Also known as the Green Goddess of China, Peggy Liu is Chairperson of Joint US-China Collaboration for Clean Energy (JUCCCE), and a leading environmentalist. Named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time, she has successfully catalyzed change for over a billion people, seven times over. Peggy’s superpower is bringing people together to bring in a better future faster. Her latest project, the “Tornado Leadership” methodology, draws from her work across policy, economic, technical, and spiritual realms to lead societal-scale changes. She lives in Shanghai.
I’ve known Peggy since 2017, when I was lucky enough to spend some time in China – first teaching at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and then staying with Peggy in central Shanghai. There are many wonderful things I could say about Peggy, but the main thing I admire her for is her ability to get stuff done. This could be connected to the fact that, as far as I can tell, she appears to never sleep.
In this conversation, we talk about how our perceptions shape our world, yin-yang polarities and energetics, alignment and resonance, bridges, wanting to be a robot, avatars, algorithms, and Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. And, of course, Tornado Leadership.
I really appreciated Peggy’s image of the tornado of change – how we get it spinning, help it gather momentum, and draw people in. It’s a perfect metaphor for change, and in fact, quite a perfect metaphor for the whirlwind that is Peggy Liu.
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Favourite Quotes:
Marina Jacobi: “Emotions are simply your perception of reality.”
My fundamental belief is that all realities are possible for us. It’s just that some may be more probable at this moment. But through shaping our emotions, mastering our emotions, we can shape the way that we perceive the world, and that becomes our world.
If we’re all aligned, we’re all going the same direction, we’re all going in the same frequency, the same resonance, we’re feeling each other, we’re sensing each other so that we don’t cause friction, then we’re all in flow. And to me, that is the definition of peace.
All infinite realities, not only are possible, but they exist right now. It is just that some are more possible. What I mean is that a lot of them are just sitting in potential energy form. And then when you put your energy, your thought, your intention, your directional energy into something, then you can actually make that transform into kinetic energy.
Now I realize that you can be really smart and learn how to have incremental progress, right? One plus one equals two. You can work and live in Silicon Valley, and you can do the whole Moore’s Law, you can talk about exponential growth, and for a long time I lived that one plus one equals three. But now what I’m teaching people is if you want to move whole societies to a different reality, you need to do that at quantum speed, and that takes one plus one equals 11.
You need to have the internal inner work, the internal journey of moving from speaking from your head to other people’s heads, to speaking with your heart, to other people’s hearts. And you need to be able to let go of spreadsheets and plans completely.
The tornado really is about energetics momentum, angular momentum. It’s a life force. And that’s why spreadsheets will never get you quantum speed manifestation change, because they are static. They have no momentum in them. So the first thing in creating the future you want, to be able to bring forth that better future faster, is to see that future in every little detail.
Everything in the universe is simply energy waves working in harmony.
This is different from linear momentum, which is just pushing something, push, push, push something forward, using my adrenaline. I’m going to use my hard work my willpower to just keep pushing through a problem. That’s linear momentum, and that’s only going to get you incremental, maybe exponential change. But to really jump through a wormhole, it looks like a vortex the shape of a tornado. And so you need to spin the tornado, you need to expand the size of the tornado, right? And one way to do that, in a practical way, the way that I was able to achieve a lot of catalytic success in China across the country is learning how to do micro asks. And so that means drawing people into the tornado by making micro asks that they can say yes to.
Now, how do you draw people in at the same vibration, this same angular momentum, into this tornado? It’s through this frequency that we talked about – this ecstasy, this sense of marvel that you describe, this reality. And what happens is, from a neuroscience point of view, from a behavioural point of view, 95% of all of people’s actions are actually subconscious. They do what they do, because they love to do that, in that they feel a sense of love, the sense of loving connection.
You’d never see a stream of water just constantly hitting their head, so to speak, their drop against an existing boulder in the middle of the stream. So that is a really good analogy for flow versus friction. Again, the secret to everything is flow versus friction. It’s alignment versus misalignment, it’s harmony versus dissonance.
How do you create with your future self, to be able to be a creator? Part of the algorithm is to create with your whole self and your true self. Your whole self is your inner child, the now and the future self… How much are you really creating from your own karma, versus being polluted by other people’s karma?
Links:
The Facebook group Peggy referenced: My Limitless Imagination
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash