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Natural leaders are charismatic individuals with an innate talent for guiding and inspiring others. Yet, they face the same struggles as everyone else, feeling the paralysis of great life decisions and the immense fear of missing out on a large deal. The natural skill of leadership comes at a price, which is meeting expectations - to always make the right decisions, never lose out on an opportunity, stand undaunted in front of adversities, and remain a constant source of inspiration.

Natural leaders are in a constant delivery mode to satisfy the people around them: on the surface they seem to be in charge, yet even the life of a successful CEO is dictated by the agenda. When facing the void, like unexpected freedom, they feel lost. Entangled in the quagmire of daily affairs, natural leaders rarely seek inspiration; which, if it happens, only comes from within their current field of awareness. The sweet spot is to open up perception and find inspiration from beyond their field, enlarging their horizon.

Artists of romanticism like Kaspar David Friedrich painted almost perfectly realistic landscapes, portraits and historical scenes, adding only a touch of drama by deliberately emphasizing a certain aspect in the composition. They made this emphasis through, for instance, an abundant application of vivid color or an exaggerated depiction of emotions that almost slides into sentimentality. The result is an image that is grounded in reality, yet bestows upon us a sensation of magic that we struggle to describe. In the business context, Zero Senses adds this sprinkling of drama by curating an “exhibition” of inspiring impulses to open up perception and ultimately inspire the inspirer.

There is one element that is always behind inspiration: the impulse.
Through impulses, Zero Senses opens up perception. The result is inspiration, which enlarges your vision of reality and offers a higher level of awareness. The ultimate reference point is always reality. However, awareness of values, motivations, and drivers is the foundation of conscious action in business life.

Anything that inspires you can be an impulse. It can be a sensory stimulus (food, wine, opera, etc.), an experience (physical or intellectual, such as exhibitions, speeches, new technologies, etc. ), or an encounter with an inspiring individual. However, to really touch your awareness, impulses have to be individual. An impulse is a “glimpse of fire” that triggers an emotional or intellectual response, activating past experiences, personal values, beliefs, and motivations.

You can only receive new impulses that you find relevant or familiar. When you cannot relate to an impulse, it simply takes too much effort to connect with it - therefore, you subconsciously ignore it. However, if you are genuinely interested in an area, awareness will arise more naturally. That is why Zero Senses sets impulses that are individual and very personalized to your needs, including those of your business.

Zero Senses offers a journey of 0+3 Phases.
Like a curator who builds a context by carefully selecting art pieces for an exhibition, we pick the right impulses to trigger your awareness. As a curator needs to understand artists, we need to understand you.

The journey therefore starts with Phase 0 (Zero), which is an in-depth conversation. We guide your thoughts with the “Zero Senses Matrix”, based on Tanja’s 15 years of experience working with and in large companies. We identify fields that represent personal interests (i.e. inner drivers), external factors like objective megatrends, including environmental matters (i.e. sustainability and new technologies) and societal developments (i.e. changes in societal behavior, preferences of the next generation, or the understanding of luxury). We also take current projects into account. The outcome is your essence, which sets the framework for the following phases.

After we identify your needs, we will not sit in a classroom browsing PowerPoint slides. Mere knowledge is not enough. Instead, we go for a walk. Phase 1 (Impulse) is a session of curated impulses, which can include a stimulation of the senses, encounters with creators, and personal trend experiences (new technologies, social behaviors, environmental changes). In Phase 2 (Translation) we condense the essence and connect it to your business (vision, goals, plan of action). In Phase 3 (Companionship), you will apply the essence on a concrete example and learn to use it consciously. During the journey, we constantly build and maintain a bridge between personal experience and your business life.

Zero Senses provides an independent, detached, free, and inquisitive mirror; besides an extensive network and the right mix of personalized impulses to break through conditioned and narrow perspectives. Ultimately, the journey of inspiration leads natural leaders to become aware of their creation.

Alienation from our authentic self means losing sight of what truly matters to us, because we are distracted by the siren song of false drivers. The noisy, hyperactive superficiality of consumerism provides plentiful substitutes of the lost meaning: we chase job titles, awards, possessions, embellishments of material success, and social recognition. As the above-quoted Dr. Maté said in the same presentation: “Much of the economy is based on a loss of meaning in our culture.”

