Having a big idea or vision is great—but at some point, you’ve got to share it. Whether you’re talking to future customers, hiring a team, or just explaining what you do, people need to get it. And it’s not just about what you say out loud or post online. A big part of it starts with knowing yourself—what you believe in, what you offer, and why it matters. So how do you figure all that out and actually get your message across?
In this episode, I talk with Alice Marie Brink, and Ed Moehlenkamp about how to communicate your vision in a way that actually connects. We chat about the impact of social media, communication and leadership. Tune in, to learn more!
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How to Effectively Communicate Your Vision with Alice and Ed
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Any vision that you have, you’re going to need to communicate that vision outward somehow. There is just no getting around it. At some point, someone needs to know what you’re doing, whether it is people you hire to enact your vision and do the communication or the communication that you do directly yourself for your vision. And when it comes to communicating your vision outward, there’s actually an internal and an external component of it. The external component is what we often see because those are the words you say or the words you type or the images you put out there. However, there is some also internal work that you need to do in order to understand what you’re communicating, understand who you are, and understanding, in many cases, what your value proposition is, which is important for anyone to understand why they should be doing business with you regardless of what your idea is. To talk about both the internal and external components of this concept of communicating your vision outward, I would like to introduce to you Alice Brink and Ed Moehlenkamp with their Energy Interplay Initiative.
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Alice, Ed, welcome to the program.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Nice to see you.
Great to see you as well. And so just to orient us a little bit, we’ll start with you, Alice, as the internal component, which is the first component, and you work with mindset, energy, and mindfulness.
That’s right. No matter where we go and what we do, we’re carrying this internal environment with us and so my work helps people get in touch with that, become aware of it, and then learn how to drive that energy, because, after all, it’s all energy. And so, through exercises and then practical application, I love the energy, I’ve been in energy work for almost three decades now, and so that’s shown me a lot of different outpicturings of that. And so one of those, now that I’m with Ed, we’re applying it to our presentation skills offering.
So it’s all about what you’re bringing to this presentation internally that drives the energy and the connection of your presentation. Share on XNow, when it comes to energy work, how much of it is kind of overall what energy you bring to every single day interaction, whether you’re attending a networking event, meeting with one of your employees, or even just hanging out with your friends, versus the energy reset that you do in advance of the actual presentation that you’re about to give?
This is funny you bring this up. So, in almost every one of my workshops and in my coaching interactions, we get to a point where I share this favorite quote of mine, and it is, “Don’t let the weeds grow on the path to the dear friend’s home.” And I believe it’s an old Chinese proverb of some kind, but the dear friend is you, and so getting familiar with that path that leads you inward and tamping down the weeds, if you will, through repeated trips there allows that connection to be more readily available and to be more authentic to you and more in alignment. So, especially now, we’re getting a lot of things thrown at us in the world right now that can really throw us off center and out of whack and out of our optimal state, and so the more familiar we are and the more we practice, it’s easier to get back to a more centered, more aligned, more coherent state. And so I was trained in HeartMath years ago and that practice teaches people how to get into coherence and so there’s tons and tons of science and research that backs up the fact that when we can make a choice, focus our attention, choose a very effective emotion that shifts our state, and in this case, the emotion is appreciation, when we train ourselves to go there, we actually set up a beautiful, cohesive wave pattern, if you will, between our heart and head and we become coherent and that allows us to have access to better thinking, more clear and aligned intention, and it’s just amazing. It’s amazing. We can get insights more easily and we’re more present, more present in our body, more present in the conversation, just more present in life generally.
So can you give me a quick example of what a conversation with someone who is coherent sounds like versus what a conversation with someone who’s not in that coherent headspace sounds like?
Yeah, sure. In general, it just sounds more connected. I’ve done this for so many years that even talking to you about it, I can feel myself getting more coherent so I can feel my heart is activating. I can feel that my thoughts are a little more clear. This was exciting getting started in the podcast and we had a little chat right before and we had to rearrange everything, but now I’m getting centered, I’m here, I’m here with you. So the words you might feel, you might hear are things like “I hear you. Can you tell me more about that?” More connected, more inviting the energy to flow back and forth, and that actually is the basis of the whole idea of energy interplay and that’s why I named the company that years ago. It was the interplay of the energy, not just the drama of, “Oh, we can tap into energy and energy is this woo-woo thing,”
And how much is so many people’s addiction to social media, websites, and just kind of pulling out their smartphone every minute they sense that they might have like 10 seconds of boredom impeding us from getting into a coherent state?
