Welcome to our Pod.  What an honor to be here. Across so many countries, we are teachers and students, speakers and listeners, authors and readers, corporate pioneers and nonprofit leaders, givers and receivers, mothers and fathers, renowned personalities and everyday heroes. Collectively, all our work, whether formally or informally, touches millions of people. Yet the unifying question that brings us together is a much simpler, and a much more profound, inquiry: how can we lead with love? How can our hearts lead our head and hands?

On behalf of the entire volunteer crew, I'm delighted to welcome you to this field of emergence. I say emergence because we truly don't know what we'll turn out to be. And we don't want to know. As we say in Computer Science, that's not a bug, but a feature! We are all in the passenger seat of a car driven by the collective intelligence we will co-create together. If the past is any precedent, we’re in for a great ride!

We don’t know what will emerge, but we do know some of the core principles underneath our journey. And I want to share three of them -- and really, they’re best illustrated by three photos. :)

FIRST, DEEP ROOTS.

This is an oak tree. An oak tree can survive thousands of years, past any hurricane, tornado or any blip that nature throws its way. And the reason why they survive is because they have deep roots. And it wasn't just that they have deep roots-- their deep roots are  connected to the deep roots of other oak trees, and sometimes spanning over 100 miles. And so whenever one oak tree is in trouble, the other oak tree starts giving in, and if that other oak tree needs a little bit more backup, a third oak tree comes in, and there's a whole network of oak trees. And together they create an incredibly resilient ecosystem.

What is the social web with deep roots? Modern social networks might tackle the number of connections, but we're talking here about the depth of those relationships. That's a much harder problem.

Pods tackle this question and attempt to answer it by prioritizing context over content. Each day, we get a daily prompt that invites us to engage a topic from the ‘head, hands, and heart’. It features uniquely compelling content; yet, if we’re just looking for “takeaways”, Google is going to be far more efficient than a 30-day pod. :) Here, what we are actually doing is building context. You'll see it everywhere you turn. For instance, Pods are designed as a game. It's progressive, like an obstacle course or a confidence course. :) You can't go to Day 5 before you complete Day 2. You’ll see quite clearly that your depth of connection with someone who has completed Day 2 will be way different than with someone after Day 12. Everything in the Pod platform is geared towards deepening the context.

SECOND, HEART TO HEART. Or peer-to-peer as system thinkers call it.

We don’t have teachers or experts here. Sure, we can -- and should -- tap into the wisdom of experience, but if that’s our primary focus, Ted Talks is a much more efficient way to go. Here, we will learn from each other. To be more precise, we will learn BECAUSE of each other. On a particular day, I might feel like I didn’t learn much, but because I still share from my heart, it might become a seed that sparks something for someone else, and the 10th person affected by the ripple could have a profound, life-altering aha-moment. We’ve repeatedly seen that happen.

Just consider the math in this diagram. In a room of 50 people, if we engage in a one-to-many broadcast model, we'll have 50 connection. If we start connecting with each other individually ("networking" as the business world commonly calls it), our group would yield 1225 connections. However, if we engage in a "many to many" web, a group forming network, the number of connections skyrockets to 100 million trillion! That's just with 50 people. And we're far more than 50 people here.

Pods are designed not just for many-to-many organizing but many-to-many learning. Such learning is non-linear, and it’s not about me. Here’s one example of it: our pod will be held by 20-40 volunteers, who will put in twice as much time as the participants. At first glance, we might think, "Why are so many volunteers needed?" Most of their work won’t be flashy, and in fact, most of us won’t even notice it, because it’s subtle. It’s not a thump, but a gentle nudge. In a field of many-to-many learning, it is these indirect nudges that create a profound domino effect. People will notice that 100th snowflake that creates an avalanche, but volunteers are doing the work of the un-noteworthy 35th or 81st snowflake, because they clearly see the power of the ripple effect in a deeply connected web.

THIRD, BELONGING AND MIRRORING.

In every nook and corner of the Pod experience, even in your tech support email responses, you’ll notice this intention of deep inclusion and amplifying the good. When more of us feel safe and seen, collective intelligence is primed for take-off.

Yet by itself, that would be incomplete. In almost an aikido-like move of “pushing hands”, where you pull with one hand and push with the other, we couple that belonging with mirroring the whole to itself. Skilful mirroring allows us to see how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and it reorients our identity altogether. Our experience, then, becomes an elegant dance between “I feel seen” and “Who actually am I?”

Here’s a visual to illustrate that:

Last year, a German photographer named Daniel Biber was casually capturing a murmuration of starlings in Spain.  At first, he didn’t even notice what he was seeing, but when he went home, he saw the stunning and gorgeous shapes that these birds had created.  Starlings, feeling like they were going to fall prey to a larger bird, immediately fell into this formation. In just 10 seconds. And then dissolved again and kept flowing in another formation.

Over the next month, each one of us, with our uncountable gifts, will attempt to frictionlessly glide into our collective magnificence.

Our particular collection of starlings that have been organically drawn together feels quite awe-inspiring: if you are ever having a down moment about humanity’s impulse to respond with compassion, simply read the profiles of your podmates!

Across the board, the collage of inspired intentions that have convened for our little field of love fills us with a great sense of the sacred. We look forward to seeing what shapes our murmuration of starlings creates!