Episode #26

Episode #26: Kile Ortigo Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Duration: 01:17:15

Laura Dawn [Intro]: My name is Laura Dawn and you’re listening to episode number 26 of the Psychedelic Leadership Podcast, featuring my conversation with Dr. Kyle Ortego, who’s a certified Psychedelic Psychotherapist and author of the new book Beyond The Narrow Life, A Guide for Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration.

Snippet: This is helpful and I think is in the spirit of these experiences and the medicine is a servant leadership mindset. Being a CEO of her company, leaving a retreat, or being a psychologist, working with someone one-on-one, even though that may be a position of ascribed power in some way, that we aren’t doing it for ourselves.  There’s something bigger than us, or greater than us that we’re engaging with this work. I think that the other important thing. When I think of leadership, it’s not these titles, it’s not these roles but we can all be a leader if we’re cultivating the deeper work. We’re doing the work ourselves of integration or developing a skill set to serve a broader community or purpose. That just by being an example of that work, we are providing leadership and we don’t need any title for that but just to be out there and be ourselves.

I call it ego whiplash, when talking about the integration process, what happens when you chase, ego death, you have it, you have a full-blown mystical experience, and you come back and you’re back in your job, and you got to work. Some so many people become self-appointed shamans or they become integration coaches after one psychedelic journey and that may be their path. And I don’t want to dismiss that but it takes a lot of work and in deeper reflection, about the downsides of doing, whether it’s psychedelics or trying to guide people and some of these journeys and experiences, there are endless levels of nuance and complexity. And I think being able to understand how we can all fall off the path, however, we want to define that is important.

I love this conversation with Kyle or Teego; there are some good gems in this episode, especially the second half of this interview where we talk about Psychedelic Integration specifically for leaders, regardless of what domain you find yourself in. So, we talk about acceptance, curiosity, and the difference between healthy and unhealthy surrender which I found interesting. And in the second half, when we focus more on the topic of leadership, we dive into the topics of Spiritual Bypassing and Shadow Work, as well as the importance of taking time for self-reflection. We also talk about narcissism and I commented on how we have a very negative view of narcissism in our culture these days and I wanted to include a little note here about what sparked that comment for me.

I recently listened to an interview with Tammy Simon on her podcast Insights at the Edge that I just love. And she interviewed Keith Campbell, on The New Science of Narcissism, which offered a broader and maybe a more balanced perspective on this topic and I won’t get into all the details here but I’ll include that episode of Insights at the Edge in the show notes. But in essence, we can see all of these personality traits like a spectrum, we want to fall somewhere in the middle because being too high, but also being too low on some of these traits, like openness or agreeableness or neuroticism can have advantages and disadvantages. And so I just wanted to mention this to prevent this mentality of just making these blanket statements like, that’s bad. And yes, we do need to be mindful and aware of the amplification of neuroticism, which does happen for some people when working with psychedelics. But I also want to just bring that balanced perspective here and I love this term that Kyle coined called Ego Whiplash. And I just love how words and concepts like this can help us become more aware of the drawbacks of working with psychedelics and what we need to pay more attention to.

And so I highly recommend checking out his book Beyond The Narrow Life. I love that title, published by Synergetic Press and I love that team over at Synergetic Press and I want to give them a big shout-out here because they’re doing awesome work. And they also offered a special discount just for you, our listeners of the Psychedelic Leadership Podcast to receive 20% off the book with coupon code live free, and I’ll include that in the show notes.  So, I’m keeping this intro pretty short today but my heart is feeling full and inspired. And my three-month micro-dosing mastermind program is off to an amazing start, and it’s keeping me super full right now, and FYI, I’m still calling in a full-time Executive Assistant.

So please reach out to me if you feel called to explore that possibility. Through my website, live free Laura de.com and on my website, you can also access some amazing resources, as well as some awesome freebies, like my free playlist for Psychedelic Journeys and Beyond and my free eight-day micro-dosing course. I’m going to leave you with a song called Help Us Love by Mikey Pauker, who’s a dear brother on this path, and Yohana OneHeart. And help us love our shadow sides, help us love all parts of ourselves within the full spectrum of what it means to be human and I think that’s great advice for integrating our psychedelic experiences to bring a lot of loving-kindness and self-compassion to ourselves on this path, on this journey, and I think that’s the key.

