True
Next Level
Executive Coaching
Psychedelic-Assisted Executive Coaching is here!
Introducing
Born at the intersection of startup leadership coaching, psychedelic research, and behavior change psychology, the Awake Forward Method provides truly exceptional outcomes.
In fact, I believe that the Awake Forward Method will do for business leaders what Uber did for Yellow Cab customers.
Why do I believe this? Because it’s that much more effective than conventional executive coaching! The results not only support your professional development goals but also your personal and spiritual development goals all at once.
How It Works
During the 6-month program, your coach artfully weaves together the following ingredients to create a custom program for you.
- The tools, structure, advising, and accountability provided by your executive coach.
- A formal 360 review provided by Saturn Leadership
- Habit change coaching provided by an NLP master practitioner
- Therapeutic psychedelic session(s) with a master guide designed:
- Reveal the blind spots that are compromising your effectiveness
- Release deep frustrations, stress, and fears that are clouding your judgment.
- Align you with your deeper truths, values, and convictions
- Increase your leadership presence, congruence, and clarity
- Increase your visionary perspective and creative thinking
- Increase your emotional resilience and reduce reactive behaviors
- Heal elements from your past that are interfering with your present
- Trigger psycho-spiritual awakenings that level up many areas of your life at once!
Are you ready to take your life and business to the next level?
Your 6-Month Coaching Program Includes
master executive coach
You will work with a master executive coach who has more than 10,000 hours of executive coaching experience. In addition to everything you expect from an executive coach, your coach will communicate with the other experts ensuring a seamless experience.
Throughout your program, your coach will help you translate your insights into clear actions that drive your business KPIs.
neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) Sessions
Long before Tony Robbins made transformational NLP popular, this psychological method has been regarded as the most effective way to change deeply ingrained bad habits and limiting beliefs.
During your program, you will have two NLP sessions laser-focused on changing the behaviors and beliefs that you feel are holding you back from achieving your professional goals.
Therapeutic Psychedelic Sessions
By mid-program, you and your coach will have identified your most stubborn limiting beliefs and habits. These will be the focus of your therapeutic psychedelic session(s).
Available therapies include
- At home, video-supported ketamine sessions are provided by Mindbloom’s guides under supervision by Mindbloom’s medical professionals.
- Psilocybin, Ayahuasca, San Pedro, and Iboga experiences led by master guides are available in legal locations around the world.
Your 6-Month Program in Detail
No two entrepreneurs are alike, so you can rest assured, your program will be customized to meet your unique needs.
Month 1
DIAGNOSTICS, GOAL SETTING & TRUST BUILDING
During the first month, you and your coach will set your professional development goals. To ensure that you are focused on the highest leverage areas, a 360-review will verify your assumptions. Three and six-month goals will then be set. Consistent coaching sessions will hold you accountable while providing you with new tools to achieve your goals and address fires (obstacles) as they come up.
Month 2
FIRST NLP SESSION IN CONJUNCTION WITH YOUR EXECUTIVE COACHING
By the second month, you and your coach will have identified two key limiting beliefs and/or habits that are preventing you from performing at your full potential. These will be the focus of your first NLP session. The insights from your NLP sessions will then be applied to achieve your KPIs.
Month 3
THERAPEUTIC PSYCHEDELIC SESSION(S)
By month three, you and your coach will have a clear understanding of the topics you want to focus on during your psychedelic session.
Ketamine Program Example
Your executive coaching continues while Mindboom provides you with four at-home ketamine sessions spaced 7 days apart.
Psilocybin, Ayahuasca, San Pedro, and Iboga Program Examples
You will travel to a legal location that safely provides the experience you want to have.
The sessions will focus on the topics you identified with your coach as the most important to your professional development. While every therapeutic psychedelic experience provides unique results, you can count on having new clarity and perspective that will be applicable to your life and business. At the end of the month, you will have achieved your first set of KPIs.
Month 4
EXECUTIVE COACHING & INTEGRATION
During the fourth month, clients typically feel more relaxed, motivated, congruent, clear and focused than ever. Your coach will help you apply your psychedelic insights to your professional and personal life goals. You will set your next set of 3-month KPIs due at the end of the program.
Month 5
FINAL NLP SESSION
Coaching continues while your NLP practitioner takes advantage of your fresh perspective and clarity to address whichever issues you feel are most important.
You will be working toward completing your 6-month goals.
Month 6
COMPLETE THE PROGRAM
During the sixth month, you will document your success against the KPIs you set as well as the goals at the beginning of the program. A progress report survey will be sent to everyone who participated in your initial 360 review, providing you with external feedback on your development during the program. You will complete your program by establishing KPIs for the next three months, enabling you to extend the value of the program beyond its completion.
