High Agency

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:00:00] And I remember that night going back to my cabin and speaking to a God I didn't know.  So I'm going, if you're up there, whoever, whatever it is, it's like this life, I can't handle it.  It sucks.  I'm giving it back to you.  Like, just have your way with me.  Like, I just, you know, I wasn't a suicidal type.  So I just kind of spoke to, in a very unsophisticated way, I had no idea what I was doing.  I just said, 'Have it back.'  Woke up the next morning and things had radically changed.  I mean, I don't want to get into the story, but I kept running into all sorts of, as if I were on a different planet.  So I had surrendered to the point of moving from looking for psycho-emotional answers to just something bigger.  And somehow the something bigger was there in the morning.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:01:00] Welcome to High Agency, igniting conversations with inspiring people, leading transformative change.  Personality tests are often considered the domain of professional mystics and armchair psychologists, but the Enneagram is now the Borgrum Gospel.  It's shaping leadership from Silicon Valley to Wall Street.  But here's the catch.  Most frameworks like this are bloated.  They're jargon-heavy, and they're really impractical.  Enter Jean-Pierre LeBlanc, a master of distillation.  He's boiled the Enneagram's 140-question labyrinth down to two laser-focused queries, transforming self-awareness into a high-impact leadership tool.  But Jean-Pierre's expertise doesn't stop at personality types.  It's actually rooted in personal transformation.  Years ago, a devastating car accident left him battling chronic pain and fibromyalgia, setting him on a path beyond pharmaceuticals and into the world of natural wellness.  This journey led to the creation of Sage Natural Wellness, where he merged chemistry with intuition to help people reclaim their well-being.  Since its founding, Sage has been recognized on the Profit 500 list on many occasions.  And in 2016, Jean-Pierre and his wife, Kate, were jointly recognized for their work in the business.  They were recognized by EY Canada Entrepreneur of the Year.  They welcomed their daughter, Kiara, into the business, who quickly rose to lead the creative aspects of Sage.  And now they're pushing boundaries again, having witnessed firsthand what happens when private equity clashes with a brand's soul.  The family's latest adventure, Lifted Movement, which is led by Kate and Kiara, fuses design with wellness, proving that aesthetics and function aren't mutually exclusive.  And in a world obsessed with optics, he makes a bold claim.  Branding isn't just marketing, it should be a profoundly personal act.  And today, we explore what it means to lead with heart, to sell with integrity, and to build with purpose.  Welcome Jean-Pierre. Thank you. That's a beautiful introduction.  Oh, I appreciate that.  Well, there was a lot to pull from.  You've had a very interesting history. Yeah. Yeah.  And prior to this, and as I was kind of doing my research and prepping for this episode, kind of digging into your story and learning about what you've done, I think it's a beautiful introduction because there's a lot to pull from.  You've had a very interesting career and you've been really focused in this idea of wellness.  And I want to actually give that word the gravitas, I think, in this conversation that it deserves. Because self-care, wellness, these are terms that are thrown around quite a bit.  And in fact, I didn't realize myself how much of a blindness I had kind of created to what the word actually means and especially your profound approach to it.  So we're going to get into all that because I want to understand what it means to you and how and why it's been such a passion of yours.  But if we can go back a little bit, you know, we, or in the introduction, I mentioned that there was a.  Yeah.  A really severe accident and that it was this sort of chronic pain that kind of put you on this path of trying to figure it out for yourself first.  And was that your first sort of entree into this world of wellness?  Like how did all of this start?