If we want to learn how to love our neighbors and love other people who trigger us, for example, I think it starts with ourselves but don’t be too obsessed with loving yourself because that would make you a narcissist, just kidding but not really. Without any further ado, here is my wonderful conversation with Kyle or Teego who offers wise integration advice for the leaders of our time.

Laura Dawn: Welcome, Kyle Ortego, this is so nice to have you here on the show today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Kyle Ortego: It’s an honor to be here. I’ve started listening to the podcast and I’ve appreciated a lot of the topics, conversations, what you’re putting out there, some critical conversations that we’re all meaning to have about this space, and just the world at large right now.

Laura Dawn: Thank you, that means so much to me and I haven’t covered the topic of Psychedelic Integration especially from your unique vantage point, so I’m looking forward to this conversation. And so you’re a Clinical Psychologist, you’re a certified Psychedelic Psychotherapist and founder of the Center for Existential Exploration, and you also recently just published a book, I think it’s coming out this month by Synergetic Press, and big shout out to all the folks that Synergetic Press, it’s such a wonderful crew over there and your book is called Beyond The Narrow Life: A Guide For Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration. It’s quite the title, Kyle. So why this title and what does it mean?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: It’s interesting for a lot of authors and I’m one of them, is you write a book, it could be 50 100,000 words, and coming up with the titles, the hardest part, out of all of it. And that one was when I came up for my final chapter which was Beyond The Narrow Life, my publisher liked that and I thought once they recommended it as the main title because that was the destination of this journey that I had set up for the reader. And there are a few different layers of meaning which are appropriate when we talk about psychedelics and existential thought, I think.

Fundamentally meant to me initially was looking beyond a life that’s very narrowly defined and confined in terms of one’s sense of perspective, and possibility, and meaning. And so the final chapter dives into creativity including creative problem solving, symbolic expression, and just what your life can be when all of those training wheels are taken off after you do some of the deeper work. So, that’s a fundamental theme of the book and what the journey is about but we all know with all journeys, you can’t skip to the end, you have to go through the process of unfolding and that’s what the book fundamentally tries to do for every reader.

Laura Dawn: There’s so much I want to dive into here and you talk about the reader as a hero. So, going through this journey, reading through the book to arrive at this end chapter Beyond the Narrow Life, so what do you mean by the reader as a hero?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: The hero is an archetype. So thinking about Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, those are two theorists that have influenced me. So, when we talk about archetypes, we always have to have this caveat that we’re talking about, a form without strict content. There are many different types of heroes, there are many stories of heroes, and there are many ways to be a hero as an individual in our world, so the first and most fundamental that applies to everyone who I was speaking to in the book is the reader, the protagonist of a story. And from an existential perspective too, we are the authors of our story, our life choices, and then what unfolds for us, so emphasizing that sense of agency and individuality, was a big part for me.

But when we think about what a hero is, in its more fundamental core, I think, at least how we talk about it and most of our societies are the hero is someone that protects their community, they protect people that they love, they care for and they do so in a variety of ways. But primarily, the fundamental core hero from Joseph Campbell’s work, at least is not someone by the end of the story, at least that’s fighting for their motivation, or causes that are very much driven by the ego, or success, or pride or things like that. They’re fighting for something larger, something more meaningful, and something that does help others.

Laura Dawn: That’s beautiful. I find it so fascinating that just a few years ago, we never heard anyone talking about plant medicine integration, psychedelic integration, and now it’s becoming almost part of our common vernacular, it’s amazing to see, in a sense, the way the movement is growing up and maturing and taking more responsibility around how we can integrate these experiences into our everyday lives. And it’s nice that now we’re sort of all coming out of the closet and meeting in the light and having these open conversations. I know for a long time, I was very alone in my process around integration, I had to cultivate my integration practices and as my listeners have heard me say before, and my mind likes to think in Venn diagrams. And so a huge influence, in terms of my integration has been Eastern philosophy and Pema children is one of my primary teachers, and I hear her voice in my head all the time.

