The Call

Looking Back After Fifty Years

There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after.

For me, one of those moments came when I was eighteen years old. I had no language for it then, and even after five decades of reflection, I'm not convinced words can fully capture it now.

Over the years, I've described it in different ways—a spiritual awakening, a near-death-like experience, a mystical encounter, an initiation into what I came to understand as a cosmic priesthood. Each description reflects part of the truth as I experienced it, yet none fully contains it. Language has always felt too small for something that altered the course of an ordinary young man's life.

For a long time, I believed the story was about the experience itself.

I no longer think that.

The real story is what happened afterward.

How do you build a life around an event that changes the way you see yourself, humanity, and reality? How do you remain grounded while pursuing questions that many people never ask—or perhaps quietly ask but rarely voice? How do you translate deeply personal experiences into practical service for others?

Those questions have shaped every season of my life.

They led me into classrooms as a teacher, construction sites as a partnering facilitator, boardrooms as an organizational consultant, studios as a podcast host, and eventually to the pages of more than fifty books. They inspired the founding of Planetary Citizens, conversations with remarkable people from around the world through One World in a New World, and, most recently, a partnership that helped give rise to the AI Universal Engine™—a framework designed to strengthen human judgment, organizational coherence, and wiser decision-making.

Looking back, I can see a thread that I couldn't recognize while I was living it.

As an orphan adopted into a loving family, I spent much of my early life asking questions about identity, belonging, and purpose. Those questions didn't disappear after the experience that changed my life at eighteen. If anything, they became more compelling. The experience didn't provide all the answers; it expanded the questions. It invited me into a lifelong apprenticeship of listening, learning, and testing what I believed against the realities of everyday life.

That apprenticeship has been anything but linear.

There have been moments of profound clarity and seasons of deep uncertainty. Times when doors opened effortlessly and times when they closed just as quickly. There were opportunities that exceeded anything I imagined, along with failures that humbled me, misunderstandings that isolated me, and quiet periods when I wondered whether any of it mattered.

Yet through it all, one conviction never left me: our lives are not measured by the extraordinary moments we experience, but by the ordinary choices we make because of them.

That realization changed everything.

Instead of trying to explain what had happened to me, I became more interested in understanding what it was asking of me.

It asked me to listen more deeply than I spoke.

To seek understanding before certainty.

To value coherence over competition.

To recognize that leadership begins with self-awareness.

To discover that genuine transformation is less about accumulating knowledge than aligning one's life with one's deepest values.

Along the way, I discovered that these principles weren't limited to individuals. They applied equally to organizations, communities, and perhaps even to humanity itself. Fragmentation—whether within a person, a leadership team, or a society—creates friction, confusion, and unnecessary suffering. Coherence, by contrast, allows purpose, relationships, and action to align in ways that release extraordinary potential.

Only recently have I begun to appreciate that this search for coherence has been the consistent thread running through everything I've written, taught, built, and explored. Long before coherence became the title of a book or the foundation for new organizational frameworks, it had quietly become the orientation of my life.

People occasionally ask whether I still think about that experience from my youth.

The answer is yes—but not in the way they might expect.

I no longer spend much time trying to determine exactly what happened.

Was it mystical?

Psychological?

Spiritual?

An encounter with a deeper dimension of consciousness?

Perhaps those questions will always remain open.

Today, I find myself asking a different question:

What kind of life honors an experience that calls you beyond yourself?

That question has proven far more transformative than any explanation I could offer.

This series is my attempt to explore that question honestly.

Not to persuade.

Not to prove.

Not to ask anyone to adopt my worldview.

Simply to reflect on a journey that has unfolded over fifty years—a journey that has led me through wonder, doubt, service, discovery, leadership, loss, gratitude, and an ever-deepening appreciation for the mystery of being alive.

If my reflections encourage you to listen a little more closely to your own life's questions, then they will have served their purpose.

Perhaps we all receive a call of some kind.

Mine happened to arrive in a way I could never have anticipated.

The rest of my life has been learning how to answer it.

By Zen Benefiel

Keywords: Coaching, Future of Work, Leadership

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