Get Lit

Just listen. Why is it important to listen? If you ever take on any recovery work, you'll notice a lot of what makes that so potent, which is simply that people listen. You share, they thank you for your share, they listen, and then they move on.  In this episode, Adam Quiney narrated a scenario he witnessed when a person didn't get the opportunity to feel heard in any of this. What they've got was being told what to do over some time. Listen and know why just listening is very important and the difference it creates by just practicing the art of just listening. Enjoy the show!

Humans are incredibly adaptive and tolerant. We are very reliable just like a frog who sits in hot boiling water slowly but surely dying. We can tolerate things and as we tolerate them more, they just slowly shift and become our baseline. It's not until there's an acute moment in our lives that people reach out and ask for support.  This is related to the subject of the regression towards the mean, or a phenomenon that is studied extensively in skeptical communities and in scientific communities where it comes to the efficacy of anecdotal evidence, which is to say you take a remedy and you conclude based on your subjective feeling. Listen as Adam Quiney discusses this topic and what it means about your motivation for transformation and creating a shift. Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, join Adam Quiney for a powerful live coaching conversation with Ral West. Ral , an accomplished entrepreneur from Alaska, has built several businesses and is now launching an exciting new mastermind. In this episode, Adam and Ral explore a surprising realization: sometimes, what looks like a gap in our growth or goals simply isn't there. Rather than jumping in to offer advice or fill space, Adam models what it means to coach powerfully by reflecting the absence of a gap - and allowing that clarity to lead.

Have you heard of people who complain about people complaining? Why do people complain? In this episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney distinguished the three categories of people in terms of complaining:  The first group is those who don't care about things. Sometimes they complain, and sometimes they don't.  The next category is those people who complain about stuff.  The third category is those people who hate complaining and would never complain at all.  Some may think the last two categories are a total opposite, but they are not.  Listen as we dive deep into the ontology of complaining, how complaint is related to the idea of desire, and how we can be understanding to the part of us that wants to complain and other people who want to share their complaint with you. Enjoy the show!

When you are presented with someone who is boring, the first thing that happens is that you want to stop talking and lose interest in them. You start to turn your attention elsewhere and move away. Therefore, one of the consequences of being boring is that it turns people off to them. You have to ask these questions: Why would someone choose to become boring? Why would someone want me to look past them? There are many reasons you can't think of, and in this episode, Adam Quiney dives into the ontology of being boring and how to transcend boring people. Listen and enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, Adam Quiney hosts a Live Coaching and Feedback Demonstration with Mounica Veggelam and her client, Brian Piper.

What does it mean to stand? The stand is not a much-talked-about topic in leadership conversations. The art of standing is something that we learn not from a didactic or informational context, or just by knowing. It's more like about riding a bike. The way stand is best learned by having yourself stood for, and by getting to practice standing for people. By this, you get to see the internal experience in your own body and get the experience of someone loving you and holding you with compassion.  Listen as Adam Quiney, in this episode of The Transformational Leader, talks about the distinction of the stand, its importance in transformational conversation, and how it creates breakthroughs. Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, Adam Quiney discusses Theory vs. Practice.  

When people come into coaching or getting into leadership conversation, the starting point is a question of "What do you want to do?" One of the most common things leadership coaches hear is that people want to see their blind spots. The reason that being eager to see your blind spot is problematic is that inquiry allows you to avoid putting any skin in the game.  Listen as Adam Quiney talks about the fallacy of seeing a person's blind spot, and how you can put your attention on other things than focusing on seeing your blind spot. Enjoy the show!

In this episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney talks about the ontology of the empath. What does it mean to be an empath? The idea of the empath has become popular in the last 10 years. It is described as someone with a heightened ability to feel what others are feeling. Society has dismissed or bullied this trait in favor of a more emotionally detached and masculine approach. Listen as Adam dives deep into the ontology of the empath, the misconception of people about being an empath as feminine or weak, and contrary to this, empathy is an important trait. Enjoy the show!

