In college, I thought management consulting—providing solutions to companies and helping them think through complex problems—sounded incredibly interesting, and I was sure that was what I wanted to do. I even imagined what it would be like working at one of the big shops such as Bain, or Booz Allen Hamilton, or Deloitte. It seemed like the kind of thing I would enjoy.
But as the saying goes, “Man plans and God laughs.”
My path has taken me in a different direction, but the thing I’ve held on to from those dreamy undergrad days is that deep down I knew I wanted to solve cerebral, intricate problems. What I would come to find as Sub Rosa grew was that we’re able to do something special that consultants rarely get the chance to experience: we actually get to enact the solutions we recommend. We’re not just recommenders, we’re doers. Many of our clients have told me stories about hiring consultants who work with them for months to develop a big new strategy. They research and do the analysis they need in order to finally deliver a massive, often complex document that drops with a thud onto the client’s conference room table. It’s a perfectly crafted panacea for all that ails the client.
But too often the solutions the consultants produce are disconnected from the implementation. They haven’t been crafted by implementers, and as a result, they sometimes miss the key elements needed to bring the strategy or solution to life. In a word, the consultants lack empathy. Though I didn’t know it back in my college days, the connection between thinking and doing, between recommending and acting—that is what real empathic problem-solving requires.
At Sub Rosa, my colleagues and I often have the opportunity to engage with clients from start to finish. When we have clients who want to work with us in this way, the process is much more holistic. They understand the high degree of interconnectedness between the two types of work, and they value a partner who can work alongside them to bring well-rounded solutions to life. These are the best kind of clients.
Nike is one of them.
One day, Nike came knocking on our door with a visionary new product it was introducing, and it needed our help to solve a strategic and executional challenge. The company wasn’t just looking for a clever marketing idea; it was looking for a partner who could work with its product, marketing, and communication teams to build a strategy to introduce a new shoe with special technical features to the general market in a way that would tout its innovative properties while also being understandable. It was right up our alley.
Sub Rosa had already done several assignments for Nike—projects that had experimented with and challenged convention. We’d put together artist collaborations that commissioned diverse forms of installation art with new materials being introduced by Nike. We’d designed exclusive, ultrapremium retail lounges where high-end customers could create bespoke sneakers in a private suite alongside a Nike designer. We had established such a trusting relationship while working together that when Nike needed to do something disruptive, we were sometimes fortunate enough to receive the call.
By 2013, Nike had been working on this product for several years, and it was something the market had never seen. Some of Nike’s best and brightest manufacturing and material technology came together to create the Nike Free Hyperfeel.
Nike has an amazing lab called “the Kitchen,” where researchers and designers study performance, materials, the physiology of elite athletes, and a whole host of other things that help Nike continue to be a cutting-edge powerhouse. In the many years we’ve worked together, I’ve been inside the Kitchen only once, and it was like being inside Willy Wonka’s factory. Only it smelled a lot more like fresh rubber than chocolate.
After countless tests in the Kitchen, the Nike team arrived at the Nike Free Hyperfeel—a new running shoe that is ultrasensorial, form-fitting, and higher performance than ever before. The shoe combined some of Nike’s already existing technologies, such as Flyknit (a weaving technology that uses high-performance fabric to sew the top of the shoe, replacing the less ecological and more costly leather, stitching, and gluing process), as well as a Lunarlon insole, which molds more naturally to the bottom of the foot, and Dynamic Flywire, which allows the shoe to flex and contract like ligaments in the body.
It was a big deal.
Hyperfeel represented years of research and development, and the story was a tricky one to communicate. There were tons of attributes—the material science, the design, the research that had led to the product’s creation—that needed to be woven together to launch the product successfully. Nike wanted to have people hear about the technology that had gone into it, to be impressed by it, and to actually feel it.
