Interested in knowing more about me? Let me start with this: there is power, liberation, and beauty when we stop to see, and trust what is inside. You have this within you too!

Here are three snap shots about me to help bring this theme alive (or click here to view a professional CV).

1

Most recently I founded and directed The Hive: A Center for Contemplation, Art, and Action a community of leaders that pulls off 10,000 hours of small group training a year. From as early as 2004 I noticed the resonance between organizational development tools, community organizing practices, and the traditions of spiritual and creative wellbeing. The Hive is an expression of the intersection of these paths. In my seven years as executive director I learned the importance of mindful/contemplative practices for being a leader who can listen to others, stand his ground, and hold space for growing at the speed of trust. I’m no guru, and the Hive is not perfect. But the great privilege of directing a place like the Hive is seeing the up-side of incorporating body awareness, psychological safety, multicultural belonging, and purpose-aligned goals in a work environment. Not only is it possible. It brings out more flow and ability to pivot and chart new territory. This experience has opened doors to consult and coach organizations ranging from universities, major nonprofits, school systems, entrepreneurs, business executives, and philanthropy. I stepped back as director at the end of 2022, and am grateful for the board, staff, volunteers and facilitators who keep the Hive buzzing as I focus my attention on sharing this experience with more organizations and leaders.

2

The second snap shot is from the summer of 1997, I’m standing at Cottonwood Pass in the mountains of Colorado, with the woman who would become my partner and together we’d build a family and home. Kelley and I have proceeded to live and lead in communities spanning from Spokane, Washington to urban SW Atlanta to Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood. Our family’s love for food, music, crafting and entertaining are a rich inheritance handed down from my wife’s granddad who threw great tailgating parties, to my great-grandmother who immigrated from Northwestern Europe. Our son and daughter are part of that legacy, making music and art, benefiting from grandparents, aunts and uncles, and a village of family and friends who love and pray for them. Together we’re all building resilience, deepening friendships across cultures, and healing from legacy burdens and suffering that so easily drive people apart these days. Family is not perfect, and many of life’s best families are the one’s we choose—but I’ll say that my own poetry, prayer, and creative delight are inescapably tied to the experience of sharing life with these three other humans and the constellation of friends, pets, plants and cocktails that is the Bronsink home. Its all gift!

3

My final snapshot is the life of spirituality and leadership. I think Howard Thurman says is best when he writes

“There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…

You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…”

The sound of the genuine has always been within earshot for me. Beginning in a Dutch Christian family, daily prayers and readings, a mother who sang and tended our wounds, and a father who regularly gave our weekends and shared our margins with those marginalized by economic injustice. In junior and senior high school I was nurtured by youth leaders in my evangelical mega church, and by friendships with a sister black American church where I saw what bodily-liberation could look like, heard what soul-in-spirit can sound like, and sensed what longing for fairness can feel like. As early as age 20 I was introduced to contemplative spirituality and silent prayer practices. This lead to training in Christian spiritual direction, ordination as a minister in the more progressive Presbyterian tradition (PC-USA), and to forming faith communities that sought to be inclusive across race, sexual orientation, religions, and across the age and culture differences found in gentrifying urban Atlanta. My first published book was on the intersection of contemplation and design thinking that encouraged sabbath, listening, imagination, and social justice. But I also felt the weight of midlife, of entrepreneurial overreaching, generation X burnout, and in that season began to experienced my lack of control as a loss of faith. In a way it was. It was liberation from a certain attachment to security, to exceptionalism and self-right-ness, and to the recovery of a deeper relationship to our world—one that can bear and restore suffering without bypassing or coercing. It has only been thanks to friends and teachers in trauma-informed care, engaged buddhism, contemplative christian mysticism, and somatic abolitionism that I’ve come to trust the sound of the genuine in the idiom of my own very life. And it has been in coaching and consulting that I’ve seen the vitality that soul-full leadership of this sort brings into work life and relationships.

You

The best I can bring to the table as a coach, consultant, or wisdom teacher is my own life—more than data, or research or certificates, it is the presence of our lives resonating with the sound of the genuine that truly leads, heals, and makes space to accompany growth. And the sound of the genuine in you is the treasure for you to bring into our work together!