Kirk’s background is distinct from most executive coaches in his vast business-building experience prior to graduate-level education and training in leadership coaching. Prior to starting his coaching consultancy, Kirk is co-founder and lead executive coach of Enso, creating initiatives with visionary brands and coaching visionary leaders toward positive impact at scale. Kirk’s own business and entrepreneurial leadership span 30 years of successful enterprises, with roles as Founder, Chief Creative Officer, Partner, and President/CEO of 400+ people companies and vanguard creative shops recognized globally from Cannes to Hong Kong. He’s built award-winning creative cultures in New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, serving clients like Nike, Disney, Virgin, Uber, Visa, Google, Lyft, and The White House.
Kirk coaches high-impact leaders to find their greatest possibility in authentic leadership, purpose, and impact. He has been featured in Forbes, and he speaks globally on the power of mindset and inner purpose to harness the power of business. Kirk is a pioneer in purpose mindset workshop design, co-designing and facilitating the personal impact accelerator, Soul Purpose, and its different iterations like Being Limitless for Mattel and other brands. Kirk went to grad school in 2004 to earn a Master’s Degree in Spiritual Psychology and then added extensive professional training in coaching technologies like Three Principles, Soul-Centered Leadership, and Success Intelligence. Kirk is a certified graduate of the University of Santa Monica’s Soul-Centered Coaching Program.
This combination of real-world business experience and graduate-level coaching education creates an integrated skill set rare in today’s executive coaches and was designed for 21st-century enterprise. Kirk is a regular lecturer on leadership in business at USC’s Haas School of Business, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and the University of Adelaide in Australia. Kirk has spoken and led workshops on unlocking inner purpose and positive impact from Hong Kong to Copenhagen to Miami to Portland. He volunteers twice a year in a women’s maximum-security prison in an anti-recidivism mindset workshop called Freedom to Choose, and as a Burning Man participant since 1995, is currently contributing to a University of Adelaide research project on how Burning Man is influencing today’s most progressive business cultures. His own creative endeavors have earned Cannes Lions, the Sundance Official Selection, and Emmys. He lives with his wife and the love of his life, Patricia, and his sons, McKinley and Kevin, in Topanga, California. From whom he continues to learn every day.
“How much longer will you devote your precious life’s energy to sustain the illusion of importance to things that aren’t?”
— Dr. Kalina Klamann
My journey, how I got here
In 2003, at the apex of a career of founding and building creative companies and cultures, I had become the CEO/CCO of a four hundred-person agency in San Francisco. I thought I had arrived. I expected feeling fulfillment, joy, and achievement. Yet I did not. I began to experience dread, and that there was a higher calling I was missing. I knew if I stuck it out a few more years I could be done with work, but fortunately, something blocked that default approach to life: At the age of nineteen, I was told I had metastatic sarcoma and could expect to live another eighteen months. Somehow I survived. But coming face-to-face with mortality created a forcing function for my life, where every moment that followed was to be spent in vitality and meaning. I resigned, and inspired by my peer-to-peer counseling work with cancer patients, went to grad school for my Masters in Spiritual Psychology and Soul-Centered Leadership Coaching certification. I emerged united with the limitless possibility of a higher self to again build companies only now with tools and skills to make sure joy, fulfillment, positive impact, and aliveness are integral to the experience. They included a two-year adventure in DC working on Obama for America, and founding Enso in 2011, the world’s first impact agency, uniting business and its leaders with purpose and impact. I lead the executive and leadership coaching practice helping high-impact leaders unite with a higher self and inner purpose to transform themselves, business, and their worlds.
