Together we will take an intimate journey into the inevitability of our own dying and death. Choosing to see one’s self, family members, friends, colleagues, competitors, strangers, pets—everyone and everything that breathes, as sharing this common bond of mortality tends to enhance relationship, increase trust and empathy, and support deeper happiness, better quality work, and greater competence, leading to an improved bottom line—whatever that may mean in your life. Program elements* may include:

• Developing openness and compassion—not in terms of surrendering the competitive edge, but in terms of how you engage, compete, and negotiate winning and losing
• Recognizing that denying mortality is not strategic
• Taking care of lifestyle issues that you can influence (diet & exercise, emotional, mental, and spiritual health, relationships, environment), strategically complementing the more common legal/financial concerns (insurance, wills, trusts, funeral homes, etc.)
• Deepening the awareness that the benefit of material/financial success, enjoyable as it can be, does not provide a lasting peace, and what to do with that awareness
• How, when and with whom you will die
• The myth of security
• Who you think you are, and who actually dies
• The Big Two and lots of little “practice deaths”
• Grief and mourning

We will journey directly and gently through our respective relationships with our own mortality. Faced with empirical evidence that, given enough time, everyone dies, we will explore the underlying tension within our plans for an uncertain future that may or may not include ongoing “success,” the retirement we’ve imagined, or even a next breath.

What You’ll Leave With: You will leave having experienced, and with ample resources for ongoing exploration of, the paradox of the “uncertain certainty” (we don’t know the details; we all die) that surrounds your own death. You will walk away, neither in denial nor with a morbid obsession/fascination of dying and death, but rather with a heightened awareness of both your mortality and how you may discriminate and choose to engage and embrace the coming years, months, weeks, days, hours and moments.

*We will engage some or all of these depending upon the length of the program.