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:04:43] Well, it started with the accidents.  There were three in a row.  And the irony is I paid my way through school racing motorcycles, but my first job was at Procter and Gamble, they said, you must give up racing motorcycles if we're going to give you this job.  So I agreed to that.  Only to get in a car and get rear-ended two times within six months.  And then a tractor trailer making a lane change in the middle of an ice storm and flipping me over.  So a lot of soft tissue damage landed me in front of doctors who were just discovering the whole pain area.  We got to remember this is 35 years ago now, my God, this is 40, 40, 40 years ago now.  Okay.  And physical therapy wasn't part of the picture.  It was just one pharmaceutical after another when too many pharmaceuticals were having side effects, trying to get rid of the side effects, like taking things from my stomach that was struggling.  And after seven years of descent into what I would call a holistic bankruptcy, physical, mental, and emotional, I decided that I had to just look for something.  Something else.  And with a science background, when I heard that there was a, there was a symposium on traditional medicine, I thought, let's go look at that.  And I all of a sudden was exposed to everything from Reiki to Chinese medicine, to Ayurveda, which I immediately committed to, and essential oils, which struck me as the distillation; finally, you talked about distillation of herbal medicine, which is effective.  But way more effective, I thought, okay, I'm going to make medicine that's natural to see if I can get myself out of all this pain and depression and other issues.  And when it worked super well, I thought, well, the world needs this.  Let's start with Canada.  Kate loves retailing.  So she became my retail partner.  I would be originally in the closet of the second bedroom of our apartment, kind of formulating products.  I started with headaches and that's how Peppermint Halo came to be.  And the results just led to a business that grew.  It was a very tough business to build.  I remember one particular banker telling me I was in the snake oil business, you know, the essential oils weren't known back then.  And eventually it took off and, and then along the way, having worked at P &G, I remember thinking that there was just a lack of something that I didn't even know to call soul then.  So when building Sage, I was reminded that at the beginning of my career, I was thinking someone's got to figure out how to do business differently than this.  And then of course I'm going, oh, it's me.  How do I bring spirit into business?  So what was wrong with the way business was being done?  Like what did you, what did you perceive?  What I perceived in the corporation, the large corporations I worked in.  And prior to Sage, there was this kind of using the human, like a machine.  How much do we get out of people?  How little can we pay you to do how much work?  And I mean, it was actually a cool thing to do back then to be found by your boss, still at your desk at eight o'clock in the morning, because you hadn't gone home.  Well,, having been through the wellness wheel, I know that that's not really productive.  And,, so I wanted Sage to be, , a holistic wellness.  That's how you make wellness have the gravitas – add the 'W'  type holistic,, as in holistic or, or, or wellness on all fronts.  And so today, my coaching, I call 4D coaching, meaning four dimensions, physical, mental, emotional, and philosophical or spiritual, however you want to call it, so that we are looking at the whole human.  And the whole situation, and the solutions can be had on all four of these levels.  So you just kind of go wherever the client's ready to make a shift, and extraordinary results come of that.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:09:07] Yeah.  I mean, the, the holistic approach to self is something definitely that I still struggle with.  I mean, I think on my worst days I kind of treat my mind and my body as like two separate things.  And really, my body's just there to like carry my work.  You know?  Tough job.  Yeah.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:09:25] Really tough job.  But don't be hard on yourself because you're in an environment, if you're in an urban and corporate environment, that's what almost everybody's doing.  So until you find those individuals to spend your time with, I'll never forget Tony Robbins when saying, you want to know how much money is in your bank account?  Take the five people you hang out with the most, average out what's in their bank account.  That's what's in yours.  I did that math; it was accurate.  Then I realized the five marriages I was most close to, the five levels of consciousness, the five levels of wellness.  So, those five people, or in other words, the people that you hang out with have a profound influence on you.  If you choose really well, you can raise any aspect of your life, including holistic wellness.  I'm really happy to hear that.  I'm going to go blame this on my friends.  It's great.  I've asked some of my friends: 'Go get a coach and go do a workshop.'  I don't care what you do, but this thing about being broke all the time – yeah, you're wrecking my average.  Yeah.  Go figure it out.  Go figure it out.  Yeah.  I sure had to.  Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:10:34] So, I mean, this is all very highly sort of personally motivated, right?  Because I think many people would go through the pain and the healing journey you went on and then just be happy to feel better and carry on with their lives as they did.  And many people would be happy to take a business, make it productive, and as long as it's profitable and growing, kind of stop there.  But there seems to be some dissatisfaction with doing things in a way that is maybe suboptimal or maybe not as, I'm not sure how to describe it, maybe harmonious or aligned or what it is.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:11:13] Well, it sounds like you were talking about fixing the problem to get back to ground zero.  If we look at how the best relationships are created, it's about enjoying the initial thrill of it, the oxytocin, the dopamine, the endorphins. But then a real relationship doesn't occur until the first rupture.  So now you have the problem.  You solve the problem.  That's the repair.  Now the idea of the repair is it's an evolutionary process. You should not end up where you started.  You should end up better.  So if you and I, let's say, got into some kind of difficulty, as we solve the difficulty, our relationship should be considerably or clearly better as the outcome of the difficulty.  So the difficulty is part of the relationship.  So it's enjoyment, problem, repair, or rupture, repair.  And then each repair takes us another level higher.  Yeah.  And same in business.  So, Lord knows.  Sage had enough challenges.  Each challenge was not something to fix.  But actually, how do you, as a leader, evolve to the point where that issue will never come back again?  Because I've now understood it, digested it, and upgraded my approach to leadership to not face that one. But the next one will come, and it'll be more sophisticated.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:12:42] I'm reminded of this thing.  Have you ever heard of this?  The idea of the Dark Night framework for storytelling is it the dark night or the soul?  Yeah.  Sure.  I'll never forget mine. Absolutely.  And the idea that there's some inflection point, and some people will go through that inflection point, and they'll sustain.  So they'll survive it, and then carry on.  And that becomes a story of resiliency, right?  Some people, sadly, will go through that point, and they'll succumb, and then live a more diminished life after that point.  Yeah.  And then there's a rare few that will go through that dark period, and it's almost like a chrysalis of sorts, and they'll go through that and emerge as something else. Correct.  And it sounds like you've taken a lot of opportunities in your personal life and in business to treat those moments as more chrysalis than as some pall that has fallen over you.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:13:40] You're very astute. That's exactly it on a smaller level. And then the dark night of the soul is that day where it has to be a very big, I would say you evolve from trying to resolve it at a psycho-emotional level to a psycho-spiritual level.  So mine was: I would keep bringing myself to workshops, because Sage was so struggling in its first years that I would go do a personal growth workshop on the weekend just so I could show up on Monday and face having to speak to creditors in the morning and beg for money in the afternoon.  It was a rough go.  And one particular of these weekends, I remember I was just running out of solutions, and the people there, the seminar leaders, the assistants, everybody was saying, 'We cannot help you with this.'  This is your dark side of your life.  You're going to have to figure this out on your own.  And I remember that night.  I remember that night going back to my cabin and speaking to a God I didn't know.  So I'm going, 'If you're up there, whoever, whatever it is, it's like this life, I can't handle it.  It sucks.  I'm giving it back to you.  Just have your way with me.'  I wasn't a suicidal type, so I just kind of spoke in a very unsophisticated way.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I just said, 'Have it back.'  Woke up the next morning.  Woke up the next morning, and things had radically changed.  I mean, I don't want to get into the story, but I kept running into all sorts of, as if I was on a different planet.  So I had surrendered to the point of moving from looking for psycho-emotional answers to just something bigger.  And somehow the something bigger was there in the morning.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:15:40] That's fascinating.  And again, this is a whole other conversation as well.  It could probably be an hour-long podcast.  But from a background perspective, my family, my community, were from the Sikh spiritual tradition.  And within that, there's this idea of hokum, which is like the command of the universe.  And so, in our perspective, we're supposed to kind of live in a state of submission, of understanding that everything's the command of the universe.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:16:11] And that there's a bit of a – I'm not sure if it's empowerment or what it is, but this idea of if you release and become unattached and go through this sort of submission to the will of the universe, which it sounds like you kind of did.  Because what else is that except saying, 'Here, I submit.'  That's exactly what I did.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:16:30] Yeah.  And I hate the word 'submit'.  And I didn't use it then.  But like I said, it was unsophisticated.  It’s like, here, take this life.  You can have it back.  I can’t handle it.  And of course, you know, that also resembles the 12 steps of knowing that there’s a power greater than ourselves.  So all of the various religions I’ve studied, psychology, philosophies, they do all have that message.  And at Sage, one of the, well, at Sage, in my family, in all of the businesses I’m involved, I always start with: What’s a philosophy we can all agree with?  A philosophy of how the universe works.  And Ayurveda not only gives us a really powerful medical understanding of ourselves that is holistic, but has philosophies that a medical doctor, Deepak Chopra, way back when distilled, when he was still being mentored by the Maharishi, into seven spiritual laws of how the universe works.  He calls it Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.  Everyone at Sage was given that little book.  Any client I have today, I say, let's start there.  If you're willing to accept that those seven laws are how the universe works, we're going to have an easy time creating whatever you want to create, because that's basics.  We'll start there.  And Friday's law is the law of surrender.  It's the law of being unattached to whatever you want to do; what happens.  And ironically, Thursday's Law is the law of intention and desire.  So on Thursday, you're reminded to be very crystal clear as to what you want on Friday.  Now give up your attachment to it.  Let the universe deliver it even maybe sooner or better than you had any idea was possible.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:18:32] Yeah, that's very intentional, because what you're describing is-it almost sounds mundane to call it just culture.  Right?  Culture as a term in professional business settings, it's coming up a lot.  What's the culture?  What are our values?  What's the culture?  But that seems even a step beyond of saying, let's all align first on a view of the world.  And that's going to be the bedrock that we built from.  So, was this day one for you at Sage, or is that something that you kind of discovered?

