Leading Like A Futurist With Cecily Sommers

How do you know what to do when you do not know what to do? Cecily Sommers is here to offer you the tools to think and lead like a futurist, giving your life that much-needed clarity and direction. Joining Tony Martignetti, she shares how she navigated several career transitions with confidence and positivity, transcending the world of dance, anatomy, physiology, chiropractic, and business consultancy. Cecily talks all about her book, Think Like A Futurist, which explores the most valuable life lessons that shaped her own journey. Tune in as she takes a deep dive into the importance of understanding your purpose, gearing up for uncertainties, and being open to constant change and transformation.

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Leading Like A Futurist With Cecily Sommers

Introducing Cecily Sommers

It is my pleasure to introduce you to my guest, Cecily Sommers. There's only one thing Cecily loves more than solving big sticky innovation problems for some of the world's greatest brands. That's getting others excited about doing it for themselves as a strategist that Google, Salesforce, Purina, and JP Morgan Chase turned to make sense of their future. Cecily is also a renowned speaker and author who helps leaders explore big questions like, which opportunities give us the most advantage?

How do we break our addiction to certainty? How can we lead like a futurist? I just love those questions. Her book, Think Like a Futurist was nominated for the Most Significant Futures Work in Methods and Practice Award. She has been named one of the world's top 50 female futurists by Forbes. She is a two-time TEDx contributor and a frequent speaker at events and conferences worldwide.

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I'd love to introduce you to my wonderful guest. Cecily, thank you so much for coming to the show.

I'm feeling the toasty warmth already, Tony. Thank you for the invitation.

I'm thrilled to have you here. I truly loved your book. I loved your insights and just the way that you're bringing your thoughts into the world. I'm really looking forward to unpacking the journey that got you to this work. That's what we're going to do and have a fun conversation. First of all, where are you located?

I live here in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Thank you for sharing that. That's always good to know where people are coming, where people are located, and where they're settling into their place. Obviously, you're all over the place. You're showing up in different places along the world. Thank you. We're going to get started with the big questions of the day, which are these, what are the flash points that have revealed your gifts into the world? What that means is we're going to give you a space to share these moments that have defined your gifts. Along the way, we'll pause and see what themes are showing up. Are you ready to share some of those moments?

Early Life And Inspiration

I am. I have an interesting story. I certainly didn't imagine I was going to be a futurist when I grew up. In fact, the first thing that I wanted to be when I was young was a dancer. That is a dream that I pursued. I've really taken a lot of life lessons from the several reinventions that have occurred for me in my life. That first call and pull towards dance occurred to me when I was five years old. I saw that my friends and neighbors, Elise and Anne are getting into the car a couple of times a week with their hair wound tightly in buns and they had their leotards on.

Without knowing what it was, I just was like, “That.” I actually have a phrase that I use, Tony, that's called like that, like kind of a navigational tool, sometimes our senses will indicate the direction first and we don't really know what it means. What I take that to be an indicator of is that not only is it like that, it's like me. There's something in me that's being like, I'm recognizing myself. I went on to start taking classes at Madame Farrar's dance studio in Evanston, Illinois, where I did most of my childhood growing up years.

That work just going in and doing the plies and tendus and all of that over the years contributed to my sense of really finding myself early. While I no longer dance, I am very much a dancer to my core in the sensibilities and embodied energies. When I say dancer, I also mean artist. I think that I move through the world as an artist. I think it's a lot of what I bring to my work today as a futurist. That was really the first goal. As I continued to grow in my training, it landed me at the Interlochen Arts Academy for my junior and senior years in high school onto my first job with Omaha Ballet.

There was something else that was also pulling at me around the same time. That is just a real hunger to know more about the world. Very specifically an image of Paris Salon and Gertrude Stein sitting around the piano with all of the artists, musicians, writers, and luminaries of the time who were challenging their own thinking without intending it moving the world forward. There was another like that for me, like that is how I want to live my life and I want to be among all of those disciplines and discoveries. I have several turning points on my journey and I can just ask you right now, Tony. Would you like me to continue and do the full journey or do you want me to pause here?

