What is Co-Active?

Co-Active is not a destination. 

At its most basic, Co-Active means simply “being in action…together.” Or perhaps it might be more appropriate to say “being together…in action.”

Co-Active helps you stretch your sightline, get out of your comfort zone, and grow along the way. It’s a way to better understand your own journey—to help you design your own life’s quest by rediscovering your courage to be the one you want to be, in order to create what you want to create.

Lifelong leadership

Leadership has no “finish line.” We are all on a lifelong leadership journey, and every person’s journey is unique to them. Co-Active is a contextual lens to experience this journey from different orientations.

As the pace of our lives has quickened, we have become increasingly action-oriented and results-driven. It seems expedient to dispense with all the “soft” stuff (being) and instead just push to “get the job done” (doing). Unfortunately, this leaves us feeling disconnected and desperate for meaning and belonging. We wind up with what we might call “the hamster wheel” experience of life, as we run around alone in circles, desperately trying to get things done, only to find ourselves right back where we started.

This is why it is so important to begin with the “Co.” Action arising from this place of being and receptivity is whole and integrated, rather than disconnected and driven. In order for us to experience life as whole, action must be grounded in being, in our sense of connection to a larger wholeness.

When the Co and the Active go together, the action of our life is nourishing and fulfilling.

From the book Co-Active Leadership: Five Ways to Lead by Karen Kimsey-House and Henry Kimsey-House.