 It's just an honor, such a pleasure to be here. I want to thank Rajiv for the invitation many months ago to be here, which is a thrill for me. Charmaine for the introductions and for encouraging me to be myself and to share what brings me the passion in my life. And I want to thank Shaatri, I don't know if he's in the room, for giving me a great baseline for the introduction around that whole Ikigai concept about passion. And I want to say too, the interesting thing on stage this morning is not only do you have two Harvard MBAs, but we also both went to Tufts University and he didn't say that in his introduction, so we have the same university experience for college and the same MBA. So that I thought was kind of, there are no coincidences, right? The synchronicity is for Rose and I have been talking about that. Life is this wonderful string. So for me, why I am just so deeply honored to be here and to share with you, I'm going to speak for about 30 minutes and share with you how the Institute of Noetic Sciences studies energy, studies consciousness. But I importantly want to share with you as leaders, how do we bring this into reality running organizations? And for me, I could not have asked for a almost more miraculous path to be able to bring together my two passions in my life, which is I've always was committed to wanting to learn about business, wanting to be a leader of an organization. I grew up in a small town in New England in the far north of the United States and I just had this dream to go to the big city and to be able to work in corporations and in leadership. But I also had a side of me that was beginning to grow around this spiritual and I would say this interest in what are the other realms that influence us? Well, I had no idea how life would go in the path forward. But what it has brought me to was the more classic business training. And then by following my heart and my intuition, I ended up over time being able to become the CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And it's one of those life lessons that you think you have a plan and you think for the next 20, 30 years you know what that's going to look like. But it doesn't always go that way. And if you allow yourself to follow that intuition and go with the flow as we say, you can far exceed what your dreams were. So I feel deeply honored. I've been in the CEO position of IONs now for exactly a year, a year and a month. And I want to just tell you a little bit of how many of you know about the Institute of Noetic Sciences or IONs? If you just raise your hand so not too many, okay. IONs, well that's why I'm here. So IONs is actually, and we call it IONs, it's a little easier than Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONs was founded 45 years ago by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell. So Edgar Mitchell was part of Apollo 14 space program, and he actually walked on the moon. And when he was returning from his trip, can you imagine, he's returning in his capsule from the moon back to the earth. And he sees the earth, the earth rise on the, from his view in his window. He sees the earth come up. And this is pretty much a man who was a trained scientist, very much in the objective realities. He sees this image and he has this profound moment where he's overcome by this deep feeling of interconnection and seeing the earth, that's our earth, floating in this universe. He gets this profound moment of, wow. Look at our earth and then if you go deeper and you say, well on that earth we have all these countries with boundaries and borders, different cultures, different languages, but we're all one on this planet and then within this, we're within this large universe. He came back and he decided to focus his life and his work on investigating this consciousness. So he launched the Institute of Noetic Sciences and this is back in 1973. People thought, you know, can you imagine what people thought about that, successful astronaut? And he comes back and he says, we have to study this and 45 years later we still are. So I want to tell you a little bit, when you hear this noetic, this word noetic, it actually comes from the Greek, noesis, which means inner knowing. And sometimes people like to use the word consciousness as a replacement for that, but it's this sense of inner knowing. And from there you say, well, you can talk about consciousness. So that word consciousness, are you familiar, do some of you feel you have a good sense of what consciousness means? If you were saying, are you conscious? Okay. I hope you are right now actually. I do. I'll be worried if you're not. Well, there's what we like to call little C consciousness and capital C consciousness. Little C consciousness is kind of how we are today. We're sitting here in this room. I'm aware of you in the audience. I'm aware it's a little cool in here. I'm aware I'm giving this speech. You know, we're here together. The big C consciousness is when you go deeper than that. So if you think about islands, last night over dinner I was having a lovely conversation about the Maldives, the Maldives Islands. I'm a big fan of the Hawaiian Islands. So think about islands, right, an island chain. And the parts that we see are these, it's the top of the mountains, right, over the ocean. And then as you look at islands, you go down here, you go underneath the water. There's still mountains very so up here, they seem very separate. And as you go deeper, they're still separate. But there's a certain depth that we like to think of in our own selves when we do our deeper work, whether that's meditation or reflection or contemplation. We're going deeper in our consciousness. But ultimately, as with island chains, we are connected by a common ground, a common foundation. And our quest at IONS is to study how do we move deeper and deeper and actually access and tap into that common ground to improve our lives. If we improve our personal lives and our own personal transformation, we can do better in our work worlds, in our communities, in our environment. And that's the mission of IONS, is to actually apply our scientific research behind consciousness and to then translate those findings into practical programs. So for me, I'm a classically trained Harvard MBA. I'm not a scientist like the awesome team that I'll introduce you to. But my goal is to say, how do we apply what our science team is researching to make it useful for you as leaders? And that's what I want to convey to you today. So this is what we call our science dream team. We actually