Let's pause for a moment because I like to take in some of the juiciness of what you shared and just react. There are so many things that you've already tapped into, which are just so wonderful. First of all, what you just visualized for me is a sense of the Renaissance, everything happening and coming together, but wanting to be part of that movement of taking us forward to change challenging thinking, not just in one discipline across multiple different disciplines and seeing that we don't have to be held into just one place. I love the movement you started with to this idea of like that it's almost to me, I think of it as more of this, please. Just bring more of that into my life.

What often gets in the way is that we sometimes have reality strike us and we get hit in the face and say, “No, you cannot do that, you cannot have that.” It's challenging that a lot of people stop themselves, but instead, you kept on moving forward into this path and said, “No, I'm not going to allow my inner compass, my inner yearning of that thing that I see that I want. I'm not going to let that flame die out. I'm going to continue to follow that thread and know that this is my passion. It's what I'm meant for.” That's not easy. I know that you're going to probably share more about that as you go on, but I think there's a sense of how do you continue to keep that spark going.

Thank you for acknowledging all of that. I will preview for you that one of my key phrases is that the future. Now I'm moving forward to where I am in my life now, but I'm bridging this is the future is not figured outable. It is only followable. What we're really wanting to cultivate is knowing what to follow and how to follow it.

The future is not figure-out-able. It is only followable.

What you were just pointing out in my early story and also in what you understand about how we hold ourselves back trying to figure it out in advance, is that yearning is really yourself seeking its own expression and that it is our job in a sense to follow it. It is our path. It tells us all the time what our path is. That doesn't mean that we don't have things to sort out along the way. Responsibilities and practical considerations, but we do need to lean into the thing that says, “Over here, more of this place.” Exactly right.

Unleashing The Renaissance Woman

That's wonderful. Tell me what is the next moment for you that starts to take you on the path because you're already at this place where you're starting to to do the work that you feel called to. What happens next?

What happens? We're on this guy. Yes. The cliffhanger. What happens is that there is this other yearning, the Renaissance woman who also does not want to be denied. I remember even while I was at Interlochen feeling, that sometimes there are these articulate phrases or messages that come on. When I was like I've been told about being a dancer, you have to really love it. I was like, “No problem.” I do, but I realized that the implication was you have to love only it. That for me was something I could not do.

I had this determination like, “I'll show them that I can have my dance career and still be someone who lives in the wider world and all of that.” It was not clear yet to me how I was going to reconcile it except that after two years with the Omaha Ballet, I wanted to go to college, which is something I didn't think I was going to do. It's like, I want to be in this environment without giving up my professional path here as a dancer. I ended up going to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, to get my bachelor's of fine arts in dance.

There as a part of that work, I had to also take physiology and anatomy, which terrified me because math and science were not my thing, arts and humanities were. The discovery is another thing that I think about your phrase flashpoints. Sometimes we trip upon something that shows us more of who we are, more of what's possible, that we had thought, “No, that's not me.” For me, what that was actually taking anatomy, which was by the way, very hard. I loved it. There was just something that grabbed me in the course of looking inside cadavers and seeing the extraordinary beauty and design of the body, how the many systems came together to work together for something that was utterly miraculous.

It taught me that the questions science asks are very much like the questions that I was always asking as an artist and that they're so core for it. Critically, understanding how the body worked meant that I could take it not only into my training but into my teaching. It opened up a way of understanding how the world works just through the metaphor and symbol of the body and all of those systems and so because I did well in the end, I was also invited to accept a graduate teaching assistantship while I was still an undergrad in my last two years of college.

Understanding how the body works means understanding how the world works.

A discovery, something unexpected, where I'm now beginning to develop this part of my science side and forever my teaching side, which is very much a part of me. I had already been teaching ballet since the age of eighteen. That was the opening that when I then graduated and moved to Chicago to be dancing full time with a company there, teaching dance kinesiology at Columbia College, teaching ballet, and doing exactly what you had foreshadowed. That is I'm on this path to my dream coming true. Here I am, full-time company, we're touring.

