This post is a part of a series to document the Hive Global Leaders Program that I went through in San Francisco, March 2014.   The other posts in this series are posted below
Introduction
Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Day 1 (Your World)
Day 2 (Your life) 
Day 3 (Your Org)
Conclusion

Day 2 (Your Life)
After a refreshing morning yoga session, the Hive participants reconvened for the second day's program.  The focus of the second day's program was our unique lives, dreams and purposes.  We were provided with a workbook called "Designing Your Life" and were guided by Ryan to work through the self-reflection exercises individually.  Here are a number of questions that the workbook asked us to reflect on

• What do you really love doing? 
• What does humanity need? 
• How can I create what humanity needs while doing what I love? 
• What are my personal financial goals? 
• How can I create what humanity needs while meeting my financial goals? 
• Describe the world you want to see in 2050.
• I will be a force of energy in the world dedicated to…
• Simply stated, my life purpose is… (15 words or less, can be understood by a 5th grader)
• How might I make this happen
• My desired way of being will be...
• How will others remember what I'm up to? 

After drafting the initial versions of our life purposes, we got on the big bus to a mysterious location (turned out to be Bernal Heights Park) to complete the last portion of our workbook (again, in solitude).  As I sat on the slanted hill overlooking rolls of beautiful Victorian houses sprawling throughout the city, I entered a quiet and peaceful space within myself and contemplated all my hopes and dreams and what kind of steps I would need to take to get there.  After drafting out our life time, 10-year, 1-year and 90-day goals and action plans, we came back together as a group and enjoyed a beautiful lunch underneath the sun while chatting optimistically about our plans and futures with each other.  

Real Food (Rebecca Jean Alonzi, Rebecca Jean Catering) 

The afternoon session started with a presentation from Rebecca Jean Alonzi, a former Hive participant, about real food (usually defined as natural, organic and/or locally grown food that is good for your health).  I unfortunately missed majority of the presentation because I was scheduled for a free chair massage the Hive program provided, which was wonderful of course.  Nonetheless, I caught the beginning of Rebecca's talk and heard her inspirational story of evolving from a line cook to starting her own very successful catering business (her business is 5-star on yelp, which is quite telling).  There it was another tenacious individual who is so passionate about what she does that she never gave up on working hard to achieving her dreams.  I was yet inspired again. 

Mindfulness & Presence for Global Change Makers (Rich Fernandez, Wisdom Labs) 

The last talk of the day was delivered by Rich Fernandez, a trained psychologist, on mindfulness and presence.  Rich shared some neuroscience-backed theory behind mindfulness and how our brains work under stress.  More importantly, he guided us through a couple of mindfulness exercises which definitely brought a sense of peacefulness and self-awareness to the room.  Below are a couple of takeaways that I jotted down from this session.  

• Mindfulness practice improves response flexibility: simple mindfulness practices such as focused breathing creates space between stimulus and response, and thus, provides us the opportunity to choose our response.  

I particularly enjoyed this talk because of my interests in meditation, mindfulness and human psychology.  It was also encouraging to see other participants, many of whom did not know much about medication, try mindfulness practices with openness and curiosity.  

The day ended with us taking the bus over the bay bridge to treasure island for an impromptus dance party under the "dancing lady" sculpture, a sunset sing-a-long and a delicious dinner at a trendy winery venue.  We conversed into late night over deliciously prepared 3-course dinner and constant flow of wine.  Personally, I met more individuals that I hadn't got a chance to talk to during the past two days and had some heart-to-heart coaching conversations.  Positive energy and bright-eyed optimism fueled the entire evening.  It felt good to be a part of it.  