I’m so glad you brought that up. So, yeah, guilty too. Guilty. Human being, very subject to it and Ed will talk about this more, I’m sure, but very subject to the stimulus of light and sound and something new and short attention span. What’s happening is we’re giving away our power. The two magic keys I talk about in my book about energy interplay, the two magic keys are attention and intention. We really could take this to the nth degree and really step into our power. I believe, as human beings, we have this innate and very unique ability to guide and drive our attention, and we can also choose, just like the example with HeartMath that I gave you with the appreciation feeling, we can choose our intention or our feeling. We can drive those like a laser beam and when we’re constantly getting frazzled and allowing little bits of our attention to be thrown here and thrown there, we are weakening not only our mental body but we’re also weakening our energetic body. We are giving our power away. And so to reign that back in, if we can just picture the light from the flashlight being focused into a laser, that’s the power we have with our attention and intention. We can pinpoint that and a laser light can cut through things. It’s much stronger when it’s focused. And so that’s, in general, what we train.
And that’s very much in line with my initiative so if anyone wants any other help or advice as far as cutting down on screen time or being more intentional about it, please come to my website, www.lessscreentime.com, and I would love to talk to you about how to reclaim, because one of the big parts of that program is being intentional and we’re giving our power away to largely algorithms, in that matter, that are pretty much deciding where our attention goes. And so it sounds like the key is that we want to be in that better mind state when we’re giving a presentation. We want to give a presentation in a state where we can let the energy flow freely from ourselves to the audience, that free flow of energy, and we want to get to the point where we’re in that state whenever we’re talking to people and whenever we’re giving presentations.
Right, right, to be very intentional. So, just one more point about that, and I’m so glad you mentioned the algorithms are driving our bus. It’s because we’re a slave to someone else’s agenda. We’re allowing our attention to be sapped like that. And so when we can get back in the driver’s seat and pull it together and realize, wait a minute, I am going to drive this attention bus, if you will, I’m going to be in control of that, then we step into the ultimate self-empowerment. And I think we’re stepping into, if you will, our higher purpose, which is to be connected on all fronts, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical. So, I just think, it all brings it together. And then kind of using that power in the presentation arena, it clarified for Ed and I as we started working together that we really wanted to help people not only align energetically but align their message and align that interaction so that it’s not only more effective but also it’s more fun, it’s more energized, just more satisfying all around.
And that’s a good transition over to Ed. So after someone gets spiritually aligned, connected in a better mental state, then you help people with the communication and leadership, the specifics that people need to do when we are communicating or presenting.
