Signal Labs · Behavioural Intelligence

Not long ago I had a heart attack. I was living a life that looked right in photographs and never quite fit. I came round in a chair that was not mine, and understood I had been sitting in the wrong one for years.

I had spent two decades building brands for other people. Reading them, sharpening them, making them coherent. I had never once turned the instrument on myself.

When I did, I found what I had been finding in every company I ever worked with. I was three people. The self I claimed, the self other people saw and the self I actually lived. And the distance between them was the thing quietly costing me the most.

I did not arrive at this through a boardroom. I arrived through the oldest thing we do as a species: reading each other. A lion in the grass never had to perform being a lion. You knew it by the shape of how it moved. We are built to read that pattern in a tenth of a second, and to make one fused judgment: do I recognize this, and can I trust it? That instinct runs every first impression, every hire, every promotion, every room you walk into. It is the deepest currency we have. And it had never had an instrument.

So I built one.

The higher you climb, the more you are read and the more you perform. The board reads you, the team reads you, the market reads you, all day, before you have finished your first sentence. The instrument takes that instinctive read and makes it visible, fast and honest: your three selves, the gap between them, and the work of closing it. Not to give you another mask that photographs well. To let you put the masks down.

There is a word for closing that distance. Coherence.

This is the book, and the practice, that came out of that chair. It is about the self you perform, the self you are, and the shorter the distance between them, the more of a life you get back. It is, in the end, about coming home to the self you already are.

Dean Foerter

Author, The Lion in the Grass