While working heavily on the seven aspects of identity (Part One and Part Two) in Chapter 3 I received an email from friend and colleague Zach Adamson, Managing Partner of The Seaker Group, with this subject: “Most transformational experience of my life.” That of course caught my inbox eye, and I immediately opened it.
In that email and several subsequent conversations Zach told me how he “just graduated from the most transformational experience of my life,” the result of a birthday present he had received from his brother. (My thoughts instantly went to the 1997 movie The Game, where Sean Penn’s character Conrad Van Orton gave his brother Nicholas, played by Michael Douglas, a life-altering transformation as a birthday present. I highly recommend you see it.)
ChoiceCenter Leadership University’s Essential EQ Leadership Development truly is transformational for hundreds of people every year.
That transformation offering is Essential EQ Leadership Development (“EQ” standing for emotional quotient, which is to emotions as IQ is to intelligence and was popularized by psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman in the 1990s). The $2997 program is conducted by the ChoiceCenter Leadership University in a nondescript office building just outside the Las Vegas airport. Adding Robyn Williams, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and COO Corrine Clement to the conversation, I learned that this program truly is transformational, not just for Zach but for hundreds of other people every year.
Essential EQ Leadership Development begins with personal remote sessions with a coach 3-4 weeks before the physical sessions begin. Coaches want to understand about the participant’s personal and professional life, what path they are on, and prepare them for what they will encounter in Las Vegas. The physical sessions consist of two four-day workshops over consecutive long weekends with a cohort of 20 people, plus four coaches who have individually worked with five participants apiece. The ChoiceCenter asks each student to determine their own, very personal aspiration: “What do you want in your life, more than anything, that you haven’t been able to figure out?”
It asks and helps aspirants answer this question: “What do you want in your life, more than anything, that you haven’t been able to figure out?”
The first workshop focuses on Discovery, supporting participants to unpack their lifetime experiences that developed their EQ and shaped how they face the world today. Zach found this very freeing, enabling him to “reframe” his life experience, identify his self-worth, and begin to reshape his beliefs and behaviors, his reactions to setbacks in particular.
The second, highly intense weekend is one of Breakthrough, and like the first consists largely of “experiential training”, including role play, games, and activities, along with group and solo discussions with coaches and contemplation time, culminating in many “aha moments”. Breakthroughs come from breakdowns, and so this session looks internally within each participant, including candid feedback from the other members of the cohort and the coaches. Feedback allows students to see themselves as others experience them, which is often different from how they view themselves. With clarity around their current values and behavior, participants can choose to practice and build new values and behaviors that will create the results they desire. The last half of this weekend session brings the energy way up in a “journey through self”, encouraging participants on “all the amazing ways they show up in the world”, as Zach put it, “coming from the stuff at my core”. As Robyn and Corrine echoed, this is true of all participants. Zach further related that “I now understand myself better than ever before.” The weekend session concluded with a graduation ceremony with family members in the audience, as well as gift-givers (as a large percentage of the offerings are paid for by previous participants in the program, and one hundred percent of them come through referrals).
After the first weekend is a 100-day coaching curriculum, as the most vital part of the journey of self-discovery is implementing and sustaining the learning.
Ah, but the program is not over! Next is a 100-day coaching curriculum, as the most vital part of the journey of self-discovery is implementing and sustaining the learning. After Discovery and Breakthrough, students begin part three, Living EQ Leadership, where their life now becomes the classroom. These three months of integration are the most impactful level of the training as students return home with a set of transformational tools and commit to integrate them to accomplish personal aspirations that they declare to themselves and everyone else.
The focus is on a Personal Strategic Plan (PSP), with a commitment to accomplish three to five personal and professional goals in 100 days, as the program proceeds with a weekly cadence of coaching and remote “stretch meetings” with a “power group” of a six cohort members (intentionally chosen for complimentary EQs) and their coach (who, by the way, is an unpaid graduate volunteer who applies to share what they have learned by coaching others to succeed). These meetings yield stretch assignments for the week, getting participants outside their comfort zone while making progress on interim goals to the final aspiration. This power group provides accountability, so participants uphold their individual commitments and remain diligent in their work on themselves. They publicly commit to these goals as accountability to other students as well as to friends, colleagues, and family, putting them on the hook for creating results. PSP goals can vary from fitness and wellness objectives, to an improved relationship with a loved one, to managing a career change to breaking an addiction. The goals Zach committed to included focusing on unconditional self-love, time blocking the use of his phone when with his family, and as a stretch goal, becoming a General Partner on a 50+ unit apartment complex – all of which he achieved through his new company WeChooseGood, of which he is Chief Experience Officer.
They publicly commit to these goals as accountability to other students as well as to friends, colleagues, and family
Living EQ Leadership includes two weekend training sessions back in Las Vegas – one to kick off the coaching cadence and another six weeks in to celebrate progress and disrupt any results that are off track as they apply the lessons of Discovery and Breakthrough to their PSPs and lives.
Ah, but the program still is not over! The 100 days of coaching and meeting at least 90% of declared goals – as is required to graduate – conclude with a powerful three-day weekend retreat where students acknowledge themselves and each other for the deep transformational and behavioral results they have created in their relationships, families, careers, health, finances, and more. As a result of spending three months in a supportive and accountable coaching environment where they learn how to navigate obstacles, shift behaviors, create new empowering beliefs, and attain results that once seemed impossible, the training tools become sustainable for their lifetime. Students therefore spend their final weekend declaring new goals to achieve on their own as they guide themselves from a contract they make with themselves. The contract begins with the words those two words of identity, “I am”, followed by their choice of three ways of being they declare to remind them who they are when they find themselves outside their comfort zone. For example, Zach’s contract is “I am a loving, vulnerable, and inspiring man!”.
The contract begins with the words those two words of identity, “I am”
Of course, transformation is an ongoing journey, and so participants continue to work with their cohorts and coaches on their Personal Strategic Plans, on their aspirations, and on themselves for the rest of their lives. After graduating, students become members of a community including thousands of graduates from ChoiceCenter’s three decades of existence. Graduates regularly attend signature trainings – short weekends where they focus on a specific topic such as relationships, team building, abundance, life mastery, the power of intention, and more – and are regularly invited to participate in graduate events, both in-person and virtually.
As you may have already gathered, the ChoiceCenter Leadership Institute exemplifies most everything I have written about in this book – including addressing multiple spheres of transformation, affecting all seven aspects of identity, incorporating encapsulation across multiple levels of experiences, and fostering the flourishing of each and every participant.
The ChoiceCenter Leadership Institute exemplifies most everything I have written about in this book
I encourage you to look back at the ideas, principles, and frameworks of my Substack posts to see them in what you’ve read here about the ChoiceCenter, and more importantly to see how you can apply them in your own business.
Joe Pine
© 2025 B. Joseph Pine II