Offering a new lens on leadership and living, this research-based guide shows how to design experiences that can touch hearts, provoke minds, and change lives in powerful ways. Transformative experiences are life events that change our sense of self in important ways. How do they work? What elements do they require? How can we learn to design them intentionally? By embracing the research-based approach of ELVIS (the Experiential Learning Variables and Indicators System), this book details how to recast yourself as an Experience Design Leader, one that can provide those in your organization with the opportunities needed to reflect and grow as individuals. Beginning with the ELVIS Framework, you will gain deep foundational insight into how transformative experiences work. And then with the ELVIS Toolkit, which includes seven practical design elements, you will have the key to unlocking these powerful experiences for yourself and others. Whether you are new to the idea of designing experiences for others or are a seasoned veteran, ELVIS shows you how to tap into the psychology operating behind the most powerful and important experiences of our lives-those that shape who we are.

A journey into holistic transformation that can impact every areaofyour life—social, emotional, financial, physical, and spiritual—allowing you to live more deliberately and joyfully Will I ever feel like "me" again? Am I on the right track? How will I reach my dreams and find happiness? Based on her comprehensive qualitative research, Suzy Ross identifies thirteen phases of personal transformation—processes thatform an upright figure 8—to guide you along your path toward wholeness. Readers will learn the map by entering into the stories of two ordinaryindividuals who face life-changing experiences that bring them into and throughthe depths of crisis to emerge transformed and whole. Equipped with The Map to Wholeness, we can understand the deeper purpose behind major life eventsand seemingly ordinary circumstances.

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to--by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience--we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes. Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures.

Lessons Learned from Stories of Adult Intentional Change that led to Sustained Transformation, and their implications for Organizational Change and Transformation. This book yields insights about individual circumstances surrounding personal change journeys and how they eventually emerged into a new life of meaning, purpose and destiny. Are the processes of change and transformation the same? What provokes self-initiated (intentional) change in midlife? In a compelling study Inspiring Lives: Personal Stories of Sustained Transformation, author Myrna Araneta, Ph.D., examines the circumstances and processes involved in self-initiated and transformative adult change that yields insights about why and how people intentionally change in midlife. Using descriptive metaphors from nature, this book reveals some lessons learned that offer insights to individuals who will need to undergo a similar journey and their lessons and implications for organizational change and transformation. This book reveals that multiple circumstances that provoked transformative change include external experiences that created internal crises, dilemmas, discomfort, and the leap of faith to innovate one’s life. Findings also suggest that pathways to successful transformation is not one long straight road from a starting point to a finish line but, that it unfolds as a lengthy, evolving, and challenging process. An enlightening read, Inspiring Lives: Personal Stories of Sustained Transformation is filled with insights and lessons that can be utilized and implemented by others seeking to create their own process of change that may lead to personal transformation.

August Turak is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning author who attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey for seventeen years. As a frequent monastic guest, he learned firsthand from the monks as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses. Service and selflessness are at the heart of the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition's remarkable business success. It is an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining vivid case studies from his thirty-year business career with intimate portraits of the monks at work, Turak shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. He demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. Turak also introduces other "transformational organizations" that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.

This isn’t a book about BECOMING it’s about BEING: noted psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy shows how to imagine the person you want to be, then BE that person now. When you do this, your imagined FUTURE directs your behavior, rather than your past. Who is your Future-Self? That question may seem trite. But it’s literally the answer to all of your life’s questions. It’s the answer to what you’re going to do today. It’s the answer to how motivated you are, and how you feel about yourself. It’s the answer to whether you’ll distract yourself on social media for hours, whether you’ll eat junk food, and what time you get up in the morning. Your imagined Future-Self is the driver of your current reality. It is up to you to develop the ability to imagine better and more expansive visions of your Future-Self. Your current view of your Future-Self is very limited. If you seek learning, growth, and new experiences, you’ll be able to imagine a different and better Future-Self than you currently can. It’s not only useful to see your Future-Self as a different person from who you are today, but it is also completely accurate. Your Future-Self will not be the same person you are today. They will see the world differently. They’ll have had experiences, challenges, and growth you currently don’t have. They’ll have different goals and priorities. They’ll have different habits. They’ll also be in a different world—a world with different cultural values, different technologies, and different challenges.

