What is TCLT?

TCLT will be something profoundly different for each individual who chooses to undertake its challenge. This answer, however vague, is as accurate as we can be because we can’t tell you what TCLT would be for you.

We can tell you that TCLT is about transformation. It is about creating a deep, fundamental change in your being, on a cellular level, that truly revolutionizes your ability to show up in the world.


What We Mean by “Transformation”

Transformation is a shift in structure that makes something possible which previously was not. It’s often sudden and surprising. Most of us have had profound transformative experiences at some point, such as an encounter with death or birth, falling in love, witnessing powerful beauty, or a connection with something unexplainable. Before these experiences we experienced life in one way, but afterwards life was different and didn’t shift back. The circumstances may have been the same, but how we saw and experienced those circumstances was forever and fundamentally altered.

Once our world has been fundamentally altered, then how we operate within it also needs to change. Yet this internal shift needs time. We need to relearn how to operate in our environment – and until we’ve integrated that new way of being, life takes effort and work. Integration takes time, persistence, and especially support.


A Year-Long Course vs. Weekend Workshops

After creating, running and leading weekend courses for 9 years, Guy Sengstock, the primary force behind TCLT, started getting suspicious of how effective his own work was. He remembers, “I would see people have massive shifts in those weekend courses. I would watch them be on a high for the next couple of weeks. Then, usually, within a couple of months, the course continued to live in them as a peak experience, yet I often couldn’t detect any substantial and lasting difference in their day-to-day lives.” Often, participants would experience the “rubber band effect” and come crashing down from their epiphanies. They would find themselves back where they were before. The change was not sustainable. The only exception he saw to this was when participants continued getting coaching and/or got involved in a community that continued the “transformational conversation.”

In response, Guy created TCLT, a year-long crucible for transformation. Now, having completed three year-long trainings, it’s clear why this course results in lasting change.

Your environment – everything from where you live, the people you hang out with, where you work, all the way down to how you arrange your house – is the perfect support structure for your current way of being. If you leave a weekend workshop and reenter that world which was supporting your pre-epiphany self, often you slip by degrees back toward your original belief system and set point or familiar way of being.

That’s what separates TCLT from typical transformational workshops that last a weekend, that happen at some remove from your daily world. TCLT creates many opportunities for transformational shifts – and also provides the ongoing structure and support to integrate these shifts into your everyday life over time. You will be living the change for an entire year through our weekend workshops, our support network, and ongoing relational activities with your fellow participants.

It is a full year of focusing on yourself within a tight community of like-minded individuals and support staff who are committed to your personal development and achieving what you’ve always wanted to move toward. TCLT gives you what you need to have a profound experience that fundamentally changes your way of being in the world.


Operating Theories

There’s a paradox in what we, as students, are attempting when doing this kind of work. We know there is something wrong, something we want changed, something we want different. We may even be clear what it is we are wanting or not wanting. There is an information loop in our heads telling us what we want without telling us how to get it. Unfortunately, envisioning how to get what we want from the same place we are feeling stuck is like trying to look at the outside of a box while standing inside it. The paradox is that only by being where we desire to be – only by being outside the box – can we truly understand what being there looks and feels like. It is the belief that we “should” be able to get outside of ourselves that tends to keep us stuck in those repeating loops. We can’t imagine ourselves out of one of these loops. We can only experience our way out of it. We have to step outside the box first, and then reflect on the experience after.

How you experience your world and how you show up in your life is an expression of who you are. As small children, we generally expressed ourselves in line with our true nature – we were curious, adventurous, playful, without concern. But in time, we discovered things that didn’t feel safe, didn’t feel good. And we started developing rules and strategies for avoiding them. We repeated these strategies as we grew up until they became habits, as if they’re a part of us. It’s as if some part of us is stuck in the past, in our child sensibilities.

Once in a while, however, you come across the rare individual who seems to have moved beyond this place of stuck-ness. We say, “There is something about him/her that’s powerful” or “just being around this person I feel more alive somehow.” Folks like this seem to have a natural ability to deeply enjoy themselves wherever they are and/or whomever they are with. Their eyes are joyfully open and taking in the world in a way that nourishes them. They seem to care deeply, yet are free of attachment or concern. What is the difference that makes that difference? What has allowed them to become unstuck?

The difference is their relationship to their experience, the way they hold themselves and the world. They are able to separate themselves from their experience at the same time they stay connected. They come from a place of security and certainty about who they are. We call this quality “agency.” Agency is the place where vulnerability and genuine strength come together as one gesture. When we go through our lives with agency, our movements are from a single source, our singular self-legitimacy. When we are agentic, we are acting, speaking and being without need for reason or explanation. We are fully being ourselves without reference to something else or being against something else. We are relaxed into our own center, fully facing the world openly and unapologetically.

In TCLT we spend a year making a profound and fundamental shift towards agency. This shift not only gets you unstuck, freeing you from old strategies, but actually transforms your relationship with the world through the only thing you will ever and always have – your experience.

You become the author of how you experience and thus become the source of your own deepest happiness.


Are You Ready?

We will be truthful: This is not a quick and easy solution. Not everyone is truly serious about or even capable of embarking on a journey that completely revolutionizes/undoes their previous way of being in the world. Many want the magic pill or the quick weekend experience. Many of us don’t really want to examine and feel into all the different domains in our lives and re-assess what is most important to us now, and be willing to make these changes. This course may not be for you if you are one of these people.

However, there are people who are tired of their old cycles and are ready to make a change. They are ready to stop dating the same man/woman over and over again, working for the same boss, running into the same issues, feeling stagnant and stuck. They want to manifest the brilliant, creative ideas they have somehow sabotaged in the past. They know that there is a deeper sense of peace, wholeness, and purpose than what they are experiencing now and they are willing to do what it takes to reach that. If you are one of these people, then TCLT is the right course for you.

You'll get over 500 course hours, including an immersion weekend every two months, plus gatherings and one-on-ones both in-person and via phone. The first weekend for TCLT4 is October 15-17, 2010, in the Bay Area.

The course is designed to be accessible to people who work full time and people who do not live near San Francisco. Past participants have traveled across the country and even from other countries in order to be a part of TCLT.

If this speaks to you and you feel ready to take this challenge, we encourage you to apply for what could be the most important commitment that you’ve ever made toward yourself to date – a year of transforming your old ways of being so fundamentally you will simply be, without effort, a self even greater than you are able to imagine today. It is an application – not just a registration – because we want to be sure that you’re ready.

Contact us for more information and to apply now.

If you’re having a hard time deciding, or if it would help to hear about the impact of this course first-hand, participants from past years are available to talk with you about their experiences Us

We are currently
planning our next
TCLT year-long and are accepting applications

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Or contact us directly at TCLT4@tcltnow.com

"I've developed friendships that I'm grateful for and feel that I've dissolved many, many layers between who I've been and who I know that I am."

- G., San Francisco

– B., Denver

– A., Santa Cruz

– R., Australia

– J., San Francisco

– G., Berkeley

– H., San Francisco