Month 7
JOIN THE ALUMNI GROUP COACHING PROGRAM
Now that you’ve completed the program, you will be invited to join our Alumni Group Coaching Program. In this program, you will meet fellow business leaders who have completed one of our programs. Led by Michael, the group sessions will be a combination of coaching, peer advising, networking, and skill-building.
Ready to take your professional and personal development to the next level?
Request a discovery call to learn more about what Psychedelic-assisted Executive Coaching and the Awake Forward Method can do for you.
Alumni Testimonials
Frequently Asked Questions
Your coaching program will be invoiced through the Thriving Founders coaching firm. There is no mention of psychedelic-assisted executive coaching on www.thrivingfounders.com. You will pay your psychedelic experience provider independently because we do not provide psychedelic experiences.
Most of our clients have their companies pay for the 6-month executive coaching program while they pay out of pocket for their sessions with the psychedelic experience provider.
I have had clients do therapeutic psychedelic sessions during the busiest and most intense times. I can’t recall a client finding their experience disruptive to their life or business, though I suppose it is possible.
Yes. There are organizations that can provide legitimate psychedelic-assisted therapy in the US and abroad.
Ketamine is the safest, most reliable, and legal psychedelic currently available.
I have vetted two therapeutic ketamine providers, Mindbloom and Polaris. Mindbloom provides at-home guided ketamine sessions with video support, making it super convenient, effective, and affordable! Alternatively, if you want to work one-on-one with an experienced therapist via video chat or in person, I recommend you work with Polaris.
MDMA, Psilocybin, and any other psychedelics you can think of. The California Senate voted to decriminalize all psychedelics in June 2021. Other states are following suit. This is the first step toward legalization, however, in most circumstances, it is still illegal for someone to provide you with a psychedelic compound. That said, there are many organizations, including churches, that are offering therapeutic psychedelic experiences in the US. Countries like Jamaica, Costa Rica, and Mexico are popular destinations for week-long retreat programs.
Ayahuasca: I’ve been leading groups of entrepreneurs to Peru for private ayahuasca retreats since 2010 through my company, Entrepreneurs Awakening. If you’re interested in working with ayahuasca, as part of your coaching program, I will connect you with a highly reputable retreat center in Costa Rica or Peru. I will be leading my next retreat once the COVID-19 pandemic allows.
The provider you choose is responsible for your safety. They will thoroughly screen you for family history, physical issues, pharmaceuticals, and psychological conditions that would exclude you from working with psychedelic compounds. In my opinion, as long as you’re honest during the intake, the risk will be minimal. Ultimately, it’s your choice, and it is recommended that you get your doctor’s approval.
Both your coach and the professional guide who will lead you through your psychedelic therapy session will support you in making wise decisions. In fact, one of our explicit up-front agreements is that you can’t make a life-changing decision during the 10 days following your psychedelic experience. I can’t think of a single case where someone I worked with made a rash decision they regretted.
The psychedelic session is done one-on-one, or in a group setting, it depends on the substance and provider.
As a business leader, you probably feel that there is never a good time to take a mental or physical break from you duties. Over the years, we have supported clients who were in the middle of fundraising, experiencing company-threatening conflicts with the board or a co-founder, or going through a divorce. We have also led clients through the process while they were on a sabbatical between companies, and the results weren’t better than those who were engaged in the process while on the front line of a firefight. The truth is, there is never a bad time to engage in a psychological reset, emotional healing, and spiritual awakening, especially when it only takes a day or weekend!
A ketamine experience only takes 2 hours start to finish.
Solo experiences with other “medicines” are typically 8 hours from start to finish.
Retreats can be a weekend or a week-long, depending on what you want.
Psychedelic-assisted Executive Coaching (PaEC ) is a name I coined to describe any form of executive coaching that coincides with the use of psychedelics in a therapeutic context. The Awake Forward Method is the specific programmatic approach to PaEC that my team and I provide to ensure that you get the most out of your experience.
When you want to make a personality-level change, such as when you need to:
- Change your leadership style from a command-and-control to a delegate-and-empower approach
- Delegate and trust your team to learn from their mistakes, but you are struggling to do so
When distrust or impatience are negatively affecting your decision making, such as when:
- Frustration and resentment is impacting your relationship with your co-founders or the board
- You’re forced to give the CEO role to someone else and then must support the new CEO 110% even if you’re not happy with the change
When your ego is preventing you from doing what is best for the company, such as when:
- Your sense of personal identity is tied to your title at the company, and the board or your co-founder wants you to change
NLP is a communication toolkit that provides the ability to discover, utilize, and change our programmed thoughts and behaviors, assisting us in having new experiences in life that are more satisfying, fulfilling, and enjoyable. In this short video Carl Buchheit, the founder of the Transformational branch of NLP, explains NLP.
The history behind Psychedelic-assisted Executive Coaching
Scientists, psychiatrists, and therapists have been studying the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics since the 1940s. Recent changes in legal constraints and public perception have ushered in a new era of psychedelic research and, as a result, new, ultra-low risk therapies are now available. The most relevant example of this is the FDA’s approval of ketamine, a gentle psychedelic for the treatment of anxiety and depression.
On a personal note, my first psychedelic-assisted therapy experience took place in 2008 at a time when the company I founded was threatened by the nationwide financial collapse. We were forced to execute a big reduction in force and implement a significant product pivot. As a result, my co-founders and I were incredibly stressed and kept passionately disagreeing about key decisions. Personally, however, I was able to navigate the challenges with much more equanimity and clarity than I would have been able to if I hadn’t experienced my first therapeutic psychedelic experience a few months prior. As a result, I continued working with psychedelics in professionally guided therapeutic contexts. Unfortunately, at that time, there was no legal way to do this work in the U.S. I was forced to travel to countries where it was legal, but the results were worth the effort.
After leaving my company, I began executive coaching. Before long, it became clear to me that coaching techniques alone could not change the deeply ingrained bad habits, blind spots, and stress patterns that were holding my clients back from realizing their full potential. Though, based on my own experience, I knew that coaching in combination with a psycho-therapeutic technique called “neuro-linguistic programming” (NLP) and therapeutic psychedelics could. I began suggesting to some of my clients that they come with me to Peru to work ayahuasca, a traditional psychedelic concoction native to the Amazon.
The results were extraordinary! Not only were my clients having sustainable breakthroughs in their leadership development, but the positive changes rippled into every area of their lives. Demand increased, so I began taking groups of entrepreneurs to Peru to work with ayahuasca once a year since 2012. The results of these retreats are documented in my podcast Entrepreneurs Awakening.
The Ketamine Breakthrough
The problem has always been obtaining access to the safest, most effective psychedelic therapy experiences in a legal context, until now!
Since 2018, ketamine-assisted therapies have become widely available in the United States. Ketamine is a very gentile and predictable pharmaceutical psychedelic that offers many immediate benefits. The problem has been that ketamine clinics are expensive and typically clinical in nature. Their programs are oriented to people suffering from serious depression or anxiety issues, not high performers looking for better performance. They don’t provide the type of environment or support I or my clients need to get the most out of the experience.
As a result of COVID-19, Mindbloom, a pioneering startup in the ketamine therapy space, was able to get regulatory approval to provide at-home, video-supported ketamine therapy sessions. This is a revolutionary breakthrough! Now, anyone who passes their medical screening and meets certain key criteria can experience the benefits of ketamine in the comfort of their own bed! Oh, and this can be achieved at a fraction of the price they charge at the clinics.
I was somewhat skeptical of Mindbloom’s program. So, I signed up to test it out, and I am glad I did! I am delighted with the service and experience they provide. I decided that it is indeed very effective and would provide our clients with a safe, convenient, and cheap access to the benefits of psychedelic therapy. Inspired, I reached out to Mindbloom to ask them to offer a VIP service to our clients at no extra cost. They agreed, and now I am thrilled to be able to wholeheartedly recommend Mindbloom’s ketamine program to you, whether you’re a client of Thriving Founders or not. (Use discount code Awake20 and get 20% off.)
How I See Ketamine Helping Business Leaders
The most common benefits attributed to ketamine are stress and anxiety reduction as well as the ability to “think different” for many days after the experience. Based on my experience, I often find myself saying, “It provides me with the mental benefits of a five-day vacation in just 90 minutes!”
I’ve never met an executive who wasn’t suffering from the negative side effects that come with shouldering the incredible amount of pressure that comes with the job. The benefits of feeling free from that burden, even for just a few hours, let alone days or weeks, is priceless.
Thinking differently and having mental flexibility, creativity, and emotional resilience are all critical competitive advantages that are dependent on your brain neuroplasticity. Over time, stress creates a reduction in neuroplasticity. Studies have shown that ketamine causes a measurable increase in neuroplasticity for 3 to 10 days after an experience. Clients who are experiencing increased neuroplasticity while working with one of our coaches and an NLP master practitioner receive exponentially better results than coaching alone.
To learn more about the pros and cons of ketamine, read this article on the Mindbloom.com website.
A Decade of Experience
Since 2010, I’ve coached around 75 clients who engaged with therapeutic psychedelics with expert guides during the same time they worked with me as their executive coach. (To be clear, I have never provided the psychedelics or guided the experience; I lead the coaching program during which the experience takes place.) Over the years, I have refined my process into a method that synergistically combines executive coaching frameworks with NLP techniques and psychedelic-assisted therapy experiences that reliably produce both life and career-changing results quickly. I’ve named my process the “Awake Forward Method.”