have, it's very interesting, similar to Eclipse. We are also a staff of 50, headquartered in California. And we have the world's largest multidisciplinary team studying the frontiers of consciousness. And this is our team. Now it seems like everybody is so familiar with Dean. So Dean Raiden, how many of you are familiar with Dean Raiden's work? I've been having people come up and ask me about Dean. We actually have a team of scientists that are looking at consciousness from a biological perspective and how we can improve our health, from neuroscience, from the quantum physics angle. We're even looking now at virtual reality and artificial intelligence. And we just have this fantastic team. So I say, here I am to share with you today, how do I, Claire? As the CEO of Noetic Sciences actually walk my talk. How do I do that? Because every day I have to, I share many of the same challenges that you do when you're at work every day as leaders. I have to manage and develop a team. Take a look at this team. Now they don't know I'm sharing this slide. This was Halloween, Halloween last week in the US. A few members of my management team decided to surprise me. And I won't tell you who they are to embarrass them. But I do, on a day-to-day basis, while holding a Noetic perspective, I have to manage and develop people. I have to ensure a healthy bottom line. And I have to make sure we're optimizing our strategic impact. So how do I hold and balance my own belief in consciousness and those deeper realms, while also saying I've got to run a successful organization? So I do that through a framework I have been creating called Noetic Leadership. And I want to introduce you to Noetic Leadership this morning in the hope that it can help you. It can help you when you go back to your offices, when you go back to your businesses. There are three components of Noetic Leadership. The first one is the mind matters. The second is that our interconnectedness, again that baseline foundation that I showed you in the Island Peaks model, that that matters. And a theme that you heard you're hearing a lot over the past two days is that integrity matters in this. The one I want to spend a little bit more time on is the peace on trusting your inner knowing, that the fact of how much our mind matters and share with you some examples here. So why does the mind matter? Now the mind is different than the brain. The mind is what is allowing you to go deeper into those realms that I showed you on that slide. We have to trust that that inner feeling, those inner hunches actually have groundedness and they have meaning. So how many of you have felt you have those moments when you just have a sudden inspiration, you have a gut feeling they call it? How many of you would say you have that on a regular basis? Okay, so almost everybody. That is what we're talking about here, that this is very real. I had this sudden idea, I don't know where it came from. Many of the famous inventors and leaders of our time have come up with their brilliant ideas in a dream and they wake up and you hear stories. I wrote it down and I had to figure out how am I going to implement that. We are trying to research from where is that inspiration coming? So yes, the objective data in our role as leaders, analyzing the evidence, looking at financial reports and so forth is critical, but so are those inner hunches. So just think about this, as humans, this is the sound spectrum, the frequency spectrum of sound. We only as humans hear within these red dotted lines. We are missing everything over here and everything way out over here. And this graph isn't even to scale. It's much, if this would go way out. We are very limited in what we hear. We are also very limited in what we see. So again, between these two lines is all we see. Does that mean that there's nothing over here and there's nothing over here? No. It's just right now as humans were limited. And this is where I want to share a little bit of a personal story to this point of vision because I think it's affected me was that between the ages of about five and through age 16, I was actually legally blind. I had a condition that's very rare of developing cataracts as a child. My mother had had the same condition, so I inherited it from her. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the SAVA Foundation, which is out of, I believe, out of India, where they focus on this type of situation. But in the United States, it's very rare. So what happened is I gradually became very vision limited. I wasn't totally blind, but I was so greatly limited that it affected my vision. I still have in my left eye that problem. But what it was interesting to me was I didn't realize how poorly I saw because it happened so gradually. But what I feel what it led to in the rest of my life was that I began to access other expanded senses. So on a practical sense, I feel my hearing is very, very sharp because I had to develop tricks in school so I could see the bore. I couldn't see what was on the chalkboard. And because it wasn't an official type of blindness, teachers didn't really understand the limitation. So it was one of those things I had to make do in those days. So I wonder sometime because I am somebody who has experiences of inner knowing and I am someone who has had what we call telepathic. Why have I known before someone has died that they're going to die? Or why have I had those moments where I pick up the phone and someone is already on the other end that I was about to call? I wonder sometime if this vision limitation furthered that along. But I share this all with you because the point is we know that if we say, we're not seeing the full sound spectrum, we're not hearing the full sound spectrum, we're not seeing the full vision spectrum. What else are we missing? That's why we investigate this. So as leaders, I say, okay, we have to live in making decisions that balance what we call our objective knowledge with our subjective knowledge. So objective knowledge is what many of you are going to do when you go back to the office tomorrow. You have to look at reports, you're looking at data, you're researching, looking at trends, you're having experiences direct with your staff. That's very objective. The subjective is when you say, what are your own inner, what inspirations are you realizing about your work? What are those, we can call them downloads of information? They're coming from somewhere and they're very real. And I'm going to share with you a couple examples of this right now so that it can be even more