I have often been called idealistic. And not in a “you’re so inspiring” way, but more in the “bless your heart” way. (My time in Charlotte, NC ensured I understood the difference). And truth be told, I often felt defeated after those comments. Not because I thought they were wrong, actually quite the opposite. Because I took those comments as evidence that something about me was naive. I worried I wasn’t rational or logical or smart….all the things I wanted to be, the things that felt most prized in society.
And so, I would try my best to stuff it down, to operate from a space of knowledge and rationality. But the urgency kept getting louder. In fact, the shouting within my bones has gotten so feverish, I can no longer ignore it. My bones are reverberating a siren’s call that we can be so much more as people, as communities, as a society than what we are today.
I believe in the power of our inherent humanity to change the world. I don’t believe there is one particular state to arrive at, but rather an infinite becoming through creativity and innovation. I believe that through connection we can find our way through pain and suffering, and find collective ways for all of us to thrive. I believe we have the power to heal each other, to make each other feel seen, to support each other’s differences with open arms. I believe we can do almost anything we set our love to.
And if we do this, if we harness this capability within each of us, the world starts to get built from this space. We make decisions from this space. We build businesses from this space. We set policies and systems from this space. Because it doesn’t matter what you believe in, it doesn’t matter what you look like, when we are grounded in our common humanity, you are human like me above all else. I know in my bones that what we build from this truth is a whole new world.
And I know this future is hard to believe in from where we sit, with vitriolic comments flying across social media, with fact and fiction merging so that no one knows what is true, with AI accelerating faster than many of us know how to emotionally or ethically process. But please hear me out. Because what we have built, what we see around us is a direct reflection of ourselves. It did not emerge in a vacuum. What we see in the world today are systems shaped by fear, separation and the belief that one person’s thriving must come at the expense of another’s. And you might want to say that “they” built this, that “they” are the problem, but I want you to know there is only “we”. We are the problem. You and me, and all the people around us. Only with this realization, this acceptance, can we start to make the change that is necessary to move ourselves out of this.
How do we do this? How do we start to change ourselves when we have been mired in righteousness, judgement, comparison and competitiveness? I try to look for the source first, and I’ve come to believe that these characteristics are a result of our own fragmentation. I gave a college commencement speech in 2025 and included, “if we want a world that is whole, we must first find the courage to be whole ourselves.” At the time, I was talking about the bravery required to be oneself. And this still holds true. But I’ve expanded this notion into the idea of wholeness. Because authenticity is only as good as who we know ourselves to be, the space we inhabit within ourselves as we move out into the world. If I have listened to the news all morning, head out with the news reel streaming through my head, and approach someone who the news just vilified, my thoughts about you are going to be consistent with that. Because I am not holding my heart, I am not holding my intuition, I am not holding the fact that we are two souls moving through the miracle of this earth. You become simply a label or a fragment of what you are. And this is where wholeness comes in.
Because the world will only ever be as whole as we are. The world we see around us in silos and groups is a result of the fragmentation we operate from within ourselves. We separate our minds from our hearts, our intuition, our deepest knowing. We erect partitions to protect what feels most vulnerable within us. However, protectionism, assimilation and conformity has created devastating separation in our world. It is difficult today to elicit any form of togetherness. Even great disasters don’t seem to bring us together. We don’t trust each other because at some level, we have lost trust in ourselves. But when we pull the pieces together both individually and as a collective, we begin to see that we are in fact one whole.
This brings me to my fervent call-to-action. We must begin to find the wholeness within ourselves. Fragmentation begets fragmentation and we deserve better. We must start to make decisions, create systems, and relate to each other from a whole place that incorporates all the parts of ourselves – our hearts, our minds, our guts. With the pace of change and the rapid advancement of technology, this internal work has become an imperative. I developed Psi to address this, to give people something tangible to help inform action from wholeness. Because the humanity we could be is waiting for us. There is nothing we can’t create with the gifts of our innate humanness. We have shown this time and time again. But we need to get back to operating from our whole selves if we want to harness what we are truly capable of. And I can feel it in my bones. The time is now.