Yes. What I found out, Stephen, was early in my career, my presentation skills really changed the direction of my life. I had done standup comedy, I’ve done theater before, and when I got into the corporate world after my undergraduate degree, I quickly became director of operations of a $6 million company at the age of 23 and had 200 some employees, and it was based on my ability to present. I went from there to work at PepsiCo and rose quickly through the ranks there, again, based on my ability to present. And so, consequently, I ran across an organization that taught presentation skills when I was 31 years old and had been working with them ever since as well as many other clients to work on the outside part of communication skills, and that is the interaction. Communication, by definition, is a two-way street. It requires a response in order for you to know whether or not communication has occurred. And all too often, when people are doing a presentation, they get up like they’re doing a television commercial and it’s a one-way direction. It just they blurt it out there and they pay no attention to what’s going on in the audience. And what I do is teach them to connect to the audience using eye movement, using pauses to allow people to process content, and then other tools that I share that allow them to control the flow of content into the mind of their audience. My particular area of study is neuropsychology and it’s about pushing the buttons in the mind of the audience that’s going to make them remember things, it’s going to make them feel a stronger connection, and all of those tools really appeal to the fact that the bodies that we’re in were designed for a world tens of thousands of years ago. They weren’t designed to operate in the world that we find ourselves in now. And so, consequently, we know that, for example, the reason that those darn phones can be such a distraction is because they have motion, light, and color, and that is what draws our vision to look at things and so it becomes irresistible. I know some of my friends have actually started to, in order to dampen that effect, have taken the color off their phones and just have it black and white. Yeah, turn down the contrast, there’s not as much light going on, and all of those things can help them to stay away from the phone. And that’s really what I teach in a corporate environment is how do you control the attention of the audience and make sure that they’re looking where you want them to be looking when you want them to be looking there, whether you’re giving them information from a visual or whether you’re having them pay close attention to you. And then when I met Alice, I had done some leadership work that stuck a toe in the water of dealing with the internal environment of the leader, but then when I met Alice, which she has frankly become a master, an expert in this area over the last 30 years, we started to realize that my ability to show them how to control the attention in the room is very closely aligned with showing them how to manage the energy in the room. And so now that we’re combining those two in our workshop called Energize Your Message, it’s having a phenomenal impact and we do a 90-minute introduction that people get to see a transformation in themselves in an hour and a half, and then we do a full day to kind of follow up on other skills required if you’re doing business presentations.
Now, how does developing these skills work? Is this something that someone attends a workshop? Is this someone attends coaching? If they do attend coaching, do they do the internal first and then the external? Or is this something that’s kind of one of those self-improvement type of things where it’s always going to be kind of a work in progress because things change in life, you get new positions and you get new pieces of information coming your way, new social circles, and maybe one of your family members starts losing their rocker or something and you need to deal with that?
Bit close to home. I don’t know, Ed. Some of our family members. So it’s kind of a yes and. It’s all the above. The 90-minute, of course, is an introduction, well, we found snowballs that won’t hurt anyone and so we have everyone start playing some catch so they get the idea of the movement of the energy. So there’s a lot of fun and we hope surprising things in the workshop. So it’s very engaging. And in that first workshop, they do walk away with a marked difference and they get to see it because we have them film themselves at the beginning, a friend will film them, and then at the end, and they can see it and it’s one of the sweetest moments I have ever experienced in workshop, just watching the faces when they get to see themselves in their after video, they’re pretty profoundly impacted because they can really see that change.
One of the things I think is so crucial about the joining of our two forces, since Alice and I are also newlyweds as well as starting to work together in developing this workshop, is we have learned over the years how to make all of these skills transfer very quickly with engaging, enjoyable activities so that we can make things happen very quickly for folks, and they can see the results virtually immediately. And, again, it’s very powerful and we have found the combination of these two, the internal skills and techniques and state of mind that Alice brings to the party and then my external skills as to where to look, how long to look there, what to do with your hands, how do you stand, how do you move through the room, how do you direct attention back and forth between visual content, all of those things now have also been married, just like Alice and I have been, so that somebody can maximize their ability to energize their message and influence their audience.
So one of the things we do, Stephen, is in 90 minutes, we can only do so much.
It is a limited format, yeah.
It is. In 90 minutes, we can –– I mean, we’re talking about our workshops, so in 90 minutes, it’s a short time, but I’ve been doing mindset rewiring and limited belief and trauma neutralization for years and so I have a few specific tools that we can use. In this case, we address fear of public speaking, obviously, but it’s deep and profound shift in a very short time so people really feel that, and, actually, available to them, though, is extended coaching. If someone wants additional support, we make sure that that’s offered afterwards because things come up. We’re going through a very effective speaking skill and then we’re making internal shifts and we kind of pulse it so that we’re doing one then another then there’s another energy tool and then there’s more physical learning a skill that improves your speaking and so what we found after even our first workshop is that some people were having major stuff come up because they really are transforming. This is an inside job, and so we want to make sure we offer that support. And so then the full day, we’re going to go deeper into what our goal is that someone can stand in front of a room and be in complete control of their state. Their state is authentic, it’s calm, they’re present, there’s no sweaty palms, there’s no forgetting words, that they can stand up there and really maintain their state, which is more fun for the audience and more connected for the audience. And so their message is the key. We want to make sure their message is really connected.