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:19:01] Gosh, no.  Okay.  Yeah.  And it took me forever.  I mean, Sage is a classic case of 19 years.  20 years of struggle.  And right around the 20th year, we became this overnight success that had taken 20 years.  And it was around that time that I got very clear that there was a three-layered cake, if you wish, of our culture.  First was the philosophy we all agreed on.  That was the seven laws.  The next was an intellectual understanding of ourselves and each other.  So, we go back to.  The oldest Greek thinking of know thyself.  And that's where the Enneagram came in.  We'd been using disc and we'd used colors for a minute and Myers-Briggs.  But when I discovered the Enneagram and the depth of it and the philosophy of it and how it's actually not a personality test, it is a human development tool that will take you all the way to not only understanding.  And maybe even mastering all of the personalities, PowerPoints, but then releasing all of that, realizing that we're not our personality.  Our personalities are just a set of automatic reactions that we've been developing since we were about a high, you know, something happened at some point and we took on a strategy to attract more love and repel what scares us.  And we've been practicing that strategy for, in my case, seven decades.  And so that's what that second layer is about.  The third is just a best-practice approach.  It's the Rockefeller habits.  And that's why when I work with clients, I start with a success map, you know, a one-pager that basically dictates like, 'What's my vision and what's my mission in life and the culture part- 'What are my values?  That's the.  That's the best way to describe a culture.'  And then 'what do I want to do?'  and 'How am I going to do it?'  and 'What's next?'

MO DHALIWAL

[00:21:15] You know, the Enneagram was just barely on my radar, and I don't think I even appreciated it fully until we spoke because Myers-Briggs was the only one that I had dug into to any, you know, meaningful level ever.  And there's there's some value to it.  But I think.  I think I had kind of just over time dismissed it or discarded it as being, you know, cool.  It's interesting having a way to codify somebody's attributes.  And then what?  And because there was no real.  And then what?  It just seemed like, you know, a nice little sort of almost like one of those business vanity metrics of we know what you are and INTJ or whatever it is.  And you can put that off to the side.  But the Enneagram and the questions you asked in particular were quite.  Interesting in that they were about some of the behaviors and the ways that I showed up.  But you also asked the questions over time of when you were here, how were you or at this age?