The loss of trust in intuition is the direct result of our alienation. After the Second World War, artists of the ZERO movement abandoned the very concept of art to find a pure expression of truth. Similarly, to find your true self, you need to let go of the substitutes that fill your inner void: the embellishments of visibility, the internalized command to fulfil societal expectations, and the general misuse of the concept of “career” as a source of identity. A complete reset to stillness and emptiness is essential to perceive who we are in the first place.

Tanja Schug, the founder of Zero Senses and a former brand consultant, is deeply passionate about wine. In the past, she contemplated different ways of pursuing her hobby, from becoming a winemaker to running a vineyard in California. Yet, none of the options felt right, as if wine were only a transmitter of a deeper meaning. When we taste a sip of wine, we naturally struggle to distinguish the components, the mental images behind the rich cacophony of flavour and smell. As Gordon M. Shepherd wrote in his book, Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine:

“(…) Although one consciously perceives a smell, a smell that has properties of an image, that image is not conscious. (…) We are very good at recognizing complex patterns, such as someone’s face, but lack the vocabulary to describe them. This is exactly the challenge in describing the qualities of a wine aroma.”

Wine tasting is a conscious effort to identify layers of sensation, like traces of pineapple or blueberry. Through conscious discernment, you create a bridge between past experience and the sensory perception of the moment. Hence, wine becomes a vehicle to instil your existing knowledge into a new context. Once Tanja came to this realization, she decided to apply the same pattern in her life, extending the notion to new domains.

“Awareness of my feelings and the ability to connect them with my experience provide me with an unshakeable trust in myself”, she affirms. Self-confidence and independence from outside influences (i.e., statistics, analysis, and confirmation) stem from the cornerstone of self-trust. Tanja became a change catalyst and companion of natural leaders in realizing their personal strengths and reactivating their intuition through conscious intelligence. The latter emerges from the balanced connection of rationality and emotions through the sharpening of sensory awareness.

Returning to ourselves is a tedious journey. The undertaking might seem daunting because of its apparent loneliness and defiance of societal expectations. As the most fundamentally intimate and important things in life, we are essentially alone with the responsibility and effort bestowed upon us by our commitment.

In Tanja’s view, the first step is agreeing to the departure: “The decision to sign up for the journey is harder than it appears. We are instinctively afraid of change. However, it is better to decide consciously that we are indeed at a point where we need change. Otherwise, life will force us into change.”

Leaving the concern of everyday business and throwing out the unnecessary garments of superficial trivialities takes courageous determination. Deliberately locking out the noise and at least temporarily leaving our ordinary context is essential to start seeing beyond the surface of everyday life. Yet we do not have to be lonely on this journey.

It is no coincidence that even mythological figures were led by trusted guides through their journeys. At the beginning of his Divine Comedy, the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri finds himself in a dark forest, completely lost and overtaken by fear. Yet, he soon found a guide: Virgil, the Latin poet, leads him through the steps of a mystical journey from hell to paradise. As he told Dante: “I therefore think and judge it best for thee / to follow me; and I shall be thy guide.”

Most of us are too busy running on our treadmills to realize the true magnitude of our self-alienation, let alone to consciously look for sources of inspiration or an adept guide to lead us back to ourselves. As our ancestors showed us, we never walked alone on new or difficult paths.

Reaching a state of clarity is a prerequisite of change. Zero Senses is a detached and neutral mirror, purely reflecting your deepest values, drivers, and aspirations, without adding or taking away anything. Without guidance, you might follow the path you already know. Without safety, fear of judgment might deter you. Zero Senses not only creates a safe atmosphere of acceptance to awaken your awareness, but also curates impulses to widen your perception. We accompany you on a journey of transformation.

Tasting wine taught Tanja that understanding emerges both from knowledge and experience. The sharpening of sensory awareness and the reactivation of intuition lead to more clarity, which in turn becomes the foundation of personal independence and inner stability.

However, there is no uniform way to cultivate awareness. Zero Senses curates the impulses through choosing sensory stimuli that match the personal characteristics of natural leaders. During a profiling phase, we identify the key topics of interest and relevance, ranging from visuality (e.g., art and nature) to human impulses (e.g., meaningful discussions with inspiring people).

Ultimately, we distill your essence: as your strengths manifest themselves, you can start translating and using them intuitively within every moment, discussion and situation. As your conscious intelligence improves, you can slowly unravel and change the underlying patterns of your life.