Quiet quitting is when employees disengage and leave without a fuss. Employees seem fine on the surface and everything is good, then suddenly they disengage and leave. Leaders in this situation are often left feeling frustrated and powerless.  In this episode, Adam Quiney dives into the ontology of quiet quitting. What is going on with quiet quitting and what is happening below the surface? Listen as he explores this topic and answers questions like why leaders struggle with quiet quitting and how transformation can support a leader to address this properly. Enjoy the show!

In this episode of The Transformational Leader, we will get to know Donald Trump. Yes, you read it right. We get to know Trump on the ontological level, the service of addressing being rather than doing, being able to see things at a deeper level than just what we are doing on the surface and understanding things with a little bit more (0:22) depth and clarity. Everyone's favorite person at this point is Trump. It is either you love him or you hate him, and you probably aren't very keen on him, not very bland or beige on him. To distinguish Trump's ontology, we must look at him in a few ways and model a couple of things. Listen as we dive deep into this intriguing topic and see the ontology of Trump in a new perspective. Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, Adam Quiney discusses The Ontology of Play in High-Stakes Arenas, The Unjust Nature of Transformational Work, The Ontology of Readiness, Soft Power in Leadership, The Ontology of Motivation, The Ontology of Blame,  The Art of Unlearning, and more!

In this week's episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney, whose profession involves selling relationships with people, introduced a new concept on how to learn to sell.  A lot of entrepreneurs end up being stuck in the idea of not having to feel the context and pain they have around rejection. They are no longer conscious of these rejections, so instead of creating a breakthrough in what they are doing, they end up just creating a thick callous. In this episode, you will learn how to sell. In Adam Quiney's context, moving from that place of saying, "Let me know shortly if you would like a coaching conversation," to asking a straightforward question, "Do you want a coaching conversation with me?" From this, you can now stand for them to be a yes or no. This will allow you to be clear with yourself and with them on how you can provide value to them. Listen and know the right response to these situations, moving from the old context to the new context that will create a breakthrough. Enjoy the show! 

On this week's mid-week episode, join Adam Quiney for a very special conversation with David Hardy about the parallels between functional neurology and ontology.

If you are someone who does a lot of speaking and wants to be able to bring people along with you, this is an exceptional skill to develop, leading people's listening. When we are leading someone's listening, most of the time, we have an understanding of what we want to do, and then we just begin to speak from that place. What often happens is that people sit there listening, and they are stuck with the question in their mind: Why am I being told this? When we are given information like this, we don't have a context for our listening. How to lead someone's listening? How do leaders speak in such a way that they get heard? Why is it so important? Leading people's listening is a skill that effective leaders do. A skill, approach, or technique that those who do it often haven't been trained. Listen and know more about this topic as Adam Quiney dives deep into this! Enjoy the show! 

On this week's mid-week episode, join Adam Quiney for a very special conversation with special guest JoinMichèle Soregaroli, as they talk about all things related to living a fully-expressed life. Come join us.

In this episode, we will talk about politics. Politics is on the ontological side, which is the study and science of being. The being underneath the words that we say and do. Politics is a system by which every four years or so, is that there's an election. In that election, the public votes for whichever party or candidate runs for a specific position. Now, inside the system, the public votes and the votes get tallied, and that will be in power for the next four years.  The ideal of politics is the leader who is the purest, cleanest, and has the most integrity and all that rises to the top. A lot of us want that kind of leader. When someone doesn't play by those rules, we get outraged and frustrated. But the truth is, the rules are actually what wins the game. In the end, it is not about someone with the most integrity, purity, or honor. We end up inside the game of politics with whatever leader is best able to play the game.  You won't want to miss the discussion about the ontology of politics and how we can relate to it in our everyday lives. Enjoy the show!