And as Alice said, it’s about them being in such a state that their focus isn’t on them. Their focus is on their audience.
A hundred percent.
And watching how the audience is responding requires you to control your eye movement so that you can actually watch how the audience is responding, something that’s not a natural thing to do. And we’re also fighting some other natural things that happen based on this vessel, this body that we’re in, that was designed for a long time ago because the fear of public speaking, a big piece of it comes from the fact that when you stood up in front of ten people who were paying close attention to you, if you did that 25,000 years ago, chances were good that was not a good circumstance if you had the undivided attention of ten people. And so, consequently, your body recognizing that situation does things. It chemically prepares you for action through the amygdala, which triggers the adrenal glands sitting on top of the kidneys, you get a squirt of adrenaline into your bloodstream when you stand up in front of people and they’re all looking at you. As a result of that, your body now is preparing itself for fight or flight. You either have to kill them or run out of the room, and in a business presentation, you have neither of those options.
Nor are they good options if they were available, right?
That’s true. And so, consequently, you try to deal with it. People try to shut it down, which is why you see a lot of speakers pace, because then the adrenal chemical gets burnt off in the largest muscle group in the body, which is from the back down through the back of the leg. You’ll also see people’s rate of speech pick up dramatically, and when the rate of speech picks up dramatically, and I’ll give you an example right now where if you don’t leave any pauses in between the thoughts that you’re giving to your audience, it makes it very difficult for them to figure out where one thought stops and the next one starts, because there’s no pausing to allow comprehension to occur.
So it’s trying to understand a bus to rhyme song, essentially.
Exactly. We’re also allowing the energy to land and we’re allowing the energy to be with the person and come back to you. So we use the figure eight a lot to demonstrate that this interaction is happening all the time and you’ve got to let it happen, and Ed has a great analogy,
And so we train people to use their eyes in a very deliberate way and actually drive their energy in a very deliberate way. And I want to add one more thing to your fight or flight, there’s also freeze, and that’s when people forget, their brain does not work, they have no words. That’s the other reaction when you’re in a stressful situation. Yeah, we’ve all done it.
When I was in college and I first started learning about this stuff, I actually refer to it as the five F’s of stress, which takes us a little bit further, there’s Freeze, Fight, Flight, and then there’s Food, and then there’s another F word that is ––
Oh. Another F word is Fawning. You get fawning. You get over complimentary. I use that in coaching. It’s a very –– lots of Fs, or you can be in a fog. The fog is really interesting too. Your brain just kind of shuts down.
There’s probably a dozen F words really.
A little bit of neuroscience here, what’s going on is they know that the very center part of your vision, when you look at something directly, it lights up 44 different areas of your brain, and so you’ve got all this visual stimulus that your brain’s trying to process and while you’re doing that, if you’re talking to an audience, you’re trying to remember the content that you prepared, and so every speaker can relate to the fact that, at some point, their mind goes blank and they don’t even remember their name, let alone the next point, and so the reason that occurs is because we cannot do two things on a conscious level at the same time. We’re forcing our brain to process incoming visual stimulus, we’re trying to give out words that we have rehearsed and practiced, and we get gridlock in the brain. It shuts down. The only thing that we can shut down, which is the outgoing thought, and you’ll watch speakers as we have learned in the environment that we find our bodies in now, speakers tend to look when they don’t know what to say next and don’t have notes. Where do they look, Stephen? They look at ceilings and they look at floors. That’s because those are blank spaces. We’ve learned that. And so, consequently, we’ll look up, we’ll collect our thoughts because now there’s no visual stimulus to process, to speak up, and then we can talk again. And those are some of the keys that we share with our participants and make sure that they understand there’s a better way to do that because as soon as you look to the ceiling, the audience knows you don’t know what to say next and they will harshly judge your content as a result of that. They’ll think you don’t know what you’re talking about or you’re making it up as you go, when the reality is you’ve become visually overstimulated. So, a better way to fix that is to keep your eyes trained on the eyes of the audience and create big pauses for yourself as you transition to the next person.