We needed to create an experience that would wow consumers not only with how the shoe looked but also with how it felt on their feet—and we knew that empathy held the key to solving this. We turned to the Seven Archetypes to help our team gain the broadest, most empathic understanding of what we wanted to communicate. But early on I realized that if we wanted to apply empathy to this particular problem, we would need to go deeper in order to engage with consumers on multiple levels. It led us to the creation of something we refer to as the Whole Self—a philosophy largely inspired by my meetings with a man named Gil Barretto, an intellectual and spiritual “athlete” of Olympic proportions.
His voice had a subtle booming quality. He didn’t yell. He didn’t even speak loudly. But his tone had a gravitas and a rumble that made his words land on my ears in a way that made me uncomfortable yet inspired me at the same time.
“How present are you?” he asked matter-of-factly.
I was twenty-eight years old at the time and thought I knew everything there was to know about life. I was switched on. I was insightful. I was definitely present. And I was sure I relayed as much as I attempted to summon a sense of humility through my young and oblivious pride.
Gil smiled back and asked a simple question: “Are you right-handed?”
“Yes,” I responded.
“Good. Here’s what I’d like you to do . . . . When you leave here today, I want you to open every door you approach with your left hand.”
I thought to myself, That’s it? Easy enough.
That was one of my early visits to Gil Barretto, a man who would become a mentor and a guide and who would play an intimate role in my personal and spiritual development for the seven years we worked together before his passing. I met Gil through a series of fortuitous circumstances. For a few years, I had been part of a monthly meditation group hosted by my dear friend Alexandra. Alex is a kind and mystical woman who is about ten years my senior. She’d been working on her own mindfulness for a long while and had opened her door to help others seeking a more present way of being. We’d spend time each month talking about the work of G. I. Gurdjieff and Carl Jung, the finer points of the Nag Hammadi Library, and other esoteric works. It was a powerful time for me that opened my eyes and my spirit to a world much bigger than myself.
One day Alex said she thought it was time I connected with Gil. She had referred to Gil from time to time in passing. She’d say something about how she and Gil were talking about such and such or that she’d be seeing him at a monthly gathering of his students. I didn’t know what Gil taught or what being his student entailed, but I was intrigued. When she offered to introduce us, I happily agreed.
After my first session with Gil, I spent the next week opening countless doors, only to realize on the other side that my right hand was recoiling from the handle and returning to my side. “I did it again,” I’d tell myself. It was beyond frustrating.
I couldn’t believe that something as simple as opening a door with my nondominant hand could be so difficult. But I wasn’t in the moment. I was unconsciously moving through life while my mind continued to race through an inner monologue at a million miles an hour.
Of Gil’s many gifts, his ability to help others see this about themselves was one of his best. He knew how to assign a simple action, something that would require presence and discipline and that, if adhered to over time, would lead to a heightened sense of self-awareness. That’s what the doorknob assignment did. It made me realize that I was rarely, if ever, actually present. To put it another way, I had no empathy for myself. I was completely detached and had no real understanding of who I was or where I was.
I was always thinking about something else. Where I was going. The meeting I had just left. What I wanted for dinner. Anything other than the present moment—or even the door in front of me and the conscious act of opening it with my left hand.
Gil looked like a Navajo elder, though actually he was mostly Puerto Rican, hailing from Spanish Harlem. If you looked at him long enough, he’d start to look like any number of ethnicities. He was timeless and raceless, and though he was entirely self-aware, he was selfless, caring for his students as they fought their inner battles. He never missed a meeting or started late. He was in his late seventies when I met him, but he still stood over six feet tall and had broad shoulders. He always wore a shirt and tie and expected the same of me when we met about three times a month.
He’d lived in India with gurus, he’d studied beside esoteric scholars in far-flung corners of the world, and he’d trained with descendants from the twentieth-century spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff’s school. He had been educated as a psychologist, and he played a mean saxophone. He didn’t have a particular philosophy that he preached. He wasn’t interested in filling his students with his own dogma. He once said that if my god was an umbrella, his job was to help me understand and believe in that umbrella better than ever before. His own experiences and study had given him powerful tools to help his students on the road to self-understanding. That was what made Gil so special.