And it’s been such a big influence, not just for my integration, but the work I do with other people and she always says, the spiritual journey, in essence, is going from narrow mind to open mind. And so to me, there’s just such a strong overlap with even that body of wisdom and transpersonal psychology, and the way that we move beyond our narratives to think bigger, and which has motivated me to go back to graduate school and get this degree in Creative Studies, and change leadership and looking at the overlap between Creative Problem Solving and Psychedelic. So, I love that you’re taking this from a slightly different angle but what were some of your big influences here? If we were to pop up a Venn diagram here, what big circles would be on the table?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: I love that you bring up that image because it guides me all the time because I had such wide interest as well and there are so many different opinions out there about everything, including what psychedelic integration is, what’s the role of psychedelics in the individual journey versus community? And I like to the indigenous versus science, that’s a big one that we’re having some important critical conversations about too. So, I do think of a Venn diagram and I like to place my bets on those places that there’s overlap, where there are many different pathways to get to a similar conclusion, one of those examples that I know you’ve talked about, I think, in your podcast before is interconnectedness. How do you deny interconnectedness from any of these different angles, even if we go from a strictly materialistic conservative science point of view? 

But I think that was the challenge of writing this book right now, is there are a lot of opinions out there, there are a lot of controversies, and there are different ideologies about even just the nature of reality itself and places that I think we can find overlap, but that’s hard. There’s a lot of ambiguity that we have to tolerate when trying to navigate these various worldviews and perspectives and for me, types of readers, that’s very much something that I do in my clinical practice, too and I think, just by mere exposure from a variety of people, we begin to have these conversations.

But what I was trying to do in the book is not make some argument about the fundamental nature of reality, or say that psychedelic integration means you do step 12345, like some people like to do, while recognizing that’s helpful to have a structure, even if it’s a structure that you fight against or you argue against sometimes that’s part of the creative process itself. So, I think science was important to me because I’m a Ph.D. doctor in Clinical Psychology and science was so much a part of our training, at the same time as art was important in the therapeutic process itself.

It’s not that you throw treatment manuals at someone, and they automatically get better by trying to weave in some of the perspectives of science, what are some of the places that we can have some level of confidence about what we know about the nature of reality, while also recognizing that there’s a lot of mystery out there to play with? And I think that’s where the creativity came in for me as an author, and why it was fundamental, or writing the book and helping someone go through these journeys that they are a part of that process too, I didn’t want to take the perspective of, here’s this psychologist, or here is this guy telling you what reality is or what a psychedelic integration is, but here are some ideas and exposing people to a broad swath of perspectives and things that have been helpful for me. And then ask the questions, how does this apply to your life? That’s why I start with cosmic awareness. What is the sheer magnitude of the cosmos and space and time mean to you as an individual living now?

Going to that question is more important than explaining the quantum theory to a reader but it’s that relationship that I think is built over time that we build with ourselves and others. So the overlapping circles, depends on what are those other circles for me and the reader, it was cultivating this very special relationship through writing, and why I tried to think of myself as being just another person along the path with them, not the expert coming in but helping guide as I’m learning from them, too, that’s how I do my clinical work. So, that’s how I wanted to do my writing as well.

Laura Dawn: So, how do you define psychedelic integration? What’s your definition?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: From a very basic standpoint, I think it’s helpful to start there is just bringing to life the lessons or experiences that you receive during a psychedelic journey and it’s an art of translation, I think, fundamentally, and translations always imperfect. So for some people, especially those having a very profound mystical experience that integration process depends on what their life is like already, like before and immediately after the journey. And I think I’ve spoken to some people who believe that integration happens naturally and organically after having a powerful experience and I think to a certain extent, that’s true. But I also have spoken to people who’ve reached out to me for integration support and their problem is they had a beautiful sense of interconnectedness and deep meaning, and it opened their eyes to possibility and so nothing about the journey itself was challenging.

But the challenge was, they worked in this job that was not meaningful to them or was about material success and so that was the work of integration was figuring out this conflict, and what the implications of this experience were for them. But like a lot of people, this person ended up canceling or not showing in the first meeting and I never heard back from them again, which happens that it’s scary to think about integration that challenges one’s worldview and life circumstances but that’s one example of how it applies. But it’s always unfolding. I think that is something that wouldn’t be too controversial to say that there are people even after having hundreds of psychedelic journeys, who’re still integrating that first experience which is so powerful for them, but it is a meaning-making process too, I think in a practice.

