Delve into the transformative journey of Ted Strauss, a luminary dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of human potential and consciousness. From embarking on spiritual quests to pioneering groundbreaking approaches in human development, Ted’s story is a testament to the power of integration and awakening. Join MysticMag as we explore the depths of his insights and the profound impact of his work on personal growth and collective evolution.
What was your professional journey like and how did you get into this line of work?
It started with my experience following my sister through school. She was always a scholar and a brainiac, so she got top grades in all subjects. I only got top grades in the things I cared about, so the teachers started questioning whether I was using my full potential.
Then I started wondering what “full potential” even meant. It seemed the assumption was that getting good grades in all subjects was the same as using one’s full potential, a premise I intuitively rejected. I became interested in exploring anything that would explain the meaning of living one’s full potential, including Eastern spirituality, which had all kinds of promises of enlightenment, and the suggestion that awakening consciousness would somehow give you everything you ever wanted.
Starting at age 13, I spent a huge amount of time pursuing consciousness awakening. I was reading a lot of books, trying all kinds of esoteric practices, and getting initiated into things that would open my chakras or consciousness. At 17, I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation, which opened a lot for me. I became a Transcendental Meditation teacher and practiced that path for 20 years. But after 20 years of deeply devoted practice and teaching, I had to wonder if I was ever going to experience the kind of stable awakening I’d been seeking. I then started asking “How many people have actually awakened through this practice?” I heard of just two practitioners who claimed they had, out of around two million. Not good odds! That’s when I decided it was time to pivot. I realized that in all my one-pointed search for awakening consciousness, I had neglected my emotional and relational life and that my work and my body were suffering. I felt quite underdeveloped in these areas and decided to refocus on these aspects of my life.
After numerous workshops and retreats, I eventually found and became deeply involved in a form of work that was about embodied awakening in relationships. That work helped me make huge shifts for myself, one of which was awakening consciousness in a stable way. I got to a place where it was obvious that I was infinite consciousness, and always had been. Then I learned how to drop into unity with my body, which was a complete shift in perspective.
After that, it started to become clear that despite these life-altering subjective shifts, there was a lot that wasn’t healed in me. There were a lot of relational issues from my childhood I hadn’t dealt with. I started to see this in other spiritual teachers – that they hadn’t really dealt with their own childhood issues. And yet, adherents tend to project that if the teacher had a great awakening on the level of consciousness, that must mean they are amazing or perfect at everything. Sadly, that turns out not to be the case. And
it became obvious that the real issue was a lack of deep integration between the absolute and the relative slides of our being.
I went through years of work to bring healing. My wife and I worked together, partnering to support our mutual healing. We both learned to allow ourselves to be deeply feel and be vulnerable with each other. We helped hundreds of couples awaken and heal together. I began to see that humanity’s models of personal development and awakening were unclear, outdated, and quite incomplete. And that the study of consciousness was still held quite separate from the study of personal development. This led me down a new path in my lifelong research.
I teamed up with Dr. Carol Griggs, who had a PhD in professional coaching. In her work, she was focusing on the corporate world. She and I both needed a clear model of human development which would also be deep enough and well-researched enough to show us where somebody is and what their next step could be. Together, over several years, we constructed that model. We created a beautiful chart that describes 14 stages of development for humans in 5 domains – consciousness, uniqueness, mind, emotions, and body.
These are 5 levels we all understand and relate to, but they’re rarely integrated or evenly developed. People tend to have strengths in one of these areas over others, which is why we created an iConscious Assessment that helps people discover, in an automated way, where they are in each domain and automatically gives them suggestions for practices that will move them toward their own next stage in each domain. Soon after, we were invited by John F. Kennedy University in Northern California to create a masters level course using our model that would put the history of human development models and understandings into the bigger perspective of our model.
We then got into the Loving AI project, in which we borrowed the famous robot Sophia and trained her to be an awakening coach. She then had conversations with hundreds of participants and a whole study was done around this. Amazing things happened; some people got their minds blown about the expansive groundedness they felt from these early AI conversations. That experience inspired me to embody the iConscious perspective in an AI coach that could be accessible to all. In fact, I’m working right now to build such a coach and hope to make it available later this year. After Loving AI, we wrote our book “iConscious: Accelerating Human Development”, which is available on Amazon. It describes the model and the whole process of integrated human development in great detail.
Through the years, I coached many hundreds of students to awaken directly, heal their relational conditioning, and fulfill their absolutely unique function in life. I’m driven to help millions awaken rapidly and live their full potential. I believe we need this kind of shift not just to become more compassionate, effective, and fulfilled, but to survive as a species. To survive, we must cooperate, and to cooperate, we must directly experience our underlying unity with our neighbors, all people, and all life.
What ideas and principles do you base your coaching on?
Much of what I do in my coaching work can be reduced to 4 main approaches. One is the iConscious model. In my work with individuals, it allows me to understand who the person is, where they are in the 5 domains mentioned, and what they currently need in each of these domains. Without understanding their unique picture, I would be just throwing out techniques and ideas, without knowing how they’ll affect the person. I wouldn’t know what’s likely to stick. That’s important because a lot of teachers will proclaim “This is the practice you should apply” without understanding the uniqueness of each person.
The second principle is the Enneagram. It’s an incredibly powerful system for understanding our defense system. We might think our defenses are our natural gifts, but they’re just patterns we developed in our childhood to protect us from feeling overwhelmed by our painful experiences. When we understand our defenses, we can start sorting them out from our natural gifts and learn to bring our unique blessings to the world.
Human Design is the third principle. It gives us very useful information about who we are underneath our defenses. It also makes clear how to make decisions that are aligned with our uniqueness. This is another big accelerant because when we learn how to follow our own instructions,
we live authentically and we have the impact we were designed to have.
Between those 3 systems, I get a good understanding of who my client is, what their reactive patterns are, and where they stand in the bigger picture of their personal unfoldment process.
The fourth principle is what I feel when I’m working with the client. When we’re working together, I can feel where they’re flowing and where there are kinks in their flow. That gives me the instant feedback I need to guide them as directly as possible into relaxing into their full potential.
Can you explain the coaching process and your sessions to our readers?
First, I have to get to know each person uniquely so I spend time in early sessions asking questions about them and encouraging them to talk about themselves. Then I assess where they are in the three systems I mentioned. Once I have all of that, it’s just an ongoing conversation. At the end of each conversation, I offer them one or two particularly potent practices that I feel would help them in their current stage. Through those conversations, my clients wake up much faster than people do through other means. How can I say that? I’ve been tracking the stages my clients pass through using the iConscious model. One client entered coaching with me at age 50 in stage 5 and two years later found themselves in stage 9. That means they took 10 years to get through each of the first 5 stages, but only six months to move through each of the four more stages. That’s about 20 times faster. The difference is huge, and I’m dedicated to making this pace of growth the new normal.
This whole approach changes people rapidly and permanently in a way that frees them to be who they are uniquely and to live their own full potential. To me, full potential is not about skills and accomplishments, but rather about how much a person is holding themselves back. When we’re not holding ourselves back and we’re just following the prompts of our being and our inner authority, we’re living our full potential. We will always gather tools, knowledge, and accomplishments, and that’s all great, but it’s clear to me that living our full potential is about letting flow flow through us.
What motivates you to keep doing what you’re doing?
In my mid-teens, it became obvious to me that the technology humanity was developing was increasingly enabling people to have both a massive positive impact and also a massive negative impact on all of humanity and all life on Earth. Comparing the trajectory of technology development with the trajectory of human development troubled me deeply; I could see we’re in for a very difficult time because many of us don’t know the difference between love and violence. The only solution to this problem is to speed up human development so that people mature to the point where they can know their unity with their neighbor and responsibly deal with this kind of power. That’s what keeps me going. I’m in it to help speed up the awakening of the world so we don’t kill ourselves and so we actually move forward with as much peace, love, and mutual cooperation as possible.
How can a person get involved with your work?
I offer a free 30-minute call to anyone who’d like to consider working with me. Just send me an e-mail; I’m at [email protected]. I also encourage people to visit iconscious.global and tedstrauss.com. They can also buy “iConscious: Accelerating Human Development” on Amazon. Just reading that book will definitely accelerate anyone’s awakening process because it will shed light on where you are and where you’re going.
