Exposure Therapy

When you birth a body of work, you're making direct contact with life. Think about the last time you felt inspired. You'd probably describe it as "feeling alive", right? That feeling of aliveness is when we truly communicate with life itself. And if you are a creator, or a leader or a thinker, the most important thing you can do is develop and nurture a relationship with that sense of inspiration. That's what the best leaders do. They attune themselves to inspiration. Do you? We were extremely fortunate to have Laura Dawn, M.Sc. come and speak to us at Exposure Therapy yesterday as we study "Special Spaces" this month and explore what it takes to create the kinds of spaces that transform people and communities. Laura is a psychedelic transformation coach that works with leaders who want to yield psychedelics for inspiration, growth, and breakthrough expansion. I can tell you every single one of us Exposure Therapy yesterday felt the power of the spaces she creates, just through her voice and words. You'll feel it in this video, too. Crafting the space and permissions for yourself to realize your potential as a creator is both an art and science... and Laura definitely brought the science to us yesterday, both in her own research and the many leaders she's worked with. I think even this little dose from our time with her will impact you, too. #leadership #creativity #culture

We're excited to reveal our topics for 2025! Scroll through the carousel below for the full list. Over the past year, our community of strategic thinkers has grown into a hub for decoding culture together. Here’s a look at what we’ve accomplished and what’s ahead: - In 2024, we will have delivered 10+ original, in-depth research reports covering topics like like 'Build Your Strategic Mind', 'How to Predict the Future', and 'Matters of the Heart'. - We've brought in thought leaders such as Rory Sutherland, Matt Klein, April Dunford, and Zoe Scaman, along with experts like the world’s #3 female poker player, Australia’s top mentalist, and specialists in uncertainty, offering insights from the margins of strategy. - Members have leveraged Exposure Therapy’s resources to craft innovative brand strategies, enhance product roadmaps, secure clients, and enrich their research. Our community thrives on collaboration, from think tank groups to joint ventures. - Immersive workshops and wildcard activities—ranging from rage rituals and neuroplasticity challenges to future artifacts and placemaking—have pushed members to the edge of emerging culture and strategy. - We’ve hosted three private, curated dinners in LA and NYC, with members flying in from around the world to connect. Our final dinner of the year will be held this December. - And of course, daily conversations on our Slack channel continue to foster ongoing discussions, helping members process and understand the wide-ranging topics we explore together. Looking ahead, we’re adding retreats, special guests, and more surprises. Important Update: Starting in 2025, annual membership will increase to $4,000. You can still join at the current $3,000 rate by applying before Tuesday, December 10th. We only have two open cohorts before the price increase. If you’re ready to expand your thinking and engage deeply with culture and strategy, apply now to secure your spot. Come join us. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/dTJB9RvT #branding #brandstrategy #culture

Our Exposure Therapy 2025 topics have been announced! You can scroll through the descriptions below. We're nearly a year into this community - where strategic minds come to decode culture, together - and it has flourished: - This year alone we will have given our community 10+ original, in-depth research reports on topics ranging from 'Build Your Strategic Mind' and 'How To Predict The Future' to 'Matters of the Heart'. In 2025, we’ll be tackling topics like 'Infinite Play', 'Body Culture', 'Creativity' and 'The Evolution of Trust'. - We’ve brought in experts like Rory Sutherland, Matt Klein, April Dunford and Zoe Scaman, and welcomed people like the world’s #3 female poker player, Australia’s most famous mentalist and uncertainty experts to teach us from the margins of strategy. - I’ve made hundreds of personal connections between the founders, CMOs, strategists, creative directors, thought leaders and marketers in our community and relationships are flourishing. There are long standing think tank groups, people planning vacations together, and members that are collaborating on projects and new ventures. - Members have used the resources and learnings in Exposure Therapy to create provocative brand strategies, innovate product roadmaps, win clients, enrich their research and grow their skills. - We’ve had immersive wildcard activities and workshops that exposed us to the edges of emerging culture and strategy like rage rituals, neuroplasticity challenges, future artifacts and placemaking. - We’ve hosted 3 incredible private, specially curated dinners in LA and NYC for members that flew in from around the world to meet others who share their passions and curiosities (and we have one final dinner happening this December). - Every single day conversations are happening in our Slack channel, because with this much programming, people have a lot they want to process and understand together. I’m so motivated by the wonderful platform that Exposure Therapy has grown into in just 9 months that I find myself working harder and harder to make this place unlike anything else that’s out there. And it’s only going to get better from here. We’re adding retreats (our biggest request from members), special guests and other surprises along the way. That’s why we’re increasing the annual membership to $4,000 beginning in 2025. Join us for the current $3k price by applying before Tuesday, December 10th. After that prices go up. We only have 2 cohorts open before it’ll be too late. If you feel intellectually isolated but wildly curious about culture, strategy and why the world works the way it works, you deserve to invest in yourself. I think people like us want to learn everything because we have a lot to give back, not just to our professions, but to the world around us. Come join us. #branding #brandstrategy #culture

