WHAT IF THE KEY TO 10X’ING YOUR ONLINE FEMININE-LED BUSINESS…
LAY IN ACCEPTING 10X MORE RESPONSIBILITY* FOR COLLECTIVE LIFE?
*But not like the responsibility you've heard about before...
an Emergent Affiliation for Creative Leaders of the Feminine Online Business Space
The coaching industry has hardened, at least externally, into two lines:
one, that obsesses over politics, condemns spiritual bypassing & calls neutrality betrayal. This side leans toward militancy.
Another, that rejects this imposition & champions the rights of the individual.
The choice, so it seems, is between avoidance of collective responsibility, on the one hand;
and pandering to the dictates of a disempowered & disorganized collective, on the other.
What if we turned toward the questions of politics, responsibility, & collective life from the point of view of DESIRE, instead,
and asked how an expanded concept of our role in the collective could serve our expansion as business owners, philosophers, women in history?
JOIN THE BOARDTHE BOARD OF TRUSTEES
an Emergent Affiliation for Creative Leaders of the Feminine Online Business Space
WHO ARE READY TO 10X THE WORLD-BUILDING WORLD-TRANSFORMING POWER OF THEIR BUSINESSES...
BY SCALING THEM INTO EMERGENT INSTITUTIONS
& STEWARDING THEM AS EMERGENT VEHICLES OF COLLECTIVE LIFE
TAKE YOUR SEATThe members of the Board of Trustees are co-creating a new paradigm, not of “conscious business"...
but of non-linear, subterranean world-building power.
WILL YOU JOIN US?What toppled the monarchies in the West two centuries ago was not armed resistance alone — and certainly not at first.
It was the “industrial revolution.” A volcanic mix of business, technological evolution & social change.
How will “the coaching industry” in general, & “feminine business” in particular, reshape world politics & the forms of life in our society?
And what role do we have to play inside it?
We are the ones who decide that, if we so choose.
WHAT IF THE SHARED WORLD STARTED TO LOOK LIKE SOMETHING TOLERABLE OR EVEN GOOD
(BEFORE EVERY LAST ONE OF US TURNED LEFTIST, REACHED ENLIGHTENMENT, OR ACCESSED THE ELEVENTH DIMENSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS)
BECAUSE WE DECIDED TO RESHAPE HISTORY, FROM BELOW & INSIDE?
JOIN THE BOARDThe reason why men have been both captains of industry & politicians is that people who have the capacity to channel LARGE sums of money ARE in a role of collective responsibility.
Not purely monetary. Not just for the narrow world of their business itself.
This can be seen as an imposition, to ‘have’ to address the concerns of people around us.
But in fact, when chosen freely, this can be a privilege & a pleasure. A form of chivalry.
In the Lyceum world we call is “Noblesse Oblige”.
What if the people in this room were responsible for what the world looks like next, at a mass scale —
simply because we decided to be?
What if we created this transformation not by force —
but by cultivating the power of emergence?
JOIN US NOWWhat’s included in The Board of Trustees:
Monthly Live Calls
Shared, Open-Ended Project of Co-Creating the Emergent Carta
Sponsorship of the Lyceum's Quarterly Emergent Summits
Community, Support, & Transmissions in Telegram
Plus Everything included in The Council (of which The Board of Trustees is a part)
REFLECTING ON HISTORY...FROM THE TRENCHES
From March to May 1781, Paris was ruled by a radical, short-lived revolutionary government called the “Paris Commune.”
This emergent socialist experiment brought together people from all walks of life.
A participant of the Commune, Louise Michel, writes in her diary about being on guard duty with “a black man as black as jet, with pointed teeth like those of a wild animal”...
who she also describes as “very good, very intelligent, and very brave, a former zouave pontifical converted to the Commune.”
Michel records the following conversation with him, "walking back and forth in the trench under the silence of the Versaillais at Clamart":
“— What effect does the life we are leading have on you?
— Well, I said, the effect of seeing before us a shore that we have to reach.
— For me, he replied, the effect is one of reading a book with pictures.”
As modern-day scholar Kristen Ross points out, this pair is doing nothing less than reflecting on "history and its workings as it is occurring."
