 Today, I'd like to invite you to play a game, and the game is called Out-Lifening Speed. And the invitation is to see if individually and together, we can create the conditions for the extraordinary in the next 20 minutes or less. But first, let me give you a little context for the game. Where did the game come from? As it turns out, right now is just about the 20th anniversary of the moment when I was diagnosed with a fairly dire and curable illness. I went from living, working, traveling all over the world to, in fairly short order, a list of symptoms this long, not least of which was losing something like 30 pounds and not much more than 30 days. And fast forward to the crescendo moment, I was sitting in a doctor's office, and he was telling me I was one of the three worst patients he had ever seen. And his best advice was that I should be flown to Texas, put in isolation, and studied on the off chance they could find something else to do for me. So, as you can imagine, the moment had my full attention. And the great news is, of course, that we're also not very far from the 20th anniversary of what then came to be a miraculous recovery. And it's what happened between those two points, that moment in the doctor's office and that recovery that I'm talking about today. So, what happened? What worked? And what does it have to do with the evolution of conscious business on the planet? And from another perspective, it was a spectacular opportunity to hit the reset button on a legacy system that just happened to be my physicality. It was an extraordinary ecosystem of cells and DNA and organs that could all be collaborating and communicating at a slightly greater level. So, as it turns out in the end, I didn't just get better, I got best. And what I mean by that is, not only did the laundry list of symptoms disappear in a matter of months, but the symptoms of a lifetime started to disappear one by one as well. Those things that were considered genetic and hereditary and unchangeable, whether it was allergies to cats, allergies to dogs, migraine headaches, swollen glands since the age of five. So, apparently, in the act of hitting the reset button on this legacy system, I was also presencing an aspect of the extraordinary. So, let's play together and shine this light on the landscape of business. And the invitation is to practice four states of being, four states of being that have the ability to support transformation in a more graceful, joyful, even accelerated manner than perhaps were commonly used to. And good news here, everybody here has everything they need. You already know this. It's just as a civilization, we tend not to practice often enough, perhaps. So, first state of being, here we are, first state of being, super here. Super here is the state we come into when we allow ourselves to come so deeply present that we expand and come into contact with our greater capacities. It's what's happening when we run faster. It's what's happening when genius achievements are taking place. It's also what's happening when we're leading out from who we really are and not in reactivity to the world around us. And the great news is here, this can be cultivated. So, I'm going to invite you right now to call yourself deeply present and in alignment with your greater capacities, your greater beingness. Simply intend it. Simply intend it. You'll find that if you practice this, just the intention as you move through the world, almost anything becomes an opportunity to come super here. It could be a game of golf, a moment of parenting, looking for a parking spot, coming back to this intention, you will find yourself creating from a greater part of yourself over time. But what does this look like in an organization? How do we call this forth in a business? And the easiest way is to create spaces that allow people to come together and discover themselves and one another in new ways. It could be as mundane as a celebration. It can be as elaborate as an eight week leadership training program. The key is the intention and the consciousness that is creating these events. So, what you'll see up here is some elements of celebration from our landscape of graphic dimensions. The black and white is actually a gorilla happiness circle which started cropping up in the last year as another round of people were going through our introductory leadership in-house program which is called Foundations of Collaboration. But the moment I knew when something extraordinary was really afoot in our organization was actually in 2007. And it was not much longer after I had become CEO, not long after we had started terraforming in the organization and it was something as simple as a birthday lunch. People were invited solely based on the fact that they shared the same birth month with someone else. And we discovered that no matter how many years they might have worked in the same location, many of these people had never spoken to each other before. But we created this birthday lunch from the intention of super care. And on that particular day, Zarka, who you can see, brought with her a wondering she had had for the better part of six years. And it was because of the country she was born in and the language she spoke at home and the religion she practiced, she had been wondering since 9-11 how almost six years earlier how did the greater community feel about her and others like her? Did they hold them somewhat responsible? Was there an air of blame? And not every HR director would be thrilled about such a conversation springing from tendrils of religion and politics. But in our organization, this was a transformative act. It was the first time we had succeeded in creating a space where that which needed to be spoken in service of greater collaboration could come out and be transformed. And that's what happened that day. And of course, these years later, Zarka's a leader in the organization, 22 plus people reporting to her. She self-describes her