Laura Dawn: Right, meaning-making and that I think, is the process of what it means to be alive. And I love a lot of what Charles Eisenstein has to say about that and the conversation that we had on the podcast was interesting about going through the journey and then having to face life and going from this very interconnected experience to this world of separation and this world of disconnection that we live in. And so I’m curious as someone who supports people through integration, where do you balance the take your time in making big decisions, going through the psychedelic journey, and then being like, I need to quit my job. Where do you support people in slowing down in the process and following through with the actions that they know intuitively that make the most sense for them to step into the right relationship with their lives?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: These recommendations that we all have about not making impulsive decisions are critical, when it’s also balanced with using that energy, that knowledge, that insight to good effect and I think that taking the time is obvious here. But what that means is time that you’re actively reflecting on and working with, whatever that move is that you’re trying to make, whether it’s realizing a relationship, not as connected and deeply satisfying a right for you, to have I not tried yet to improve the relationship? I’m a therapist, so I might recommend couples therapy, or doing some deeper work on communication, see if something salvageable there because it’s often not that we get the conclusion in a journey or experience but we get illumination about something that’s not quite working.

But the time to reflect and use our minds, those cognitive abilities to the good effect of trying to think about the pros and cons of making a move, how you might do it. And then let’s say, that initial impulse to break up or to quit the job was the right one, after doing this reflection, then the time is used to plan, so that you reduce the likely harm to yourself and others by making that move, making that next step. So, it’s not necessarily about changing the final decision, but how to approach it so that you improve the likelihood of a successful watching-off, or then you might have a relationship or something that’s not working for you anymore.

Laura Dawn: So in addition to all of the basic recommendations that most people make around integration, which is; take your time, get rest, eat healthily, sometimes I recommend that people don’t just jump back into their sort of, quote-unquote, everyday reality, maybe take a little bit of spaciousness before, if you let’s say, go to an Iosco retreat for 10 days, have a halfway house before going back home that could be one recommendation. So, in addition to sort of all of the foundational basics, what would you say, let’s put a conceptual roadmap on the table here, what’s a framework that you’re suggesting, working with your clients, and in the book that people can sort of get a good tangible sense of through this conversation?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: Well, the book is the most structured because it’s written with chapters, all these things create that sense of safety and linearity and the process is very nonlinear, so I think we can go there. I structured it in terms of three main phases for the entire journey, and the first was expanding awareness and I had metaphorical allies and attitudes for each of those arcs and the attitude there was one of curiosity, so to help us expand our awareness, we need to work on cultivating that sense of curiosity. And the second was confronting the deeper existential trials of initiation, these deeper questions that we all have to face as humans and they deal with impermanence, death, casualty loss, the interconnectedness versus isolation, loneliness, alienation, and finally versus meaninglessness or absurdity, how to navigate those in that attitude to help with those deeper questions and to avoid spiritual bypass was one of acceptance. And then the final arc was integrating the insights into one’s life and to a broader sense of self-capital, self-thinking from young and his model of individuation, primarily and the attitude that was cultivated through those three chapters is one of wisdom by putting all these insights into practice, and recognizing the endless nuance in it.

So, that’s my model for integration and I used it and created it because it parallels the phases of the hero’s journey for your readers or listeners that know that Joseph Campbell’s work, and it also paralleled the phases of psychedelic psychotherapy. So, I like having all those overlapping circles since we were talking about that earlier, and where that is a little bit different than probably most models of integration is that most models of integration are focusing on the third phasor what happens after the ceremony but I think this is cyclical; it’s not a linear process. So, for people who’ve had multiple journeys or haven’t had any journey at all this work of integration, what we’re calling psychedelic integration is available to all of us and it’s a journey that we can repeat. And going into these deeper questions and coming out the other side, putting whatever gems that we found into practice.

Laura Dawn: I love that. I don’t know if you tuned into the solo episode I did just on cultivating the mindset of curiosity because I think that is such a big way that we train our minds to think bigger that is beyond the narrow life, that is narrow mind to open mind, it’s the bridge. And we can draw upon questions that help us to engage in that sense of curiosity and wonder, open-mindedness, open-heartedness and I think we need that, especially right now through this time of separation and polarization and division. So, let’s go into the second category, the second phase. I also love this term impermanence. I did episode number four, on bowing at the altar of impermanence, let’s talk about this.

You are the founder of the Center for Existential Exploration, you cannot I’m sure go through that exploration without making peace with this fundamental reality of impermanence, so let’s talk there. What are some of the suggestions that you’re encouraging people to take action around, maybe questions of inquiry that people can lean into, any direction you want to run with that?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: I know for my practice, that existential exploration is just such a big bucket and for most people, I say, you come to see me, it does involve questions around relationships, either that alienation they have or lack of true intimacy with others, usually those things are connected themselves, loss, but more often than not a lack of meaning and life is what the lack of purpose, that’s what is a part of their presenting concern. I came to existential thought when I was pretty young but what I like to highlight that has become important is that a lot of people assume existential thinking and these existential dilemmas and questions are leading people to nihilism.

And the existential fight is not about nihilism, it rejects nihilism for the most part, which is a giving up, a complete unhealthy surrender. So what I think has been helpful for me is thinking about these in terms of trials, these are things that we all do confront in life, we all have to face the loss of the people that we love or connected to, we all have to think about our mortality, that sets the stage just from a temporal standpoint of time, we have finite time, we don’t know when our time is up and that’s scary for most of us if we’re being honest about it.

But if we were to confront that and bring that into our conversation, and what we do for the day, what we do for the week, the month on the years, then I think it shifts our perspective from our self and trying to avoid thinking about these scary things, to opening up to possibility as all these themes are connected to me, and I think they are for other people, but maybe in different pathways. Perhaps it’s the loneliness that is that initial spark of exploration that if you can trigger that, then they go into these questions of what is a meaningful connection. What is a meaningful relationship? How do I get there? And then we can get into the practicality of it. So, I think if we confront these things with some sense of courage, it’s not that fear goes away but to have some courage about it and to question, to bring in that curiosity again, as we explore, then we will find things that we will have to think about and realize that we’ll have to accept, so that’s why acceptance was such an important attitude there. Because curiosity can take us so far, but sometimes it fails, in the toughest of times, with a loss that is just too deep. It can bring us part of the way.

I think having some understanding of what it is that we have to accept about a loss, or about not knowing what the fundamental nature of reality is, or what our life’s meaning is, is there only one path to finding life’s meaning or not? I think that’s when we begin to open up to all the areas of life that we do have agency, we do have a sense of play that we can create something, and that sense of possibility, I think is where it naturally evolves.

Laura Dawn: I love that you just framed that as like curiosity can get us only so far because we can get lost in what is the purpose, and why am I here and even that can be very disorienting if we just get sort of stuck in curiosity and moving beyond curiosity, trans curiosity, is like looking at acceptance and making peace and you also referenced unhealthy surrender, which means that you also have a framework around healthy surrender. So, I think that there are all of these additional sorts of components that we need to look at, that curiosity might start the journey, but acceptance, making peace with life is a big part of that. And so how do you encourage people who are in that sort of arc of the hero’s journey, what are some of the anchor points that we can draw upon to help us sort of draw meaning to bring greater fulfillment and purpose into our lives?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: I think what happens sometimes for people who are feeling losses for some time, they might have taken on the mantle of someone else’s sense of purpose or meaning, they emulated the heroes or their favorite models, ideas, even mythology, religion, and it didn’t quite fit, or there is some mismatch there. But I think what I see and what is something I do with all my clients is bring in this exploration of one’s values, things that feel intuitively right and true and important, especially when we can explain them away.

So, being able to put aside our thinking mind sometimes and go into our heart, and our intuition is part of that process for me. So the acceptance, though, is the Serenity Prayer, I think that one’s a nice one and it’s used a lot and people who have addiction issues, it’s fundamental in AA but there’s some version of that, that I think is in a lot of wisdom, teachings around the world but finding that line between what we need to accept and what we have to ask the agency to change is critical. And I think when I said, unhealthy surrender, I’m thinking of avoidance, like some form of avoidance, like giving up your sense of responsibility, for whatever reason because it feels a bit more comfortable, not to take action or not to try to create change, which inertia is a real thing, so the presence of it and lack of it.

So this is something that modern psychotherapy has confronted explicitly to be that avoidance can reinforce these negative behavioral patterns and prevent us from growing and expanding and finding that sense of agency again. So these personal values are the compass that we can follow when we’re trying to navigate this terrain of things that we are outside of our control and things that we might have control or influence on and the things that we have control and influence with. So, in a relationship, since I use that as one example earlier, we only have influence over how we phrase something, how we communicate our feelings, our needs and we can be the best expert at communication, might say, you can be a psychologist who does this with their clients and it’s still challenging, but even when you do it at an expert level, the person has to respond, it’s a give and take.

So, communication is a good example of that but all these life decisions, I think this just dances back and forth. And they’re the question of like, are a healthy relationship or not, is one where you try it out? You try on these different ways of communicating actively trying to open up, be more authentic to take some risk, build some intimacy and trust, and then if the other person just isn’t there yet, they can’t respond in that way. Then the question goes to can I accept that there are limitations, or do I need something more? So, that’s how acceptance I think plays out in one of those examples, it’s a common thing in my work as a psychologist, is relationship challenges.

