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Add mentionAl Killeen is the President, CEO, and Founder of Integrative Mastery Programs. The business is a set of integrated programs and training for successful executives and organizations that focuses on Leadership, Management and Coaching to create empowered, zealous cultures based on values. Questions Discussed: 1. What is different about IMP? 2. Who are typical IMP clients? 3. How effective is the IMP system? Contact Info: Email Address: alk@integrativemasteryprograms.com Website: www.integrativemasteryprograms.com Join Bill Black for his weekly humor column at blackpapers.substack.com
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Published: March 16, 2022 Thanks very much for joining us. Welcome to the show today. I'm very excited about our next guest. He is Al Killeen, and we're going to talk about his company Integrative Mastery programs. And you know, do you have executives that are, are they effective in their leadership and Management and their coaching. Well, Al comes in, helps businesses to create empowered, zealous cultures based on values, and this is kind of our theme for our show today. So I'm very excited to introduce Al Killeen. Al, thanks for joining us and look forward to our interview today.
I do as well, Bill, thanks for having me. Al, before we get into it, tell us a little bit about you and, and IMP and how you started and and what do you do for folks?
Well, I'm, I was listening to your previous show and, and, and I really very much like the message that that gentleman articulated. You know, I think a lot of us in this age group have been looking for answers, and I'm no exception. So I'm a guy that basically started out in life with a highly dysfunctional background, family, all of that. And a deep sense of sort of distrust of it all. And so I went on a hard target search starting about 40 years ago of what the major thought leaders in history have thought about the integration of various domains of reality from personal, professional, spiritual health, relationships, all of it. And along the way I went through a long business career. I've run 4 companies and Da da da and basically I got to a point when I was 48 years old where I built a company up and sold it, and the group of bankers that bought us a year into this 3 year executive contract came in and fired all the presidents of all the companies. I was one of them and I found myself sitting in a parking lot of my building wondering now whether my life was over and I was going to be standing on a street corner somewhere with a we'll run a company for food sign. And I realized that, you know, maybe I can take a different tact here. So I went home and had a conversation with my wife and told her how afraid I was, and she said, Do you think that what's hanging in our laundry room is correct, which is a stained glass little deal that she bought back 30 years ago that says your life is a gift from God, whatever God means to you, and what you do with it is your gift back to God. I said, yeah, I do. I think we all have a unique something. She said, Well, why don't you go for that, even though you're afraid? What if you have 3 to 5 times in your life when things are most traumatic, but that's when the membrane is thinnest for you to break through and discover who you are? And what if this is that time? So go write the book, go do whatever you want to do, and if we lose it all and, you know, end up in a trailer somewhere, we do and I'll be with you. So I decided to set on a path to create a perfect system. That integrates empowerment for individuals to live lives that are not only successful but significant so that when we have that 5 minutes on our deathbed, we aren't wondering whether it mattered that we were here at all.
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Well, that's pretty powerful. So you know there's a, there's a, I was just at a meeting actually this morning and, and one of our, one of our speakers said suffering is often a pathway to joy and it sounds like you, you went, you were going through that at that point trying to decide what what's happening and, and your wife was very astute to point that out, wasn't she? Hey, the signs, the signs right here. It's been hanging here all along. And yet we have to have the boldness built to actually, and I find that I have a I have a the next book is going to be on the four levels of identity. I have a model that I use on different levels of identity that people can achieve in life and unfortunately I think 98% never move past the third of the fourth of the four levels. And I think it has to do with a real shift of how we relate to the world and to reality. Instead of being essentially counterpunchers of outside circumstances, becoming creators, literally creators and manifesters of internal intentionalities grounded in our values, and I think when we do that, which all the high water marks of humanity have encouraged us to, but we've, I think, misinterpreted in many cases. When we do that, something magical happens. We give ourselves permission to start to operate from a higher place, where we literally become a creator of our reality or a co-creator of our reality if you want to think of it in terms of an interface with divinity and whatever people think of that.
So what I, what I do in my business is I've created a company that basically serves primarily executives. I coach 42 CEOs and senior executives in 2022 companies have for the last 15 years, and I tell people I'm blessed to be in the top 3% in the world of business coaches despite being the most screwed up guy you'll ever meet. So clearly it isn't me, it's this way of thinking and operating a system that gives us access to the pos. of our lives so that we aren't living lives of quiet desperation where we simply have a whole lot of money in the bank, but we aren't quite sure at the end of the day whether it really matters that we did all that we did. And and I don't know if it's if it's just the demographics, it's the time that we live in, but it seems like there are more people facing this what I call rewire, you know, not retire, but rewire. I rewire my life and what do I want to do? And is it going to be significant, or is it just going to be existence? And so it's a very powerful time for someone like you to be involved with people. What are some of the hangups that people have? I mean, you're talking a little bit about some of this, but the life of quiet desperation is no fun, and most of the people that own businesses are leaders, but where do they get stuck?
