Conscious Conversations

I’m leaning into an inspired idea that I’ve been wanting to explore for a while now, which is to have deep and interesting conversations with various friends, record them, and share them – especially friends who are very into personal growth or who are doing empowering transformational work in the world.

There are two parts to my intention. The first part is to give people more insight into real conversations that growth-oriented people are having about life, the universe, and everything. Instead of doing formal interviews, I want these to be more like one-on-one conversations over coffee – relaxed and improvisational but also interesting. The idea is a little bit similar to Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian in Cars Getting Coffee – but without the cars or the cynicism.

The second part of my intention is more personal. I want to spend more time connecting with friends and colleagues through fun and stimulating conversation about ideas we care about.

How often do we tell ourselves that we should make a better effort to keep in touch with friends? There’s social media, but that tends to be pretty shallow most of the time.

I really appreciate and respect the friends that I have, and I feel lucky to know many of the people I do, but the vast majority aren’t local to me. We may see each other at retreats or conferences or when speaking at events together, but I think it would be lovely to carve out more time to talk one-on-one about what we’re passionate about. I want to invest more in deepening these relationships, and sit-down conversations are great for that.

While I could do this on my own in private, I think there’s a nice opportunity to invite more people into the experience and create more positive ripples from this too. Lots of my friends are already used to communicating publicly since many are authors, speakers, trainers, coaches, etc. So they’d be fine with recording and sharing our conversations. We know there’s a good chance that some people would find our conversations uplifting, inspiring, and encouraging.

I intend these to be longer conversations, like 1-2 hours in duration (preferably closer to 2 hours). Hence the recordings would be more appealing to people who love depth, especially people who want to open themselves to new insights and reframes.

Fortunately a number of friends like this idea too and said they’d be happy to do it. I currently have a list of about 20 people who’ve tentatively said yes to this so far, including some from the personal growth field that you’ve probably heard of. I could invite more, but this short list will be plenty to get this idea rolling.

This idea started in Conscious Growth Club last year when we did such a call with a member, which was recorded and shared within the group. Initially I was thinking that we could do these with CGC members as well as with some outside guests, and then we’d archive the recordings as an extra member benefit. So it started as a pretty casual idea.

The offer I’ve been making to my friends is that we’ll have a Zoom video call together, and we’ll invite members of Conscious Growth Club to watch the call live. CGC members can comment and ask questions too. We’ll record the call, and at a minimum we’ll share the recording with CGC members in our private portal. But if the guest and I agree to do so, we can also share this call beyond CGC, like on our blogs and YouTube channels.

The reason I want to do it like this is so that people can feel more comfortable just being themselves on these calls, not feeling like they’re in interview mode. We can just go with the flow and see what happens. If the guest doesn’t feel good about publishing the call afterwards (or if for some reason I don’t feel good about it), then we can limit the recording to CGC members only and keep it fairly private. But if we both like the result and feel that it would have value for other people, then great, we can each share it more widely if we want. We don’t have to make this decision till after we finish the call.

While I find it hard to envision a scenario where I’d object to sharing the call publicly – I’m not particularly concerned about embarrassing myself now and then – I want to make it easier for more people to say yes to these invites. Some people in this field are more into their branding, especially those with larger teams supporting them. I want to invite them into playful and spontaneous conversations, so there’s a risk that someone might say something in the moment that they’d rather not publish too widely. I don’t think this is likely to be a major issue, but I just want to take that risk off the table, so they can feel more in-the-moment while we have our conversation.

This morning I had one of these conversations with author, speaker, fellow Transformational Leadership Council member, and long-time friend Martin Rutte. We had a lively chat for about 100 minutes, including talking at length about Martin’s Project Heaven on Earth, which is about how to create a better world for all of humanity.

Martin and I both very much enjoyed the experience, and we agreed to share this one publicly. The feedback from CGC members who were on the call with us was very positive too. I’ll be sharing the recording of this call on my blog and YouTube within the next few days. We also recorded the live chat logs from CGC members, but the chat logs are only going to be shared inside CGC, not publicly.

Presently this is an evolving idea, so I’m just leaning into it. I’d love to do more of these calls this year. I don’t intend to turn this into a full-blown podcast, and I don’t intend to do these on a set schedule. I want to keep this casual for now and see how it goes. It feels nicely aligned so far.

I also wanted to share the basic idea in this blog post, so you’ll understand what these videos are when they start turning up. Then I can link back to this post, so people can see the explanation of the original idea.

A big thanks to my wife Rachelle for helping out with these calls! ❤️