Applying Family Constellations to Business with Ivan Polic

In this Episode

• [02:08]Ivan Polic shares his background, mentioning his career as a professional soccer player and his transition to building a family business. He recounts how his sister introduced him to Family Constellations after attending a workshop in Europe.
• [16:44]Ivan explains the concept of Family Constellations, emphasizing that it is not about channeling or psychic communication but rather tapping into a mysterious field.
• [18:55]Ivan describes the morphogenic field process as a form of “feng shui of the soul,” where one can externalize one’s inner world and make intentional shifts.
• [38:24]Ivan discusses how Family Constellations can be applied in business settings to resolve conflicts and improve decision-making.
• [42:35]Ivan outlines the three leading principles of their business consulting approach: being a safe harbor, a way through, and a bridge.
• [48:30]Ivan provides information on how listeners can get in touch with him and his team for business consulting services.

Jump to Links and Resources

Ivan, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

First of all, I would love for our listeners to understand a little bit about your backstory and how family constellations became front and center in your life and became part of what you do in assisting business owners and up-leveling themselves.

Well, I was a professional soccer player. I was on a long quest to become the best player I could be. I reached a professional level and ended my career with the LA Galaxy. After that, I decided to go off and into my next quest: building our family business, taking things to the next level, and learning how best I could contribute. That journey also led me to a lot of. It’s an abrupt career change. In soccer and business, there are inner connecting qualities and capacities, such as grit, competition, tenacity, and all those things. 

Outward skills Tony’s Personal Power needed a lot of up-leveling. From my professional sports career, I have always been involved in interpersonal development. I tried to expose myself to the best mentors that I could. That led to about a 10-year journey with Tony Robbins. Even back in my soccer career, when I launched that and all of those trials and tribulations, I listened to Personal Power by Tony, and then eventually, I had enough resources to attend one of his events. 

From that point on, I went into all of Tony’s offers, got on his leadership team, and eventually, both my wife and I became trainers with Tony Robbins, traveled around the world supporting his events, leading the teams at his events and things like that. And then, somewhere along the way, I got luckily exposed to the family constellation modality. That was incredibly impactful. The first experience was really mind-blowing. 

From that experience, we went into a deep dive, learning everything we could about this, traveling worldwide, and exposing ourselves to the best trainers and teachers. After that first experience, I think I read about 30 books in two months because I was fascinated with the possibilities and impact and what this thing was. I had to learn everything there was on it. That’s my usual way of diving deep into new things I learned. That was pretty much the backstory.

Okay, but you said you had a mind-blowing experience with family constellations. If you’re willing, tell us about that experience.

I’ve told this story a lot because since that first experience—about 12 and a half years ago—my mother sat on a plane next to someone and got a flyer for family constellations. My sister is also in a personal development world in Europe. So she said, “Okay, let me check it out. Let me see what this is.” And she had an incredible experience. She calls me and tells me, “Hey, this thing you want to check out?” I immediately go online. 

I found a workshop locally in Orange County, California, and registered. I don’t know anything from anything. I showed up to this thing some weekend 13 years ago, and I walked in. It’s a very, very small room. There are maybe seven of us. It’s not my scene. The first feeling was, “What am I doing? Like, this is not I don’t know. Let me give it a chance. I’m already here. Let me sit down.” 

On the morning of that day, a young lady stood up, walked up to me, and said, “Hey, would you like to participate in this first process here?” I’m like, “You don’t want me. I don’t know anything. It’s my first time here.” “Oh no, don’t worry, this is easy. You’re going to be fine. Would you please?” “I already provided this disclaimer that I don’t know anything. So, okay, here we go.” 

She puts me in the middle of the room. This circle seating is a very small room, and there I am, standing in the middle of the room. Then, she proceeded to invite someone else to stand up and participate. She places this woman in front of me, maybe three yards away. We’re facing each other. She goes back and sits down, and we are left in the middle of the room looking at each other, and I don’t feel a thing. 

This is for multiple minutes, with each of us staring at each other with no feeling whatsoever. My mind is starting to go crazy, like, “What are you doing? What is going on?” I glance over to see where the door is. “Is it closed enough? Can I go home? When can I bow out respectfully and just go home?” As I think about all these things, I hear the facilitator bring someone to stand. I’m hearing noise, so I see the facilitator bringing in a man to stand behind me. 