ZERO announces a new beginning. In my belief, this new start gets created by oneself. In this world we're living in, we are distracted by outside impulses: our need for belonging, our wish to be seen, our hope to be successful. But where do we actually want to belong? By whom do we really want to be seen? And what does success truly mean for us? ZERO is the starting point for a new way of thinking, of finding what truly matters. Because it starts with you, your essence, your being. ZERO is you. An unmanifest silent space inside of you filled with pure possibilities. Therefore ZERO is not judging, it is positive, immensely optimistic. Its fuel is curiosity, the curiosity to create.

What inspired me to found Zero Senses is that you cannot find purity on the surface of anything. You have to see beyond the obvious to find ZERO. The art movement I am referring to experimented with new forms of expression after the Second World War. ZERO SENSES translates this into business reality, offers a path to find your ZERO, and empowers you to use it as a basis on which to live your true self.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a small group of German artists aimed to break away from the reigning post-war pessimism and artistic conventions. In the early 1960s, the founders of the ZERO art movement (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker) decided to return to the origin of creation, to ZERO. The artists let go of a damaged universe with optimistic resignation. It wasn’t the fake hurrah-optimism of today’s performance-society (Leistungsgesellschaft): they had to give a new meaning to their lives embracing nothingness because the very meaning of human existence had seemingly vanished.

Obtaining a clean slate of purity meant forgetting the past, thus freeing the future from its burden. ZERO artists jettisoned dusty dogmas and the stifling conditions of expectations. For others, emptiness might have been fearfully paralyzing. For them, it meant unprecedented depth and endless possibilities. First, they questioned the very basis of art by emptying the canvas. Then they questioned the canvas too. When almost nothing remained, they stripped down art to its essence: light, space, materials, and shapes. Instead of brushes, the artists took nails or alternators, scribbled on metal wires, explored the infinite meanings of a single color, or flapped aluminium blades in the light.

ZERO artists distinguished their style by focusing their creative energy in a single means of expression. Günther Uecker introduced a new layer of vision by using a hammer and nails instead of paint and brush, opening up an unusual entry point for the observer. Otto Piene expressed depth with lights and fire. Creators who joined the movement later further enlarged its repertoire. Lucio Fontana directly broke through the canvas by cutting or hammering holes in it, shattering the seemingly suffocating two-dimensionality. Yves Klein showed that even a single color (monochrome), his famous ultramarine blue, condensed endless layers of depth.

“Before you can express yourself, you need to assert yourself”, said Günther Uecker. Knowing who you are and what truly matters to you comes first. Challenging expectations and societal conventions only follows. ZERO artists courageously abandoned dogma and expectations without compromise in order to create space for the purest, deepest, and most authentic form of art: expressing the true self.

Modern life has inundated us with constant noise, endless opportunities, and lingering uncertainty. Stress stems from our own expectations, fuelled by the exterior: we relentlessly crave recognition, title, money, and status. We nurture an ardent desire to belong, to be visible, and to be successful. However, we rarely question the very mindset of constant performance. Where do we actually want to belong? Who shall see us? What does success mean at all?

Tanja Schug, the founder of Zero Senses felt that we need a similarly profound and purifying change in business life. Inspired by the art of letting go, she helps natural leaders reach their personal point ZERO in a safe environment. She has understood that curated stimuli of the senses (like seeing, smelling, and tasting) sharpens the awareness of feelings. Connecting ZERO with Senses, Tanja invites you to embark on the journey of discovering, embracing, and gradually realizing your true self through cultivated intuition and ultimately more clarity in any decision.

The emptiness of point ZERO is the silence before the creation of the universe. The first step is to leave the crowd and courageously retreat from the minutiae of daily life. Like Günther Uecker’s hammer that struck nails through the canvas, one by one, the impulses of Zero Senses gradually increase your sensory awareness.While Lucio Fontana defied the two-dimensionality of the flat canvas by breaking through it, Zero Senses helps you gently transcend the surface of your everyday routine to finally see your life as it is, and make decisions with the clarity of a higher context.

The resulting balance between your rational and creative sides will restore your trust in your own intuition. Clarity is the foundation of a profound transformation. The fog of everyday routine will slowly dissipate, revealing the old patterns and habits which are invisibly intertwined with all aspects of your life. However, cultivating clarity requires tremendous effort and commitment. As Otto Piene saw it, “darkness has the potential to become light”. Just like light and shadow, struggle and joy belong together, stemming from and feeding on each other.

The journey starts with you, your essence, your being. You will not only understand, you will start to see. Similarly to ZERO artists, by connecting previously unforeseen dots, you will be able to transmit your true self into your reality.