By this time, by the way, it's a modern dance company. I had a short platinum mohawk and had tossed to the side my pointe shoes, but still performing and loving it, but not happy. I was in that place, which happens for many of us of what happens when your dream comes true and you're not happy? The questions that rise in that circumstance have to be confronted if you are to know what to do. Another one of my phrases is, how do what to do when you don't know what to do?

I love that. I just want to pause for a moment before we go any further, but I just love this idea that like you take a moment you go a little further from where you were and you start to see that to find that happiness, to find that the word fulfillment, because it's not just about happiness. I think is fleeting. It can be fleeting moments, but you weren't fulfilled and you thought, “This is what I should be feeling like over the moon right now. This is what I had strived for so long.”

It reminds me of something I often tell people is sometimes you have to expand your vision to and then narrow your focus to figure out that next step. I think in many ways, it's not about throwing out a past and then think that pivoting to something different is going to solve your problems. Maybe expanding your vision was about going deeper into the world and finding out the science side of the art and that allowed you to become more expansive and find your fulfillment or at least explore your fulfillment through another avenue. Does that resonate with you?

It does. It's actually what happened when I wrestled with those questions of first, how do things aren't going well? For me, the how I knew was that I was crabby and I was judgy and I was like nothing was quite right. There was a moment for me where I took myself by the short shirt collar and just went, “Sommer, what's going on? This isn't who you are. Let's unpack it together, you and me.” I talk to myself a lot and I find it incredibly useful. In that particular conversation, I was trying to sort out, so if you're not showing up well, what's not present for you?

Is this situational? Is it time for me now to go to New York where I had other opportunities or is it conditional? I asked myself, “When are you happiest? If you're crabby and judgy now, complaining about things and thinking that I know better and all that stuff, where is it that I'm not that way where I'm actually my best self?” I realized that the basic condition for me is that I'm happiest when I can follow my own mind. I'm happiest when I can have some agency around that and also there were some lifestyle factors about being a dancer that I was like, “This is not going to work out for me.”

To have agency and be able to pursue myself, I'm going to have to have some freedom. For me, I had yet another one of these moments when during the time that I was in Chicago, I was also getting chiropractic care and the doctor had some patient education workshops. I went to it and I heard her say, “Health and disease really lie on a continuum. What our aim to do is to remove the barriers and limitations because if you do that, health is free. It starts to rise.” For me, I felt like that's what I've always been doing as a dancer.

That's why we hone our techniques so that the more advanced you get, the more master you get, the freer you are. It made sense to me philosophically. This idea of full expression and because I had discovered that not only anatomy but dance kinesiology. The workings of the body were something I was living. I thought from a practical point of view, “Maybe I'll become a chiropractor so that I can effectively afford the Renaissance woman lifestyle that I want while still being a dancer.” That was the next turn. There's another chapter on flashpoints, but we can pause here.

I love it. There's a groundedness to that, which is sometimes you have this feeling of I want to go that path but you also have this sense of realism, but also connected to the things that you've already been on. I think that you've just put in some real sense of realism, which I think is important. Sometimes people feel like, “I cannot get there.” Maybe there's a step between that we need to take that allows us to still have the ability to do what we need in the interim and it could be a great lead into something else. I think that's a wonderful way to look at it. It leverages a lot of the things you've already built. I think that's so wonderful. Helping people who were dancers and people who are using their bodies frequently, and you want to help them move past their pain.

I love what you're pointing out, Tony, and there are several things that I'll build on with this is that every transition is a leap. It comes with great risk. There's no question about it. I'm somebody who's actually taken several leaps in my life and you just don't know how it's going to go. It requires big investments and you don't know if it's going to pan out, if you'll be happy when you get there. You take a leap.

Every transition is a leap. It comes with great risk.

I want to just borrow from what you offered as your first step is always sto tart where you are. Start where you are with who and who knows you and what you have and just move from that point forward towards the direction in which you want to go. At some point again, you will have to take that leap. I would say that one of my gifts really is that I fundamentally believe in myself and that when I take those leaps and I will always play worst-case scenario, it doesn't work out. There could be great loss and failure. How am I going to be? Somehow I have this sense of I'll sort it out.