And one of the things I observe the most, just in seeing speeches as a member of Toastmasters and some other groups, is people have a certain impression about what people on the radio will refer to as blank space or empty space, and it reminds me of the time that I was whitewater rafting on the Arkansas River in 2015 and somehow my raft had flipped over and I ended up underneath the raft in the water. I had to like claw my way out. The duration of time in which that was occurring was likely three seconds, but, to me, it felt like a whole minute had passed, and I was like, “Oh my god, I’m in real danger,” because here I am underwater and under a turned-over raft that I was just in and I feel like a similar thing happens when people have a moment where they don’t know what to say. And even right now, let’s say, I forgot my next thought and I’m just sitting here like…that two seconds, I think there’s a lot of people that have the instinct to then fill it in with filler words, “Um,” “Uh,” just to make sure that they’re not subject to blank space. But from the audience standpoint, just two seconds is really not nearly as big of a deal as the speaker will often make of it in their head.
Right.
You are spot on, Stephen. I mean, time passes so much more slowly for the speaker than it does for the audience and that’s one of the challenges of getting people to take long enough pauses to allow the audience to comprehend what they just said. One of the big things we do in the 90 minutes is deliberate practice on pausing, and that pause is your best friend. It is very, very powerful as a speaker. It helps with comprehension and, in addition to that, it exudes confidence if you can pause in front of the room. So a lot of benefits to pausing.
Yeah. Now, Ed, I know in your business, you’ve traditionally worked with executives and kind of upwardly moving directors. Since teaming up with Alice and bringing kind of this whole picture together, has your typical audience changed? Are you working with different people or is it mostly people in the same situation?
It has changed. What we’re trying to do is expand the ability of people who we think their messages are important and so we want to help them to be able to get their message out and so, in that regard, we’re doing what we’re calling open enrollment classes, where it allows people to come without being a corporate event in a corporate office or hotel somewhere. We’re doing this at the Wheat Ridge Chamber of Commerce right now and holding it on usually Tuesday evenings from 4 PM to 5:30 PM.
The intro.
Yeah, the intro, 90-minute one, which we’ve got one tonight. We’ve got one again on the 25th of March. And it has reached out to a lot of folks who are running nonprofits, who are doing a lot of good things for the community so it’s not just about climbing the corporate ladder, which is a lot of my audience in the past has been interested in that. These are people who are trying to make a difference in their community and I’m delighted to be able to bring some of these skills.
Yeah, I would say we really resonate with mission-driven folks, where the effectiveness of their message is going to inspire people to either act, donate, engage, join a cause, a nonprofit, or just the effectiveness of their team. We really love working with teams, actually, and so, yeah, it’s really applicable to a lot of different areas.
Yeah. But we still do the corporate events and we still do keynote speeches and those kinds of things to a corporate audience.
We have our own work that we do. I focus more on individual coaching and then workshops and speaking that help make energy accessible. And, really, the theme of my work is both kind of reigniting hope within people and helping them clear longstanding mindset barriers that have affected their behavior. And, yeah, I use several different methods. Yeah.
I do a lot of work in team building around working with different behavioral styles or personality styles or communication comfort zones, whatever you want to call it. But people will be familiar with that through either Myers-Briggs or DISC or StrengthsFinder and those kinds of tools, because the reality is the golden rule is meant for little kids so they won’t hurt themselves, Stephen. It’s like you wouldn’t want them to pull your hair, would you? Whereas when we grow up, we realize the golden rule isn’t for us. We need the platinum rule.
And the platinum rule I’ve heard described as do unto others as they would like to be done onto, because different people like to communicate different ways and what you like may not be their preference. Share on XRecognizing that we’re all different people, different desires, right? And I think that’s one of the things I’ve encountered a lot in adulthood is actually people taking the golden rule and applying it to adulthood and say, well, I’ve even done it just like, I hate micromanagers so then I won’t micromanage anyone and maybe give them too little direction.
Right, exactly.