He’s standing about three yards behind me. As I look and see him, a huge wave of sadness takes over my body completely. These are intense waves—really deep, deep, deep sadness and grief. I am just taking over. As my body takes over, my mind says, “Wow, what is this? Wow, this is intense.” It’s so intense. My body starts to react, and then spontaneous tears come. 

I don’t know what this is about, but genuine grief is passing through my nervous system, and my face is just a mess—huge tears, lots and lots of tears. I’m like, “What is going on? Gather yourself.” Probably about five minutes of grief passing through my nervous system, slowly, I’m like, “Oh, my God, this is slowing down.” And finally, it kind of subsides enough. I can wipe my face. They’re giving me tissues. I’m a huge mess. I’m like, “Dude, what are you doing?” 

As I wipe my face and my eyes, I can finally open them again. I look across at the same woman standing at the same distance, and I’m stunned by her beauty and sweetness—she seems almost like an angelic figure in front of me. I’m trying to take this in, but I can’t. It’s so unbelievable to me. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m having a spontaneous movement that I’m not initiating towards her. 

My body started to move toward her even though I didn’t intend to. I thought, “Whoa, what’s going on here?” I looked up, and she was also incredibly connected. Now, we have this connection. We’re getting closer, and as we get really close, an incredible embrace just happens. It’s so sweet and beautiful. We’re holding each other.

In the middle of all that, I think, “Dude, you have completely lost it. You’re definitely certifiable.” I open my eyes a little bit. Everybody’s staring at us, and I’m like, “Dude, this is wild. What is going on here?” This goes on for a few minutes of us holding each other, and then finally, the facilitator says thank you, and we’re letting go of each other. “You can go ahead and sit down.” So we go and sit down. 

They don’t debrief what happened. They’re just going into the next process and the next process, and I’m like, “What the hell is this?” While sitting there at the next process, I think, “Hey, did they give me something to eat? Did I drink something? Did they hypnotize me?” I’m reviewing, questioning, doubting, and skeptical, but at the end of the day, I had no backstory. This is one of those facilitators, and we work this way as well. Now, that works blindly. 

So the participants know nothing of the backstory. It’s totally non-cognitive, and I can’t talk myself out of it. I’m like, “I guess I gotta investigate. This was incredible. I want to know what this is.” So, at the lunch break, I corner the facilitator, and this is a lovely 75-year-old woman. I’m like, “Could you please give me a little something on what happened earlier when I was representing?” She said, “Well, the young lady who asked you to participate wanted to explore her relationship with her father. You represented her father, and the young lady that was standing in front of you represented the client.” I’m like, “Okay. And then what?” 

She said, “Did you notice how you couldn’t feel anything at the beginning?” I said, “Yeah. Well, she said that’s how her relationship with her dad was. She couldn’t connect with him no matter what.” She tried a lot of things and couldn’t connect with him no matter what. I’m like, “Yeah, man, I couldn’t feel anything there. And so then what?” So she said, “Her dad is a first-generation immigrant from Hungary. I had a thought, maybe a hunch, that there could be something to do with this country of origin. 

So, as a test, I placed the representative for the country of Hungary behind you.” My mind was already preparing to be just blown up. I was thinking, “What? I mean, we’re connected to countries. What are we talking about here?” And she said, “Well, my interpretation of what happened is that once you stood in the place of the father, and there was a relationship now with the country of Hungary.”  

My hunch is that when he came to the US some twenty years ago, he was extremely sad. He was homesick, nostalgic, and missing his country and his family. The only way he could function in the new world was to make himself numb—to numb the sadness, longing, yearning, and missing of his country and his family. He just numbed himself to survive and function. 

When he numbed off the sadness and grief, he numbed off all the other feelings so he could not connect with his daughter. His daughter could not connect with him. He literally wasn’t able to feel when you came from an undefended nervous system, stepping into his place on an energetic morphogenetic field level. You had nothing of the backstory, no defense system, and no feeling of blocking. You had a healthy, available nervous system. 

So when you stepped into it, all those feelings you could feel. And he said you felt the 20-plus years of his sadness. And I was like, “Well, that’s an unbelievable statement.” But having the experience two hours earlier and actually running through my body, I was like, “That was a lot.” A lot went through my body. She said, “After you felt all the sadness and grief, now you could feel also other emotions,” which was the immense love he had for his daughter. 