Read about my experiences during the other days at Hive
Introduction
Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Day 1 (Your World)
Day 2 (Your life) 
Day 3 (Your Org)
Conclusion

This post is a part of a series to document the Hive Global Leaders Program that I went through in San Francisco, March 2014.   The other posts in this series are posted below
Introduction
Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Day 1 (Your World)
Day 2 (Your life) 
Day 3 (Your Org)
Conclusion

Day 1 (Your World)
Saturday started bright early at 8:30am at Change.org's headquarter in Potrero Hill.  I felt very lucky that I live in the city and can easily roll out of bed to attend the program.  Many participants flew in from cities all across the country including one lady coming from Uganda just to attend the program.  Among us were an intelligence officer who just came back from Afghanistan, an activist who changed policy for disabled people in Ghana, several serial entrepreneurs who had successfully built many companies, a designer with deep expertise in story-telling, a 24-year old HBS dropout pursuing her dream career in SF, a scientist from NASA, a few directors of non-profits, a finance expert from South Sudan, several innovative educators and me, a recovering management consultant who is building up a business in personal and leadership coaching.  Participants at the program ranged from 21 to 39 with the average age of 29 and a half.  Throughout our 2-minute long introductions, I felt a sense of youthfulness as well as maturity among the crowd (although I know how strange this might sound).  Youthfulness is represented by the hopefulness and eagerness for action among the group, while maturity points to the thoughtfulness and self-awareness of many participants, especially the seemly younger ones.  I was both impressed and humbled by this group.  

We started the day with some healthy breakfast and a 20-min yoga workout, which was very refreshing and grounding.  Today's sessions were all about developing a better understanding of the world and how we can make our contributions to make this world a better place.  Below is a complete (as much as I could recall based on memory) list of the sessions from Day1's program and my attempt at capturing some of the highlights and key learning.  

Design a Better World (by Ryan Allis)

This session centered around the concept of "the original position" and "the veil of ignorance" , features of John Rawl's theory of Justice.  We started by breaking into our small groups and imagined ourselves as souls before our births, not knowing where in the earth we would be born into.  We were given the task of coming up with the 2-3 principals of the world as a group.  Many things came up during this exercise, respect, love, trust, abundance, fairness, just to name a few.  I think the idea was to help us understand from a philosophical level what type of world we would like to create as compassionate human beings.  While I was not familiar with John Rawl's philosophy, I thought the session did create a nice grounding for some of the later conversations. 

Tacking Human Progress (by Ryan Allis)

During this session Ryan introduced to us a number of key performance indicators that he and his team came up with to measure human progress.  The detail of the framework can be seen here.  One of the key discussion points of this session was that the advancement of human progress in areas such as health, peace and economics seems to come at the expense of a deteriorating environment.  One participant used the analogy of "re-arranging the furniture on the Titanic" to illustrate the danger and concern for where human being is heading towards.  We also discussed the inter-relatedness between these metrics, the limitation of these high level metrics (individual community not feeling the progress described) and other metrics could be complimentary to this framework. 

The Future of Science & Technology (by Aaron Frank, Singularity University)

I knew nothing about Singularity University before Aaron's talk.  After learning about this organization and the projects they work on, two words stood out to me, "exponential" and "technology".  According to its website, Singularly University's mission is to "educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges".  They run executive educational programs, graduate programs as well as other innovation focused conferences and programs to accelerate technology to address humanity's biggest problems.  Aaron walked us through the evidence of exponential technology growth and showcased the type of technology innovations in clean energy, nanotech, genomics, neuroscience, big data, etc.  After watching IBM's Watson using machine learning capabilities to beat other jeopardy contestants and hearing about lab grown leather bags and hamburgers, we were left to ponder in awe and some level of fear of this exponential growth.  I was not the only who felt a little scared of this anticipated rapid growth of technological innovation.  I could not help but wonder about what this all meant for human beings and the world.  Too bad that we ran out of time for a nice debate around this topic.  

Using Business for Scalable & Sustainable Change (Ben Rattray, CEO, Change.org) 

In this session, we learned about Ben's story building Change.org.  Like most entrepreneurs, Ben's journey of triumph was preceded by lots of failure, heartbreaks and difficult times.  It was encouraging to hear that he stuck to what he believes in and continued to pursue his purpose no matter what happened.  A couple of key learning points that stood out for me.  

• See failure as learning opportunities with potentials for growth.  Sometimes, because you failed, you worked harder and ended up achieving things you would not have achieved if you did not fail earlier.  Illustrated by the graph below. 

• In general, work on something you are so passionate about, even if you fail, you will be proud that you tried.  
• Choosing between for-profit and non-profit for your mission-driven company is a pragmatic choice.  Instead of thinking about revenue as a separate, annoying thing that you have to deal with, think of it as an integral part of your mission.  How can you pursue revenue that can advance your mission? 

