The Courage to Want with Chip Conley & Tami Simon

FREE IMBA MASTERCLASS

The Courage to Want

Giving Yourself Permission to Want More, Want Less, or Want Something Different

Understanding the needs beneath our ambition, choices, and next chapters

What if the restlessness you can’t explain has a name? Join us for a candid, inspiring hour on ambition, permission, and the needs underneath both. Chip Conley built two beloved hospitality companies on one idea: pay close attention to what people need. In this session, he turns that attention toward your life.

Airing Live on
Thursday, September 17 at 5 pm PT | 8 pm ET

Thursday, September 17
5 pm PT | 8 pm ET

Chip Conley

Founder and Executive Chairman at MEA, NYT Best-Selling Author, Speaker

TAMI SIMON

Founder, Sounds True

There’s a question most of us avoid asking about the life we’ve built: do I still want this?

Maybe you got the job, built the business, earned the title. Whatever it was, you worked hard for it. So why doesn’t it feel the way you thought it would?

It turns out you may not have chosen wrong.
What you need may have changed.

Chip Conley has spent his career paying attention to what people need, at work and in life. Here’s one thing he keeps seeing: what we need shifts across the decades, even when everything around us stays the same. Maybe you once needed security, and now something in you is asking for freedom. Maybe recognition drove you for years, and now what you want is meaning. Or maybe you’re still chasing the next achievement without being sure what you expect it to give you when you get there.

We usually call that feeling restlessness, or burnout, or tell ourselves we should be more grateful for what we have. But sometimes the simpler answer is that we’ve changed, and our lives haven’t caught up yet.

Chip came to this honestly.

When the dot-com crash was threatening Joie de Vivre, the hotel company he’d founded at 26, he went looking for answers, and found them in a strange place: the self-help aisle of a bookstore. He picked up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and started turning it into something he could run a company with, and it carried the company through the crisis. Years later, he brought the same thinking to Airbnb.

Somewhere along the way, he realized the questions he kept asking about employees and customers were worth asking himself. What do I need now? Am I looking for it in the right place?

That’s what this hour is for. Chip will teach you the simple ladder he uses to make sense of a working life: a job pays you money, a career earns you recognition, a calling gives you meaning. None of them is wrong, and most of us are living on more than one rung at a time. Together with Tami, he’ll help you get honest about which one you’re living, and which one is pulling at you.

One thing we believe at Sounds True, and it runs through this whole hour: there’s nothing wrong with what you need.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting security, or recognition, or success. There’s nothing wrong with wanting more meaning. There’s nothing wrong with realizing that something you worked very hard for just doesn’t fit anymore.

Wanting was never the problem. The problem is mismatch. Purpose won’t fix a security problem. Money won’t fix a meaning problem. Achievement won’t fix a belonging problem.

Pushing harder takes one kind of courage. Getting honest about what you want now takes another. That’s what this hour is for. Come as you are.

One thing we believe at Sounds True, and it runs through this whole hour: there’s nothing wrong with what you need.

Wanting was never the problem. The problem is mismatch. Purpose won’t fix a security problem. Money won’t fix a meaning problem. Achievement won’t fix a belonging problem.

Pushing harder takes one kind of courage. Getting honest about what you want now takes another. That’s what this hour is for. Come as you are.

In this free class, you’ll learn:

How to put a name on what you’ve been feeling. You’ll find yourself on Chip’s ladder-job, career, calling-and by the end of the hour you’ll know which one is asking for your attention.

Why what you need shifts across the decades, and why that gap tends to show up as restlessness, burnout, or a boredom that doesn’t make sense on paper.

How to tell which kind of problem you’re dealing with, so you stop throwing purpose at a security problem, or money at a meaning problem.

Where to look when you’ve lost the thread. Chip points people to four places: what excites you, what agitates you, what you’re curious about, and what you set aside earlier in life.

Why you don’t have to figure this out alone. Chip likes to say that wisdom isn’t taught, it’s shared, and this hour runs on that idea.

Why this hour is only a starting point, and how the Inner MBA gives you the time, structure, and teachers to keep working on what you find.

Free to attend. Join us live or register to receive the recording.

Who this is for…

This is for you if any of these sound familiar:

You hit the goal, and the satisfaction lasted about a week.
You keep thinking about a change you can’t justify out loud yet, so you haven’t said it to anyone.
You’re good at your job and a little bored by it, and you feel guilty saying both in the same sentence.
People come to you for advice about their careers, and lately you don’t know what to tell yourself.
You’ve done well by every measure except the one you can’t name.

You don’t have to be in crisis. Most people who come to this work aren’t. Something’s shifted, and you’d like to know what, before you make any big moves or talk yourself out of them.

If any of that sounds familiar, this class is for you.

Meet your hosts

Chip Conley

Founder and Executive Chairman at MEA, NYT Best-Selling Author, Speaker

Chip Conley is a three-time TED speaker and New York Times bestselling author of Learning to Love Midlife, Wisdom at Work, The Midlife Manifesto, and more. He’s also the founder of MEA, a thought leader on midlife and aging, and one of the world’s leading experts at the intersection of business innovation, psychology, and spirituality.

Chip has spent forty years on one question: how do you build a business with heart and still make it work?

At 26, he founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality and grew it into the second largest boutique hotel company in the country, running it through two recessions. Decades later, Airbnb’s young founders asked him to help turn their startup into a global hospitality brand. Inspired by his experience of intergenerational mentoring as a “modern elder” at Airbnb, Chip founded MEA and has since dedicated his midlife years to reframing the concept of aging and supporting people in navigating midlife with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.

He has taught hundreds of multi-day workshops on working through challenges, finding purpose, and owning wisdom. As someone who has navigated his own major life transitions, from hospitality entrepreneur to Airbnb strategist to founder of a wisdom school, Chip brings both personal experience and proven frameworks for designing a purpose-driven next chapter that moves beyond achievement into genuine impact and legacy.

In the Inner MBA, Chip teaches leaders how to recognize what they and the people around them need at each stage, apply his needs-based frameworks to real decisions, and build careers and companies where ambition and meaning grow together.

TAMI SIMON

Founder, Sounds True

Tami Simon is the founder of Sounds True and the host of this conversation.

She founded Sounds True in 1985 with a clear mission: to disseminate spiritual wisdom. What started as a project with one woman and her tape recorder has grown into a multimedia publishing company that features hundreds of leading teachers and visionaries of our time. Sounds True has produced over 3,000 titles, including events, certification programs, and transformational online learning experiences, and is North America’s leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings.

She’ll guide the hour with the directness, depth, and practicality she’s known for, helping connect Chip’s work on what people need to the questions you’re carrying into it.

You’re allowed to outgrow the life you worked very hard to build.

Take a breath and read that again, because most of what we’re told about growth points the other way. We’re supposed to want less as we get older, settle in, be grateful for what we have. Chip has spent his whole career finding a different road. Your ambition has been trying to get you something at every stage of your life, and the real question is what it’s reaching for now.

For you, that might mean wanting more. It might mean wanting less. It might mean wanting something different than you’ve ever let yourself say out loud. This hour is about giving yourself permission to find out, and you’ll leave knowing what’s underneath it.

It’s free and it’s one hour. All you bring is the question you’ve been carrying.

Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.

Free to attend. Join us live or register to receive the recording.

A program by Sounds True

In consultation with the Greater Good Science Center