That’s when my mind was completely blown. I was like, “Whoa, this is incredible.” My mind was racing at that point. The implications were incredible. At that point, I had a lot of skills in personal development. I had a lot of things that I’d already been working on, but nothing like this had happened to me. And the implications were incredible. I was already doing a lot of change work. 

But the implications of this in a noncognitive manner, just stepping in and experiencing something that might have been backed up for a long time, the therapeutic, the change, the transformation possible here, seemed to me from first glance to be incredible possibilities. And because of that, I dove in, and I was like, “Well, I cannot give any other explanation, but there’s something mysteriously powerful here, and I must know everything about it.” 

I went on to read Bert Hellinger’s book. He wrote 40 books, anything I could grab and find and whatever.  From the beginning, I went in chronological order, and I tried to read everything. Then, I started traveling all over the world, trying to learn as much as possible, incredible possibilities, and incredibly powerful modalities. Twelve years later, it completely changed the trajectory of our lives and the trajectory of a lot of people that we’ve worked with. 

That’s the mind-blowing first experience. I glanced over it because I’ve told this story a lot, and it takes a while to tell, but it gives you the first-hand experience and the implications and the possibilities of that. So, I guess it was meant to be.

Yeah, amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that. I was wrapped the whole time. I’m sure our listener was, too. So how does this work? Is this like channeling? Is this like you’re receiving stuff psychically, and does the person you’re representing need to be someone who’s passed, and then they’re communicating with you in a psychic fashion?

It’s not like that. There are elements to that. It really works in a mysterious way. I tend to say that human civilizations have seen lightning in the sky and have been like, “Whoa, that’s incredible power.” Since starting fires, they’ve wanted to know how we can harness the fire in the sky. In the early days of playing with electricity, Edison, Tesla, and all those guys, when we started, finally to get a sense of what this is, that’s kind of how I see the current moment in time in consciousness of humans and humanity. 

This modality is really tapping into something, into the next revolution of consciousness for humanity. We don’t really know yet. It hasn’t been decoded. It’s something very, very mysterious. It’s not yet fully revealed how this works. My hunch is that it’s probably going to take 100 to 200 years for science to be able to decode this. But in the meantime, we are kind of the early explorers. 

And even though we don’t know how the magic works, you and I probably couldn’t wire up our house for electricity. Maybe you could, but I couldn’t. Even though I have an electrical engineering degree, I still couldn’t wire up a house. But I sure know how to turn on the lights because when I go to the thing, I press the button and boom lights. I don’t know where it goes. I don’t know where the wiring goes. 

I don’t know how it’s hooked up, but I know I can utilize it. So that’s kind of where we are. And the best descriptions are provided by a scientist, Rupert Sheldrake. He covers something that’s called the morphogenetic field. So, in the morphogenetic field, he uses the flock of birds. How do the birds know how to move in unison? And there could be a flock of birds. And fish also move in this way. How do they know how to move in unison? They move as a unit. 

In order to coordinate all those fish moving at the same time together in all that fashion, they have to have some kind of other connection rather than the connection that we can see. He is saying that in the morphogenetic field, they enter the field together, and they’re together in the field, and they move with the field in the morphogenetic field. Another way to call this field would be the Akashic field. Another way to call this would be the etheric field.

Different modalities and different ancient sacred bodies of knowledge and consciousness would have different names for them, but it’s all the same. So, in the field, everything is written. Everything that ever was is there. Everything that is there, and everything that it probably will be, is there all simultaneously right now. And so what we’re doing when we step into these things is entering the field and entering the energy of the person with the intention for some kind of good cause. 

You’re entering the field in that particular place, in that particular time, and you are able to feel what that person feels. And you also can. You’re able to see the spatial relationship between elements. In that example I provided, there’s a spatial relationship between the father and the daughter with some distance and some frozenness of their relationship. And then that was the relationship in the field between them. 

In the field, everything is written.

And up until the grief was felt and processed. The new relationship at the end of the process is between the father and the daughter in the field. What we’re working on is in a spatial, relational way. I like to call this the ‘feng shui of the soul.’ You are creating a new spatial relationship in the more optimal space for flow, love, abundance, and whatever else you want. That’s how the Chinese created the feng shui. 

How can we optimize the living space in the best possible way with where we put the door and the window? How do we rotate the house based on the north, south, west and east? That’s really what this modality is. It’s really feng shui of the soul, feng shui of your inner world. And it’s probably one of the only modalities where you can externalize your inner world, where you’re externalizing. Usually, to do introspection and reflection, you have to go within. 

I’m doing a tremendous amount of meditation and all of these modalities. And so when we usually never experience ourselves, we see ourselves in front of us. You can go into observer mode, and you can go outside your body. But this is actually kind of an intentional modality where you can externalize your inner world, and you can actually make shifts in the sense of the ‘feng shui of your inner world’ and what’s going on in there and how you can shift things in an intentional way that can be helpful on your journey.

I love that. That’s really cool. I love your description of it as a ‘feng shui of your inner world.’ Are you practicing feng shui of your outer world in terms of where you put things like mirrors and different objects in your home and how you place the furniture?

We are more practitioners of the feng shui of the inner world. We have consulted and done small things, including feng shui of our aerospace manufacturing plant, because we faced some major resistance and immunities to change and some major difficulties. We’ve done some feng shui work out of necessity. We believe in it. But compared to the two, we’ve done a much deeper exploration of the inner world.

I recently heard a presentation by Marie Diamond. She spoke at a Mindvalley event, and she described that there’s a corner, let’s say, in your office, that’s your success corner, and then there’s a relationship corner and so forth. If your desk is facing away from the success corner, you will have a much harder time with your business or career than if you faced the success corner. 

Vishen Lakhiani was talking about how he just changed the position of his desk and then experienced all these blockages in his business in Mindvalley when he was earlier in that growth cycle. It’s now very large, but that was earlier. He was experiencing some blocks in the growth of that business, and he changed the position of his desk, and things just started to unlock.

Yeah, it’s incredible.

I’m curious if the person you’re working with, like the client, has to be in the same room as the others or if you can do this remotely.

It’s definitely possible to do it remotely. We have done a lot of work online. During the early stages of COVID-19, we went online and did a series of events. From August 2020 to about the end of the year, five months, we did about 200 hours of original content online on this modality. It gathered a global audience because everybody was at home and couldn’t participate in their favorite modality. We tapped into that moment. We made a huge difference.

The first challenge we ran was called systemic work, all day, every day. The idea behind that is how you can facilitate your life from the lens of this modality on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. It’s easy when you go into a sacred circle, if you would, and everybody’s coming. Everybody can feel the sacredness, and we can do some really deep work there. 

The first challenge we ran was called systemic work. The idea behind that is how you can facilitate your life from the lens of this modality on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis.

But when your angry neighbor is knocking on your door, can you summon that presence to facilitate that situation? And so that was the premise behind that. And we did a series of events. Find your voice: The Sacred Compass Transitions challenge, where we help people make transitions. From this lens, we did the challenge called Who’s Making Your Decisions? Because lots of times we’re not making our own decisions. 

We’re just hijacked by the different systems and influences from the outside, and we’re not really making our own decisions. So that was a wild ride, and it was really cool. But definitely, it can be done in groups, or it can also be done one-on-one with a facilitator. And the work is done a bit differently, maybe through a guided process rather than a spatial thing. So it’s the spatial thing that happens in a guided way with your eyes closed or feeling things, or the facilitator represents a key figure that you need to confront and get whatever you need. There are ways to do it. And we did it in a big way during COVID.

I’m sure that was transformational for a lot of people. It was really cool that you did that. Is any of that online now, like on YouTube?

You can just say if somebody’s interested, they would have to contact us. Currently, these are all recorded, and they’re in the vault. They’re waiting for their moment to be put together into something. For someone who’s really hot or interested in something, we can make an arrangement where they can get the videos. The challenge of this is that there was a lot of experiential. 

Probably 50% of the whole process was experiential in little pods, small little experiences that were really, really impactful, where in breakout groups, people will go and have a very deep experience based on, “Okay, we’re going to have a representative for this, and you’re going to be there and experience that. You’re going to face this first, and then you’re going to face this. Then, we’re going to come back and harvest the experience and answer questions.”

