About Us
21st Century Leadership:
Leading from entelechy is good business
- Executives in flow are 500% more productive than those not in flow (McKinsey & Co., 2013)
- Meaning, or being connected to your purpose is ranked the #1 factor in job satisfaction, and is 2x more important than company leadership (Job Satisfaction Index 2019, Happiness Research Institute)
- Personal purpose is cited by global CEOs as one of the top 3 things (with ethics and values) to focus on (IBM, 2012)
- Purpose is correlated with a 539% increase in resilience (Kumanu/Harris Poll, 2021)
- Purpose-driven leaders have employees who are 70% more satisfied (Harvard Business Review, 2014)
- Purpose-driven leaders have employees who are 56% more engaged (Harvard Business Review, 2014)
- Purpose-driven leaders have employees who are 100% more likely to stay with the organization (Harvard Business Review, 2014)
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and, behold, service was joy.”
—Rabindranath Tagore
The Human Entelechy Institute was born to meet a growing and unmet demand.
In our combined 35 years of working with high-impact leaders, it’s been the last twenty that have witnessed an upward parabolic curve of so many seeking something beyond the standards of greater achievement and excellence.
With the timing of the calvary, there is a simultaneous global emergence within the hearts of leaders of three great truths:
- There is a higher order for me than great achievement and excellence—they are my means, not my ends.
- I have reached the place where I will not be able to access this higher order through the accrual of yet more information from outside of me, but only through recognizing, owning, and liberating what has always been inside of me.
- If I can commit and stay true to that, I will be able to unite with both the joy and impact I was always meant to have.
We have had the honor to sherpa many of this wave of leaders as they have made the ascent from the basecamp of achievement and excellence, to the summit of fully living their human entelechy— harnessing inner purpose toward the creation of outer impact.
Because the result we have always seen is the realizing of a whole new being who then begins creating a whole new world, we came to understand it was our entelechy to scale the liberation of this ever-growing wave, beyond what we could do one-on-one.
Be sure to see the case studies which we regard as the latest “dispatches from the front” confirming why we feel this is the most exciting place in the universe to be.
— James and Kirk
Founders & Facilitators
James Price, MA
Co-founder | Lead Facilitator,
The Human Entelechy Institute
Kirk Souder, MA
Co-founder | Lead Facilitator,
The Human Entelechy Institute
James Price
James Price is a senior advisor and coach to leaders who are up to big things. Starting early in life as an entrepreneur, a fire for change and possibility has always been in his belly. Fortunately, this spark was combined with a deep love for people and learning and a dedication to his own personal development. While running and growing his own companies James received support from a coach for many years and this relationship developed an awareness of the power of coaching to liberate potential.
James has a long personal history as an entrepreneur. Beginning with his first paper route at age 11, he created a series of boot-strapped ventures before launching a corporate apparel company in his mid-20s. Those early experiences, including joining the prestigious Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) when he was 27, inspired his passion for enabling personal and organizational excellence through intentional leadership and coaching. Being an early entrepreneur also gave him a profound connection and appreciation for what it takes to start and grow something that has never been done before. Seeking an academic and clinical platform for his coaching, James earned a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica and graduated from the College of Executive Coaching (ICF accredited), while embarking on what has become a decades-long journey of C-suite leadership coaching.
Looking far beyond the confines of the workplace, James coaches leaders to live full, well-rounded, intentional lives, and multiply their impact by building companies that do good for their people and their communities. He has worked with hundreds of leaders from companies like Alphabet (X, the moonshot factory), Apple, Google, Lululemon, and Lyft. Beyond large enterprises, James has advised and coached smaller fast-growing companies across architecture, advertising, education, finance, defense, non-profit, real estate, and technology.
In 2020, James launched Basecamp, a community-based coaching platform where a series of his proprietary coaching principles are applied to carefully curated groups of individuals seeking personal freedom in their terrestrial and spiritual lives.
Kirk Souder
Building Businesses Before Building Leaders
Kirk’s background is distinct from most coaches in his vast business-building experience prior to deep education and training in leadership coaching. Kirk is co-founder and lead executive coach at Enso, creating initiatives with visionary brands and coaching visionary leaders toward positive impact at scale. Kirk’s own business and entrepreneurial leadership span 30 years of successful enterprises, with roles as Founder, Chief Creative Officer, Partner, and President/CEO of 400+ people companies and vanguard creative shops recognized globally from Cannes to Hong Kong. He’s built award-winning creative cultures in New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, serving clients like Nike, Disney, Virgin, Uber, Visa, Google, Lyft, and The White House.
Kirk coaches high-impact leaders to find their greatest possibility in authentic leadership, purpose, and impact. He has been featured in Forbes, and he speaks globally on the power of mindset and inner purpose to harness the power of business. Kirk is a pioneer in purpose mindset workshop design, co-designing and facilitating the personal impact accelerator, Soul Purpose, and its different iterations like Being Limitless for Mattel and other brands. Kirk went to grad school in 2004 to earn a Master’s Degree in Spiritual Psychology and then added extensive professional training in coaching technologies like Three Principles, Soul-Centered Leadership, and Success Intelligence. Kirk is a certified graduate of the University of Santa Monica’s Soul-Centered Coaching Program.
This combination of real-world business experience and graduate-level coaching education creates an integrated skill set rare in today’s executive coaches and was designed for 21st-century enterprise. Kirk is a regular lecturer on leadership in business at USC’s Haas School of Business, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and the University of Adelaide in Australia. Kirk has spoken and led workshops on unlocking inner purpose and positive impact from Hong Kong to Copenhagen to Miami to Portland. He volunteers twice a year in a women’s maximum-security prison in an anti-recidivism mindset workshop called Freedom to Choose, and as a Burning Man participant since 1995, is currently contributing to a University of Adelaide research project on how Burning Man is influencing today’s most progressive business cultures. His own creative endeavors have earned Cannes Lions, the Sundance Official Selection, and Emmys. He lives with his wife and the love of his life, Patricia, and his sons, McKinley and Kevin, in Topanga, California. From whom he continues to learn every day.