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:22:18] How were you?  In your early 20s when you weren't as integrated as you are now is an example.  Yes.  And I have to say that to my to my great dismay, it's a very powerful tool and I wielded it poorly at first.  Yeah.  Because I was looking to apply it as a cultural part of Sage and I it took it took many years of applying it to realize the subtleties.  And I went from thinking that only the assertive types should be leaders to eventually giving a talk at SFU on what is your brand of leadership, meaning there's nine different ways to lead.  Mm hmm.  And so today, the key thing is I see it as the language of appreciation.  And so when I meet someone, I'm asking questions to assess their Enneagram so I can find their strengths really quickly and just hang out with those.  Because the more we focus on someone's strengths, the more their weaknesses become irrelevant.  And so it's it's my social approach also because I'm not socially very adept.  And so.  Yeah.  Kate calls it my party trick.  I go look for people's strengths and talk about that.  And then it leads to a great conversation because I'm really a human potentialist.  I discovered a very young age.  I was at McGill in pure chemistry and physics, and it didn't suit my kind of brain.  Didn't know the Enneagram at the time.  So I took an interest course in hypnosis and discovered just what people were capable of, and going like.  Why aren't we living anywhere near this potential of what you can do under hypnosis?  Because, kind of life is a form of hypnosis, which isn't hypnotized to do the best things for us or the planet.  So so that I was 17 years old at the time which led me to on a very long journey of how do we get the best of the best out of me and the best out of whoever's sitting in front of me?  00.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:24:35] And I thought that was the first experience that really there's a possibility of that.  I forget whose quote this is?  I remember he sucks at remembering names of people and books or anything, frankly?  But it was this idea of the controlled hallucination.  Right?  And I heard for reality is a controlled hallucination anyways? Yes. Then to some extent, you should be able to just hallucinate something better.  Right?

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:24:57] Possibilities of that, quality of my marriage was an hallucination that eventually became, you know, the source of my greatest joy.  Me as a parent, I struggled with, you know, so many misinformation.  Now I'm about to become a grandparent.  So I'm hoping my daughter will be looking for me for round two, a better round two.  So yeah, I agree.  Was Kiara in the picture when Sage was started?  Kiara was two years old.  Wow.  And so she grew up with it.  So she knows that brand inside out.  And so when she joined us, it was quite natural.  At first, she just saw an opportunity to have the only portable phone available to her was to have the 1-800 number and she would answer everybody's questions.  And so she knew the brand better than anyone because she grew up with it.  And so at some point, she stepped into Chief Creative and literally moved it forward.  She was the one that said, 'Dad, I know you think it's integral to have your business grow by word of mouth, but you should know about social media.  That's word of mouth on steroids.'  That wasn't her words.  But she was basically looking to bring what we needed was to reach people.  More easily, more effectively.  And she's just a force to reckon with.  People instantly like her and get her.  She's a very clear communicator.  And so she moved the brand forward for 10 years.  Oh, wow.  Incredible 

MO DHALIWAL

[00:26:51] And so the business grew.  And I mean, the success at this point is well known, right?  You're over a year; it's a multi-decade overnight success.  And it got to a point where it was big enough that you got investor interest and then it was acquired.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:27:09] Then we brought in private equity partners.  And I think in a way, it's a weird thing to say, but I think in a way it's almost too successful because the private equity partners saw it as an opportunity to get more involved than they normally do.  They were so excited.  They were so excited about it that the CEO said, 'I'm not going to have a managing director, managing partner take care of you.  I'm going to be the one that's responsible for your brand.'  And then they just couldn't help but to want to study it.  They were sending their MBAs, and they started to tell our people what to do.  And eventually they were really meddling.  And so we had to say, 'Bless her heart,'  Kate was the CEO at the time.  And at some point she just said, 'Look, guys, either you run this business.  Or I do.'  But the business is too challenging.  We're growing into the US market, which is very, very hard to do for a Canadian company.  And they were really getting in the way.'  And so at some point they decided, OK, we're going to take you at your word.  Move away.  We'll run the business.  And sadly, that has not worked out.  Wow.  And so does the family have any connection to Sage now?  We still have.  Our share is frozen in.  Yeah, but not from an operating standpoint.  But we have no operational.  We've tried our best to suggest what would work.  But unfortunately, the business needs a strong entrepreneurial force to get where it needs to go.  And private equity people hire MBAs and corporate types.  And so, that entrepreneurial heart that existed in every minute of the day when Kiara comes up to be with mom and dad in Whistler, at the time, we were talking the brand.  And that's all gone.  So now they might be working on the weekends.  I don't know.  But it's just not getting the job done.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:29:27] I mean, it's, you know, kind of antithetical to it, but I was going to describe retail wellness as a bit of a knife fight.  Like, you know, competitive and difficult industry, especially with the amount of. 

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:29:43] Retail is extremely tough. And wellness is usually very much one-on-one.  So if you're trying to democratize wellness, if you're trying to reach a lot of people.  Yeah, that's very, very hard to do.  And, in fairness to our private equity folks, it's no surprise that they're struggling.  Yeah, it's very difficult.  It is such a personal thing.  And so.  And so, there's the entrepreneurial aspect.  You describe the entrepreneurial heart.  Well, I could have said entrepreneurial and personal to me are really, really close.  So you're helping me realize that why what I think is possible for Sage isn't happening.  Is that it's been depersonalized?  Kate and Kiara and I were constantly out there teaching whatever the end of the business was.  And, and I saw Sage as as an educational business.  We were literally out in these shopping malls, educating people that, why don't you be your first practitioner.  Be your own doctor.  Number one, number two, why don't you let nature be your first medicine, even if it's a walk in the woods, let nature, you know, so it was educational at that level, at our head office level where we had as many as 200 people, we were teaching the seven laws, we were teaching enneagrams, we were teaching leadership, we were teaching a new approach to to all of this.  So it was very educational. 