real for you. But the point is in noetic leadership, you don't throw away the objective information and say, oh, I'm just going to go with my hunches all the time. Forget what the data says. We can't really do that. Nor can you do the opposite, which is only live in the objective. You're missing a whole range of information about the people you work with, about your clients, about your customers. That's why holding those two in balance is important. The other factor in the mind matters is this piece, we talked a lot, it's come up in conversation yesterday, very much about our belief systems. Do we hold unconscious belief systems and biases that get in the way of our work? This example is literally from my trip here in the past few days in Malaysia, just to give you a real example. This is a club-med advertisement. Now, I am from the part of the United States, it's very cold with very long winters. When I saw this, I thought it was fake. It was an ad in a magazine and I said, what is this snow picture in club-med? Because I've only ever seen club-med be tropical, warm ocean resort. And I said, I didn't even know that club-med would have anything having to do with winter time. And it was so strong that I actually didn't believe it. But obviously it's true, have any of you been to a snow vacation where it's cold? Yes, some of you have. So that just shows, that was one of those real examples for me when I said, I don't believe, I question its authenticity because of my own unconscious belief system. Also similarly, in the mind matters is the importance of using our intention and visualization. This is very real. If you wanna think a bit from a physics perspective, we can think about it as a funneling of energy in the right direction of what we're aspiring to. But I have another story about this. This happened exactly a month ago tomorrow. This is a true story. We were having a management team meeting and IONS is a non-profit organization. And as a non-profit, sometimes the finances get a little tight and I had had a very serious discussion with my management team about some changes we had to make. And they respected that. We wanna have sound finances going forward. And they said, one of my directors raised her hand. She says, you know, Claire, could we do a visualization because it might be good for refocusing our energy going forward. He said, Claire, what would you do if we suddenly received a million dollar donation? I said, oh my gosh, that would be great. That would take care of a lot of things. It would give us some breathing room. So we all went around the room. We said, well, wouldn't that be nice? Okay, that was the end of that conversation. Two days later in why I have this image, I am on a flight from San Francisco to Chicago for a meeting and I get an email from the fundraising director that a million dollar gift has come in. This is no joke. I'm not making this up. I couldn't believe it and I had nobody, I couldn't react on the, I'm sitting on the plane and I'm reading this and I couldn't go crazy. And I had nobody I could call, I was trapped. And it turns out it's true. There is a man who was little known to ions who had decided to make a million dollar gift. Now he's spreading it over four years, but that million dollar gift was just what we needed. So that is a true story. One could say, well, Claire, how'd that happen? I like to think a bit as about aligning, aligning the team's energy. There is real truth to this and that's why we're studying it so we can understand it better. So quickly, and I want to just show you, some people ask about the science on this. One of ION's major scientific areas is using what's called the double slit experiment tool that has been used heavily by Dean Raiden. And I won't go through because we don't have enough time to tell you how exactly it works. But the point is with the double slit in a normal framework, you're shooting photons through two slits and in a normal, when nobody's paying attention to it, oops, I'm gonna go back to that, when nobody's paying attention to the two slits, they tend to form a wave, they exist as a wave. As soon as an experimenter or an observer starts paying attention to this, what happens is the photons exist as tiny particles. Something happens with how the display changes between the original and when somebody's placing their focus on the tool. This is an experiment that has been done thousands and thousands of times and how we interpret this is that there is an effect of directed mental attention. When you focus on something, whether that's in person or it's at a distance. So in Dean Raiden's experiments, he will have people all over the world direct their attention at a specific time of day to this experiment based in California and they will actually see material changes in the outcome of the waves as they get focused into new patterns. This is real and it's the kind of work that we're doing. I share this because people do ask me, Claire, can you tell us a little bit about the science? I'll give another example in a second that I hope is useful to you. So that part is all about our mind and our inner knowing. The second component is about our interconnection and what's interesting for me, for many years I was a consultant working a management consultant in organizations and we do this diagram of what's called the ecosystem and you do a very flat image like this of okay, I'm the leader in the middle and my ecosystem is my staff, my customers, the community, our competitors, okay, that's nice. Well, it turns out it's so insufficient. Our interconnectedness is so much more vast and interwoven. We have dependencies with all of those we deal with out there and they are interlocked with each other. So it goes from a very flat model to a very multidimensional model. So the fact that I could say I have clients here, I have vendors, I have suppliers, it's not just that they're connected with me or my organization, they're actually connected with each other and a broader community. And what we're discovering is that people are also interconnected at great distances. That distance and time often doesn't matter and this is where you get into quantum entanglement. So those who are familiar with quantum physics know about this phenomenon of quantum entanglement. I like to use that as a metaphor, even though it's also scientifically based, as a metaphor for the effects we have as leaders on our communities and on the world at large. So let's talk about this a little bit. There's another scientific tool called the random number