Most of us live our lives worn out with stress, anxiety, and emotional chaos. Moreover, the law of adaptations shows us that the more we experience any internal state, the more it becomes the operating system of our life. From Mindfulness to Heartfulness offers another path. It invites you on your own transformative journey to live life at your fullest capacity. It will show you how you have become who you are, and it will offer you a blueprint for change. It will show you how heartfulness, embodied, calms the threat and fear that so often consumes you, and it will offer you a step-by-step approach to one of calm and connection, including a loving connection with yourself. It will show you that love, compassion, and connection are trainable and allow you to tap into your deepest potential. It will show you that healing is possible through heartfulness for yourself, and it will demonstrate the transformative power of every moment. Built on the foundations of mindfulness, you will experience the miracle of heartfulness. This miracle emerges when we seek and actively engage in whatever life-generating opportunity each moment holds. When we fully embody heartfulness, our bodies transform, our lives transform, and the whole of our existence transforms.

Prisoner of Infinity examines modern-day accounts of UFOs, alien abductions, and psychism to uncover a century-long program of psychological fragmentation, collective indoctrination, and covert cultural, social, and mythic engineering.Whether it is the forces of God, government, aliens from outer (or inner) space, or the incalculable effects of childhood sexual trauma on the human psyche, premature contact with these forces compels us to create "crucial fictions." Such semi-coherent mythic narratives make partial sense out of our experience, but in the process turn us into the unreliable narrators of our own lives.Taking UFOS and the work of "experiencer" Whitley Strieber as its departure point, Prisoner of Infinity explores how beliefs are created and perceptions are managed in the face of the inexplicably complex forces of our existence. While keeping the question of a non-human and/or paranormal element open, the book maps how all-too-human agendas (such as the CIA's MK Ultra program) have co-opted the ancient psychological process of myth-making, giving rise to dissociative, dumbed-down Hollywood versions of reality. The New Age movement, UFOs, alien abductions, psychism, psychedelic mind expansion, Transhumanism, the Space Program - what if they are all productions devised by committee in dark rooms to serve social, political, and economic goals that are largely devoid of true substance or meaning? Through an exacting and enlivening process of social, cultural and psychological examination and excavation, Prisoner of Infinity uncovers the most deeply buried treasure of all. The original, uncredited author of all mystery and meaning: the human soul.

In his first study book, Nathaniel Jones delves into the principles, strategies, and challenges of studying, meditating, and applying the Word of God to our everyday lives. It is in these consistent, sincere, and often imperfect efforts that we will develop a deeper relationship with our loving Heavenly Father. In this soul-transforming work, Nathaniel builds upon God's foundational principle of love. It is love that captivates and motivates us such that we yearn for it and it only. It was this epiphany, despite years of being a pastor, church leader, husband, father, and son, that he began to grasp and embrace what he felt had been underemphasized in his ministry. With a renewed enthusiasm for the transformational work he was witnessing in his own life, he began sharing these enlightenments with others. This study is to inspire a personal relationship with God. It is not to support our religious beliefs or denominational doctrine but to help us learn, know, and live the truth and walk in love. Part of our conundrum is having a relationship with someone with whom we have no conventional physical connection. A personal relationship with God requires surrendering to the Spirit of God and intentionally studying His Word while also being transparent, reverentially relaxed, and open with Him. He knows everything yet wants a loving--not merely transactional--relationship with us. He wants to hear our voices, and He wants us to know His will. It is in these times that we can share our thoughts, stories, traumas, etc. with the One Who gets us--for with Him--we are always safe--emotionally and otherwise. It is in our relationship with Him that we begin to truly know who we are as His children, the seed of Abraham through Jesus Christ. In this way, we become the people God created us to be and live the successful, joyful, and peaceful lives we truly want and that He intends for us to live.