Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Through Katie’s work at the Hendricks Institute (which she co-founded with her husband Gay Hendricks) and Julie’s work at the Evolutionary Power Institute, and through their live trainings, programs, books and online courses, they have worked with thousands of participants across the globe. Interweaving neuropsychology, physiology and improvisation, these leaders are widely known and deeply loved for supporting the expansion and joy of those they teach.
Friends and collaborators since 1995, this is their first interview together. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie in November, 2018. Crafted Leadership’s mission is to spread conscious leadership throughout the global workplace, using Julie and Katie’s work as the foundation.
Nancy: You are living masters in the fields of conscious relationships, conscious leadership, and human potential. I believe that the world should hear you together. I know you are old friends. I don’t think you have been interviewed together.
Katie: I don’t think so, that’s true.
Nancy: Julie, would you tell us how you got to know Katie?
Julie: There were two paths. First, I found the book, “Conscious Loving.”
There was the subtitle, which I cannot quote right now, but it was something like, “How to Find Yourself and Be Fully Together.”
Katie: “A Way to Be Fully Together Without Giving Up Yourself.”
Julie: I had done my dissertation on something similar about merging versus disengagement. That’s what I’d been working with, playing with, doing research on, creating research tools about, and there it was.
By looking at that book, reading that, I immediately understood that you had an answer to that question of how do you have self and relationship, which is the question of relationship.
People know how to have self by staying out of a relationship and how to have relationship by giving up themselves, but to have both? It got my attention that this book was a solution.
There was another very important event of sitting across from my partner, Kathy, four years into our relationship. Literally, my arms folded, sitting on the floor glaring at her, staring at her because we were in the middle of a big power struggle.
I’m thinking, “I’m 35 now. If every relationship I have lasts 5 years, how many more relationships will I have if I live until I’m 75?” She had the wisdom to actually pick up your book Conscious Loving. She started reading me the questions on page 154, about how to move out of power struggle.
The third question, “What are you getting out of staying stuck?” That’s the question that changed everything because I got curious. I had not, up until that point, been curious. I just figured I was RIGHT. Miserable, but right.
That’s the question that changed everything because I got curious.
Katie: The big payoff.
Julie: That question was really what helped me enter into the world of wondering instead of knowing. Then I tracked you down, which was really smart. Then I went off to your workshop for eight days.
That question was really what helped me enter into the world of wondering instead of knowing.
Katie You didn’t mess around.
Julie: Eight days where I started feeling better and better and thought, “Okay, there’s something in this.” I wanted to feel that good all of the time. That has been my question ever since — how to feel that good. That was 1995.
Nancy: Katie, would you share some of your first impressions of Julie?
Katie: A very smart clam peeking out. I could tell how curious you were. I also could tell that you had a capacity to commit and to sustain. So, it’s one thing to get the information, but it only comes to life with practice. I could see right away that if you took something on you would practice it. You would form a relationship with what you were practicing for the curiosity of it and for the love of learning. One of the things I first saw and that I still see guides you is your curiosity about what’s going on and what’s next, and how could we do this differently.
Julie’s curiosity is one of the many qualities Katie noticed.
Also, there was a quiet determination. There’s also something that I’ve experienced – and what was immediately available – was your invitation.
A lot of people come AT other people and they have Things To Deliver, and they want to Make Sure you know them – but you’re an invitation for relationship, for co-creating, and that’s immediately evident.
I think people feel they can approach you, that you are available.
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Other blogs from this interview touch on fear, courage, emotions in the workplace, flags, their bodies of work, and the present world. Read the next installment, Part 2 — Katie’s Work.