We didn’t somehow earn life. Maybe there’s a point of view where you can say that. But it was gifted to us somehow. So we want to honor that.

It was very, very experiential and very deep. So we would want to find a way for people to have some support while they’re going through this. But people at a certain level can definitely expose themselves to that and see what’s going on. The wild thing was, is that in the Find Your Voice challenge, we encouraged people in a Facebook group, and based on how we were leading it and how vulnerable we were, everyone volunteered to go on camera on a Facebook live in the group and share their innermost challenges when it came to finding their voice. 

And that was hundreds of things. I wasn’t sleeping as the person leading the process. I had to see every minute of every one of those things. I didn’t have to, but I was so enthused by its vulnerability and authenticity. It was riveting. I had to make a comment on every one of those things. And so I wasn’t sleeping. It was insane. I had about 130 Facebook Lives for 130 days straight during that time. We were doing a huge wave of energy during COVID. It was a huge boost of positivity, energy, and contribution. So we always think of that as a lot of fun.

Actually, as we’re recording this, we’re going through an energetic window in time called the Omer. It’s 49 days, and it’s a difficult time. The way it’s described in Kabbalistic terms with Kabbalah is accelerated tikkun. Tikkun is Hebrew for soul correction. So we’re having an accelerated soul correction process during these 49 days. We’re about two-thirds of the way through that process right now. And I don’t know if you’ve experienced any difficulties or challenges or tough relationships during these last handful of weeks.

We’re always edging, and we’re always on the edge. So we always have difficulties because we’re always edging to the next growth opportunities for us. I know we were just in Europe celebrating our 25th anniversary and seeing our parents and all of these things. We’re back home now, so I would love to know what day we are on so we can we can keep an eye on that.

Yeah, it’s day 33, I think, right now, with 49 more weeks, roughly. The reason I brought this up is because that whole COVID timeframe feels to me like it was accelerated tune as well. So people were doing stuff that were not their best selves, really under pressure, kind of like a pressure cooker environment. I remember in the early days of the pandemic, walking our little baby around the neighborhood, and we weren’t wearing masks. We were living in Encino, LA, at the time. A lady came out of nowhere to yell and scream at us and wish that our baby got sick because we weren’t wearing a mask by ourselves with anybody within many, many tens of meters away. It was just us outside, not wearing masks. And she was following us, screaming at us, telling us she wished our baby would get sick. I’m sure people who reacted in unkind ways were in a very pressure cooker kind of environment, a state not their best selves.

When you are in that kind of situation, it is really, really important to rein in your reactivity and be aware of how you treat others. And so anyway, that was one of the incidents that just finally put us over the edge. Like, “We’re moving out of California. That’s it.” I believe everything is orchestrated from above by God. And that was for our highest and best good. So that we would make a positive next move and not get too comfortable living where we were in Encino. And we moved out of, actually, out of the country for a while. It was an incredible experience that I’m so grateful for. But yeah, that experience was really, really uncomfortable.

Yeah, definitely. People under pressure can do some really, really not cool things.

I guess that also relates to family constellation work because when somebody says something hurtful to you and it’s somebody that you look up to or you care very much what they think, like a spouse or a family member, and then you hold on to that resentment for maybe decades, you can use family constellation work to release all that pent up hurt, anger, frustration, and sadness. And the person that you’re in conflict with doesn’t even have to be on this side of the veil anymore. They could have passed years ago.

We inherit our parents’ open and unanswered questions. We inherit their unfelt pains and any kind of energetic blockage or major trauma that may be overwhelming.

Absolutely. A lot of the disturbances that we bump into have happened in the previous generations. We inherit our parents’ open and unanswered questions. We inherit their unfelt pains and any kind of energetic blockage or major trauma that may be overwhelming. And you know, what happened in the previous generations, lots and lots of trauma. And so all of those things can come up and have no explainable cause. And this is one way to get to those things and makeshifts that are not easily apparent. I mean, in talk therapy, you could talk, just talk forever. It’s not something that’s going to get to this. I think it’s a great opportunity for people to optimize the name of your show.

Yeah. Thank you. If we look at generational trauma as something that can be healed now, do you believe that it actually goes back in time? You said earlier that everything that ever was is and will be, or it’s all happening simultaneously. Can we heal our ancestors through this family constellation work?