Laura Dawn: Interesting and their notion of healthy surrender versus unhealthy surrender make me think of this notion in Eastern philosophy around healthy non-attachment, like holding it lightly versus being detached and it’s so nuanced, it’s tricky.  It’s the topic of spiritual bypass, it’s just so nuanced and so tricky. I want to talk about spiritual bypass in a moment but before we get there, I’m just curious, like, speaking to this topic about leadership.  So people who are working with psychedelics, and we know now, so many people are stepping into this space, working with psychedelics, whether they’re leaders in the psychedelic space, or whatever domain that they find themselves in, especially for leaders. What do you think are the key things that people should be thinking about in terms of psychedelic integration for all leaders, regardless of what domain they’re in?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: I do think spiritual bypass is one of those, so we’ll talk about that. So I think understanding spiritual bypass, understanding avoidance of complexity and nuance, I think to be a leader in this space, probably accounts for most spaces, you have to be able to dive deeper into complexity. And not knowing that curiosity, again, is so helpful with that and recognizing that there are pieces of the puzzle that all of us have, and the people who may not be in a leadership position, but they have a lot more information that you don’t have, even though you may be the leader of a company or retreat, it’s respecting that difference and that this complexity offers so many opportunities for all of us to be involved. I think with leadership in psychedelics, there are so many controversies going on as psychedelics become more mainstream, and capitalism and indigenous culture versus Western culture.

There are some critical conversations that we’re having I know you have and I appreciated listening to you and your guest’s riff on this stuff. But I think what is helpful and I think is in the spirit of these experiences in medicine is a servant leadership mindset, that being a CEO of a company, leading a retreat or being a psychologist, working with someone one-on-one, even though that may be a position of ascribed power in some way, that we aren’t doing it for ourselves, there’s something bigger than us, greater than us that we’re engaging this work with. That’s not always the case, I think recognizing that, too, as part of this challenge of bringing this concept of spiritual bypass to the broader world is that people can talk the talk, we can talk the talk, I can talk the talk but I need to be able to be critical of my actions and my sense of integrity and authenticity, as I enter into these new relationships with others, regardless of what my position is and I think that’s the other important thing.

When I think of leadership, it’s not these titles, it’s not these roles but we can all be a leader if we’re cultivating the deeper work if we’re doing the work ourselves of integration, or developing a skill set to serve a broader community or purpose that just by being an example of that work, we are providing leadership. And we don’t need any title for that but just to be out there and be ourselves. 

Laura Dawn: When we were talking last week, you made a good point about just how you frame leadership, you can lead from the front. Do you want to keep running with that sentence?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: I have a lot of stories in my life where I like, this is from high school that I got introduced to this model but I don’t remember anything about that week. It was a leadership week that I grew up in the south and in the south, we have boys state and girl state and there you get to nominate for them. I think they are teachers for your leadership ability and then you go and at least in Arkansas, it was going to listen to a lot of politicians talk about being leaders, which isn’t always, the right model necessarily that we’d want. But the one thing I remember about that whole week was this model of leading from upfront within and behind as three types of leaders. The leading upfront is what most of us think about is the charismatic leader, the CEO, the person giving the TED talk, and they’re trying to inspire, to direct and that’s a traditional at least in the west form of leadership. Leadership from behind is more like a shepherding, so it’s someone who may be a part of a team or a community, they have a sense of the vision but the leadership style is to help the team work through the issues or set the task and work on executing them.

And then the leader from behind is just gently guiding when necessary but it’s a bit more hands-off. Leading from within is being actively a part of the team, part of the community and you’re working on your piece of the puzzle that you’re passionate about, or something that speaks to your skillset and those qualities of authenticity, I talked about meaning these personal values, like you’re cultivating those in this setting, whether it’s work or another type of community and you’re supporting others who are doing the same thing. Not the same thing as you are, but following their path and so you’re helping, encouraging them, you’re leading by example but you’re ideally in a group of people where you’re all feeding off of each other’s positive energy and learning and talents and coming together, and not needing to be told what to do either from a front or behind. I appreciate that model probably the most.

Laura Dawn: I love that. And so do you think that one person can learn how to embody all three leadership styles and that’s the most beneficial is to learn how to draw upon the right one at the right time?

Dr. Kyle Ortego: I do think generally in life, that’s a helpful strategy is to get a lay of