MO DHALIWAL

[00:31:24] But I guess the point I was going to make there was that it's not just entrepreneurial.  Because there's a real wellness and human potential focus that you have.  Yes.  That in this instance, it just works so well for what the product is, what the brand is, and what the company is.  Yeah.  And I think that would be hard to replicate because I think to some extent brains are replicable.  You know, you can actually on a business, you can do brain transplants; heart transplants are close to impossible. 

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:31:58] Yes, we can leave behind organizational systems.  Frameworks, processes, workflow.  But the love that we had for the brand, the love that we had for the people that we worked with, the love that I would like to think they had for us and our communities that were-there was a ton of love, and you can't put that in an operations manual. 

MO DHALIWAL

[00:32:25] So you left Sage Wellness.  But you didn't leave wellness behind.  True.  That's very core to who you are.  So how are you, how are you exploring wellness today? How are you continuing on your mission of helping people heal and be more well? 

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:32:41] So there's the family, and there's me.  So personally, I've just taken it to coaching young entrepreneurs. Coaching philanthropies is a favorite area because I've always thought that they were underfunded and undersupported. Mm-hmm.  So, supporting those executive directors, supporting these projects, and teaching everything that I learned at Sage to help them grow their organizations is very, very fulfilling for me. As a family, Kate and Kiara decided to take wellness at a different level because we had a non-compete with Sage because we still have shares connected. And so they helped people with movement.  So they created a line of fitness products that are so beautiful, they're so design-oriented, that you actually can leave it in your living room, you can have it in your bedroom, the family room.  And if you see it, you use it.  I discovered that by leaving my yoga mat just within eyesight of my bed.  And I thought, wow, I am using it so much more.  Because when I see it, I use it.  So that approach is what, you know, got me to literally have, like, weights so that, because many of us have bone density issues, you know, with the quality of the food we eat and aging, we need to lift weights.  So that weight, if it's made out of, like, a Porsche-quality paint job with marble inserts.  Wow.  If you have a cart that, instead of having gin and scotch on it, has, you know.  Has built-in somehow a gym, but the cart is beautiful enough that it's also holding a few books and a plant, it's part of your furniture.  And so she's figured out a way.  She and Kate have figured out a way to instill wellness right into people's living rooms.  So little brown bottles might be in your health cabinet in the bathroom, but now there's some wellness right in front of you. 

MO DHALIWAL

[00:34:57] That's incredibly creative and so specific.  I don't think I've seen anybody else doing that.  I guess that's pretty remarkable.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:35:04] You're right.  It doesn't exist.  And it was actually Kate's idea during COVID.  Couldn't go to the gym.  Wanted to lift some weights.  Did not want those typical, you know, rubber-smelling, chrome, ugly things.  So she thought, well, you know, Kiara can help me design this.  I know how to get things sourced.  So I'll have one of these built for me.  And of course, every friend said, that's such a good idea.  Have one built for me, too.  And then we thought, oh, here we go.  So COVID woke us up to that opportunity.  And the rest is history.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:35:42] And on the coaching side, I mean, you describe the types of clients you're working with.  But I mean, even in our first conversation, I feel like we were about 45 seconds in before it was into a lot of depth.  And I think you were pretty well straight into, quite naturally, coaching mode.  And those are conversations that I appreciate as well.  Because the way you described, you know, your appreciation, I guess, of social environments, I think mine's similar.  I'm a little socially awkward at first.  I have a lot of difficulty having small talk.  I'd rather just walk into a conversation and be like, 'Okay, so, you know, what traumatized you as a child?  Let's just get into it.'  And so for that reason, I appreciated our conversation.  Because, yeah, we were, you know, seconds in.  And you went immediately to those two questions. 

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:36:30] Well, you put your finger on it in the introduction.  Because 140 questions online is a little tedious.  And what most people don't know is that these tests are only 66% accurate.  That means that one out of every three people is actually getting a false reading of their Enneagram.  Or for that matter, the other tests aren't.  I don't have a statistic for the other tests.  But none of these, people don't know themselves well enough to answer the questions well enough.  So what I've done is I've turned 140 questions that are quantitative into two questions that are qualitative.  And those two questions can fit into a conversation with anyone who doesn't want to talk about the Canucks or the weather.  And so, and since, and you probably could feel that.  I was actually interested in finding your strengths, finding the best side of you.  Finding that out didn't bring up any resistance.  And quickly you could see that I was there to help.  So I remember at the beginning of my career, I said to myself, 'I want every time I meet someone, I leave them a little weller.'  It's a word I made up: Weller than when I met them.  So whether it was putting some peppermint oil on their bed, or the back of their neck to loosen it up, or their shoulders.  Or whether it was a conversation that enlightened a possibility for something to be better in their life.  And so the coach in me has been around for a long time.  I mean, I was coaching little five-year-olds on the ice rink called Peanuts when I was 15 years old.  And so I've always wanted to help.  And today, every conversation is an opportunity for a relationship to build.  On just things improving.  So that's become my culture.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:38:27]  I mean, just because it's fascinating.  Let's explore those two questions.  Like how you arrived at them, what they are. 

