sums, for most of my twenties) and am also very cautious about plant medicine. I think it is a profound technology that requires respect, and many of the modern groups that administer it don’t treat it with the respect it deserves. I also think that it can be life-changing when deployed in healthy ways.

If you do choose to pursue it, I recommend being highly scrutinizing when it comes to where and with who. Trust your intuition if you feel something is off. I also advise you to choose an avenue that includes integration. If not, I suggest creating your own ways to integrate the experience, ideally with the methods above. Many people have huge openings, only for change not to manifest because they lacked proper support around integration.

Obvious covering-my-ass statement: this is not an endorsement or recommendation to pursue plant medicine or psychedelics. All I mean to say is that, in my experience, it’s some of the stuff that works.

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These are my big five. I’ve found they work incredibly well for myself and the people I know. Do they resonate, or have you found something else? What core principles, technologies, and practices resonate with your system at a deep level?

I’d love to know in the comments.

In Love and Wonder,

Justin

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If you enjoy reading the Leadership Lab, consider clicking the ❤️ or 🔄 button above so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏. It would mean the world to me.