Yeah. So this actually segues back to your point of back to the screen time and the social disconnect and all of that, because we came up with this concept of the conversation cafe where we want to help reeducate people on how to connect with different kinds of people. And so we’re working on a new product, I don’t know if we’re ready to announce it, but we have basically boiled it down to four different conversation comfort zones, we’re calling them, linked to behavioral style. So how would this kind of behavioral style like to be conversed with? And that applies to not only the boardroom, it applies to the first date room. So it’s fun and we’re trying to make it fun with the cafe kind of vibe where, okay, all these people, which zone are they in in the café? Let’s learn about them and let’s go sit down and have a chat.
One of the examples I’ll use, Stephen, for anybody who’s worked a nine to five job Monday through Friday, that Monday morning meeting, when you’re starting the Monday morning meeting first thing and you’ve got somebody who asked, “So, what’d you do over the weekend?” Well, some people will ask that question because they’re sincerely interested in what you did so that they can better connect with you and understand your hobbies and interests. Some people will ask you that question not because they want to know what you did but only because they did something really cool and they want you to ask them.
They want to tell you that.
And then there’s another crowd that really is wondering, “Why are we talking about what we did over the weekend? Let’s get to work.” So, it’s managing all of those different communication comfort zones, not only as you build a team in business and progress but also, as Alice said, just socially, because as we have all this digital environment strip away our ability to communicate with each other, people don’t get as much practice doing face to face communication streams too.
And one of the things that really has disturbed me about the digital era is that the level of connection being atrophied a little bit, and I’m not sure what the four types of communication, if they’re four levels, but most of what I’ve heard is that there’s like kind of surface level, there’s in between, and then there’s the really, really deep stuff but you need a certain amount of focus and attention and if you’re always going minute to minute, at any minute, this thing could be pulled out, be disrupted, it’s like having a family with toddlers, that, for most people, that’s only a few years of their lives as opposed to their whole lives where…
Right, right.
Or let’s get really in depth about something and really get to know someone on a deeper level than, okay, you live in this house, you do this for work and you like peanut butter.
Right. Well, that just segues back again, now we’re back interplay. Now we’re really interplaying, Stephen. So it’s back to the energy. There’s no time or space limitation to the energy. I do distance healing with Reiki energy, other healing energy modalities. Very effective, measurable, documented, all good, but we, as a human being, we have the five senses that we are used to using, common knowledge.
If we’re not using our energetic sense, it’s like we’re choosing to close our eyes and walk through life and not use our visual sense... Share on Xbecause it’s an innate ability we have and that’s the difference, and it can be scary, if all we do is look at a screen all day, when we have a three-, four-, five-dimensional person in front of us, that is a new thing. That’s a scary thing. We’re not used to that and so we put walls up, that’s in the field, they feel that, it makes the communication less connected, more guarded. That’s our goal is to get back into the comfort of communicating and being a total human and it’s as natural as breathing. I mean, it is how we’re wired.
And enlightened corporate suites all over the country are realizing this. In the 90s, when I was first doing this, if you were going to talk about interstate and so forth, most corporate boardrooms weren’t interested in that conversation. And yet, it’s insane. I mean, now, there’s so much scientific proof that state of mind is influenced by so many different things in the energetic environment around us. But also, the other thing that’s going on is that athletes since the 70s, maybe earlier than that, have been trained by coaches to do visualization and self-talk and manage their inner environment in order to perform at an elite level consistently. And so leaders all over the country who are paying attention have realized this is a key part of their game. If they’re going to stay at the top of their game, they’ve got to work with their inner environment.
Mindfulness and meditation, yeah, common, yeah.
We’re talking about the inner work and the outer work, how it kind of comes together. Now, what I’m curious about is if there’s any examples, commonly known examples, in our lives today, in our culture today, of people you observe that have done good outer work but no inner work or the other way around?
I think we can agree politicians have done a lot of good outer work as a rule. They can talk to a crowd. You’ll watch them, they’ll pause in between thoughts, and you’ll also notice that they use those skills to avoid having to share any content. And they do that deliberately. I mean, because there’s a reality here. As soon as they take a position on anything, they’re going to alienate somebody that’s not going to vote for them so they try to sound good, look good, and not say anything. And so that’s a deliberate event. Even though we look down on them for not really taking a position, that’s why they’re doing it but they’re going to look good while they don’t take a position.
