The IDG Revolution

In this episode, I speak with Jamie Bristow, a leading voice in the global movement to place inner development at the heart of societal transformation. As the Policy Director of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) initiative, Jamie has been deeply involved the effort to grow the IDG movement around the wold. Prior to working at the IDGs, Jamie was focused on bringing mindfulness into the halls of power in the UK. Jamie has advised governments, led impactful research, and become a key advocate for integrating contemplative practice into public life.

Together, we explore why mindfulness matters right now, what he has learned by doing this work in the political space, and how narrative has played a key role in the growth of the IDG movement over the years.

It's a substantive discussion with a global leader in the fields of mindfulness and inner development.

Learn more about Jamie here:

Daniel Hires currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer for the Inner Development Goals organization. He is a lifelong activist, social entrepreneur, and innovator.  His LinkedIn page lists 19 different professional roles, including working for the UN, being a university professor, working as a coach and consultant, and founding a youth civic leadership movement before stepping into his current role focused on marketing the IDGs.

In our conversation, we experiment with some silence, explore the relationship between inner ways of being and the world around us, and explore Daniel's fascinating journey of experimenting around creating positive social change.

Learn more about Daniel at the following links:

 Jen is an experienced advocate and activist-turned therapist and consultant. After spending years leading major organizing initiatives for national unions like the AFL-CIO and SEIU, she made a career shift and became clinical social worker. Today, she is the Founder of the Center for Grounded Action, an organization focused on bringing inner development to some of the most difficult challenges we face in the world today.

Jen's life embodies the shift from a focus on outer change to a dual focus on both outer and inner change. She brings a wealth of experience and expertise to both domains, and is doing groundbreaking work around bringing inner development skills and tools some of our most challenging public problems.

Learn more about Jen here:

Meet Matthew Lee, one of the eleven Senior Scientific Advisors to the Inner Development Goals Foundation. Matt is an accomplished scholar, researcher and author who has been focused on studying human flourishing for many years. In particular, his focus has been on the cultivation of love. He has a very big mind, a very deep soul, and a very open heart, and he is one of a small group of thought leaders actively shaping the IDG movement.

In this conversation, we explore the science of love, the importance of inner development, and the work of human flourishing.

Learn more about Matt here:

Ora Grodsky is the founder of Just Works Consulting and the author of a forthcoming book entitled Justice, Love, and Organizational Healing: A Guide to Transformational Consulting (available on Feb. 25th, 2025).

She began her career as an acupuncturist, and has spent decades refining an approach to organizational consulting that brings the wisdom of traditional chinese medicine to the work of organizational transformation.

Ora is a master practitioner, and her new book provides both a deep dive into her philosophy of transformational consulting and a collection of practical tools that are surely to be useful to anyone engaged in the work of organizational consulting.

What is the Noosphere? And what does it have to do with Inner Development?

On this episode, we chat with Sheila Hassell Hughes, the Chief Operating Officer of a nonprofit called Human Energy that was founded to introduce the science of the Noosphere as a source of meaning for future generations in our globalizing world.

Expect a thought-provoking conversation that moves from some very big ideas about the story of human existence to some very practical implications for understanding our own personal inner development.

This episode lifts up the voice and expertise of Dr. Donna Hicks, one of the remarkable thought leaders based here in Boston who is helping to shape the IDG framework. She is an internationally renowned expert on the concept of dignity. She began her career in the field of conflict resolution, where she came to realize that dignity played an powerful but overlooked role in healing or perpetuating conflict. She went on to develop a model of dignity that is both theoretically rigorous and highly practical, and her work has grown to have a global impact.

In this conversation, she discusses her remarkable journey to developing her approach to dignity, what impact it has had in the world, and how it relates to the inner development goals.

For those looking for more information, here are a few links:

This podcast is a project of the Boston IDG Hub. In this episode, you'll meet the three individuals leading this hub:

This brief episode provides a high-level overview of the initiative at the heart of this podcast series. What are the IDGs? Where did they come from and what are they trying to achieve? And what are the key concepts that inform this model? In just over 12 minutes, this episodes explains it all.