A visionary space that sees the future you

We invite people to author the further reaches of the possible.

We bring together leading facilitators from around the world to help people, practitioners, and organizations redesign their experience - developing better collective capacities for sense-making and meaning-making to inform higher quality choice-making - moving towards a world consistent with our higher values and potentials. This is the precursor a human care experience that is transformative.

I’ve taken a few workshops and classes with People Before Patients, and each one was a meaningful, thought-provoking, and quality experience. I’ve learned things and new perspectives that have created shifts in my own life.

— Stacey, Workshop Participant

I have shifted from discomfort to embrace curiosity, inviting the practice of possibility that comes through examining the stories that shape us. I have discovered some orienting principles that will serve me. I have learned that we become what we practice and so we must choose to practice wisely.

— Judy, Workshop Participant

Vertical Development

Up, Up, and Away

We understand evolution and healing as one in the same process. As our perspective expands, we are invited to act differently towards ourselves and others. Here are some ways we are showing up in the world…

Vertical Development in Health

  • Vertical Development has far-reaching applications for health practice. Understanding the sense making device employed by patients and health care professionals allows us to tailor clinical approaches – what precision medicine is to the unique biology of a patient, Vertical Development is to the unique sense making maps being employed by people across their health decisions and behaviours.

  • Vertical Development Academy

  • Completed a literature review and exploring the integration of the practice in different organizational settings.

  • In patient and caregiver education, health care professional training and practice, and in organizational development.

  • Ongoing

Person-Centric Healthcare

A New Standard for Person-Centric Practice

  • The popular language currently operating in the health care sector speaks to a “patient-centric” approach. We are proposing a more fully developed understanding of the further reaches of working with patients and their caregivers by describing this outlook in “person-first” terms. This is not just semantics. A move from a patient-centric to a person-centric approach reflects a more expansive way of sense and meaning-making. We intend to create a standardized framework that can be applied by health care organizations who want to integrate person-first thinking and practice.

  • Janssen, Innovative Medicines Canada, Bristol Myers Squibb, GSK and Roche

  • Project is being initiated in collaboration with health care companies seeking to better understand the further reaches of a person-centric outlook.

  • As a model of better practice in health care organizations.

  • Phase one costs are estimated at $150,000. The project is currently fully funded.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness and Managing Later Life Transitions

  • Later life is marked by significant life transition. The intensity and frequency of these changes can trigger states of stress, anxiety and disorientation and lead to worsening mental, emotional and physical health among older adults. The purpose of our project is to provide older adults with mindfulness-informed practices to better manage life transitions and the stresses that accompany them. Mindfulness is a contemplative and therapeutic practice that has been demonstrated to be very effective at helping people cope with life changes.

  • Program design inquiry beginning Summer 2023.

  • Directly with older adult populations or as a program within organizations.

  • Private donor provided seed funding for program deployment in 2023-2024.

Holistic Trauma

Trauma-Sensitive Practices for People Living with Chronic Conditions

  • Research demonstrates a strong link between trauma and many adult chronic diseases, including pulmonary, cardiovascular, autoimmune, and pain. Experts estimate that 90% of people have experienced at least one episode of traumatic stress in their lives. Traumatic experiences leave an imprint on all aspects of a human's physical, emotional, intellectual, relational, and spiritual life.

    The Holistic Trauma-Sensitive Practices for People Living with Chronic Conditions program focuses on teaching people living with chronic conditions non-pharmacological, trauma-sensitive practices to alleviate distressing symptoms, balance their nervous system in order to build self-reliance and resilience and contribute to healing body and mind.

  • Somatic Coaching Academy

  • Core program components have been developed.

  • With people living with chronic health issues and in support of health care professional training and practice.

  • Grant pending.

Continuing Human Education

Growing Through What You Go Through

  • Growing Through What You Go Through is an opportunity to explore unchartered terrain: the parts of your life at work and play that you may have a bewildering relationship with. The questions that remain unanswered in your heart.

    We have created a series of online adventures with eye-opening perspectives designed to inspire, delight and enlighten. Travel across the experience of time, beauty, love, presence, and lightheartedness and remap your life’s story.

  • Project is being launched in May 2024.

  • Growing Through What You Go Through was designed with one purpose in mind: to provide an opportunity for delight, curiosity, wonder and insight, which in our world we call sense-making; How do we make meaning of our experience? What internal maps and stories we use to interact with ourselves and the world around us?

  • Project partially funded through grants from: Government of Canada Community Services Recovery Fund, Janssen, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Innovative Medicines Canada. Additional funding provided through a private donation by Marketa Ricicova.

We Wait Differently

  • We have an unusual relationship to time in health care. Some, like patients, have too much, others, like health care practitioners, have not enough.

    Healthcare has tried tirelessly to defeat the waiting monster, to no avail. Perhaps there is more to the story; some untold possibility waiting to be discovered.

