The Winding Way of the Warrior
The Story of Gibrán Rivera, internationally renown master facilitator and leader of our Boston Career Change “Hive”
I was in my early thirties when I lost everything that was dear to me.
My partner, my house, the work that I valued most and the people that I had thought were my friends: everything I had worked so hard for came apart much quicker than the time it took to build it. That is when my transformation started.
But let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?
I always wanted to make a difference. To make things better for more people.
So I followed a certain path. I went from activist, to organizer, to selling fries, to running for public office. I had some good wins and made important changes, but it always felt like I didn’t go deep and far enough.
I was part of a successful effort to indict the Speaker of the Massachusetts State House. We brought down the most powerful politician in the state. He was replaced. But it was only a few years before the new Speaker was sent to prison. I started to think that I was caught in a hamster wheel. It felt like our victories did not really matter.
It felt like the game was rigged.
So I went off to sell fries.
Not French fries, Belgian fries. We started a business that was going to compete with the pretzel shops sprinkled through every mall.
It was hard work. We took a year and a half to build the business, but shut it down in three months.
Some might call it a failure, I like to call it my MBA. I cannot imagine any other way of learning as much as I did about what it takes to build something real. It wasn’t easy to lose the dream, but I gained lessons one cannot pay for. Those stay with me to this day.
After our Belgian fries business failed, life got harder, not easier. That’s when, at the age of 32, I had a breakdown.
Losing the very foundation of my life was one of the most challenging experiences I have ever had. But I found a strange power when I hit the bottom.
Something deep stirred in my heart.
The right teacher had shown up and helped to wake up a part of me that I didn’t know existed. I found myself on my knees, consumed by shame and by grief. I was lost and broken-hearted when I finally surrendered. It was there I found the point from which there was only one direction: up. I realized that what I lost — my house, the work, even my partner — was what I had to give up. My breakdown became a breakthrough and it completely changed how I live my life. My personal failure gave way to liberation, because when I had nothing left,
I finally learned how to love. I learned how to be free.
I became a facilitator.
I had been in too many meetings that did not work. I had been part of too many fights among people who were supposed to be on the same side. I had gained an intimate knowledge of the pain-points that plague the modern workplace. But now I had a bigger heart, and with that a bigger perspective.
I joined a firm that focused on organizational change and facilitation. I started to help people work better together. I learned a lot about collaboration and the transformative power of human connection.
My work got deeper and more meaningful. I met the right mentors and wound my path to mastery. Facilitation became my art. Nurturing human connection among people who live with purpose became my life’s work. Today I consistently find myself facilitating rooms full of the most accomplished leaders in our country and abroad.
For the last 10 years I have worked to heighten awareness of the dramatic paradigm shift that is reshaping our societies. The fact is, everything has changed forever. We are living through an unprecedented moment in human history. We are experiencing breakthroughs that would have inconceivable just a generation ago. And we are living through challenges that were simply unimaginable to the people that came before us.
Technology makes our world smaller. Climate change makes it vulnerable. The world order we were born into is coming apart at the seams. But today, more than ever, any one of us can step up and do something that will matter to the rest of us.
I think of it as a moment of choice in the evolution of the species. Will this be our evolutionary crash or our evolutionary leap?
My commitment is to work with people who want to leap.
The most important lesson that I have learned in my years of service to leaders of social movements is that our best shot is to experiment. No one has the answer. We are here to try things out. We are here to poke, probe and iterate. We are trying to do something that has not been done before. Our job is to learn by doing.
Commitment to relentless experimentation. Deep alignment with passion and purpose. The power of authentic connection. This is how we leap.
Today, I find myself at another juncture. I am as thirsty for justice as I have ever been, but I also see the way in which polarization is making our minds and hearts too small. I can’t see how only working with activists, organizers and leaders of social movements will get us where we want to go. This is a leap that needs all of us. Not just the folks on one or the other end of the pole.
For me, Your Project X is the latest iteration in this ongoing desire to hold a space that truly matters. It is a way of helping people make their dreams real. I am here to tell you that we, humans, need your ideas. I am here to help you get them out of your head and into the world.