I kept trying to master the door-opening exercise and would return to Gil time after time, lamenting that I wasn’t getting it. Eventually, after about four months of work, I was able to proclaim my success. “I’m doing it, Gil!”
He smiled a half-grin and said, “Good. Now switch back.”
It took me a few more months of the exercise before I began to figure out what it was really about. I had begun to breathe more slowly. I was in my body. I was becoming more present. I was learning how to quiet the inner dialogue that had me running around like a madman. I was beginning to understand my inner self.
That was what Gil had been striving for all along. He was dismantling some of my bad internal habits. He was helping me to see the different “I’s” that were driving my actions. Some days it was a manic “I” who couldn’t stop thinking about work and clients and managing the growing complexity of the company. Other “I’s” were self-destructive, self-indulgent, or simply lazy. I got to know all of them and was able to see that each of them was a lesser version of the man I wanted to become. The nearly constant state of self-observation Gil had put me into had helped me notice when the wrong “I” was showing up and trying to run the show.
So in a way, Gil saved my life. He didn’t pull me from a burning building or take a bullet for me, but he might as well have. He stepped in front of a false version of myself that was at the wheel of my mind and body. He spotted in me a more essential, more capable “I” and over time, with additional training and dialogue, he helped me regain control of a self that was careening toward disaster.
Sometimes a session with Gil seemed like talk therapy. I’d go on and on about what was happening in my daily life, and he would let me talk as his silent gaze looked into something deeper. After I had rambled on for probably thirty minutes, he’d usually ask a sharp and powerful question such as “Why do you think I should care about any of this?” or “Who’s talking right now?” Those questions would knock me back and make me rethink everything I’d just said.
Other times we sat across from each other, gazing into each other’s eyes for a long period of time. The room would seem to change dramatically. The light would shift. Even Gil’s face would start to change. In those moments I’d see or sense something, some sort of information lying just beyond my normal perception. Gil knew how to help me access that information; to see and hear it in a way that was understandable, while also crazy and entirely mystical. Powerful things would happen in his office. I never quite knew what to expect, and even when we had a tough session that left me in tears, I never regretted our meetings.
During the time I worked with Gil, I began to know myself more fully, and I came to refine my own philosophies on personal development and, more specifically, on empathy. It’s been about a decade since we first met, and Gil passed away a few years ago—peacefully and in his own way—but he still walks with me every day.
After Gil’s passing, I began to think more and more about empathy and what it really meant. I thought about how most of us spend so much time trying to get a grasp on one another, but rarely do we take the time to delve deep and try to understand our own selves.
Philosophers and psychologists have suggested for years that each of us is made up of many “selves.” Carl Jung referred to them as opposing attitudes of the ego and the unconscious. William James is quoted as saying, “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.” Emmanuel Kant wrote extensively about the “I of reflection” that we encounter through apperception. This stuff can get really heady, really fast.
I’ve taken bits of philosophy that have resonated with me and tried them on for size. Some fit nicely, others were cumbersome and clunky. Over time, I’ve come to believe that we have within us seven distinct facets of self. When they are working together, aligned and empowered, we understand ourselves fully. When they are in discord, imbalanced and confused, we cannot become the leaders, creators, or partners we want to be.
These seven selves begin at our roots. The first to consider is the Physical Self, which helps us explore the power of our presence and experience the environment around us. Gil’s early lesson with the doorknobs was engaging me in a kind of kinesthetic learning in which I was becoming more aware of myself through action and movement. He was pushing me to get into touch with my physical presence, to inhabit the here and now, and to be in command of my own body. Without this sort of presence, any other more cerebral pursuits are futile.
Next is our Emotional Self, which connects us to our personal needs and our inner voice, giving us a means to achieve greater understanding and self-knowledge. This self helps us understand our biases, our fears, and our self-imposed limitations and constrictions. Talk therapy is a great way to explore this realm of the self. This therapy is often diagnostic, and ideally, when effective, it can lead to actionable behavioral changes that help us come into our true “self.”
The Inspired Self is the spark that ignites the inherent desire to make, to do, and to solve. We engage with this self when we establish goals or intentions we want to pursue and then take the steps to act upon them. Think about the times you’ve set a goal for yourself, then acted upon it and accomplished it. The deep sense of accomplishment you get fuels the Inspired Self and encourages us to set new goals.
Unfortunately, many of us get stuck in this self, especially those of us in the business world who thrive on the achievement of measured goals, to the exclusion of the other aspects of the self, causing us to hold ourselves back from a deeper, more whole sense of understanding and personal growth.
Having grasped our physical, emotional, and inspired states of being, we can begin to look at how we fit within the context of the world around us. What role do we play among our family, friends, and colleagues? This is the Community Self, and it helps us understand how our individual self interacts with the world around us. What type of person are we at work? At home? Do people rely on us the same way? Do we provide different things to different people, or are our core aspects of ourselves relied upon in a similar way irrespective of the people around us? The Community Self helps us know what others most often rely upon us to do and helps us contextualize the “fit” of our relationships.
If people ask us to behave in a manner consistent with our own views and the intent of our Whole Self, we can work with others effectively. But when we are urged to deviate from our authentic self, to act in ways that pull us from our core beliefs, it is often an indicator that we need to do some personal work to improve our sense of agency or the dynamics of our relationships.
One way we can make such changes is to begin to engage with the Intellectual Self. This is the self that asks questions both old and new, micro and macro, universal and specific, to help us get a grasp on our perspective and communicate it effectively. At times our emotions are complex and hard to manage. How many times have you acted out of anger and said something you shouldn’t have? Or been so overjoyed that you saw a situation through rose-colored glasses, obscuring the reality? The Intellectual Self helps put our emotions and senses into concepts and words that help us understand what’s going on inside us and relate more effectively to those around us.
Mindfulness is an ancient topic that has become increasingly popular again. The growing interest in meditation, from tried-and-true forms such as Vedic and Zen meditation to more contemporary modalities such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and facilitation tools such as the popular app Headspace, have helped people the world over to become more conscious and aware. It’s no coincidence that in these trying times, we are seeing more people, of all demographics and psychographics, begin to explore a more mindful state of being. This is the nature of the Mindful Self. This self’s primary function is to raise our consciousness for the present moment, our relationship with the world around us in this moment, and our place in it.
Once we had outlined these six selves—the Physical, Emotional, Inspired, Community, Intellectual, and Mindful—I thought about what these different facets of our inner workings add up to. What kind of clarity do they create?
For me, they come together in an awareness of our Aspirational Self. Some might call this our purpose. This is what we strive for and constantly pursue. It clarifies the vision we have of our growth and what we see as the necessary steps to getting us there.
It is in our nature to grow, to learn lessons, and to evolve. Many great spiritual teachers, spanning all religions and sects, have shared this lesson with us for millennia. The pursuit and acceptance of the Aspirational Self allows our lives to gain meaning. Having a sense of our greater purpose is like the magnetism that keeps a compass needle pointing toward the north. With clarity of purpose, we can make choices and take actions clear-mindedly.
These are the aspects of the Whole Self.
It is no coincidence that they correspond with many ancient teachings. Those who are familiar with the Eastern concept of the chakras can see how these seven facets of the Whole Self correspond with the seven primary chakras. They, like other mind/body mapping frameworks such as the Chinese dantians, are used to help translate ancient wisdom into understandable states of knowledge.
Though I have invested countless hours into thinking deeply about these matters, exploring my own personal development, and relaying my thoughts to others who are walking along a similar path, I do not believe there is a finish line because these pursuits are never fully finished. Instead, maintaining an awareness of the Whole Self is a constant practice of self-attention and awareness, affording us the opportunity to notice when we are losing track of a part of our self and enabling us to make small course corrections or adjustments to regain alignment.
Do I still open doors unconsciously from time to time? Absolutely. But I also know that through the daily, hourly, and moment-to-moment act of self-observation, we can understand and attain a better and more whole self.
Even if just for a moment.
At Nike, a pair of size 13s was waiting for me. Wearing a pair of Nike Hyperfeels felt like wearing a padded sock. That was the first thought I had when I slipped my feet into the stretchy material. When I walked, I could feel the texture of the concrete below my feet. It was weird. I wasn’t barefoot, but the shoes made me feel something close to barefoot.
Others from our team had a similar experience. We began to talk more about going barefoot and how rarely any of us was outside our apartments without shoes on. (I mean, after all, we do live in New York, and who knows what might be lurking on the sidewalks waiting to jab, cut, or poke our feet.) The Nike Hyperfeel was built on more than ten years of learning from the company’s Nike Free franchise, which they had launched in 2005. Nike Free was grounded on the notion that barefoot running strengthens your feet. As our Sub Rosa team did its research for Hyperfeel, we talked to runners who said they knew about the growing “barefoot running” trend and the fact that many athletes had started running without shoes as part of their training.
A number of them told us that the most notable moment for barefoot running happened at the starting line of the Summer Olympics marathon in Rome more than fifty years earlier. Abebe Bikila, an unknown Ethiopian marathoner, lined up barefoot next to some of the world’s top runners. A little more than two hours later, he was the first to cross the finish line, his bare feet leaving a trail of runners behind him.
Since then, the trend has continued to ebb and flow in popular culture. In 2009, the book Born to Run, which was in part about barefoot running, was released and sold millions of copies. This added to the frenzy already started by the Nike Free shoes, and led to an emergence in barefoot running. The more we researched the subject, the more information we discovered. Barefoot running helps change the way your foot strikes the ground. You become more aware of your gait, and some runners even say you can reach a more meditative state while running barefoot. We knew that if we could elucidate the power of this mind-body connection, we could show how Nike’s new product would help people fully connect with their feet, themselves, and the world around them.
We looked at the seven aspects of the Whole Self and applied each one to the feet and the experience of running; and then we considered how we could integrate those insights with the whole body and mind. Soon an outline for our strategy began to form.
• The Physical Self: We would use the feet as part of the overall product launch.
• The Emotional Self: We would find a way to heighten the emotional response to the activity of placing the feet on the ground (or floor).
• The Inspired Self: We would create an experience that would prompt participants to want to learn more about the barefoot running trend.
• The Community Self: We would design the experience in a way that would compel the participants to connect with one another about what had happened to them.
• The Intellectual Self: We would provoke a sense of curiosity in the participants by communicating information to them in a nontraditional and sensorial way.
• The Mindful Self: We would encourage the participants to reach a state of connection to the present moment and the world around them through an immersive experience.
• The Aspirational Self: We would give the participants a takeaway that would reveal something about themselves they didn’t already know, which they could use in the pursuit of their higher goals.
At least, that was the plan. We still needed to come up with the big idea, but those were definitely our building blocks. We knew that connecting with some of these selves would be more difficult than others, but considering the effect the shoes had had on us, it made sense to incorporate the concept of the Whole Self.
We started to think about how we could use Hyperfeel to get people more engaged in the act of running. We talked about having a group run in the shoes, followed by a workshop in which the participants would give us feedback. Those ideas were okay but didn’t really tick all the boxes.
Then it hit us. We wanted to have people really connect with the value of the Nike Free Hyperfeel, and to do that, we needed to have them appreciate the experience of being barefoot. Most people haven’t run barefoot, and many just slip on a pair of socks, regular running shoes, and go. They don’t feel the ground, and they don’t have the sensorial connection to what’s below them. We needed to change that if we were to contribute to the successful launch of the Hyperfeel. We had to lead people to empathy for the experience of being barefoot.
We wanted to create a sensorial experience that would allow people to engage with the soles of their feet, recognizing the role they play as sense receptors. From there, they would discover for themselves how using their feet in this way can positively influence their own meditative state.
Over the years, we’ve worked with many different clients. The ones who are the most fun are those who are as thoughtful as they are brave, who are willing to take calculated risks when they believe those risks are in the best interest of the brand and the business. Nike is one of those clients. Our clients quickly green-lit our concept, and before we knew it, we were in preproduction to design and build an immersive 4,000-square-foot labyrinth in the middle of downtown Manhattan.
We designed the Hyperfeel experience to be explored in the dark. From the outside, it was a black-on-black, monolithic-looking structure with a subtle, illuminated Nike swoosh on the side. We provided no explanation about what was happening on the inside. For us, that was part of the intrigue of the experience. The exterior wasn’t where the story was being told. What mattered was what people found inside—and ultimately inside themselves.
The guest list was full of important members of the media as well as influencers from the sports community. Olympic runners, professional athletes, and members of local running clubs were all queuing up to experience what was going on inside the mystery box. Such campaigns, ones geared toward influencers, are designed to drive buzz and awareness. By reaching a few thousand influential people and giving them a powerful experience, we were counting on them to spread the story of Hyperfeel and create a word-of-mouth campaign. I always trust news I hear from my friends more than what I hear from advertisements. Our goal was to create believers in the product by doing what we do best: letting them connect empathically with the product and its story. If we got that right, everything else would take care of itself.
Once inside, guests were greeted and asked to take a seat. Next we asked them to take off their shoes and socks. We then attached a smartphone to each person’s arm and rigged them with a sensor that would track their brain waves. We let them know we were doing it as a way of capturing data for “something that will be revealed at the end of the experience.”
It’s difficult enough to get consumers to do experimental stuff, but athletes and members of the media are even more dubious about this sort of marketing. We weren’t telling them what was going to happen inside, which made it even more challenging. But we applied empathy in anticipating how they would react to what we were asking them to do, and we let them know that we actually wanted them to be skeptical. We didn’t want them to be easily convinced. We just hoped they would go into the experience with an open mind and see what happened.
That simple conversation—a subtle but direct addressing of what we empathically knew was a point of resistance—helped us reach a place of trust and collaboration with the participants.
Everyone was up for it.
One by one, we led them through a dark curtain and into the pitch-black labyrinth. They were told that the only way to get to the other side was to trust their feet and feel the textures below them. As the texture of the floor changed, they were encouraged to pause for a moment and stand on the particular material to see how it made them feel. We asked them to use their feet as a guide and keep walking until they found the next texture. They moved from rubber to asphalt, from wet rocks to grass, and on over a variety of other surfaces along the journey.
Our sensors let us know where people were in the maze, and we could trigger audio or lighting effects to guide them if they got lost.
Some people flew through the space and were on the other side in five minutes, but others took their time, enjoying hanging out in the darkness and sensing the space around them. One person spent a little more than thirty minutes inside. A few people on our team debated going in after him, but while they were deciding, he emerged at the exit with a wide smile on his face.
Once the participants reached the end, we removed the sensors and downloaded the brain-wave data we’d collected. We projected the results onto a six-foot circular surface in a sort of abstract digital mandala where they could see their brain-wave activity as they had moved from surface to surface. That gave each participant a unique insight into his or her own neurological experience, and the participants began to realize what powerful sense receptors their feet were.
Some of them learned that their brain was at its most meditative state when they were standing on grass, yet every day they ran on a city street. As more data was revealed, people began having interesting conversations about how they might change their running routes to help put them into a better position to be in a more relaxed, calmer mental state.
That was the point.
Our part in Nike’s overall launch of the Hyperfeel was not just to sell a shoe; we wanted to show how this particular product, and the new technology that had gone into it, could lead people to become more fully engaged with the world around them—all through the soles of their feet.
We gave each participant a custom print of his or her mandala, and sent all of them a digital version they could share in social media. Over a three-day period, we hosted more than a thousand people in the space. As they left and shared their experiences online, we were able to launch the shoe to millions of people with real firsthand accounts of what it felt like to wear the new product. The press started to pick up the story, and that played into Nike’s overall marketing launch of Hyperfeel, and soon the shoe was part of the national conversation.
The shoes flew off the shelves, and Nike sold out of the first run within days of the launch. It was a huge success.
But for us it was more than a success with a client; it showed that applying empathy, with an emphasis on the Whole Self, was an effective means of solving a problem. We weren’t just trying to sell a product; we looked at all facets of the experience and delivered something that truly addressed each component of the whole self—giving people an experience that engaged every part of their being.
The Whole Self in Action
• The Physical Self: We made the feet, and particularly their soles, the core input for the overall experience. We focused attention and awareness at the physical body level.
• The Emotional Self: By using different textures on the floor, as well as the light and sound triggers, we created external stimuli that gave the participants something that engaged their emotions. They were sometimes confused, sometimes peaceful, and sometimes excited, but all of them said they had run through a range of emotions as they walked through the space.
• The Inspired Self: Each participant came away more fully aware of his or her states of awareness and relaxation. Many of them said they were inspired to think about their bodies differently and to consider how small changes in their routines could have an impact on their overall well-being. Many went away with new goals or ambitions for their personal training routines.
• The Community Self: Though this was an individual experience, many of the participants stayed after because they wanted to talk with the others, learning from them and feeling more connected with the community of participants. In addition, their willingness to share their experiences with their own networks was a testament to how meaningful the journey had been.
• The Intellectual Self: Everyone who left the labyrinth was newly aware of how powerful the feet are as sense receptors. They understood Nike’s philosophy and technology better, and they could see how the technology could help them understand their own selves better.
• The Mindful Self: We engaged with people at a mindful level, and they engaged with themselves. They knew their connection to the space around them more intimately. Their senses were heightened, and their ability to feel the world around them was ultimately enhanced.
• The Aspirational Self: In the end, many participants walked away having moved their understanding of themselves a little further down the field. They had learned something meaningful about themselves and were more committed to changing or pushing themselves in a new or different way to more fully experience their mind-body connection.
In pulling it all together, we created an experience that was holistic and all-encompassing, and we also helped the participants connect more fully with themselves and the world around them.
As we were finishing the Nike Hyperfeel campaign, Gil was very much in my mind, saying with a smile on his face, “Open every door you come to with your left hand, and see what you find.” That simple exercise had taught me how to engage with my whole self, and that had changed me forever.
Years after the Hyperfeel launch, I looked back on the work and the philosophical foundation we had built around empathy. It was clear that the seven Empathic Archetypes and the seven aspects of the Whole Self had something to do with each other. There was no question that the archetypes on their own were helpful, but my team and I were looking for ways to train our empathy. We wanted to really work with the archetypes, and all of a sudden it clicked: we could ask ourselves questions framed by the seven aspects of the Whole Self, and those questions would lead us to probe deeper into each archetype.
A group of us spent weeks thinking through a series of questions that would weave the two concepts together. In the end, each archetype was given a series of seven questions, one for each facet of the Whole Self, and we used those questions to provoke deeper insight and understanding for one another and, ultimately, for ourselves.
Here are the questions we developed for each of the Empathic Archetypes. They are arranged in the descending order of the Whole Self, starting with Aspirational at the top and moving down through Mindful, Intellectual, Community, Inspired, Emotional, and Physical.
The Sage
• What is your purpose?
• Where do you feel most present?
• How has your past shaped who you are?
• What is a lesson you have imparted to others?
• When negative emotions arise, how do you deal with them?
• How do you stay grounded when the world gets overwhelming?
• How do you nurture yourself and your practice?
The Inquirer
• What do you most want to know?
• What personal biases interfere most with your finding truth?