I want to pause for a moment to say this. This is exactly why you're a good futurist because there's a realization that you've played it out a little further than most do. Some people don't think about the fact that what happens if this doesn't work out. Do I have a thought about how I will be? Will I be okay? Will I think about the repercussions of all the scenarios? Maybe even the why behind why I'm doing this. What is driving me forward? It's still this innate passion for doing this thing, being the Renaissance person that I know I am. That belief in yourself is so powerful. A lot of people don't have a true belief. Sometimes they think like, “I'll give this a try and then go in with 1 toe, 2 toes, 3 toes but you have this real belief that ultimately it's going to work out.

As you shared, the scenario planning was innate in me to do that so that we can move, as I refer to it as you want to be directionally right. There's no guarantee, but you are at least moving in the direction of your purpose. The conditions that you believe having checked it out a little bit, I think I'll thrive here or I think my business will do well. I also believe that as we go, we'll learn what needs to be learned and adjust as we go, which opens the door for another Cecilyism, which is how critical it is, because everything's uncertain. It is critical to hold tight to purpose and play loose with tactics.

Becoming A Futurist

Absolutely brilliant. I'm so glad that you're sprinkling us with little points of wisdom along the way, which is exactly what we need to hear. I'm so thrilled that you're doing this. This is just brilliant. I want to eventually get into the concepts that are in the book, which I know these elements are also in there, but I want to hear the next step so we can move to the flash points that got you to the futurist.

We go to the next chapter. It requires two and a half years of prerequisites because as I mentioned before, I was an arts and humanities girl who did the minimum of science and I had to go back and do high school-level chemistry and algebra before I could even qualify for the prerequisites that I needed to go to chiropractic school that then went on to biochem and physics and more. I returned to the University of Illinois to do that where I could still dance and teach anatomy and then got a research assistantship as well and biomechanics and so forth. It turned out once again I was utterly illiterate in math and science is the truth.

I really struggled at first. I was failing quizzes and that thing. I just went to park myself in the tutorial hall and take my books and raise my hand every time I had a question. This I think is yet another lesson we're all beginners and we all have deficits in certain areas, but that doesn't mean that you don't have the potential and skill to develop. I just dedicated myself to that. As soon as the literacy hit, I really excelled and this is where then I began tutoring biochem and all this stuff. It comes together. You tap into something that's there, but undeveloped within yourself.

I came, I moved to Minneapolis then to go to chiropractic school in part because it was a community where I could still dance and a very rich arts place. What I learned along the way is I was also studying Chinese medicine, and classic homeopathy, and putting many of these systems of thinking together, each one of them with different logic around what health is and what disease is. I was again revisited by some of the same themes in my life, which is at the end of school, you do an internship and then you do an externship as well where I was an assistant to another doctor in their practice.

I heard again, “I don't want to be doing anybody else's work. I want to do my work.” Even though I thought, “I'm no good at business. I cannot do this.” That's what I should do. My inner self was going, “No, I am happiest when I'm doing my own work and I have big ideas. I've been teaching a lot through all these years. Twelve years ultimately of teaching anatomy, clinical sciences, and other preparatory courses. I once again started with what I had and where I was with people who were waiting for me to get going and started in a studio apartment with a fold-out chiropractic table and began there.

My reputation grew, my teaching grew. I was doing seminars on workshops and ultimately built a clinic, hired five people to work with me in that clinic, started an art gallery, bought another clinic. What I discovered from my experience in both the sciences and in art is that somehow business felt native to me. I understood it as a creative platform that through the course of really building and producing what's work that needs to come out into the world as I did as a performing artist, I get this and I get the values. I did well and once again people were asking me to coach them, to teach, to do seminars, and that business consulting and coaching was my next step.

Transition To Business Strategy And Consulting

I sold my clinics in 1998 and moved into starting where I was, working with healthcare practitioners and businesses and helping them grow their business with a point of view of being a brand strategist. Here I am as an artist. Let me help you pull out who you are, the truth of your expression, and make it into a model and a strategy that is specific to your position in the market. We can do that.

