FOUNDATIONS
The Power of Intention
Master the
Human Operating System.
If you have worked in organizations, you know the meeting. It started late. People came in one at a time and opened their laptops while the person at the front read slide fifty-seven to a room that had stopped listening. Someone asked a contentious question, and two people whose agendas did not align went back and forth over it while everyone else sat and waited. You spent the hour deciding what you could safely say, or working your email. Near the end, people began to leave, asked for the slides, and said diplomatic things. Nothing was decided. Nothing was acknowledged. Another meeting was set to continue the discussion.
Add up the hours, the salaries, and the overhead, and that meeting cost more than most of the line items anyone in the room is accountable for. It produced nothing.
You have probably concluded that the meeting was badly run. It was. That is not the reason it failed. Every person in that room walked in carrying an intention. They did not choose it, they were not aware of it, and it did not align with anybody else's. Those conflicting intentions ran the hour. The agenda never had a chance, and no amount of standard facilitation technique would have given it one.
This is the water we swim in, and it is not confined to meetings. It is in the request that was heard as something else, the commitment that was never delivered, and the work you delegated and did not get back.
The Power of Intention is where you learn to intervene in the waste, the drama, and the churn, and to lead with power rather than force.
The operating system at the source of action
This program does not teach communication skills. Skills sit on top of something deeper and more senior. Underneath everything you say is an intention you are unaware of and did not choose, and that intention decides what your words do when they land. Every person runs on the same system. You learn it here by studying your own while it is running, in live conversation, rather than by learning about it.
The first thing you get is listening. You learn to tell which Mode of Intention a person is speaking from, including yourself, and what each mode produces in the listener. Some conversations generate more conversation. Others produce committed action. Once you can hear the difference, you can lead an exchange from one to the other deliberately. You can do it in one sentence, in the meeting you are already in.
Then you work on the two things that take you out. The first is the reaction that fires before you have decided anything, an old memory activating and taking your effectiveness with it. You learn to catch it while it is happening and to recover inside the same conversation. The second is the stance you take toward your own circumstances. A Victim of Circumstance cannot see the actions an Owner takes for granted, and almost everyone defaults to the first under pressure. Moving your stance turns a problem you have endured for years into a project you can finish.
From there the work goes outward. You practise Other-Centered Listening, which is hearing a person from inside their point of view rather than from inside your own. You practise Conversation Management, which is how you establish accountability that holds without your having to stand over it. You take on a precise vocabulary for all of it, so that what you noticed in the room is still available to you months later.
You leave having designed and begun a project you would not have taken on before, and with the tools running in your own conversations rather than sitting in a binder.
What happens in the room
You sit in a chair, at a table with three to five other people, depending on the venue. You change tables at every break, so you work with most of the room before Sunday.
What you bring is your own experience of working with people and your intention to get better at it. This program is about how you make things happen in the world with other people. Most of what you practise on comes out of your current work: a collaboration you want to move faster, a team you want more from, a relationship that matters to the result. Three days of that changes how you operate.
The days are built out of conversations in pairs, inquiries at your table, practice in the communication itself rather than instruction about it, noticing exercises that train you to see what is running underneath what is being said, writing on your own, teaching from the front with slides, and open conversation with the whole room. Twice over the three days you speak from the front of the room.
Twice a day the room stops and you write. Your insights go into your Insight Journal, you read them to your table, and each table brings two to the whole room. That is how the material accumulates over three days, and by Sunday you have it in your own words rather than in ours.
What is said in the room stays in the room. If you come with a colleague, sit at different tables. Everyone in the room agrees to be coached by Gabriel on their communication, which is a condition of taking part and is what makes the three days work.
It is taught, not facilitated. Gabriel Sakakeeny has led this kind of work in a live training room since 1988 and is answerable for what you leave with.
Coffee morning and afternoon, an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner, and your own participant materials binder to write in and take home.
Who this is for
This program is for anyone whose results depend on the actions of other people, and that is a wider group than it first appears. It includes managers and executives, and it equally includes parents, teachers, salespeople, pastors, directors and conductors, and anyone else whose work only counts when other people do something.
Almost nothing anyone builds gets built alone. The vendor has to deliver what you actually asked for. The partner has to follow through. The people you are counting on have to want the outcome as much as you do. Whatever you are creating in your life, some part of it lives in another person's hands, and this program is about that part.
You have probably already noticed that the difficulty is not competence. You know your field and you know what needs to happen. The gap between imagining the result and getting it done opens when people who have their own intentions, their own history, and their own reading of what you said get involved. Most of what is available to you in the program sits in that gap.
This program is for people who want to be genuinely better at working with others. It is not for people who want a set of techniques for getting better compliance. Those are different aims and they produce different results. The tools taught here work by aligning what people actually intend with what needs to happen, which requires that you authentically mean it.
What the program asks for is three days of full attention, willingness to practise in the presence of people who will see you practising, and an agreement to be coachable on how you communicate and your leadership behaviour. In return you spend three days working on your own real situations rather than on hypothetical examples.
People who lead through other people, and who have reached the ceiling of what force and persistence can produce, find that this is where the next level opens.
What you leave with
The ability to hear what is actually driving a conversation. Which Mode of Intention a person is speaking from, what that mode produces in whoever is listening, and how to lead an exchange into one that generates action instead of more conversation.
The ability to recover in the moment you are thrown. The reaction that triggers before you have even noticed does not automatically stop happening. What changes is that you learn to catch it while it is running, and you get your effectiveness back inside the same conversation rather than wondering what happened for the next few days.
A problem you have been enduring, transformed into work you can actually do. The move from Victim of Circumstance to Owner is not an attitude adjustment. It changes what actions are visible to you, and a condition you have lived with for years becomes a project with a first step.
Accountability that holds without micromanaging it. You learn to make requests that land as requests, to get commitments that are real commitments, and to hold people to them without force. This is what replaces checking up on everyone.
A project you have designed and already begun. Something you would may not have taken on before the weekend, chosen by you, started in the room, and carried out into your life.
Your Insight Journal and the program materials, which hold what you distinguished over the three days and how you got there, in your own words.
A working vocabulary for all of it. Self-Centered and Other-Centered Listening, the Modes of Intention, Conversation Management, the Three Fundamentals of Leadership, Being at Closure, and the rest of the Human Operating System. Precise language is what makes a distinction survive over time.
The people who practised with you. Under pressure, months later, the fact that somebody else shares what you together are working on is often what keeps it going.
The next program
Friday 4 to Sunday 6 December 2026
Northern California. Venue to be confirmed.
Friday and Saturday, 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM.
Sunday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
Arrival from 8:30 AM on Friday.
Sixteen places, and four reviewer places.
Taught by Gabriel Sakakeeny.
After the three days
What you build over the weekend has to keep working in your life to make the difference you intended. That is what many people ask about before they enroll, and there is a structure for it.
Graduates of any Foundation program can join the Practice, which meets online every week for ninety minutes. You bring what you are actually dealing with that week, and Gabriel Sakakeeny coaches it in front of the room. The Practice is for people who are actively putting the tools and perspectives of the Way to work in their own lives, over months rather than over a weekend.
Once a month the Institute meets for ninety minutes on the first Tuesday, and it is called First Tuesday. Gabriel leads. Some evenings he gives a talk and takes questions. On others, people send a coaching request ahead of time and are coached live. Nothing is prepared in advance. Any Foundation graduate may attend and may bring a guest. There is no charge.
The three Foundation programs stand on their own and can be taken in any order. Together they open the door to the Leadership Curriculum.