In this episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney discusses the ontology of reframing. He will briefly explain what is the ontological thing happening when we reframe. Reframing is about choosing how we want to relate to the circumstances of our lives. Most people frame the way they approach, feel about, and relate to life as it shows up.  What a lot of us want to do is figure out how to manage life perfectly, so that we only have to be with the people we find enjoyable or the job that we like doing. In short, we are basically trying to manage the circumstances of our lives to feel the way we want to feel. It will never work because life is infinite and will continue to find ways in. We can never fully control our circumstances, so trying to manage them puts us on the back foot.  Listen as Adam talks about the good side of reframing or when it is empowering and supportive, as well as the risk of making this like a duality of things. Enjoy the show!

As a leader or coach, the time you are going to stand up for people to go beyond their comfort zone also means that some might get triggered and confronted. In short, you are going to piss or upset people. The only way we can ensure we never upset people is to keep ourselves quiet. Being upset is part of the abundance of a fully expressed life. In this episode, Adam Quiney tells you why being upset has to be part of leadership, and what it means to be a leader that embraces upset as part of leadership. You will hear more about the ontology of upset in this podcast, listen and enjoy the show!

Today, Adam Quiney will be talking about one of the big breakthroughs that he had to create for himself along the way; it is about making 'The Path and A Path.'  'The Path vs A Path' is a fundamental trap of leadership. Most people into coaching and leadership are on the wrong side of the distinction between 'The Path' and 'A Path.' The nature of our human experience is that we are prone to arrogance, which is given to us by virtue of our own subjective experience. We think that our experiences are the ones that people also must have because of the success we had in them. Listen as Adam shares more about this topic and gain a unique view of someone's breakthrough through a million ways of doing it. Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, join Adam Quiney for a very special conversation with special guests, Seth Drugatz and Maggie Buchana.  In this episode, they dive into exploring the topic of possibility.

Live from a retreat location in Costa Rica, Adam Quiney talks about one of the things they do at the start of the retreat which is establishing breakthroughs. In this episode, Adam revisits the concept of a breakthrough which is often a missed concept and poorly understood.  How do we make breakthroughs happen? What most people think about breakthroughs is the things that they will get or the tangible results of it. We define our breakthroughs in terms of the outside world and our circumstances. This is not a very powerful way to define a breakthrough.  In ontological leadership, we work with breakthroughs in a different way. The specific definition of breakthrough is access to a new way of being.  Listen and learn more about breakthroughs, their misconceptions of them, and the kind of breakthrough we look forward to at a retreat. Enjoy the show!  

The first stumbling block for most of us is that we get very caught off in facts. The facts will be the same, and we can do nothing about those.  Whatever story we tell ourselves, it will have an impact on our energy, motivation, and intentionality, and what we see is possible and impossible. The results we can create, the way we thrive or struggle in life, and the experience we have of life are all functions of our relationship to what is happening. In this episode, we will focus on how we will just not listen to the circumstances but on how we can relate to those circumstances. We also get to distinguish the idea of a conversation for survival versus a conversation for transformation. Listen and enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, join Adam Quiney for a very special conversation with special guest, Hans Phillips.  In this episode, they dive into talking about all things life, leadership and everything in between.

In this episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney talks about practicing the fact that you won't always get things right. He also talks about working with the fact that you are not going to get something right, and why not getting it right actually supports you in transforming. Usually, early on, people will explore things that they want to try and commit to move their lives forward and take on some practices.  Most of the time, the things we expect are not always the things that happen, and many people relate to that as a failure. You actually end up in the place that you think you shouldn't be and would rather avoid.  The miracle of coaching is that it brings you to that place, what shows up, and how you move beyond it. That's where the transformation starts! Listen to learn more about this topic, and enjoy the show!

What a great opening statement for 2025! In the first episode of the Transformational Leader for this year, Adam Quiney talks about this essential aspect of your journey in leadership. The journey of developing yourself as a leader through the experience of being with someone whose leadership is genuinely something they've worked on and spent time honing. When you work with a leader who has been managed for many years, the first thing you will see is their wisdom, skill, and capacity for leadership. You will hold them up in high regard and set aside yourself in honor of them. You will be glamoured by this experience, and you will stop seeing your leaders as human doing their best, but more special than that. The complication of this is once you trust your leaders fully, it will swing to the other side and just go with yourself.  This is the point where there is usually a breakdown, and what's going to happen no matter what is that your leader will continually let you down. The more you hold them on a pedestal, the more often they are going to let you down.  Listen and know more about this topic, enjoy the show!