To do that with sensitivity for the trends, because our primary mandate as people, as societies, and in business is you have to be relevant. You also have to do it with an authenticity that resonates when people see you. They have once again that same indicator of like that. This is the one for me. That's where I developed a lot of my thinking and it gets me on the path towards being a futurist and doing strategic foresight, but I'll pause.

You're blowing my mind right now. This sense that it starts by ing that you cannot be put in a box, that you cannot be stopped by saying, “I don't know, or I haven't done that, so therefore I cannot do that.” You start to say with practice, you can pretty much do anything and you can expand yourself into any possibility. You said earlier about this idea of following. It starts with following the things that are part of where you're getting and then continuing to see the threads that are leading you in that direction.

All of these things start to show themselves as you move on. You start to realize, “I can do this and because I've done this, I can do this.” Things start to reveal themselves through that process. To other people looking at you from the outside, they may be thinking, “ She's totally crazy.” In reality, they might make absolute sense or they do make absolute sense to you because they're just building on the body of evidence that you started to create through all the things that you've created.

They're absolutely congruent on the inside. This is the natural course of evolution of my own development and its expression. You're right, to the outside, it looks like what? How do you get from here to there? Something that is very characteristic of my thinking, my way of being, is that I am hungry to get to original principles. It's what has allowed me, I think, to be good in business. It was what made me such a stellar diagnostician and teacher. This idea of seeing systems across systems and finding the essence of what's going on and what really needs to be addressed first in a complex web of issues that all come with it.

You start to see the path towards, if I'm a doctor, healing, or towards strategic objectives, if I'm doing business. The principles are similar. It's what made me such a good fit for what foresight is and why foresight is such a good tool for me in my work. That grew out of the fact that while I was doing a lot of trends. By this time, I'm also doing a fair amount of speaking and consulting. I realized that trends are sexy, but they don't really help us very much in my opinion. I was exposed to a couple of futures and I once again like that's how I think too.

Began to study strategic foresight. Once again, given who I am, I go deep, I go wide, I do all of these things. I started the Push Institute, which was a nonprofit think tank for change. Its biggest public project was the Push Conference. This was 2003 to 2008. The Push Conference was an international conference that at one time was known as one of the three best executive conferences in the country alongside TED and PopTech. It was push because it was a look at what's pushing the future in new directions.

Each year had deep themes through many different disciplines, but our whole focus was on the questions, the inquiry that become the probe into a discovery around what's next for you and my framing of that. In the course of it, as I was doing now big future of projects too, I developed my four forces of change model. Was invited to write a book and continued with that. That's what came, Think Like a Futurist that was published now in 2012.

It's twelve years old at this point but because I'm always going to the essence of things and the universals, these things are evergreen and still unbelievably smart, I believe. I use it all the time. That's where it's gone for me. In this last phase of work, I've done projects that are the future of energy, the future of healthcare, the future of pet ownership, the future of finance and the future of leadership. Maybe we'll pause there because that really takes me into the further evolution of what my work is today.

I'm so glad you shared this last part of the chapter, which I think is such an important element of the book that you publish, which I think is interesting. People often think, we need to have a fresh book that just been published yesterday and that's going to be the new thinking. The reality is you tap into this frameworks and thinking, and it still becomes relevant today. It just, you can tap into how do you use that framework for the new business and new industries and ways of applying it with a new lens.

Three Things That Never Change

I think there's so many timeless frameworks that we still use today that don't go away. We got to make sure that we don't think like, “It's a few years old, it's still not relevant.” It absolutely is. I think what you did tap into in this book was brilliant. Maybe if there's something you could add 1 or 2 additional nuggets from the book, I would be thrilled.

I will. The subtitle is incredibly meaningful for me because I think it's a direction for all of us and the subtitle is know what changes, what doesn't, and what's next. We get so distracted by what's changing. In fact, it stems from what doesn't change. We really want to connect ourselves, hitch ourselves, follow the things that don't change. To your point about why it's still very valuable is because we're tapping into the universals. What are the three things that never change? The laws of change do not change.

Those forces of change are true throughout society good for all time, and so is the nature of change. The other thing that doesn't change is human nature. Culture does, values do, its expression does, but the basic needs of who we are don't change. In business, we are really wanting to pay attention to the core needs through the expressions of contemporary life. If we understand the first part of the universal laws of change, we can get down to the roots of understanding that's what the four forces do that give us a picture of the scenarios for mapping that.