Rapid Prototyping (by Tom Chi, Google X, Mango Labs, Factory, and other things) 

In my opinion (and many Hivers would agree with me as well), this was the best talk of the day.  This is not just because the content was so innovative and ground-breaking, it is because Tom Chi is one of the smartest yet one of the most humble people that I have ever encountered.  I think half of the class became his fan after his short 20 minute presentation.  You can learn more about Tom and hear his talk at Ted-Ed below about how he led user experience design for Google Glass.  In his short 20 minute talk, Tom shared with us his experience using rapid prototyping techniques to innovate at Google X and many different social innovation projects that he had been involved with.  He also shared with us some of his thoughts and life philosophies around innovation, human psychology and social change.  Some of the key takeaways from his talks include

• Doing is the best kind of thinking.  
• Maximize rate of learning, minimize the time to try new things. 
• When encountering failure, focus on the 15% that worked well instead of the part that didn't work.  This will help your brain avoid rejecting the whole experience and foster positivity and creativity which is conductive for future success.  

• Think before I do = 100% optimization on 20% of variables
  
• Do before I think = discover 70% of variables along the way of trying 
  
• Social change (or any form of behavioral change) requires shift in mindset.  
  
• Identity is the enemy of possibility, therefore, we should hold both loosely.  (For Tom Chi, he changes jobs/positions every few years, as a process in destroying his identity and discover new possibilities).  

Tom left Google X a while ago (as part of the destroying identity process I would guess) to pursue his passion of solving the world's biggest social problems.  He is currently working on using rapid prototyping techniques to help launch 10 (or more?) companies in a year globally to address social issues.  A group of us signed up to help Tom with his book writing project which aims to share his ideas, philosophies and life lessons with the world.  Having read draft content from a few chapters, I was again impressed with his wisdom and I very much look forward to the outcome of this project.   

How to Start a Global Movement (by Jenny Sauer-Klein, AcroYoga, the Movement Blueprint) 

Jenny is the founder of AcroYoga, a movement and a community of physical practice that combine yoga and acrobatics.   After a number of years of being the "queen" of AcroYoga and creating a global community of tens of thousands of participants, Jenny decided to leave the movement and start a new phase of her life.  She shared with us the challenges she faced letting her "baby" go, seeing her movement continue to flourish after her departure, and finding her new purpose in life through teaching others about starting their own movements.  You can find some of the basic steps of her movement blueprint on her website.  I simply thought she had an amazing story building up AcroYoga and I applaud her for being able to leave her legacy behind and create new identity for herself.  

Disconnect to Reconnect (by Levi Felix, Campgrounded, Digital Detox) 

I knew this was going to be a unique session because the first thing Levi asked us to do was to take a selfie with a strange face and posted on Facebook.  Here is the picture I shared on my timeline. 

We were then asked to leave our phone at our chair and go out for a walk.  Bathed in the warm and beautiful afternoon sun of San Francisco, the fifty of us ran around on a patch of green grass and played a silly game like school children.  "We should take a picture of this!" someone burst out only realizing a second later that none of us had our phone with us.  How ironic that in our modern day of technology, "capturing and sharing within our social media" becomes more important than "staying present and savoring the goodness right in front of our eyes". 

After an exhilarating 15 minutes of laughing and playing and running, we sat in the grass and learned about Levi's personal journey evolving from an overworked start-up executive on the brink of breaking down to someone whose life purpose is to help others unplug and stay connected with each other on a human level.  Levi's story deeply resonated with me as I reflected on my semi-addictive behavior with technology.  I made a mental note in my mind that I would try to implement one "unplug" day per weekend with my husband so that we could spend more time being present with each other.

Dinner/Reception 

Our first day ended with a casual cocktail/dinner at Ian Ross Gallery, a beautiful art gallery in SOMA.  As we exchanged thoughts around today's learning over delicious dumplings and sliders, I felt a sense of hopefulness, optimism and a strong eagerness to take action.  It was amazing that in one day, we learned about the fascinating future of technology, thought about how we can take small yet quick actions to create change or a movement, felt the liberation of unplugging and made genuine face-to-face connections with one another.  Many of us were very impressed with the caliber of speakers from the first day and we all looked forward to the next two days' programs.  