Simply put, committing to something greater than yourself means having a mission, purpose, and commitment that goes beyond your own human contrivances. However, most people tend to make commitments from their internal state—their moods, feelings, and what their present to at the moment. While not committing to something greater than yourself can seem harmless, it can actually do significant harm. For starters, it can make you spiritually fat. It can also make you lose your vitality. What impact will this have on your leadership? What should you do about it? We'll get to the bottom of things in this episode, so don't forget to join me!

In this episode, I'll dive deep into the concept of polarity and how it can show up in relationships including your leadership. The ability to distinguish between the 2 energies—the masculine and feminine—can give you a clear idea of how to lead in a way that creates polarity. How do you distinguish and embody both aspects so it benefits your leadership? How can you make awareness of this concept work for you? I'll discuss all these and more in today's episode, so don't miss it!

To create a truly transformational leadership, you need to have access to new possibilities. Distinctions are tools that can give you access to new possibilities. In addition, distinctions will also allow you to cut through all the thought and make a decision right away as opposed to wasting time analysing things. In this episode, I'll talk about 5 distinctions that will help you lead and how you can use them to move your leadership forward. You'll learn powerful insights in today's episode, so don't forget to tune in!

While unfortunate to note, many people (including powerful leaders), assume not honouring their word is harmless. However, if truth be told, not keeping your word has a significant impact not only in your life but in your leadership as well. When you don't honour and keep your word, you end up losing people's trust both in you as a person and as a leader. So what makes honouring your word challenging? Why is keeping your word a crucial component of a powerful leadership? And how do you stay true to your word? Please join me as I discuss the answers to those questions and more in this episode!

There are three kinds of conversations that we usually see in coaching and leadership. These are neutral conversations, facilitative conversations, and transformational conversations. Transformational conversations are the type of conversation that most people get into coaching for. It is more of seeing your blind spots. Inside a transformational conversation, we are entering into the context that there are some things that you simply cannot see with your own eyes.  Facilitative conversation tends to be more of the steps you need to take. After the transformational conversation, the facilitative conversation aims to give you direction. This part of coaching can feel very confronting because it moves you into your fear.  Lastly, a neutral conversation is a conversation where the person basically doesn't have a gap. In this situation, we need to get curious about ourselves, and what are the things you need to happen in your life. Listen as Adam Quiney gives clear illustrations and examples for these kinds of conversations! Enjoy the show! 

On this week's mid-week episode, join Adam Quiney for a conversation on Resistance —the hidden force that holds us back from our next level of leadership. Tune in now to explore how resistance shows up, its impact, and strategies for transformation.

Do you ever find that e-mails are overwhelming? Do you ever find yourself with a never-ending list of things to do? This system will help you manage that! It is an approach designed to help you stay on top of these tasks.  In this episode, Adam Quiney talks about The Weekly Review. The Weekly Review is a core part of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology created by productivity consultant David Allen. The intention of doing a weekly review is to get on top of and manage all of the papers, e-mails, notes, messages, and all other stuff accumulating throughout the week. Through this, you will stay on track of things you find overwhelming. Listen to Adam explain all the important aspects of The Weekly Review in this episode! Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, join Adam Quiney for a very special conversation with special guest, Kraye Grymonnt.  In this episode, they dive into talking about all things ontology.

In this episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney distinguishes between trusting yourself versus being impenetrable. It is important to see the distinction between these two because they can look similar on the surface. A lot of leaders in the world believe that they are showing signs of trusting themselves. But the reality is that they are showing up in a particular way that is actually the antithesis of trusting themselves—they are the opposite of it. That is impenetrability. Impenetrability is where you have a belief or way of being in the world where you show up, and others can say anything to you because you trust yourself. It cannot make an impact on you because no matter what other people say, it just bounces off of you. Impenetrability or the inability of people to make an impact on you is a sign of a lack of trust. It is a sign of a lack of sovereignty. Listen and know more about this topic! 