    A simple idea dawned on us: what if, instead of waging a war on waiting, we changed our relationship with it? What if instead of trying to solve waiting, we simply waited differently?

    When waiting transforms into wait-less-ness we allow it to become a dynamic, light-hearted feature of our journey to health, healing, and fulfillment.

  • Project at its inception stage being informed by a group of health care professionals and human development experts.

  • Transforming the experience of people impacted by a health issue, practitioners and health care organizations.

  • To be determined.

Basecamp

  • For many practitioners, modern health care feels like a steep climb fraught with emotional, moral, and physical hazards. Practice can feel like an endless climb without moments of rest, reflection, rejuvenation, and perspective taking.

    We are working in partnership with a network of health practitioners from across the country to create Basecamp, a place from which we can renew people and practice.

    We want to begin by simply holding space that gives health practitioners a place to catch their breath, feel the ground beneath their feet, and restore a sense of calm.

    From this place, our intention is to listen and to share with a view on deepening our understanding of the experience of health care practice from the perspective of those who are living it day to day.

  • Project at its inception stage being informed by a group of health care practitioners.

  • Develop specific change actions that will help restore a greater sense of equanimity for practitioners and support transforming the health care system into a sanctuary for practitioners and citizens alike. A for-us-by-us initiative.

  • To be determined.

Our Leadership and Organizational Development Programs

Our work is grounded in experiential group learning, peer-based support, and 1-on-1 coaching. They are highly customizable to meet a range of individual and organizational needs.

  • Stepping into the Future

    In a world that is complex and fast moving, how does an organization keep pace, particularly in a health care industry that is notoriously cautious? Organizations that are visioning the future benefit from the accompaniment of our team of designers and facilitators who help participants author a future that is more satisfying and impactful. We support organizations in expanding their sense-making, which increases their capacity to make enlightened choices.

    Stepping into the Future
  • Polarity Wisdom

    We have been trying to make sense of both sides of our experience since dawn of time. Polarities can be complementary or they can seem conflictual. They often show up in our lives as tensions that feel unresolvable. Is this a problem to be solved or a polarity to be integrated? Together, we’re going to explore how we can move from the tension of either/or to the integrating wisdom of and/also across an organization. Learning to hone the strength of opposites, honoring the strength of opposing views and reducing our fear of the “other” side of things.

  • Vertical Development in Health

    Vertical development is about expanding mindsets — it fundamentally changes the way we think and behave. Mindset refers to the mental models we use when we are thinking and its impact on our sense of identity. It informs our attitudes and behaviors. Vertical Development has far-reaching applications for health practice; it helps health leaders deepen their awareness of the stories they are telling themselves that shape their reality and how to expand those narratives developmentally.

    Vertical Development in Health
  • Mindful Leadership

    Presence of mind and deep awareness creates clarity around what is necessary to fully engage ourselves and those in our care. A mindful disposition invites creativity, adaptability, and the capacity to be meaningfully present in any interaction. Leading mindfully means having the presence of attention to be aware of how our thoughts, emotions and sensations are supporting the present moment and bringing our full capacities to bear. Through mindful presence we open to tremendous possibilities.

    Mindful Leadership
  • Cultivating Resilience

    Adversity in an organization is inevitable. How one relates to that adversity is within our power. Cultivating resilience means learning the path that transforms obstacles into opportunities. Limiting beliefs in how things should be done inhibits change and growth across organizations. We can react or we can choose; one path leads to growth the other leads to the familiar and a resurfacing of old patterns. Resilience is the opportunity to bounce forward and grow through adversity.

    Cultivating Resilience
  • Effecting a Culture Shift

    Leadership is 98% disposition and 2% position. That means that great leaders begin with the question: How am I leading myself? From that place we can begin to understand how we are projecting ourselves into the world and how we are inviting others to know themselves. Organizational cultures can be built around this ever evolving intelligence where everyone becomes more attuned to each other. That is a culture that nourishes mutual growth and support.

    Effecting a Culture Shift
  • Participatory Design in Health Care

    Participatory design aspires to actively involve all stakeholders in the creative process. It facilitates mutual empathy and equal engagement involving entire communities. Participatory design is an antidote to disempowering health care practice arising from destabilizing hierarchies, often seen in approaches to health care administration and across the experience of authoritarian health care. By facilitating the design of spaces, processes, and interactions developed in a participatory way, one restores equilibrium by drawing on collective capacity.

    Participatory Design in Health Care
  • Peaceful Confrontation

    Cultivate a deeper sense of inner balance, grounding and focus. As you confidently develop the dexterous use of assertiveness and flexibility, this will ensure that the challenges you confront are handled in ways that lead to mutual empowerment and new solutions to old problems, while reducing the risk of harm to yourself or others. The result is an expansion of trust, collaboration and a healthy work culture. The experience includes time for role playing, team-building interactivity, and creative problem solving.

    Peaceful Confrontation