Our point of view is our intention isn’t to heal them. That would make them less than they had their life. They’ve had their time. No matter what difficulties they faced, they were able to pass life on. Our view of our ancestors is hugely colored by gratitude, honor, and respect. We don’t have any intentions for them because, primarily, their intentions live in us. If you think of it as a flow down the mountain, they come before, and we are downstream. Mountains and rivers flow downstream, but they never flow upstream.

We are downstream. The two rivers of life from the two ancestors, the wings, if you would, from the mother’s side and the father’s side. Those two rivers come from way many generations back, and they flow and flow and flow, and those two rivers come and merge inside of us. So now our job is to enable maximum flow to the next generations, to our projects, to the things that are important to us, to life, and to value and honor the life that was given to us. 

We didn’t somehow earn life. Maybe there’s a point of view where you can say that. But it was gifted to us somehow. So we want to honor that. What we’re doing is opening up as much flow as possible, opening up our channels so that more of life can pass through us, so that we can receive more life. There’s also, in our DNA, in the cellular memory of the material that manifests in the manifest world, if you would, remains the imprint of what our ancestors have gone through. 

Incredible strength, resilience, and capacity, along with some painful, traumatic, incredibly difficult things that were not processable at the moment, that were so overwhelming that they were not able to be processed. So now, our willing nervous system, if you would, can allow that to actually process. If we create the conditions for that and if we have the awareness to allow that. 

If anyone’s burning out in your business, that means that people are suffering in order for your product or service to be delivered.

With every one of those processes, we’re opening up more capacity for the flow of life, energy, strength, capacity, and all of these things. And so that’s the view that we have in this kind of body of knowledge.

Now, can you incorporate this work into your business? Let’s say that there are dysfunctional relationships between colleagues or between a staff person and their manager. So, how would that work?

It works in the same way you can work in a circle and then provide representatives. You can work spatially on a board, moving figures around, initiating conversations and initiating things. And it’s incredibly powerful in diagnosing what is in relation to what would be a 30-minute process in target market exploration that can replace a 6-month process of consumer research and all of these things. And you can find what resonates with you the most. 

You can find the strongest, what you are in alignment with the most, and all those things in conflict situations. An incredible amount of decision-making is going on in business. Anything that can help you make those decisions is extremely powerful and helpful. It has implications for all of those different things. We call it organizational constellations. Do you have any problem? What is it particularly strong in? Persistent problems that are immune to any kind of effort on your part. 

So if it is a systemic blockage of some kind and maybe a hidden cause, the normal ways of going about it aren’t going to do it. This is spoken from direct experience because, in our aerospace business, we ran a very intricate, very difficult, demanding business, and we always hit upon these resistances. It was like, “This is the twilight zone. What is happening?” Finally, we had a way of getting about it. 

Many times, business owners are entangled with their businesses, so they get identified with them. So they’re no longer almost in a co-dependence built between the business owner and the business. They become one unit. “I am my business, and my business is my type of thing.” And so we’re able to facilitate a healthy separation of the two entities. A lot of times, the growth cycles of a business can really ruin a person’s quality of life because the needs of the business can outrun one’s nervous system very quickly. 

If you’re a guardian at the gate of the growth of your business and you give everything it needs, you might get so depleted, wiped out, and burnt out that the recovery can be very difficult. At the same time, business growth can be capped by one nervous system being in control or centralized decision-making or whatever it might be, where business needs are much bigger than one nervous system can pass through. 

We are a bridge for the founders to wholesomely provide this legacy and find the next chapter of their lives or the next moment in their journey.

And so, by this healthy separation, we enable a higher quality of life for the business owner as well as a higher possibility of growth for the business, which also increases the value of the business. It’s a more holistic, systemic, wholesome, long-term, sustainable kind of life contribution to the community. If anyone’s burning out in your business, that means that people are suffering in order for your product or service to be delivered. 

And there’s something missing in that equation. The benefit that people receive comes at the expense of people beyond the kind of good quality exchange. Those are the things we look to identify and shift. This would be the feng shui of business. The feng shui metaphor is working well today. What we do is have three leading principles when we work with organizations.

