...And part of it was because I was interested in how other people perceived me so differently than how I perceived myself. There was so much variety, and I was like—what's going on? There didn’t seem to be any consistency anywhere.

So I kind of got into my own tangle of stories that created a great deal of suffering. A lot of cognitive distortions. A lot of confusion. And in climbing my way out of that through a whole bunch of different modalities—which we can get into in a moment if you want to—I started recognizing: who I thought I was is not who I actually was.

But it was these tools that I was engaging with—I mean, I’m a storyteller by nature. I got an MFA in fiction. I’m a creator. So I wanted to develop tools to help me understand myself more. And then I started sharing these tools with my friends in my spiritual community, and people were like—wait, I have that. I personalize everything. Wait, I have black and white thinking.

And I sort of naturally found myself hosting little teeny tiny workshops for people, and then bigger, and then bigger, and then creating curriculum. So it was really organic. I thought I was going to spend my entire life sitting in a dark room by myself writing fiction that would eventually enlighten people—and that would be how I earned my existence.

But life had a different idea.

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Rich Fernandez:
You mentioned that you yourself—and I know this to be true—are a practitioner of these different modalities. You might call them personal development, personal growth, spiritual development—whatever you want to call them.

What kind of modalities are we talking about?

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Elizabeth Koch:
Yeah. This is a big abstract word. So we talked about silent meditation retreats—that was the first gigantic paradigm shift of my life. To realize: oh my God, I’m not these thoughts. I’m not these emotions. I can actually see them. I can get space from them. That transformed everything immediately.

Once I had some space from these thoughts, then I could start investigating them. That connected me with cognitive behavioral therapy. I could see where I was completely upside down in my spaceship—what I was believing was true, and what wasn’t true. So that was hugely helpful. I went really deep in that for a while.

Then—way too long after that—I realized: wait, I have a body. The body has something to do with this too. And I got very interested in somatic experiencing. Understanding how the thoughts in the mind connected with the physical sensations in the body are what make my stories feel so real. Unless I unglue those, I’m just going to be trapped in the same cocoon—or Perception Box, as I like to describe it.

You know, the description you read about Tiny Blue Dot—the Consciousness Research Foundation I started—it did start as a consciousness research foundation. But that was to understand the neural correlates of consciousness and how it’s created. That was so big and abstract, and I quickly found it wasn’t helping people in their day-to-day lives.

So now we’re squarely focused on measuring the Perception Box. Like—what happens when the Perception Box walls are very close, neurologically? And what happens when they’re expanded?

I can go more into Perception Box in a moment, if you want to. Those are the modalities. There’s a lot more, but that’s the high-level view.

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Rich Fernandez:
That’s super helpful, and we will talk about perception box in a second. I do want to say to the audience—if you’re listening—if you have questions or comments, you have the chat bar available to you. We will definitely make time at the end for 10–15 minutes at least for Q&A directly, where you can unmute yourself and join this dialogue.

But I’d like to continue a bit more of a paired conversation here, to introduce everybody to this work you’re doing and really growing in the world.

You talked about your own personal practices—silent meditation, CBT, etc. But as I’ve come to know you and your team, you’ve created a very clear, direct, and potent way of approaching our own growth edges through this perception box work.

You used a phrase earlier that made me smile—you said, “I was upside down in my spaceship.” Tell us about that. What is perception box? Why is it important?

Elizabeth Koch:
All philosophers have been talking about what I describe as the Perception Box since BC. Neuroscience has research that backs up that we’re all in our own kind of personal reality bubbles—and has for a very long time.

In fact, there's a NOVA series—a two-part series that came out recently—called Perception Deception. It's filled with these wonderful neuroscientists who tell great stories. It’s all this research. So if you're interested in going deep into the science of Perception Box, I highly recommend Perception Deception.

Very simply, it’s this invisible mental box that every human being lives inside. It distorts our perceptions. It distorts our ability to understand other people, to see them clearly—definitely to connect with them in a clean, pure way—and to understand ourselves. To understand our own motivations, our assumptions. It’s built from the material of our beliefs, cognitive biases, and cognitive distortions.

No one is immune. We are all living in Perception Boxes. And they’re not bad. The way I describe it, it can sound like, “Oh, it’s horrible, we need to bust out of our Perception Box.” We can’t. It’s a reducing valve—from all the infinite content that’s out there—to be able to navigate our world and our relationships.

But we can have agency over where the walls are. Whether the walls are really close—which means we’re believing a lot of untrue things about ourselves and others—and we feel separate and distant, like people are a threat. I lived for a long time with my Perception Box walls like this.