Well, that's a first of all, a beautiful observation and I think a beautiful question, Bill, and and I guess I would begin the answer to that with a quote that I always start every program, speech, everything I do with. I, I do speeches for a group called Visages that you guys I think are familiar with. And I go around the country and talk to CEO groups, and I always start with this to live a life of great success requires mere personal effort. To live a life of great significance, however, requires great purpose. Success doesn't necessarily lead to significance, but significance always leads to success. And I think that's a quote that in some ways sort of captures what you've correctly observed, which is this is a time of angst for a lot of people. And a lot of people are busy sort of driving for the hoop of economic survival and whatnot, but I think it, I think it has to do with Maslow's hierarchy of need. What we think we want is simply to have enough warm, safe, and dry. We want to have enough money. We want to have a house in Boca Raton. We want to have the boat. We want to have whatever we want. But what we're missing there is that there's an internal architecture of intentionality and approach that's critical for people to get in touch with. And that's while it's a universal system, it's a uniquely customized approach for each individual because your values are going to be your values. They might be different than my values. But if you come at your life through the intentionality of essentially manifesting those values as you would for your children and as your loved ones, but you do it everywhere and you do it with everything you do, you come from a higher place within yourself where you magically receive support. I mean, as crazy as that sounds, things happen that otherwise wouldn't happen because now you can be trusted with the power of manifestation. Because you are a force in the world that is more than merely somebody promoting their own ego or personality or self-interest. So your question was what what gets into what I'm sorry, Bill, but what you said to answer your question earlier, I'll answer it quickly. What are the hangups people have? They're really. The ladder on the wrong wall. They're really pursuing an objective, an outcome in life that they think they need through the prior essentially experiences of being a human wanting to survive, but they aren't playing big enough because they don't know how to, and that's usually rooted in Essentially not having a large enough vision of what their life can stand for out of the stewardship of living to a higher calling.
I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead. Not at all, not at all. Thank you for that.
It's very, very fascinating, and I think you're right to the standpoint that people may be afraid to, to leave behind that identity, but I think their identity, especially for business owners, goes well beyond. Fear of it's not financial for a lot of these people. It's, it's their identity and they know what it's routine and identity and prestige and everything that goes with that. And it's hard to start to build, it's hard to build up something new from that that they might feel like I've spent all this time building up this. This identity. I'm the king of my community. I, you know, I, I'm the, I'm the guy that supports Little League teams and, and people know me and, and I'm respected and all my employees love me and now I've got to leave that to move on to something else that, that, that maybe they don't what we're finding is a lot of times they don't know what that passion is yet. And then which is where a good coach comes in. is to essentially provoke a different sort of inquiry for the individual than they perhaps have ever had in their entire life. One of the things I like to do with clients is I like to do sort of the Ben Franklin thing, and to my knowledge he's the one that came up with this, is to move. I believe everybody's in their own movie all the time, Bill, and everyone else is just a walk-on cameo role in that movie, and most of us think my movie is the movie. And as a result of that, we go through our lives sort of looking through the life manual trying to figure out what the what the game is on what we do in the next phase to have it be meaningful. And I think if we operate from a different place that says, look, go forward like Ben Franklin suggested we do to your own funeral and imagine that you're at your funeral, what is it that you want people to say about you? Now what's compelling about that question is, if what you want people to say about you is he supported Little League teams, he was respected, my employees love me. Nothing wrong with that, but how will that matter?
It's It appears that we've lost Al. Unfortunately he was on a roll there, and I hope we'll get him back. Perhaps he'll he'll be able to call back very shortly. Yeah, sometimes this happens with technology. Al Killeen, he is a visage speaker and we've been talking about what is visage. Viti is an organization of hundreds actually thousands of business owners all over the world that come together. Meet, listen to great speakers like Al. Unfortunately, Al is dropped right now and hopefully we'll get him back on the line very shortly.
So let me tell you a little bit more about what Al has done and how he helps people. He, he goes in and coaches and helps people to identify and find out what their inner power is so that he can create. That, that fire that everybody needs to move forward and it's so important these days, you know, we have, we have millions of business owners who are reaching a point where they're saying, I think I'm done with this act. I think I've finished my my 30 year business ownership plan, and it's time to move on to something else, but The ones that are clear on what that next thing is do much, much better than the ones that aren't sure what that next thing will be, and that's what we're finding with a lot of people is that unfortunately. A lot of people get to a point and they say I just don't know what that next act will be, and so they don't do very well for that.