This is what we are doing inside the Board of Trustees, from the trenches of the online business space:
REFLECTING ON OUR OWN PRESENCE IN HISTORY AS IT IS OCCURRING…
& WHAT PART WE WANT TO PLAY WITHIN IT.
LET'S BEGINREVOLUTIONARY TIMES CALL FOR REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES (SORT OF)
The particular socialist experiment of the Paris Commune was soon violently crushed by the French government.
Yet the socialist project did not originate there & certainly did not die there.
Reading Doctor Zhivago, set during the revolutionary period in Russia, I found a startlingly similarity to Michel’s conversation with her comrade in the Paris Commune.
Here is the original text, spoken by Zhivago himself, the doctor & poet:
“It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it — the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity.
I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched.
Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.”
It can be easy to think of politics as the domain of politicians, journalists, & technocrats.
Yet in Michel's 1871 memoir as in Pasternak's novel about the revolution in Russia, politics is about more than parties, programs, & catchphrases...
It is about the relationship between life (personal and collective),
images (real and imagined),
and action (private, political, and otherwise).
What these texts suggest is that how we individually & collectively imagine that life...
what pictures we look at, how we look at them, & even what we say about them & see in them...
and then what we do as a result of them...
comes together to form history itself.
For many of us, the images that we have held of the world & of ourselves are crumbling & reforming … rapidly.
The Board of Trustees is a space where we surrender to the sea of change, & together articulate a new ethos, a new culture...
one that could, emergently & from below, give birth to a new & possible collective life.
WILL YOU JOIN US?FROM GRAND STRATEGY TO EMERGENT STRATEGY
Pasternak described the revolutionary period as follows:
“Everything had changed suddenly —the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to.
As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child, and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself."
"At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute — life or truth or beauty — of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded.”
Like revolutionary Russia and France in the era of the Paris Commune, our time, too, is a time of great change.
A time when people do not know what to believe, and so they are attracted to reactionary, militant, or rigid ideologies, right or left.
The alternative is not centrism.
It is not convenient neutrality.
It is an alternative that lives below, beneath, and at the root of all of the options we have encountered in the waking world.
This is the proper home of "Emergent Strategy"...
a term I borrow & play with from the great adrienne maree brown.
At Yale, where I went to college, there is a famous class called "Grand Strategy".
The idea, so I gather from everything I've heard and seen, is that graduates of the seminar contribute to US "grand strategy" -- at a variety of levels.
Grand strategy is about control, dominance, gaining the upper hand.
In the Lyceum, we instead cultivate Emergent Strategy.
For me, "Emergent Strategy" is about withdrawing energy from misguided systems, & "making the Old World obsolete".
It is what I have called a "feminine form of warfare."
Where there is a power vacuum, it is time to embody more of our power.
This is how we transform the landscape around us at every level -
emotional, ideological, political, economic, aesthetic, spiritual… physical.
I'M READYThe goal of the Board of Trustees is threefold :
- to think in ways that provide embodied, emergent, flexible, magical alternatives to the ideologies of right and left…
- to produce concrete manifestations of & experimentation with that emergent thought-work...
- and to co-create a thriving Lyceum community that is an antidote to the last-resort, desperate “magnetism” of those spaces & ideas.
It is to this end that the Board of Trustees undertakes two collective projects.
Shared Project 1:
THE EMERGENT CARTA
An Ongoing & Collective Visionary Inquiry & Creative Project on Individual Sovereignty & Collective Entwinement
In 1215, a group of rebel barons forced the king of England to a document -- the Magna Carta or "Great Charter."
This document listed their rights, privileges, & duties. It stipulated a rule of law that governed not only their actions -- but the king's as well.
This was epoch-making, at least for Western memory. It is said to have introduced the idea of a "constitution" to the Western justice system.
In The Board of Trustees, supported by explorations of literature, history, philosophy, and art, we gather to write an Emergent Carta.
This is not a set of fixed rules or agreements, but instead a provisional & open-ended document --
part collective inquiry, part manifesto, part map of the territories we ourselves are creating as we write it.
In writing this document, we consider ourselves to be both rebels & kings, heretical, sovereign & entwined.
The EMERGENT CARTA won’t be a document forcing conclusions and consensus.