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:38:35] The Enneagram is actually sacred geometry.  It's greater than the human brain.  And if you look into it, you'll find out everything is a triad.  It's all in threes.  Threes is that there's a certain power.  From the Holy Trinity all the way down to there are three types of aspects to, for example, human intelligence.  You have gut intelligence, heart intelligence, and brain intelligence.  So one of my first questions is to try and establish if you're a gut intelligence, you're more of a body type.  And so you're more intuitive.  You're getting more black and white answers because they just feel like it's like you just know.  So if I can distill a question down to a yes or no, you're just going to naturally have it.  Kiara is a gut type.  And I've been watching her grow up with this level of certainty that comes with just reading her body.  So that's gut intelligence.  The heart intelligence is relational.  So some people, their first priority is like, what impact am I having on you?  What impact are you having on me?  Are we connecting?  Does this feel good?  And those of us who are heart types like myself, we go to university and we're all taught how to not listen to this but listen to this.  But for some people, that is their natural first place to go.  It's all about possibilities and causalities.  And a lot of analysis.  And they just love data.  And one of my first dates with Kate, she says to me, 'You know, this restaurant won't be around in three months.'  It's kind of too bad because the food's okay.  And I said, 'What do you mean it's not going to be around in three months?'  She says, 'Well, there's I forgot the numbers, but there's 24 tables.  There's two settings.  There's only six people here.  It's 7 o'clock.'  And she was quite right.  Three months later that, I think it was called Tomatoes or something, was out of business.  And I thought to myself, 'God, I must be boring.'  That.  On an early date.  She's doing math in her head.  I found out later she could do the math in her head as just part of who she was.  It comes easily to her.  While I'm trying to pay attention to what's the potential in this relationship.  And were her strengths in mind, and they're complementary.  We could work together.  Like I was having a completely different internal conversation.  So the bottom line is we have all three.  We make decisions with all three.  But we all have a dominant intelligence center.  For Chiara, it's gut.  For me, it's heart.  For Kate, it's head.  That was part of the fortune of our success is that we really covered those three aspects.  The second question has to do with pace, natural way of being.  Some people are more introspective, slower, quieter.  They remember a lot.  They listen a lot.  And they take their time to make a decision.  They take in a lot of information or a lot of emotional content.  I call those the slower-paced introspective.  Some people are assertive.  They're fast.  They take charge.  It's like, 'Follow me.'  Who's with me?  This is what's going to happen.  So, in the middle, you have the supportives.  Those are the ones that they don't want to take quite the risk of the assertive.  They want to know who's doing something I believe in and I'm going to support that.  Or, what's a good cause I can support?  So, they're the helpful types.  So, they're a medium pace because you can't be supportive if you're calling the shots and moving fast.  And you're not supporting quite as much when you're introspective.  So, there are three distinct speeds that we operate at.  And dependent on a number of situations, we move at different speeds.  But we do have a dominant speed.  Mine is fast.  Kiara is fast.  Kate is fast.  So now I've got two distinctions of three choices each.  You can do the math; that's nine possibilities.  So, a fast person from the heart is known as the achiever, the Enneagram 3.  A fast person from the head is known as the adventurer.  That's Kate.  And a fast person from the gut is called the protector or the challenger.  That's Kiara.  And then there's the other six.  So you can see if I get an accurate answer to those two questions and because they're qualitative, I can hear hesitations.  I can hear when people are telling me they're a head type and I go, 'so do you care what people?'  Oh, yeah, I care what other people think.  So they're thinking that they're thinking, but they're caring what other people think.  That's a hard thing.  So the qualitative questions allow me to make some adjustments and then check.  And then the ultimate checks, I really should call them the three questions.  Is that we all go to a different personality under stress.  This is the part that our society could so learn because we're willing to live with all that stress, not realizing that we're not ourselves anymore.  Or at least, we're not the personality where all our gifts are.  We're actually leaving the gifts.  Might as well put them in a box.  Yeah, you're inhabiting something else.  Yeah.  So those of us who are, let's say, achievers, our qualities – we're passionate.  We're quick.  We care about people.  We want to change the world for a better place.  As soon as we're stressed, we go to the dark side of nine, which is we get withdrawn.  We get stubborn.  It's like all those qualities are gone.  Now we're operating from a very difficult place.  So stress brings on a personality change.  And so if we knew that, we would pay a lot more attention.  What's stressing us?  And how do we back out of that?  At Sage, that was the thing that I didn't, you know, in a meeting, we'd have a one-hour agenda.  The first thing we would do is just take the stress out of the room, make sure everyone was present, everyone was collaborative.  Take all the problems; it could take 40 minutes.  But in the next 20 minutes, extraordinary things would happen at warp speed because all of the resistances and all the blocks were taken.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:45:16] So that third one is actually, I'm feeling some validation here because that one I'm actually intimately familiar with.  And only because I have a friend and colleague who has a program called Groundwork where she actually only deals with the stress response.  She's honed in on that to understand that, you know, in high-performing people, high-performing teams, the kind of unlock for them is to understand who they become when they're stressed out.  Exactly.  And why.  Yeah.  And I should probably know better.  Because in the office here even at Skyrocket, I know for myself, my managing director, fantastic relationship.  We get a lot done together.  And we're paired well because our strengths and weaknesses, I think, complement each other.  But stress response, mine is like immediate snap decisions.  And her stress response, I think, is analysis.  Right.  Right.  So, you know.  That's the stress.  No.  And the other thing that's actually interesting about your questions is that there's also like this.  Yeah.  This time dimension.  Because when you first asked me, I forgot what the exact question was.  But it was about my 20s.  And, you know, I struggled with that a little bit because I feel, you know, with age, surely there's some maturity.  But there's hesitation in some areas where you used to have this absolute naive confidence almost.  Right.  And in my 20s, I would say, I was probably very gut.  Because when I look back, I'm not sure if I wrote anything.  I didn't write anything down, analyze anything, looked at any data.  You know, I was just shooting.  Right.  From the hip.  Right.  And doing really fun, awesome stuff.  It's, you know, when I was working in technology, came out of Silicon Valley, I started a festival.  I started working in advertising.  And everything was just whatever I felt I did.  Right.  And, you know, if I was in a job and as soon as I didn't feel it, it didn't matter.  Like, I wasn’t able to do the math and say, well, you know, I’m a high performer.  I’m a high-paid person working in software in the early 2000s in California.  By all intents and purposes, that’s a great spot to be in.  And I just couldn’t reconcile myself with the math.  I couldn’t say, well, if a salary is this much, if I work for this many months or, you know, a year or two, I’ll have this much.  Therefore, I should, you know, do the logical thing.  As soon as it wasn’t like here, I didn’t feel it; it would just leave me.  And I would just check out and I couldn’t do anything anymore.  And I feel like I’ve transitioned since then.  And these days I kind of wish I had some of that more-being so confident of just following my gut around.  And these days I feel like I'm, you know, sometimes a little bit of analysis paralysis, sometimes getting lost in the exploration, the ideas.  And from that, not necessarily having as clear a direction as I did then when I would really just work from the gut.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:48:09] Well, the expression I would use for that is: 'What got you here won't get you there.'  So, you had a series of less sophisticated gifts that actually got you somewhere of stature.  But now you get to a place where those were all kind of reactionary, very personality-oriented.  If you can transcend your personality, if you can actually have full choice when a situation occurs, because you've become that integrated, you have a whole new level of performance available to you.  If you can do that for your organization, you can do what we built at Sage, which was an exponential culture.  We got to a place where we could double and double and double year after year.  That takes a team that works really, really well with each other.  And it takes individuals that work really, really well with each other.  So that's available to you.  It just requires kind of shifting gears from using your old tools when they stop working, not going, oh, I want them back.  It's more like, oh, what are the new tools that want to offer themselves to me so that I can take things to the next level?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:49:34] And then the other part was about pace.  And so I was happy to hear you say that there's always some dominant trait.  Because on pace as well.  Sometimes I'm hard on myself because as much as I might be a snap decision person in some instances, there's also other times when I am completely just avoidant, procrastination, push it out of you, sit, wait.  That's your stress response.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:50:00] So if you and your partner know that, then she can say to you, hey, Mo, what's stressing you out?  Let's deal with that.  Get that out of the way, because I want the usual you-that has the pace and the quickness, and that sees things.  So that procrastination, that's when I say 'withdrawn,'  stubborn.  I could have also said 'procrastinates,'  slows things down.  It's like, oh, I just don't want to handle that.  And kind of thank God.  Because when we are fast individuals, if we stayed that fast under stress, we'd do some serious damage.  So I find it as, you know, we've got to remember all of those coping mechanisms.  Our whole personality is a coping mechanism that we developed at a very young age.  The opportunities to start recognizing it as such and knowing we're not locked in to that coping mechanism.  We can make some conscious choices once we recognize what it was and what can be. 