Human nature does not change, even though culture, values, and expression do.

The last thing that doesn't change is your purpose. Don't mess with that. Pay attention to it. It is your compass. When we are pointing it into the future, we're taking a look at what is the potential that wants to rise and be expressed that's in us and all of our like that's tell us that direction. All of our philosophies and worldviews tell us that direction. We're pointing it in the direction of where the future is headed.

We can build scenarios and then we can map the territory. We can think it through and be thoughtful. By the way, this is what strategy looks like. We reverse engineer it into what are the plans? How do we get from here to there? That's what innovation looks like. We're filling the innovation pipeline at the same time. Ultimately we have to get to and who do we need to be to lead this? That's where leadership is. My work cuts across strategy, innovation and leadership.

What you just did and whether you knew it or not is that you're speaking to me and to everyone else, but you blurred the lines between personal and business. Organizations are hearing this message and saying to themselves like, “Our purpose as an organization should be our true North, our way of thinking. No matter what the future is, it's still a purpose that should align with us as we move forward.”

As an individual, as a leader, our purpose and all the other things that you talked about, they really are. It's an individual endeavor, but it's also an organizational endeavor that we're talking about here. It was really wonderful that you did that because it has us thinking in that way is that strategy and sit looking at the future is both a personal endeavor and an organizational endeavor. In many ways, the same types of tools can be used in both places. Would you agree?

They are the universals. Everything has its own life force, its own DNA. We are going to be most successful when we abide and follow what the DNA is built to do. In business environments, purpose can sometimes be cringy because it has taken the path of being purpose washing. It's a position of, in the market about our values. What I'm talking about is just like each of us who are born, when a business is born, it has a point of view and a philosophy on how are we organized to meet those customer needs.

Our point of view is our point of differentiation in the market because nobody sees it or can do it quite the way we do. If we really stay true to that, then our differentiation stays whole and robust and it also becomes, we cannot do any everything. We have to do what we do really well because we're built and we're born to do it this way. I have a lot of experience in brand strategy and that's really what we're getting to is what are you built to do that no one else can do? You don't want to be the best, you want to be the only because that's the truth. In being the only, you are the best.

Our point of view is our point of differentiation in the market. If we stay true to it, our differentiation stays whole and robust.

Lead Like A Futurist

There's so many directions I want to take you with this because you're you shared so many brilliant insights. I guess I want to ask briefly what is next for you? Where are you headed to next? Maybe share a few insights on that before we get to our final question.

All of this work has built a mission in me to spread change literacy. Again, because they are universals, I feel like this is not hard at a basic level but being able to scan the four forces, understand the pattern of reinvention in life. This is not hard. What's more important for me now is that beyond literacy, I want to take it to the level of the individual leader, where we cultivate change fluency. What that means is with all the work that I've done, it's really smart. It's like brilliant work, but it doesn't last if you don't have the capacity, which means the human capacity to really be okay with change and to know how to follow it, especially in times of uncertainty and great turbulence that we are in.

In a world that is fully unstable, the locus of stability now has to be inside. That means that I am developing, I have a program that I call Lead Like a Futurist. I'm turning and building on from Think Like a Futurist to Lead Like a Futurist across six fluencies in three domains, leading self, leading strategy, and leading culture. The six fluencies leading self are reinvention. Let's learn about cycles of change and purpose and equip ourselves to live that way so we can lead that way. We take that good work into leading strategy, which is foresight and innovation, which after you can now see change and have a vision for it.

You can move into leading culture, which is to say to people, come along. How do we intentionally build belonging inside of this vision and purpose? The last fluency, which is where we are headed at all times is wisdom. How and where do we source the most critical parts of our knowing when there are no answers? How do we know what's right to do when there are no right answers in a way that is humble, that is discerning, and that always from its place of goodness seeks to do the most good for the most people and has ethical vision already built into it? This is really the work that I'm dedicated to now and lead like a futurist.