experience as being part of a family. And I happen to take that as a functional family rather than dysfunctional family. And so we have to ask, what becomes possible when we create these spaces that allow us to meet at such points of essence and meaning? So, state of being number two, living the question. This is a massively fun one because the invitation here is to simply revel in the not knowing. We walk questions all the time, and in so doing, we live the answers. And the invitation is to no need to plan, no need for fear of failure, just live and walk the question. And so my question to you is, what is your question? And if I ask it again, what is your question that most closely expresses your calling in the world? Because that's where all the greatest energy to create really comes from. So in the context of organization, how does this work? Well, again, at Graphic Dimensions, we've been walking a question that probably resonates with many of you. What is the vast potential of corporate culture to be an uplifting force in the world? We were walking that question when we co-designed our C4 culture, which is a stand for creativity, community, collaboration, and consciousness. We were walking that question when we created new collaboration, new passion-driven collaboration groups called C-forums. And we were walking that question again when we pushed the sustainability C-forum to point at something that they perhaps were afraid might be impossible to just swing out. And they decided to focus on becoming a zero landfill organization, which seemed a little preposterous at the time because so much of what we do is manufacturing, in addition to being a tech group and a design group and a customer care group as well. And in less than a year, not only did they design the roadmap to success, but we're within minutes of becoming a completely zero landfill organization. So, state of being number three... Oh, wait, there's the action shot of people living the question. State of being number three is being the field of potential. What is being the field of potential? This is when we embody and emanate something so, so fully that in a sense, we make the invisible visible to others. And this is what it looks like. You think of anybody you admire. Probably you can sense that they've been doing some of this. Everybody from an Olympic gold medalist to one example that comes to mind. There's a designer named William McDonough that some of you might have heard of. For decades, he's been presencing the potential for all design to take into consideration the well-being of all children of all species for all time. And as a result, there's all sorts of movement around the planet, a cradle-to-cradle movement, for one, that grew up out of this space. Because as we presence the potential like it's here now, not any delta between now and the future, that it's here now, we magnetize to ourselves the people, the projects, the opportunities that want to conspire with making that potential real and visible to even more. So my invitation to you on this is what is that facet of the diamond for you, that you're here to presence that fully? What might it look like in terms of the potential of corporate culture to be an uplifting force in the world? So, oh, and here's our corporate example, here's our corporate example. We have, in the last year, we had a filmmaker on site a few times and in very uncensored interviews, this is Kate, one of our customer care representatives being asked about how she feels about our environment. And you can get a little bit of a sense of what we've, the presencing of potential that's going on, basically. We're presencing a certain, among other things, a certain integrity, honesty, and caring that wouldn't we all love that to become the default behavior of corporate culture everywhere. But I particularly love Kate's comment because it seems to come with a little bit of ruthlessness to it and many people find some of those things a little soft. So, next practice, this is the bonus practice, witnessing brilliance. And here's the thing, if you are practicing the first three practices, congratulations, you are already changing the world. But one small world of warning, you may unleash the Kraken just a little bit. And what I mean by that is, when you invite especially large groups of people to co-create a more magnificent reality than what's existed before, even among the most enthusiastic and willing, what can tend to happen is that that which was in the way previously can tend to bubble up. It's fine, it's not a problem, but as a leader and especially a facilitator of other emerging leaders, you are going to want to practice this one. Witnessing the brilliance means especially in the face of challenge, especially in the face of what looks like resistance or noise. It could look like a multi-million dollar IT project going off a cliff, it could look like the next global recession. But here's the practice, you see this sunset, which actually is in driving distance of where we are in North Carolina. Very easy to witness the brilliance, and I invite you to do that right now. Just take in this sunset, that is the practices to take what you feel right now, looking into that sunset and be able to shine that out in the face of others sitting across from you, especially in times of stress. As you practice that, you will discover that that noise, that resistance, loses its ability to take energy away from your forward momentum, and it's just something we hold in awareness, no need to fuel it at all. So that's at life-inning speed, those are the four practices, and the really great news is that there's no need for trauma, there's no need for dire illness to start playing, and as you practice, you will be amplifying the best of transformation wherever you pay attention. So I just want to thank you for playing, and thank you for supporting all of us in hitting the reset button on ourselves, our organizations, and maybe the world.