Creating a bold new "space" such as the metaverse is a wicked 👿 problem. Though the Metaverse was popularized by Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash, commercial attempts ranging from Second Life to Roblox to Google+ to PlayStation Home have had different levels of success and outright failure. ⚰ I continue to believe Meta has a better chance at success 🤔 but I had never thought about the analogy of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 🍫 💡 Jasmine Bina's post below is a brilliant take on the direct connection between Zuck's personal brand and style (which has evolved much!) and the metaverse. Insightful read. Check out Exposure Therapy as well. "He's the defacto host of that space whether he likes it or not, and his personal brand will set the tone for how we should think and behave in these environments, whether *we* like it or not. " #brandstrategy #technologyadoption

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Exposure Therapy, a year-long journey to expand my skills as a strategist and explore new ways of thinking. I’m looking forward to connecting with brilliant minds and challenging myself in new ways. A special shoutout to Jasmine Bina, co-founder of Exposure Therapy, for the insightful conversations that helped me make this decision. I’m excited to see where this journey takes me, and big thanks to the entire team for creating such a dynamic space for growth! ✨

The future doesn't happen one thing at a time. The problem with a lot of futurism is that it extrapolates a single thing forward and assumes everything else will stay the same. And that makes it really easy to forecast the negative future scenarios, and really easy to totally miss the positives. Famed novelist and sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer came and gave us a masterclass in predicting the future at Exposure Therapy last month and he had a lot to say, in a wonderfully entertaining way 😂 Some of my fave points from this awesome session: #1) The guy who invented powerpoint has doomed us all to be simplistic thinkers. When we believe every idea should be reduced to bullet points instead of a nuanced argument, we can't hold multiplicity in our heads and we can't forecast into the future effectively. #2) All fiction is the literature of conflict. Most famously, it's a good guy and a bad guy, but it's also very often *ideas* in conflict with each other. And conflicting ideas create uncomfortable gray areas that most futurists don't explore. #3) Don't ask 'What's the world going to be like 10 years from now?' Instead ask 'What was the world like 100, 90, 80, etc. years ago?' If you start from today, you literally have no compass to point in a direction. You need the vector of history to push you forward in plausible directions. (Personally, that's why I think the final form of every strategist is to become a history nerd ;) ........... P.S. for those of you who like to chastise me for saying "predict the future" instead of "forecast", chill out. We all know what I mean. #strategy #branding #futurism

Too many strategists fall in one corner of this chart. Can you guess which one? And its not just strategists. It's researchers, foresights people, marketers, and brand leaders. We see the future through one lens and do very little to push ourselves to see it through the other 3 lenses, even though they may be just as probable. If you can't see both abundance and scarcity, both a near future and far one, you're not really seeing the future at all. The best among us work hard to inhabit all 4 quadrants. This month in Exposure Therapy we're exploring "How To Predict The Future" and the first step to making better predictions is to understand and account for how your perceptions are being influenced. Here's what's really wild... Scientifically speaking, your entire experience of reality is an internally generated mental simulation of what’s really going on (look up the Free Energy Principle). If our reality is made of our expectations then the information ecology we exist within has a huge influence on those expectations. And let's be honest - the majority of novel information we consume about what's going on in the world comes through social media, clickbait dressed as news, and memes. This is why the modern notion of what is ‘normal’, what is ‘safe’, and what is ‘likely’ are in such flux. When social algos, clickbait titles and memes are our collective social benchmark, where most of us form our expectations of the world and expectations that we then act on, then it shouldn’t be all that surprising that so many of us feel anxious, angry and afraid when we think about the future. But despite all of this, it’s a superpower to realize that there’s no daylight between changing your expectations of the future and changing the world you live in. And if you’re in the business of predicting the future, then you need to get comfortable with shifting your own expectations along this map. Let's start with this question: "Which quadrant do you most often find yourself in?" #branding #brandstrategy #strategy