It's a program I run, it's the speeches I give, and it's what turns me on in a big way. It does, thank you for this opportunity, Tony, for me to share everything about who I am is absolutely alive in this work. It's the message I believe for your audience. Everything about who you are is an alive and as an accumulation and expression of what you do today. It's really our work to keep on leaning into those things that pull us forward and to trust that we have it. If we don't have it to know how to ask for the support we need, because we can develop more of who we are and to be patient.

Like that. Sign me up. I definitely would love to engage in this work with you. I think anyone reading, you just did the most amazing and authentic and real engagement as to why this work is important now. This is what we need most in the world. I'm glad that you're doing this work.

Thank you so much. There's one thing I want to add. Every turn for me, as I mentioned at the very beginning, has been risky. I have met failures. I have met people along the way who say, again, “You're a quack. What you're a dancer, chiropractor, a futurist. This does not make sense. I'm sure you're interesting.” I have had to work my way into the authority that is true for what I really do well and to stay true to that all the way along and to be the translator that I now am for many people. Even now in developing Lead Like a Futurist, it's my next evolution, but it's not guaranteed. I am born to do this work.

Book Recommendations

I really believe that and this funny thing when you say that is that I feel that viscerally and there's a feeling that oftentimes you know when you talk to somebody that there is an element of they're going to keep on doing this until they find a way to get through to people. That's what I'm feeling in this moment. I don't know where to follow up from this. I know we're running out of time, but I do have to ask my last question because I ask every guest. That last question is, what are 1 or 2 books that have an impact on you and why?

I would offer a well-known book. It's by Yuval Noah Harari. His book Sapiens. He's a beautiful thinker, a beautiful writer, and he does the broad distillation that is really native to me and I glom onto. I think he says a lot about what humans are great at, which is cooperation at scale, and that the things that really shape our behavior and the choices we make are our narratives. What we believe really matters. When we change what we believe, it can change the world. I do a lot of work with that. The other book that has affected me and that I draw inspiration from is Falling Upward by Richard Rohr.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest, is also the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, and has written many books. This is about the spirituality for the second half of life. It addresses in the second half of life, we're losing a lot. We've achieved so much. That's right. We go through a period of growth and accumulation and achievement and yet we naturally move into a phase where we realize that's not what it's about and that it is this ascending feeling. He does some beautiful work there.

He has another book called The Wisdom Pattern, which of course is really my home, in which at a minimum he talks about the crucible, the cross nature, paradoxical nature of all realities. Again, this is very native to my work and that a lot of what we're doing is just saying everything belongs. We don't get one thing or the other, we get everything. How we can recognize it and how we can hold it. I like to talk, it's about how our capacity to hold all of the contradictions and polarities rather than having our concerns about them hold us back.

Episode Wrap-up

His work sounds fascinating. Definitely something I haven't heard before. I'm surprised. I read pretty aggressively, I guess you'd call it, expansively. I'm just like, this is my next read. I want to start by just saying, this was an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for all your brilliant stories, your great insights, and everything you've brought to this space. Thank you for bringing me.

It's a privilege, Tony. I don't always get to tell my story, and it matters to tell it. I appreciate your perspective in following that thread with me.

Before I let you go, I have to ask, where can people find you if they want to learn more about you? What's the best place to engage with you?

LeadLikeAFuturist.com. I have two websites. That's where this work is hosted. There's also CecilySommers.com, LinkedIn, Cecily Sommers. You'll find me everywhere at Cecily Spmmers. I have speaking engagements that are coming up and videos and that thing. Lead Like A Futurist continues in 2025, where that full curriculum is being hosted online at the Maven Learning Platform. If you have interest in that, you can reach out and join waiting lists or reach me directly.

Thank you and thanks to the readers for coming on this journey. I know you're leaving just completely blown away. Go and sign up for the list, go find ways to get on the Lead Like A Futurist program. You will not be disappointed. This sounds like such amazing work that you want to be part of.

Important Links

• Cecily Sommers

• Think Like a Futurist

• Lead Like a Futurist

• Sapiens

• Falling Upward

• The Wisdom Pattern

• LinkedIn - Cecily Sommers

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