And what are the tools we can use? The ones you all teach so well—it’s part of why we resonate so much with your work—you teach tools like emotional intelligence, resilience. They help expand people's walls so we can understand our motivations, connect with others, connect with our work, connect with our communities. That’s kind of it.

Rich Fernandez:
What I’ve come to understand, and the way you're describing it—when the Perception Box walls are really close, when it’s really small—it sounds like it causes a lot of suffering. A lot of pain.

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Elizabeth Koch:
Oh yeah. You feel isolated. You feel separate. You feel like no one can see you clearly. You can’t see yourself clearly.

Mainly what it does—for me personally, and from what I've seen in the workshops I’ve facilitated—it makes people feel... it puts them almost in a shame place. Like, “I don’t want to share what’s actually happening to me because others will judge it.” And then, because others are a threat—they’re a threat to my sense of safety, to my sense of feeling okay within myself—it makes us feel like everything is a threat.

It’s like a mental distortion of reality that we live in and believe.

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Rich Fernandez:
And you really do connect this a lot to neuroscience. Can you tell us a little about that—how and why science is important in this formulation of Perception Box?

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Elizabeth Koch:
Well, Search Inside Yourself is rooted in science too.

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Rich Fernandez:
Exactly. So for us—it’s because we try to approach things from—and granted, this is a very specific approach—there are many other approaches you could take to this. You can take spiritual approaches, theoretical approaches, humanistic approaches.

But we take a more scientifically and empirically grounded approach to a lot of the practices we teach. Because we’re really interested in how the brain and body contribute to emotional intelligence. That includes things like the ability to focus, to direct and harness attention, to generate creativity and the conditions for creativity, to create the conditions for empathy and compassion.

A lot of those have neural foundations. Those neural networks can be activated, trained, and strengthened. We had our origins at Google. We do a lot of our work in contemporary business settings, where people are really hungry for these tools, but also want to know the scientific validity of them. So they’re not just trying some random flavor of the day.

In some ways, it strengthens and validates the case for—

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Elizabeth Koch:
You know what’s funny? We used to say—Google people, the engineers, would come for the neuroscience, but they’d stay for the meditation and the community that resulted from the practices.

I think it was my friend and former Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute board member, Bill Duane, who used to say that all the time. He was an engineer at Google. He said, “Yeah, the engineers all come for the neuroscience—because it’s fascinating: neural correlates of attention, neural correlates of emotional intelligence, activate them, strengthen them, neuroplasticity—tell me about that, I want that.”

But the actual experience is so powerful and practical. That’s what they wind up really cultivating.

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Rich Fernandez:
Yeah. And that’s true of Perception Box too—I kind of answered your question because you kind of handed it to me—

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Elizabeth Koch:
No, yeah—but it’s so perfect. I mean, again, why we’re collaborators and partners and a great deal alike. But I hear you saying you almost have to Trojan horse in the heart work. You don’t have to call it spiritual—we can just call it expanding perception work—by grounding it in data.

Your clients are for-profit organizations. They have a bottom line. They’re not going to take a leap of faith with their teams. So let’s answer that. It’s all true—both are true. It does open your heart, and it does help the culture of an organization. It helps everyone get along better. It makes people feel more empowered in their role. And it helps the bottom line.

It does all that. So why not present them with something that will onboard them?

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Rich Fernandez:
Exactly. And I do want to just say, though, that it’s less Trojan horsing it than, of course, pretending it’s one thing but really offering another. Because in this neuroscience-based approach to mindfulness, emotional intelligence, Perception Box—I would say, there is no deception involved here. There is no pretending. It’s all one thing.

It’s a set of tools and practices that trains and changes the mind and body. And we can both practice it and measure it. That’s all. So we present the full package.

That is one particular approach. Again, that’s the approach we take—because we try to speak the language and use the frameworks that are familiar to people in what I might describe as analytical, empirically based, rational business settings. And we offer a similar approach with a really strong experiential learning component that also touches into the truth—truth that actually derives from the neuroscience and behavioral research.

Elizabeth Koch:
Yeah, this was my Perception Box. And I mean—thanks for calling me out on it, because I have one. They thought it was going to be some heart-opener thing, and they didn’t want that. They were just like, “Why am I here, anyway?” In the beginning, I did have to change gears. So I just loaded them with research, neuroscience, why we’re doing this.

And then they started leaning in. At the end—I think I’ve told you this before—we ended the experience with a version of Just Like Me. I don’t know what it’s called now.

It’s like, these investment bankers, they’re like, “What just happened?” I’m like, “Uh... if I had led with that, you all would have run out of the room.” Like, “I don’t want to cry.”