Ask yourself if you’re a strategist that judges culture or gets curious about it. Because I see a lot of judging on this platform and that’s the quickest way to being a poor strategist.

People don't think in facts, they think in myths. A few months ago we studied the topic "How To Build Your Strategic Mind" for Exposure Therapy and I brought in master mentalist Andy Nunn to show us how the belief-generating engine that is the brain really works. It turned out to be quite an emotionally moving conversation. Even when Andy tells his audience outright, “I have no psychic powers,” they come to him after his shows to ask about the future, their deceased loved ones, or the otherwise spiritually unknown. They *sense* a magic that isn't really there. And yet they can't shake the feeling that there's something more. You'll see in this video that people even misremember, fill in perceptual gaps and create a whole lot of context around Andy's performance. It all highlights a powerful truth: people don’t always remember what happened—they remember what they want to believe happened. They align themselves with stories that fit their inner narratives, even when reality is right before their eyes. This tells us two things in strategy: 1) In a world filled with endless information, the most important truths aren’t always found in data points or facts. They’re in the stories people cling to. Quant can support or validate a strategy, but it should never lead it. Data is a clue, but the answer will always look like a mythology. 2) Whether we want to admit it or not, we're in the business of belief and that is a huge responsibility. The worst among us will exploit it as a weakness. The better among us will nurture it as a vehicle for creating a more human world. The real magic isn’t in what Andy does but what is happening in people's brains. This gap between what’s real and what we perceive shapes not just our personal beliefs but our strategies in life and business. Our minds fill in the gaps so remarkably easily, aligning what we experience with what we want to believe. And it happens every day, in every decision we make. #branding #brandstrategy #culture

The ultimate goal of relationships stopped being about love a long time ago. Today, it's about self-actualization, healing, and rebirth. Yet that abstract measurement of "love" stays with us today in our myths, our media, our friendships and our marriage vows. Our institutions of relationship begging for a new yardstick. Love is an outdated ruler that measures the wrong thing, potentially leading us away from what we’re really searching for, and that's making people uneasy. This month in our brand strategy community Exposure Therapy we explored "Matters of the Heart" from all angles to truly understand where culture is headed in its quest for connection, and how brands in all categories center themes of love and connection in a way that moves people to act. As Stephen Chbosky said, “We accept the love we think we deserve”, so what does society think it deserves now? We brought in provocative speakers who shifted our perceptions around honesty and healing in branding, had a wildcard activity that pushed conversations about the heart, and explored new research that sparked many spirited conversations in Slack. But that's the "thinking" side of Exposure Therapy. The "feeling" side happens at our dinners. This time we held our soiree in New York and it was easily one of the most meaningful nights of my year, aptly called "Emotional Alchemy For The Bravehearted”. A beautiful, open, insanely curious group of members gathered to let it all out. If you want to aim for something bigger than love in your life, you need to take bigger swings. You need to spin the bottle and accept your proverbial fate (don't worry, there was no kissing involved but there was a lot of personal sharing which may have been even more terrifying.) This community continues to amaze me. Thank you to our members who flew in from out of state (and country) to be with us, including Carina Bhavnani, Katie Faulkner, Ti Chang, Sarah S., Meghan (Kane) McCollum, Maggie Garner, Ted Steyer, M.M.C., and Jamica El and extra love to our NYC locals who made it out Michelle Mattar, Paul Capobianco, Christina Viana Mendes, Reid Litman, Jennifer Ekeleme, Peter Spear, Grace Clarke and our special guests Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel and Eric Litman. We'll see you for our next dinner in December! #branding #brandstrategy #culture