Our focus has a frame.

For more than twenty years, I’ve been a futurist. It’s my job to see around corners. Every landscape has corners (no matter its shape) and as every futurist knows, looking for them is the key to seeing them.

We’re here to see unseen forces.

Many forces travel in the landscape alongside our aims. They don’t hide, but if we’re not looking for them, we can’t see their role in shaping the experience unfolding, often beneath our awareness. It may be wonderful or terrible—a flow so smooth it feels divinely ordained, an overwhelm so strong that it halts our progress and leaves us frozen with fear, or an anger so mobilizing we trample across the landscape, destroying the seeds we’d been cultivating only moments before.

Only the forces explain why such potential can exist in such equal measure, on any given Tuesday at 3pm. And what would we see of them, if we dared to look?

We’d see what matters most, and is most challenging to grapple with:

Our intentions. Others’ intentions. The biology influencing those intentions.

Emotions. Expectations. Threat consciousness.

Sixty-million-year-old systems. Automations. Interventions.

Mighty Forces call for a line of sight.

I’ll tell you something straight from neuroscience. That sense of unease we feel when we sense something unseen? It does not arise by accident. Our evolutionary brains want eyes on it, and it’s worth our time to look. Because these forces aren’t only shaping our unfolding experience. They are shaping our beliefs about what is possible.

Mighty Forces: A Concept Photo via Canva

Recognizing them is how to begin.

The Mighty Forces sat on the shelf nearly forever because I needed a frame. But what would that be?

Many of the forces we’ll talk about are physical—felt in the body, like our neurobiology’s fight-or-flight responses, which often take the wheel before our minds have even caught on. Others we tend to speak of in spiritual terms—like consciousness or flow. Still others are conceptual and socio-structural, shaping every space we inhabit: identity, assumption, belief. Almost all of these forces can dictate what gets seen or said—and what gets skipped.

The problem was the longer I held out for a frame, the more time passed. And the more the world became… the one we’re in. I found myself in one of those “living invitations” I always talk with my clients about. So I stopped categorizing and looked. And what I saw was obvious. What I needed was a container—one big enough to hold everything that belongs in it. Suddenly the answer was clear:

“If it acts as a force, we’ll call it one.

-Cherie Dikelsky’s famous last words

A large container, to be sure—one with room to move. And as I mentioned in the About page, we won’t be alone in it. The forces travel with all of us, so our exploration will be shared, and we have compelling voices to guide us as we journey.

We’ll lay a foundation and work from there.

So where to begin? I suppose with the forces that shape everything, everywhere:

  • Mind: The most consequential verb ever to be nouned.

  • Sight: The bias of mind, evolved over millions of years.

  • Consciousness: A force likened to sentience, but probably more complex.

  • Time: Arguably our most precious resource/limitation/relationship.

  • Will: An underappreciated, sometimes-conscious factor in human outcomes.

  • Evolution: An occasionally intentional context for the human experience.

  • The Future: A force shaped by all and realized by the ready.

  • Neurobiology: The Interpersonal Neurobiology at the center of human being.

  • The Lived Experience: The neuroplastic nexus of all of it.

There are so many more, so from here, we’ll dive into as many as we can.

My goodness, the audacity.

How dare I attempt to characterize—much less propose we dance with—such Forces?

That’s what I’m figuring out. Carefully? Empirically? As Time permits?

With as much help as possible? That’s the plan. And I’m glad you’re here for it.

May the force(s) be with me—and with you.