THE SUBTLE POWER WAY
The Curriculum
You have done real work on yourself, and there is still at least one part of your life that has not transformed. The same self-defeating patterns repeat, and it seems that there is nothing you can be or do to change that.
There is a reason for that. It is not that you have not tried hard enough. It is that you have been working on the machinery with the machinery itself. That mechanism works day and night to keep you the same, and it does not know or care about your happiness or fulfillment. It is not your friend.
This curriculum develops the ability to observe your own psychology while it is operating and to unhook from it, so you can act from a Self you chose instead of the one assembled for you by the accidents of your past. The effectiveness, the influence, the closure with your past, and the ground for whatever spiritual life you want all follow from that. The Subtle Power Curriculum offers four programs in two parts, built to develop that ability.
Three programs lay the foundation.
Know Thyself, The Power of Intention, and The Stages of Life each stand on their own. They have no prerequisites and no required order in which they must be taken. Each program is a three-day face-to-face intensive.
When you complete all three, you can apply to enter the Leadership Curriculum, which includes three three-day intensives with three months of weekly group coaching between them. The cycle repeats once per year. Entry is by interview and admission is not automatic.
FOUNDATIONS · START HERE
Know Thyself
See the self your life built, and give power to the Self you actually are.
Your brain's job is to keep you alive, reproducing, and stable. Making you happy, peaceful, or fulfilled was never in the job description. So when you set out to change something that is outside what is normal, your brain works against you, skillfully and underhandedly, so you do not catch it while it is operating. The life you are living now was given to you by the accidents and decisions of your past, and it will stay that way until something intervenes into your brain's homeostatic agenda.
Know Thyself is that intervention. Through a sequence of real life data collection, guided inquiries, experiential exercises, and your own reflection, you build a map of the Default Self from your own history: the sensitivities you were born with; the memories of your early environment; the beliefs your child-self adopted about you, other people, and life; the way you regulated emotional pain; the harsh judgements you made about yourself; and the emotional setpoint that you always return to.
The second half of the program uncovers your Essence, who you are at your core, which was there before any of the conditioning, and from it the Life Purpose and Values that are authentically your own. By the end you can hear the whispering of your synapses in real time and tell them apart from your Essential Self. That ability to separate your Self from the machinery enables you to live a fully adult, authentic, integrated life driven by who you are at your core.
Who this is for: accomplished adults in life transition whose self-defeating patterns persist after years of personal work.
You leave with: the ability to catch the Default Self machinery operating in real time, the ability to choose to live true to your Life Purpose and Values instead of repeating self-defeating patterns, and practices that sustain those abilities over time and under pressure. Your two Maps, your Insight Journal, the program materials, and the people you did it with keep the work present in your life.
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The Power of Intention
Discover and master the Human Operating System.
The result you needed depended on other people, and it did not arrive. You said it clearly and they heard something else. Someone committed, and the commitment quietly went away.
This program works on the machinery underneath inspiring high performance, from the inside out. It starts with the stance you take toward your own circumstances, because a Victim cannot see the actions an Owner takes for granted, and that stance is already running as the default for almost everyone under pressure. From there you learn how intention and communication actually work together to produce something real: managing a reaction while it is underway so it stops choosing your behavior, turning problems you have endured for years into projects you can finish, shifting a counterproductive relationship in real time, and establishing accountability that holds without force.
Who this is for: experienced professionals whose results depend on other people.
You leave with: communication tools you can use under pressure, results moving that had been stuck for years, and people around you who commit and then deliver.
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The Stages of Life
The map, the path, and the promise ahead.
You have been solving your life one stretch at a time, without a picture of the whole thing, and you have been doing it since you were old enough to try. Everything you have built and everything you regret got decided that way.
The Stages of Life Program gives you the strategic view that has not been possible before. Where a life goes, in what order, and why. You see why you turned out the way you did, which retires a set of conclusions about yourself you have been believing for decades. You see what is coming, which is where people report the most relief, because the thing they had been bracing for turns out to be a stage with a function and an end rather than the beginning of the decline. And you see why people who are nothing like you are the way they are, which changes what is possible with your family, your colleagues, and the people you had written off.
You stop navigating blind.
Who this is for: adults who want to be free of their past, effective in the present, and deliberate about what comes next. Prior development work is an advantage, and so is having found it insufficient.
You leave with: closure on the resentments and regrets you have been carrying, the strategic view of a whole life and your own position in it, clarity on what you still have to develop, and a basis for the decisions of the next decade.
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When you are ready, the work advances.
THE LEADERSHIP CURRICULUM
The Leadership Curriculum is one program that unfolds across three quarters. Nine days in face-to-face training, in three intensives, with three months of weekly group coaching between each one. What happens in the training room is embodied in your life before you come back for the next intensive.
Running through all of it is a leadership project in the world, of your own choosing. You create it on the first weekend, you carry it through nine months while the curriculum works on you, and you complete it before the last intensive. On the final weekend you stand in front of your peers and give the talk about it. That project, and its results, is the demonstration of the leader you have become.
The three parts:
INTENSIVE 1 · Self-Realization: The Way of Subtle Power
Express the Essence you uncovered in the Know Thyself program as a high Purpose and the Values that follow from it, and live it as a leader in service to what is best in the people you lead. Your project begins here.
INTENSIVE 2 · The Spectrum of Influence
Acquire the perception and the skill to fully implement what you learned in The Power of Intention and The Stages of Life programs at the leadership level. Move an idea from a possibility to something whose time has come, with people from every value system and level of development, and stay cool and effective in the face of the resistance that change always brings.
INTENSIVE 3 · Demonstrate Mastery
Complete the project, and show in your life and your community that the leader you configured is who you have become. Discover what world-class leaders know, so you can hold your own in any room and at any level of accountability.
For people who already teach, coach, or lead development inside an organization, this is also the path to learning to teach the Subtle Power Way, as Institute faculty or inside your own company.
Entry is by the three Foundations and an application interview. Admission is not automatic. The Leadership Curriculum runs once a year and opens in October 2027.
Where to start
The Power of Intention Program starts with the currently unconscious intentions running underneath what you say and do, most of which you did not choose and cannot yet see. From there it works outward into the tools that enable you to express them effectively. What the program enables shows up outside you in the areas of leadership, collaboration, and results with other people.
The Know Thyself Program starts with you observing your self-defeating behaviors and your moments of joy, and reads backward from them to the Essence they point at. What the program enables shows up inside you as the ability to manage your own states and make conscious choices about who to be and how to operate successfully in life.
The Stages of Life Program sets both the inside work and the outside work into the context of a whole life lived well from beginning to end, and can be taken at any point.
So it comes down to where the pressure exists for you right now. If it is in what you are trying to get done with other people, start with The Power of Intention. If it is in you, start with Know Thyself.
Dates and formats for everything currently open are on one page.
Or write to us and we'll help you choose the program and the dates that fit your needs best.