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Rich Fernandez:
Yeah. And for those who aren’t familiar, Just Like Me—we call it “Seeing Similarities”—it’s a version of a deep empathy exercise. You connect with the innate humanity of someone else in an experiential way—yes, even in a work setting. And it’s possible.

Again, these are some of the skills we’re not trained on in business school. They’re not the most intuitive business skills—but they are more essential than ever.

Rather than continuing to talk about this conceptually, I think, Elizabeth, if you wouldn’t mind—would you guide us in a short Perception Box–style practice? Just so people can have a little bit of an experience of what we’re talking about?

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Elizabeth Koch:
I would love to. Thank you for inviting me. I don’t think of myself as a talking head—I really enjoy the experiences. And I’m sure Search Inside Yourself agrees—you all have facilitators, you’re not talking heads.

We probably agree that it’s going inside where transformation happens—not just someone talking to our conscious mind. So if you’re all willing, this is a super-fast one—it’s like three minutes. It’s a visualization that will put you in touch with...

Well, let’s just do it.

So if you’re comfortable closing your eyes, go ahead and close your eyes. Sit back in your chair and just... relax. Let your arms hang gently by your side. Let your jaw hang gently open. And exhale all the air out.

Now inhale through your nose to a count of 4... 3... 2... 1...
And exhale out your mouth to a count of 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

Now imagine a person that you’re having a difficult time with seated in front of you. Just bring them to mind. This is not someone who has invaded your boundaries in any way. This is someone that you, on some level—even a minor level—feel shut down to.

So picture this person.

Now this person is going to speak to you. If you believe in higher selves or souls, this is the version of the person who wants to connect with you—the higher self version of this person.

First, let them tell you their perspective—why they do the things they do. Let them tell you the personal need that’s motivating their behavior. Be sure to really picture them speaking directly to you in your mind. Don’t just think about it—feel it.

What emotions are coming up for you as they speak? Whatever emotions are there, just let them come up.

Now let them tell you the challenges that they struggle with, that you don’t ordinarily see. Let them tell you what burdens they’re carrying.

If you’re thinking, “Well I don’t know any of that—I don’t even know them that well,” the details don’t matter. What matters is that every human being has suffered. This person is no different.

So let them tell you what burdens they’re carrying.

Now let them tell you what they ultimately want—more than anything. Not just for themselves, but for others. What they want for the whole world.

Now let them ask you what you ultimately want. What do you care about more than anything?

Picture them listening to your answer—with genuine interest and care.

Now gently open your eyes. And just notice—was there even a subtle shift in your attitude toward this person? Even a subtle one?

Because as I’m sure most of you know, neuroscientists have found that short visualizations like this one expand our mental models. Expand our hearts. Expand what I call our Perception Boxes.

So I hope you felt a little bit of a shift in that short time. Maybe I did—I guess I’m saying that out loud. I definitely did.

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Rich Fernandez:
Those of you that are listening, feel free to drop thoughts or responses in the chat bar. A lot of hearts. It definitely shifted my—what I’d call—relational nature toward this person. My perception actually changed. You know—it’s really powerful. They’re doing what they’re doing, and I had a different level of understanding.

Thank you.

Elizabeth Koch:
Can I actually tell you a story? Because so many conversations about Perception—and about what we’re up to and what Unlikely Collaborators is—I’m a storyteller. Can I tell a story that I hope illustrates what we mean by “unlikely collaborators”?

Because really—and you all are so deep in this work—what we mean is: it’s a paradox. When your Perception Box walls are collapsed around you, it can feel like everyone’s so different. Like, everyone hates you. I mean, if you go on Twitter, you know—everyone’s like...

But if the walls are expanded, it’s so much easier to see—of course we have differences. We have different backgrounds, different upbringings, different belief systems, different political beliefs. But beneath it all, we all want the same things: to see and be seen. To love and be loved.

So in 2019, I wanted to figure out a way to help audiences really connect with this inside themselves. I went on a tour with a former child soldier from South Sudan. Have I told you this, Rich?

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Rich Fernandez:
You did. But tell it, please—tell everyone.

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Elizabeth Koch:
Okay. His name is Emmanuel Jal. He lived in Canada at the time. So the tour was through some major cities in the U.S. and Canada.

On first glance, it’s like—are you kidding? This privileged white chick from the Midwest and a former child soldier from South Sudan, who at age five saw his entire village burned down, saw his mother murdered before his eyes. His father ran away and left him for dead. Instead, a tribe found him, handed him a gun, and said, “We’re going to get vengeance on the people who did this to you.”