MO DHALIWAL

[00:51:08] I just realized actually I had it backwards before.  Because when I think about me and Nina's stress response, I think our usual is that I'm fast-acting and she's analytical.  I think under stress, she's the one that comes to me and says, 'We have to make a decision on this.  We have to do something.'  And I'm like, 'Ew.  Exactly.'

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:51:27] So job one is get rid of the stress.  So find your mentor, your coach, whoever is your source of wisdom.  Get rid of the stress.  Become yourself again.  Make that happen for both of you.  And now all of a sudden business becomes that problem becomes your source of I like to say the thing that holds you back becomes the thing that propels you.  So the thing that's holding you back, your source of stress is a gift.  But it's a gift with an ugly wrapper.  You got to know there's a gift inside that ugly wrapper and be willing to get in there.  Unwrap it.  Go get the gift.  Be willing to make a shift.  For those of us who are fast, sometimes it's humility.  It requires a willingness to not do self-deceit and go, okay, I didn't want to admit it, but I screwed up over here.  What have I learned?  What am I willing to change from here on end?  And now all of a sudden things become easy as they should be.  That's another thing.  We're taught no pain, no gain.  There's some wisdom there, but it's backwards.  Life is meant to be easy, actually.  When it's hard, it's just to let us know we're heading in the wrong direction or we're using the wrong tool or we're not paying attention to something or we're deceiving ourselves.  That's what the purpose of hard.  So that's Wednesday's law, the law of least effort.  I love that law.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:53:06] But you said something fascinating there, which I think.  I want to unpack a little bit more.  This idea of self-deceit.  And the reason why that just stuck out to me is because myself and with my team: You try to create an environment of trust.  And what's been coming up a lot for us even is like honesty, really connecting to the truth of what's happening.  And I realized recently that actually quite a while ago, that sometimes you can kind of accidentally arrive in an environment where you're actually hiding.  Where it's like high trust, but low honesty, where there's maybe some self-deceit going on.  Maybe we're not really connected to the truth of what's happening, but you have a team that still believes in the overall mission, likes each other, likes working together.  And so they trust each other and it kind of creates a weird blind faith situation right where we trust each other.  But we don't have the level of honesty we need to really know what's going so we can take that trust and do something with it.  How do you counter self-deceit?  How do you encourage other people to kind of get to you? 

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:54:09] Intimacy is so important, I know the old adage: into me see.  When you're willing to be open and and say the thing you don't want to say,, , be very candid and self-revealing if you can create your team to do some of that. , I have a tool called Witty, what I don't want to tell you is this is a weird acronym, right?  W-I-T-T-Y.  And, and so if I wanted to create intimacy with you, I would say, 'Tell me something you don't want to tell me', and and I'll tell you something I don't want to tell you, and if we do a few rounds of that, you'd be surprised how all of a sudden we'd be like two people who have known each other for 10 years, and we did that in 20 minutes. 

MO DHALIWAL

[00:55:06] That's fascinating! 

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:55:08] That builds trust.  Yeah, if I see you really opening up and telling me things that you wouldn't want to tell me, and I do the same, we do that back all of a sudden I'm in a position to trust you.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:55:19] I think I have a variant of that, I think that goes deeper, but  I've got a variant of that, which I think just kind of skims the surface of that.  When I'm like noticing that a couple of us are out of alignment and we're a small team here, right?  And when I notice that a couple of us are out of alignment or we really need to get to a place before even addressing the issue, we'll sit down and kind of do like a three-person exercise where each one  for the other two people will ask a question or sorry respond to a question.  Those questions are what do I like about working with you?  What do I not like about working with you?  And what did I learn about myself, there's the witty exactly we're  In the middle,, and then, and then what did I learn about myself and working with you, yeah, that's brilliant, yeah, but it just kind of touches on it,, but intimacy is interesting, I'm sure that works.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:56:08] Patrick Lencioni has has some great work in that direction if you haven't read it recently,, , what's it called, five the book title is is escaping me at the moment, but if you look up his most popular book, it's it's a story about a business that comes together because they do all of those things so the closest thing I've seen to the story of Sage written up in a book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  The five dysfunctions of a team, yeah, got it, okay.  So, I'm not keen on the title but I love the content.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:56:53], so you've embarked on your sort of next adventure now which is as a coach,, and I think it's a really interesting space that you work in, but also your approach to it is quite singular, from what I've seen, anyways.  But what has been your i guess biggest learning up to this point, of what people need to show up in life the way they want to?

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[00:57:25] Right; we've all got to go back to the word 'singular'  because you might have just put your finger on the on the transition that I'm facing right now which is singular, as in just me, as a coach.  So I spoke about  Rachel who was my assistant once upon a time became the trainer and I'm now working with her.  I'm now collecting a number of people that I have been mentoring to become coaches and I'm looking to create a movement because coaching is all about helping people raise their consciousness.  And when it's singular, it's just one-on-one; I'm only having so much impact if I can find a way to package everything we're teaching our clients as a team and work as a team again, and find a way to reach more people.  I think that there's a next stage, so I thought you know I'm gonna be 70 in October, I thought that I was supposed  To slow down, but, what I didn't tell you is that I'm coaching into the industry of psychedelics, I've been doing that for six years, and therefore I've been exposed to some extraordinary people, some extraordinary journeys.  And, as much as my weak intellect thinks I should be moving towards retirement, the higher messages are telling me no, no, no, lots more to do.  Remember how old was Colonel Sanders when he finally sold his recipe?  Like was it 84 years old?  So clearly,, the messages are now sinking in.  I'm meant to do more and I meant to do it in the way I've been teaching.  Wednesday's Law, the loveliest effort.  So, if I'm living the loveliest effort, then why couldn't I do something that I'm not supposed to do and I'm not supposed to do it in the way I've been teaching?  And I'm not supposed to do it in the way I've been teaching-of substantive impact on on our society and as a leader, I had a weakness of being non-inclusive enough.  So, I want to have another round and I want to be a better team player, more inclusive, and live the loveliest effort because I worked really hard at Sage.  I want to do it in a whole new way, and basically, I want to demonstrate you know the best of what I was able to manage at Sage, and whatever I missed out. Here's my  chance to you know live even deeper into all the philosophies that i believe in well to continue the colonel sanders metaphor it sounds like you've landed on a great recipe i think i might have yeah so Jean-Pierre if somebody wants to learn more about you and what you're doing where should where should they go well that's a question because i'm now i'm not yet public so right now i i've got my clients because clients are telling others and so I mean i've got a website that's half asleep the alchemynetwork.com  is the the alchemy network is the name of my coaching business so i guess i could be found that  Way,, I'm not on social media, , for a number of reasons, but I might have to change that.  So, I'm at a transition point where, I'm in the huge curiosity of committing to doing something big to help raise consciousness.  What is that going to look like?  I don't really know, but I do know that I just need to keep making one step at a time, seeing who shows up.  Never been on a podcast before; you showed up and I'm going, 'Ha!  Maybe I can do more of that.'  I mean, I'll see how this first one looks like when I listen to it and, and if it looks like it could serve the cause, I'll do more.

MO DHALIWAL

[01:01:37] And so, I hope you do a thousand more of these because  I think this has been a fantastic conversation and I think so many more people need to hear it, and also hear about your approach and how you do things, and probably even engage with you selfishly.  Yeah, I hope you do a thousand of these.

JEAN-PIERRE LEBLANC

[01:01:53] Well, I have found this very enjoyable and and I'm looking forward to seeing what's possible between the two of us because I've discovered you through this, I i, and I'm thinking, is there a way that whatever I have can be helpful to you, because you're who's sitting in front of me right now?  No, I'm sure there is.

MO DHALIWAL

[01:02:21] Yeah, thank you so much for coming on; really appreciate your time, it's been  an absolute pleasure all right thanks Jean-Pierre till we meet again well hopefully we've given you a lot to think about that was high agency like and subscribe and we will see you next time