Read about my experiences during the other days at Hive
Introduction
Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Day 1 (Your World)
Day 2 (Your life) 
Day 3 (Your Org)
Conclusion

This post is a part of a series to document the Hive Global Leaders Program that I went through in San Francisco, March 2014.   The other posts in this series are posted below
Introduction
Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Day 1 (Your World)
Day 2 (Your life) 
Day 3 (Your Org)
Conclusion

Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Early Friday evening, I arrived at the "Starship", a 4+story house in upper market which is also the headquarter of Ryan's start-up, Connect.  Upon entering the door, I immediately met a couple of very interesting people who were well-traveled and brought interesting stories to the conversations.  More impressively, they seemed to be genuinely interested in my story as well. As more people poured into the grand multi-level house, the vibe felt incredibly open and kind. 

After a brief introduction from the organizers, we were divided into 7 groups.  Each group had a separate dining area and was called upon one by one to get dinner.  I no longer can recall the details about the food because I was quite engaged in our dinner conversations, but I remember the food being delicious and the meal ended with some yummy chocolate truffles.  

My group of 7 hailed from countries as far as Guatemala and Australia.  We were in various different fields spanning from Food industry to Transportation to Psychology.  While everybody came to the program wanting to meet other inspiring people, each of us seemed to have a slight twist to what we wanted to get out of the program.  Some of us wanted to start a social enterprise and was looking for specific knowledge/skills while others came to learn more about themselves and expand their horizons.  I was struck by the diversity of our group and started to get more and more excited about what awaits me in the next 3 days.  

After dinner, our group facilitator, Evan, instructed us to do a "share your life story in 5 minutes" exercise.  I had done this type of exercise before in coaching classes and other programs.  I knew willingness to be open and vulnerable is the key for this type of bonding experience to be authentic and effective.  Thankfully, Evan provided just the right instructions.  We were asked to bring our full presence and listen deeply.  We were also asked to share a little more than we are usually willing to share with strangers and speak what comes to mind.  As a result, we went beyond the usual "accomplishments-filled" life stories and shared where we came from, how others influenced us and how we became who we are today.  As I listened to everyone's story, often composed of both struggles and triumphs, I started to see the common thread that linked us together.  We were all here because we yearned for something, something bigger than our past and our current job title or organization.  I guess you can call it a dream, a vision or a life purpose.  

The night ended with a small group of us breathing the crisp evening air on the roof-top of the "starship", gazing at the shimmering city lights of downtown San Francisco in the distance.  I could not wait to see how the next three days unfold. 

Read about my experiences during the other days at Hive
Introduction
Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Day 1 (Your World)
Day 2 (Your life) 
Day 3 (Your Org)
Conclusion

During the past weekend, I attended a new leadership program in San Francisco called Hive Global Leaders Program.  The idea for Hive originated in August 2013 and its first ever Global Leaders Program was held in January 2014.  I learned about the program from Smiley, a friend of a friend, who serves as the emcee and a facilitator for the program.  I remember looking into Hive's website and being intrigued by this new format of leadership development.  However, I was still a little bit hesitant about paying $750 for a three day program which was only being run for the 2nd time.  I poked around the website more and then decided to give it a try because I respected the founding team members Ryan Allis and Adam Pumm.  Their profiles seem impressive and Ryan, in particular, attended HBS.  As much as I liked the content Ryan created on a number of topics and shared freely on Hive's website, I still had reservation about this guy.  Is he a big-ego, type-A, HBS stereotype?  After-all, he did post his HBS class photo on Hive and created an 823 slide presentation on life lessons at the age of 28.  With all my curiosity and reservations, I applied to the program. 

Fast forward to the end of the 3-day program, standing on the roof of a co-working building in SOMA, surrounded by 50 amazing people who I got to know quite deeply over the past 3 days, I felt inspired and hopeful.  I was so glad that I stumbled upon Hive, was lucky enough to get in, and as a result, became a part of this extraordinary community.  The following several posts is my account of this amazing experience. 

Read about my experiences at the other days of Hive
Introduction
Day 0 (Welcome Reception)
Day 1 (Your World)
Day 2 (Your life) 
Day 3 (Your Org)
Conclusion