I mean—what could we possibly have in common?

So what we were showing audiences, as we did this speaking and workshop tour, was: at the beginning, yeah, we had nothing in common. But as we got older in our stories, we explained how our Perception Box beliefs got built and how they contracted us more and more.

By the end of the story, we were seeing not only that our Perception Boxes got built in weirdly similar ways, but also that how we learned to expand them was weirdly similar. And now, we have the same perspective on the challenges of the world and how to solve them.

He calls me a sister. There’s so much love between us. We were trying to show that beneath it all, we’re just human beings struggling for connection and collaboration.

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Elizabeth Koch (continued):
And the workshop piece—I don’t remember why this popped into my mind earlier when you were talking—but I’ll get to it.

In the workshop, we carefully cultivated the audiences to be a wide range of people who seemed like they might not have anything in common. Then we had people partner with someone in the room who seemed very different from them.

By the end of the workshop, people were saying, “I feel closer to this person than I feel to members of my own family.”

So we’re just trying to help people see—no matter what—once our Perception Box walls expand, we’re just human beings with such similar struggles.

At Search Inside Yourself—you know, our tagline, which you mentioned earlier, is “The only way forward is inward.” And Search Inside Yourself—it’s right there in the title. So all of you—we all believe the same thing.

But just to have people experience that this “unlikeliness” isn’t really that unlikely—we were hoping that people would go off into their lives, at work, at home, and have that little moment of, “If I could connect with that person, surely I can find a way to connect with this person.”

To see things from their point of view.

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Rich Fernandez:
Absolutely. In fact, if we look at these comments—I love some of the ones in the chat, Elizabeth.

Thank you to those who are commenting. I’d like to actually speak to three of them.

Genevieve—hello in Switzerland, friend. Genevieve is one of our teachers at Search Inside Yourself and said it was perfect timing for her.

Andrew’s comment too—hi, Andrew. You said, “Nice simple practice—thanks, Elizabeth. Even though I’m struggling to truly connect with this other person on a regular basis, simply thinking about what they want and why they’re doing what they’re doing felt more inspiring than draining.” And then you said, “I have a call with them right after this, and I feel much better about it.”

That is so great. Thank you for taking the time to chat that out. That is really thrilling.

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Elizabeth Koch:
Totally.

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Rich Fernandez:
Tanya, you said, “I can entertain the notion that this dialogue is possible.” Can you just elaborate on that, Tanya, in the chat—if you’re still there?

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Elizabeth Koch:
I think she was referring to the story with me and Emmanuel.

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Rich Fernandez:
Okay, yeah, exactly. That is the power of Perception Box work. That thread of common humanity is alive—and glowing—in these types of practices and in the workshops.

So, your organization happened to do some of these workshops at your headquarters with some of your other collaborators—who are completely different organizations than we are. Some nonprofits in the arts, a prison podcast and mindfulness organization, a media company—I remember there was a jewelry maker. All walks of life, really.

And we all had that experience of common humanity.

When you think about Unlikely Collaborators—and again, just full disclosure as I said in the beginning: you’re an early investor in us and we are a collaborator with you—you told us what drew you to our work and mission. But what about others?

When you look for collaborators—because you support other organizations through experiences, storytelling, investments, and impact—what are you looking for? What do you mean by “Unlikely Collaborators”?

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Elizabeth Koch:
Number one—it’s one I actually keep in my mind a lot too, because we meet with so many powerful organizations.

There are two major bottom lines.

One: they have to be, in some way, shape, or form, focused on Perception Box—on bringing awareness around the fact that we’re all living in one. We all are living in our subjective reality bubbles. And helping people expand the walls to bring in more connection and more possibilities for collaboration.

That’s number one. So like I said with Search Inside Yourself—that was super obvious.

Number two: the leaders have to be in the work. They have to be humble enough to recognize: “When I’m triggered—maybe it’s not everyone else’s fault. Maybe there’s something going on inside of me that I need to take a look at. Maybe I’m part of what’s happening here.”

That was super obvious from you, from our first conversation too. The level of humility, the level of self-investigation that you do on an ongoing basis, Rich.

So just to give you some sense of the range—I mean, you mentioned some of the people who participated in that workshop—but I can offer some little descriptions of other organizations too.

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Rich Fernandez:
Yes, please.

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Elizabeth Koch:
These are beautiful organizations.

One is called Moral Courage. Some of you may have heard of it. It was founded by a Muslim LGBTQ+ woman named Irshad Manji—it’s beautiful. I was talking to her two days ago, actually. They create workshops that are a form of conflict resolution.