• When have your instincts led you astray?
• Whom do you go to with tough questions?
• What do you continually ask yourself?
• What types of inquiries make you most uncomfortable?
• How does your body communicate?
The Convener
• Where is your favorite place to be a guest?
• How do you balance being self-serving and selfless?
• What makes an experience meaningful?
• Whom do you collaborate with best?
• What are a host’s greatest skills?
• What about you most comforts others?
• When do you bring people together?
The Alchemist
• What motivates you to progress?
• What does approaching a breakthrough feel like?
• When does your curiosity create difficulty?
• Who has challenged you to be better than you once were?
• How does iteration inform the outcome of your work?
• What are the biggest sacrifices you’ve made?
• Where do you go to experiment?
The Confidant
• When is listening more valuable than counseling?
• What role can silence play in a conversation?
• How do you build trust?
• When have you breached a confidence?
• What should people better understand about you?
• How do you protect yourself?
• When are you the most observant?
The Seeker
• What mistake would you make again?
• How do you explore your inner self?
• When is failure productive?
• Who inspires a sense of adventure within you?
• How does courage manifest in your work?
• When does bravery become foolhardy?
• Where do you go to push your limits?
The Cultivator
• What are your most audacious aspirations?
• How do you build endurance?
• What do you purposefully leave undone?
• Who are your long-term partners?
• What commitment have you made to yourself more than once?
• When has mentorship played a role in your life?
• Where do you feel most nurtured?
With those questions completed, we decided it was time to take our thinking to the world. To do so, we created a deck of cards. After all, the tarot had been one of our biggest inspirations for the archetypes. We called the deck “Q&E,” which stands for “Questions and Empathy.” I use the cards in all sorts of settings, from workshops and client kickoffs to internal projects and even social gatherings.
We started to sell the cards, and the feedback began to roll in from everywhere. Teachers use them with students who have trouble opening up about themselves, and I have a friend who hosts a monthly dinner and leaves a card on every guest’s plate as a way of sparking new and deeper conversations around the table. We even have a few clients who have bought them in bulk and distributed them to their entire organization.
I discovered that not only are the cards great at provoking deeper connections, but they are permission-granting tools as well. If I were at a cocktail party, met someone I didn’t know, and asked him or her, “Where do you feel most nurtured?” he or she would probably think I was a creep. But when the cards are involved and they are the ones asking the question, people become more open-minded. I’ve seen it happen countless times. Complete strangers pair up and start working with the cards, and within minutes someone is crying, laughing hysterically, or gesticulating wildly as they relay an impassioned anecdote about their life. The cards create space for connections to occur and empathy to emerge. People begin to understand each other on a deeper level.
One day I got a text from a good friend who lives in San Francisco. He told me he had been dating a woman for about half a year, and they had decided to take a road trip down Highway 1, riding along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He had taken his Q&E deck with him for the drive, and he and his girlfriend had started to go through all the questions together.
The message he sent had a photo from when they had pulled over on a turnout in Big Sur. The big blue Pacific Ocean was in the background, and in the foreground was his girlfriend smiling with tears running down her face. He said the cards had let them get deeper in a few hours than they had gotten in six months of dating.
I realize that this anecdote might seem a little sappy for a business book, but here’s the point: these archetypes have plenty of applications in our lives. Sometimes we forget that “businesspeople” and “colleagues” are real people, too. I’ve sat in countless meetings where clients have told us about their need to focus on business-to-business conversations—omitting the very obvious point that when their customers leave their office, they are regular people just like you and me. Though you will likely use the principles in this book at work, don’t be surprised if they also find their way into helping you connect with empathy in many other situations.
The Empathic Archetypes and the Whole Self together created a sort of powerful alchemy that spurs empathy. It’s hard to say why or how that happened, but time and again I have seen people change as they play with these cards and probe into territories we rarely reach during the small talk we all engage in. Give it a try, and see what emerges as you take a deeper look into those around you and, ultimately, into yourself.