Procrastination is something that most of us have a particular context around, and that context around procrastination is that it is like a problem we have. Statements like, "I just need to overcome my procrastination." What we do is create a separate entity called procrastination that we have.  The idea here about procrastination is that it is simply a form of resistance. There are a million reasons you might be resisting something. We procrastinate, and ultimately, it is a form of resistance. When we start to look at resistance, it becomes very simple. Listen and know more about procrastination and how it becomes an active form of resistance. While you are procrastinating, you are aware that you are not doing a thing. You are aware that you are choosing to do something different than that thing that is a bit scary. It is more of a form of passive resistance. Enjoy the show!

In this episode, Adam Quiney talks about the ontology of being always right.   Anytime you've been around a leader who always got the answer or is always right, that's the ontology or the way of being that we are going to talk about. It is a way of being that is automatic and unconscious.   The way of being of being right. These are the leaders that if you volunteer something, they are already aware of it. They already know that. The underlying experience that this creates is that there is no way for you to actually have an impact; everything you bring bounces off.    While this is nice in that it provides a degree of certainty, like the leader always knows how to handle the situation, it creates the rest of us as followers because there is nothing we can really contribute. There is nothing we have to offer.   Listen as you will know the impact of being right. Enjoy the show!

How to catch and reflect on someone's impact? How to provide feedback? It is a big issue in leadership not only because a lot of people simply avoid providing feedback but the other thing that happens is that people give feedback, but it does not land. The impact someone is having is the way how they are showing up, and what they are doing lands on other people. We are continually having our impact even when we go out of our way to not have an impact. We always have an impact. Sometimes, our impact in service is in alignment with our intention, and other times, we have one intention but our impact is different. Those are the times when feedback is most important because if our intention is out of alignment with our impact, we've got a problem. That's what we mean by catching and reflecting on someone's impact. Listen and know how we can catch and reflect on someone's impact. Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, Adam is discussing two topics provided by our community: 1. How to support clients through recognizing patterns in their life, Navigating difficult conversations with colleagues, and taking yourself out of coaching and being fully present with the client (i.e., not leading them based on your own "stuff.") and 2. Relationship with the unknown. Whether it is something small unknown I meet with in my daily life, or I have something big (in my mind) unknown coming for me or I am going towards something unknown so far for me. I believe we all have the unknown with us under some form. 

In this episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney talks about the metaphors of transformation. This episode will help you understand why transformation is challenging and what we are working with, in terms of our human nature when we are up against that. Human nature is to experience a problem and want to solve it. That's what humans do. The trouble is we can't see with much altitude in our lives. We can see it with other people, but in terms of ourselves, we are stuck inside our perspective and our worldview. What that means is we don't see our beliefs as a set of beliefs. Instead, we see them as reality. Listen and know the metaphors you can relate to in terms of transformation as a leader. Enjoy the show!

Today, Adam Quiney shared some of the things he noticed and learned from the Intensive. The intention is to create breakthroughs not just for those who attended but also for Adam and the team. Most people see a breakthrough as an insight. The meaning of breakthrough, in Adam and his team's lenses, is access to a new way of being that was previously unavailable while a person's circumstances remain the same. The work of any transformational approach is to confront your resistance to what you fear. Whatever you want that is not currently available to you is locked behind the door made up of your fear and resistance to that fear. Listen and learn more of the lessons from the Intensive. Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, Adam is live coaching Amy Armstrong, around distinguishing around where she began versus where she is now, in addition to concepts about boundaries, breakdowns and breakthroughs.

If you had a bad start to the day, you are wrapped up in the story of what a shitty day is. As you go with the rest of the day, you will look at things to justify that it is indeed a shitty day. Generating the event in yourself how you want to experience it requires some energetic input.  Generating as a leader is the act of choosing how we will be and showing up in alignment with that. It sounds like a trait, but it is more about our state of being.  In an event like getting stuff done, there is a default way that will show that you are tired, exhausted, and not excited about what you have to do. With this, you are entirely justified, and no one could criticize you. That is not the experience of the event you are committed to creating. Listen and know more about the art of generating and how it matters for us leaders! Enjoy the show!

On this week's mid-week episode, Adam is live coaching Kacie Martin, around the process of creating Possibility, offering practical insights you can apply to your own leadership journey. Don't miss this chance to see transformation in action!

If you've ever found yourself in a situation where you do a lot of research and try to get the answer but can never seem to find it, this episode is for you! As a child, we are taught to trust our paths and learn by failing. We understand how to move through life by doing crazy stuff.  As we age, we will meet people who want to keep an eye on our future and will help us grow on how most people are going. What happens is, that instead of being invited to discover our path and giving us space to do so, we are asked to do what society tells us is the right thing to do. We are taught to shift our desire with collective wisdom and understanding. Because of this, instead of trusting ourselves, we follow what other people would say is good for us. We start to look for an internal answer. Listen as you learn more what are the consequences of the need for the right answer, and what can we do about it. Enjoy the show!

"My life is already super busy and I have very few precious resources to manage time to practice." Practice is a concept that gets used a lot in coaching, sports and meditation. It comes into play whenever there is something in life that we want to improve, change, shift and develop in ourselves. Before we go to practice, this is not typically our default way of approaching stuff especially when it comes to something like changing ourselves. Instead, we have a default context or approach to how we relate to life. In this episode, we will talk about the ontology of practice. We will dive into the ontology of what it is to practice. Enjoy the show!

In the concluding part of The Heartbreak of Leadership series, we will discuss a person who doesn't know where to stand in their leadership process. To summarize our previous episodes, in Part 1, we talked about the heartbreak of leadership from your perspective as a leader standing for the people you are leading. In the second part, we talked about the experience of developing your leadership and how it goes when you have a leader who is not doing their work and putting it on to you. In this episode, we will focus on the stand that the leader is 100% responsible for how things have unfolded. Enjoy the show!

In the previous episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam Quiney talks about the heartbreak of leadership. The heartbreak of leadership occurs as you are leading someone, and they turn against you, fight with you, and argue with you. Today, we will look at the other angle. We can't see the new dimension. All we can do is pull whenever someone is trying to help us see beyond our current worldview. All we can do is pull that into our worldview. The whole process of leadership transformation starts here. You start getting very inspired and excited and suddenly, it will direct us back towards the world we know. What happens over time is we see our failure and not see our results.  This is where the heartbreak of leadership begins. Listen to know more and enjoy the show!

The heartbreak of leadership is a function of the fact that, as a leader, your job is to have a little more altitude than those whose leadership you are developing. Altitude is the ability to see a little bit more of the picture, like a coach, than the players on the court can. With this altitude, the leader can see a little bit more of a bigger picture. As a leader, you will be able to see something that these people are not. Your job is to develop their capacity to rise and see that. That will happen in the face of their former strategy to cut down the tree and in the face of human resistance that will pull them back to what they know. There are chances that leaders might take this personally like you are not good at leadership or doing a bad job developing them. Leaders can also project that they are unable to take leadership development and are not candidates for leadership.  Listen and know how heartbreak works, how that is created, and what happens. Enjoy the show!

Conversation for transformation and conversation for survival are two important distinct conversations valuable when leading, coaching, and supporting someone. In this episode, we will see the distinctions between these two types of conversations. Some distinctions include conversation for transformation is different from our default conversation or the conversation we operate regularly in our daily lives. Our daily life is a conversation really for survival. It is a conversation about what is going on with your life and what you have to do. A conversation for transformation is a conversation that exists in the realm of possibility, and that possibility is everything outside of what is already predictable for you to have. When we engage beyond the transformational conversation, we are stepping beyond the balance of "here's why I can't do that." There are more things to learn about this topic, so listen and enjoy the show!