And they don’t mean conflict resolution like getting people to all agree with one another. Instead, it’s to get people to celebrate their differences—to celebrate different opinions and lifestyles—and to see that all of it is, in some way, shape, or form, valid and important. That we can evolve as a species and society. And how much more we can learn from one another if we lean in with curiosity rather than that sense of threat we talked about earlier.

Prison Yoga—you may have mentioned that too—it’s not just physical asana practices they bring into prisons. It’s a lot of mindfulness training and techniques. And it doesn’t just focus on prisoners—it also focuses on the correctional officers. Can you imagine how much stress they’re under? It brings in whole families to work with them too. So it’s really 360 degrees. Really beautiful.

The Moth. Have any of you experienced The Moth? If you live in the Bay Area or anywhere in California, you might have.

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Rich Fernandez:
Have you been, Elizabeth?

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Elizabeth Koch:
Yeah. The Moth is a storytelling organization that teaches people a particular way of telling stories that I find very Perception Box–expanding. In the telling and in the hearing.

They’d never describe it this way, so don’t tell them I said this—but I think of it as kind of a hero’s journey story: there’s a challenge, then a recognition, and then growth.

But as an audience member, your Perception Box expands just listening to these stories. They’re such heart-openers. Beautiful.

Rich Fernandez:
I love that. And I want to mention—first of all, we’re going to drop some of these names in the chat for folks who want to learn more.

And second, I want to come back to this idea that these are different organizations, in different sectors—nonprofits, creative industries, health, social impact—but you’re weaving a common thread between them. That thread is: transformation through expanding the Perception Box.

And you’re supporting these organizations in really thoughtful ways—not just financially, but also by creating immersive experiences. For example, what we did together in Santa Monica. And I understand that’s something you’re planning to offer to more people and partners in the future?

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Elizabeth Koch:
Yes, thank you for bringing that up. We’re in the middle of renovating this amazing building right by the beach in Santa Monica—it’s like two blocks away. It’s going to be our “experience center,” our home for in-person programming.

It’ll be where Unlikely Collaborators hosts immersive gatherings, workshops, retreats, storytelling salons—whatever we can dream up to help people expand their Perception Boxes in community.

And what we really want is to co-create with organizations like yours, Rich—organizations doing transformative work in different domains. We can do something more powerful together than we could on our own. So it’s not just about hosting our stuff in the space—it’s about building a creative lab where people can explore big ideas, experiment with new approaches, and support each other’s missions.

That’s what makes someone an Unlikely Collaborator. They’re different enough to bring something fresh, but aligned enough that the collaboration expands what’s possible for both sides.

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Rich Fernandez:
Exactly. I think that’s what makes this collaboration so meaningful for us at Search Inside Yourself.

You’re building a network, a kind of movement. And it’s not just a philosophy—it’s a practice. It’s lived. It’s experienced. You’re creating containers for people to do that inner work and also connect across boundaries.

So, what’s next for you, Elizabeth—for Unlikely Collaborators, for the Perception Box work? What are you most excited about in the year ahead?

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Elizabeth Koch:
I’m really excited about two things.

One is that we’re launching a Perception Box experience in a digital format, so people can engage with it online—on their own time, in their own space. That’s been a big lift. But we’ve seen how powerful this is in live settings, and we want to make it more accessible.

And the second thing is these immersive retreats. They’re not your typical “sit in a circle and talk about feelings” events. I mean, yes—there’s plenty of reflection and emotional work. But there’s also play. Creativity. Curiosity. Art. Storytelling. Mindfulness. Even movement and music.

We’re curating experiences that engage the whole person. The goal is to help people feel safe enough to let those Perception Box walls come down—and then support them in building back something more spacious and connected.

So we’re piloting those this year and scaling up next year. I’m pumped.

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Rich Fernandez:
I’m excited too. Thank you for bringing all of yourself to this work—and to this conversation.

Before we close, any final words you’d like to share with the folks here today?

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Elizabeth Koch:
Just that if anything we said resonated—if you felt something shift, or a little bell rang inside—follow that. You don’t have to have a huge, dramatic breakthrough every time. But when your Perception Box even slightly expands, new pathways open up.

If you want to stay connected, we’re easy to find at Unlikely Collaborators. And Rich—thank you for being a teacher, a partner, a brother. It’s an honor to walk this path with you.

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Rich Fernandez:
The feeling is deeply mutual. Thank you, Elizabeth.

And thank you to everyone who joined us today. Keep exploring. Keep expanding. And keep practicing the art of transforming perception—for yourself and for the world.

We’ll see you next time.