The first leading principle is we are a safe harbor. “We’re a safe harbor for you as the business owner. We’re a safe harbor for you as a business. You can come to us as vulnerable as you are because we made much worse mistakes than you already. You can just come transparently and tell us what’s going on. We’re going to hear you out. It’s a judgment-free zone, and we’re going to work through things and meet you where you are.” And this is kind of like we’re a safe harbor for you.

The second thing that we are for them is we’re our way through. We are on our way through from here to the fruition of your vision. We can help you navigate the decisions, emotions, difficulty, whatever it might be, the uneven exchange or the incorrect order, or what doesn’t belong. And how do you want to navigate the ship? 

Ideally, this business outlasts the founder or the owner, meaning that the legacy lives on beyond the essence of why this was founded and what goodness it gives to the world that it can go on beyond this generation. And that’s the kind of thing we focus on. So we help them find a way through. 

Everything that could be internal to the business provides a good mix that we can fulfill in the essence and vision of the business.

The final thing is that we are a bridge for the founders to wholesomely provide this legacy and find the next chapter of their lives or the next moment in their journey. This is a fulfilling new place and a new orientation in life besides just the major focus on the business. That also provides more space for the business and a new, more fulfilling life for the founders. And that’s a gist of how we do this work.

You incorporate family constellation work in your practice and help these business owners get up-level and have a successful exit.

Yes, we definitely do that. We focus on three main shifts when we work with people, leaders and organizations. The first shift is the kind of inner world shift. That’s the kind of inner world feng shui. The second shift is the kind of operating system shift. Who is on the team, what systems, what tracking, how do we do that, how do we organize it? Everything that could be internal to the business provides a good mix that we can fulfill in the essence and vision of the business. 

Then, the final shift that we focus on is the marketplace shift. We look at market trends and what is all involved, how is the pricing, how is the offer, how does it match, where are the opportunities, how can we differentiate more, how can we maximize more, how can we make the future revenue independent of the founder? All of those things are what we focus on in the marketplace shifted.

When we connect, it becomes a part of a holistic journey. We have nine accelerators that are part of that process that support a momentum-building process so that we can create the maximum value in the business, maximum value for the community, and maximum potential value. Create a business that is sellable. Create an asset that provides goodness to the community, the founder, and the people working within it. And so that it’s goodness all around. 

At that point, the founder or owner can pass it on to the next generation, continue it, or sell it on the market to the correct buyer. Someone who’s going to have the ear and the sensibility to continue something so great in the same vein and with the same kind of intention. And so that’s what we do and what we work on. We call these three shifts a part of a larger body of work that includes the family constellations, the systemic work, and a bunch of other things from our experience.

We call it shift intelligence. It is kind of a whole body of work where we are progressively learning how to be better and making shifts on how to have the presence of mind, how to have the discernment and the courage to make the intentional shifts and changes and evolutions in the right direction to enable that flourishing of vision and improvement of the quality of life. And that’s what we do and how we look at it.

That’s really cool. It sounds like there’s a lot of intentionality in that. You help all parties involved reveal more light in the world and improve—not just your client but also the buyer if it ends up getting acquired. This intentional, deeper approach benefits the team, the staff, and your client’s family.

We always create a culture where it’s energizing to come and contribute.

Thank you so much. Culture is a huge component of this. Teams on the ground, we always create a culture where it’s energizing to come and contribute. It’s energizing when you go back home; you’re not wasted, spent, or abused. You come home, and you can share that goodness with your family. It’s very much a growth-oriented space that we love to create. And so everyone, it’s kind of a rising tide. All boats, if you will.

I love that analogy. Awesome. If our listener or viewer wants to work with you and your team and give them that support to up-level their business and their team, how do they get in touch? How do they work with you?

The best place to look would be at jumpstartyourexit.com. You can get some information there, and you’ll be able to reach out there. Another way is that we’re very active on LinkedIn, which has many tips and frameworks. We’re sharing many things on LinkedIn, such as parts of our story, short instructive videos, and many other things. You can also find us on LinkedIn. In the future, there will probably be more of those kinds of programs that are currently in the vault. Their time will come as well.

Okay, well, I look forward to that. All right, well, thank you so much, Ivan. And thank you, listener. Thank you for being open-minded, real, raw, and just vulnerable. Thank you, Ivan, for sharing such incredible stories and your metamorphosis. And I wish all of you listeners great success. In the meantime, have a great week, and we’ll catch up with you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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