It will be a space for what has genuinely appeared to the group as (provisionally) true (subject to continual scrutiny).
This is not a combative space of forced agreement or “respectful debate.”
It’s a space for those willing NOT TO KNOW THE ANSWER, and to feel around in the dark for toeholds.
Where we are genuinely curious about the differing ways of knowing of each of our members.
And where we allow our shared inquiry, to change & develop how each of us separately & together, see (& create) the world.
Shared Project 2:
THE EMERGENT SUMMITS
Quarterly Conference-Festivals Combining Experimental Teaching, Community-Building, and Individual & Collective Transformation
The Lyceum holds 4 Emergent Summits per year.
In these month-long collective offerings which are open to the public, we bring our visionary practice from the back room of the Board of Trustees out and into the world.
Or better said, we invite the world into our ante-chambers.
All members of The Council are entitled to a spot as Speaker at these Summits, while members of The Board of Trustees are Sponsors who are invited to participate directly in shaping the festivities.
The Emergent Summits are not shortcuts for gaining followers or clients.
They are rather manifestations of our collective creative power, no matter who arrives “from the outside.”
They are, first and foremost, for us.
Just as the Lyceum is.
They are spaces where we bring our body of work into the world in real time.
Because our work exists & matters irrespective of external recognition.
And when we live by this, that is precisely when our power in the external world...really begins to grow.
Side Effects of This Work...
- Expanding & deepening our identities as a WORLD-BUILDERS, SOVEREIGNS, REALITY CREATORS
- Turning our businesses more & more into EMERGENT INSTITUTIONS & stewarding them as VEHICLES OF COLLECTIVE LIFE
- Experimenting with the art of MICRO-WORLD-BUILDING & VISIONARY LEADERSHIP in our own spaces
A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF R.O.I. ('LE ROI' IS FRENCH FOR THE KING)
Almost all online coaching spaces acquire authority & magnetism through the promise of riches & money in some way.
This is far from being wrong. I love it for that.
But there is room for, & I believe a need for, spaces that actively prioritize something else.
What I propose here is that UNDERTAKING HIGH LEVEL OPEN ENDED REFLECTION ON ART HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY,
through the lens of each of our individual paths of EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE PRACTICE,
will actually prepare our minds, bodies, and spirits to lead our respective companies, our industries, and the latent collectives crystallizing around us, toward a better world.
It may seem like gathering in this way requires an enormous suspension of disbelief.
It does.
And yet precisely because it has the potential to be ridiculous, it also has the potential to bear actual moral authority.
Not through issuing demands.
But through allowing genuine reflection & expression to come through us.
What I am inviting you into is to a certain extent a piece of experimental, private theater, an experiment in symbolic action as a form of transformation of self and other.
Both gestural and generative.
The Board of Trustees is for the leader who is thinking decades, maybe even centuries or millennia ahead.
Who wants to shape collective cultural & political landscapes, in addition to making money.
I have walked the halls of hallowed institutions: Yale (est. 1701), Berkeley (est. 1868, a hub of the Civil Rights Movement), and the University of Vienna (est. 1365).
I have sat in classrooms with Kennedy’s and at institutions that have educated many presidents.
I left the academy because I knew the future wasn’t gong to be born inside those walls.
What is a Board of Trustees made up entirely of women?
Psychics, creatives, visionaries, revolutionaries. People of incredible personal power.
Such a thing has never existed.
TAKE YOUR SEATWhat can be thought, experienced, imagined, & invented inside this collective space, and nowhere else?
What worlds will be built, by those who were here with us?
How might this experience change the way you lead your audience and your business?
How will the thoughts you think here SERVE your audience in the short & the very long term?
In times of revolutionary change, new images, forms, must be invented.
Inner meanings become vital & directive where once they were secondary or dispensed with entirely.
I believe in the possibility of a collective life that is not compulsory, fixed, imposed from above, but that flows out of and into the sea of change, art, and emergence.
The BOARD OF TRUSTEES is an experiment in collective, emergent cultural creation.
The point is not what we decide and declare. It’s who we become in the process of the inquiry.
We may have sharp edges. We may butt heads. We may feel sensitive or hurt each other.
But regardless of the outcome, we will have done something unprecedented.
Will you join us?