generators. And this has been work that IONS has been involved with through Princeton University. Princeton has taken the lead on this. So this is an esteemed American university conducting these random number generator projects. They're scattered throughout the world and basically what a random number generator is doing is putting out just a random set of zeros and ones and zeros and ones. And they just follow a randomized pattern. But what we're studying is what happens to the pattern during major world events? So I'm just going to show you a couple. This is the chart from the 9-11 attacks in the U.S. And what you can see here is this would have been a normal random line would be hugging this right here. Look what happens at the spikes when the first airline crash happened, when the World Trade Center collapsed. And then when the news really hit people's awareness, look what happened to the pattern with the random number generator. It should have been zigzagging along this line and it spikes way up. The same thing with the terrible earthquake. This is an example of course that has local relevance. Again, look at the red line after, this is the time of the earthquake and the tsunami that happened. Look at that dramatic difference. We don't have time for it now but I will point out that you see a change even before the earthquake happened. So that is raising a lot of questions about predictive abilities. Was there something going on that people were picking up on a tragedy about to happen? That is again for a longer conversation but the point is these random number generators, this is the last one I'll show is the U.S. presidential election. This is in Dean Raiden's new book that just came out. But yeah, you can see when it went, when the announcement was made at midnight, you can see what happened over here. So again, random would be just hugging the line and then you see these great spikes. Now we show this because some people want to see the scientific evidence behind consciousness and our ability to apply this in our world and some people say, hey, I don't need to see the proof but we believe in doing the scientific research which allows us to apply these skills better in our work as leaders and as general citizens of the world. The last part on this realm I'll share is part of a program that I love to deliver in a longer session and it's about energy and again, I love that this is the leadership energy conference because you can appreciate that in our personal selves, we have our own energy centers. Some of you are familiar maybe with the chakra model. Whether you think of it as a metaphor or a biology, there are point of certain energy centers in all of us that are actually moving us in our work and they tend to go from this baseline of our groundedness, our beliefs, our traditions, what we hold through our early part of our lives, working our way up into how we get our work done and how we set and receive grand visions going forward. Now there's a lot to this. The statistical fact I wanna share about energy, I don't know how many of you are aware of the electromagnetic energy of your heart. Your electromagnetic energy of your heart is estimated to be between 50 to 100 times greater than your brain. So what does that mean? That's actually a measurable effect of heart energy. That that's the type of thing we wanna work on as leaders and this is something in my position that I'm keenly aware of how I show up at work, how I show up with my team is they can feel that, you can sense that and it's very important to be aware of that, how you are. Chartres was talking about culture. I believe your personal energy and how you optimize your energy flow is the foundation of the culture that you set in your organization. That's whether you're running an entire enterprise or you're running a small department or you're an individual contributor. The energy you bring to the workplace, it really matters. So again, I'm sharing a lot with you today and I'm gonna have to wrap up so that we can do Q&A but I just wanted to say that I wanted to give you enough to make this useful for you. The third big part and it's been mentioned so much in the conferences about integrity. So instead of repeating what others have said, I'm gonna tell you how I've been using the integrity concept. When I started my position as CEO of IONS a year ago, I set three hallmarks. I decided what is Claire going to be known for so that the staff could know me better and know what's important to me. So I had three. It was integrity, clarity and prosperity. And that integrity point that my own clarity about integrity has helped me so much to make those tough decisions or to be able to say, you know, we might disagree on something, a business decision for the organization, but if I am making my decisions based on what I truly feel is best for IONS and best for our public service mission, it makes it a lot easier because I don't have that feeling of self-questioning. So being clear and confident about your own higher purpose as an organization and for yourself, the fact that using the power of your mind, again, holding integrity to be able to have in those tough moments if a staff person doesn't agree with you to know like you are coming at it from that baseline. And the fact that also it truly helps to unify the team. If you say, you know what, we're making the best decisions we can based on our vision and our mission of an organization, I would love to study and this is something for IONS to do next. The fact that this integrity influence is so powerful, what's the underpinnings of that? It's a feel good thing, but it's more than that. And that's what I'm very intrigued by. I know it's helped me a lot. So those three prongs that again, when you think about consciousness and you think about what we call noetics, inner knowing, to remember that your mind matters, your inner knowing matters, our interconnectedness as a community, as a world matters within your team, within your own ecosystems and that integrity as the foundation is critical because I truly believe that if you didn't approach your work with integrity, you could be feeling you're using your inner knowing all the time, but if it's not for the right purpose, it will not succeed. So that's what I wanna leave with you and to allow Rajiv to give a chance to do Q&A. I hope that this, you could take away a few elements that you can put into practice when you go back to your offices and to know that this is very real and this is what we're committed to studying. Thank you. Thank you.