Yeah, they respond to incentives.
That’s a good one. I’m trying to think, I can’t think of an example but I just want to share with you what my whole mission is to get the energy into as many hands as possible so that we’re using it, it’s demystified, it’s not woo –– I always say I’m woo, I’m not woo-woo because I did commercial and residential real estate forever. I owned my own wellness center and ran that thing. I built it out of an empty building, really, and ran it for 12 years. I have a business chip in my head is what I’m trying to say. But I also grew up in a family that had a lot of spiritual ability, let’s say, and I’ve been around a lot of more woo-woo people in my life, and I’ve gotten kind of annoyed with the drama of it. I’m like so what? So what if you can do these things? It’s not a practical application that everybody can use, that it’s a part of everyday life. And so that’s kind of my mission is to get it out of the –– yeah, get it out of the realm of this is something other people do. This is something somebody with tie dye and beads does, although I like tie dye and beads. We actually have a slide in our 90-minute presentation and it has the phrase “energy intelligence” in that. I kind of coined the term, your energy EQ, your energy intelligence, so that we are more –– we’re getting facility with this innate ability. It’s fun. You feel an immediate difference. It’s beautiful. I’ve used it for things as serious as people going through pain with cancer or amputation, lots of different instances with physical, all levels of physical, emotional, mental, spiritual stressors, and found that we’ve got tools. We’ve got tools and we can apply them. Yeah.
So it seems like the person that’s done the inner work but not the outer work is more likely to not even be that much of a public facing person, like politicians that are the other way around. You just picture like the person who’s very spiritually aware and just living off the grid somewhere but has never really learned the effective way to communicate a vision around stuff.
But I also have to dial back and say no judgment there, because I know that there actually is only one field of energy that we are all sharing. Anything that one does does affect the field. So maybe, in this lifetime, that person is just supposed to hold the flame and be that center of radiating bliss. Great, we need it, but that’s just not what I’m called to do. I say I’m the Think and Do page. I taught elementary art. I like to get in the crayons and I like to learn a thing and do a thing and make a thing. So that’s how I teach energy.
And now you both have written books as well.
We have.
Yes, yes. Right after I did my master’s degree in organizational leadership, I was working at a corporate university, and at that university, we had the opportunity to work with these owners and managers of businesses and they would come to the university for four days a quarter, so over the course of a year so I had 16 days of instruction. I was excited about it, because we got to do follow-up and things that you don’t always get to do when you’re doing workshops and training for corporations. And I tried to get them to do reads in between the quarters that I’d have them come to my workshop, and they wouldn’t all do it because they were all busy people and so I was laughing over beers with a friend and we said, “Well, we should make a book on all of these team building skills and techniques and knowledge and we should make it with great big types so it looked like it’d be easy to read,” and then somebody said, “Yeah, and make it with popups, like a kid’s book,” and so that’s why we wrote a book called UnLearning: How to Help Great People Become Great Teams and it’s the world’s first business popup book meant for adults.
Maybe only.
Yeah. And there might be a reason for that, Stephen. It’s very hard to produce.
Yeah, very expensive. There will not be any more. Can brag on Ed a little bit. It’s very deep, very engaging, but we’re in the process of getting that on film so we’ll be able to share it that way. Ed’s going to read, everybody can see the popup thing. You can see, I think, doesn’t Einstein play golf?
Yes, he does.
Yes, I believe. So there’s a lot. It’s delightful.
Yeah. I usually don’t think of popup books for grown and…
We took 50 some text on team building and leadership and boiled it down throughout all the jargon that everybody uses to brand their book with and just set it in plain English and got it down to 5,000 words only.
Nice.
And across 16 spreads in the book. It was a great activity, I learned a lot from it, but future books will not be popup books.
And what is the book called? In case anyone wants to look into it.
It’s called UnLearning.
UnLearning. UnLearning popup book.
Yeah, Ed Moehlenkamp.
And then your book?
My book is called You Have the Power TO LIGHT THE FIELD. And then I usually follow up, because you do, so my book is very hands on. You learn a little bit about my history and how I discovered my energy body at a young age and then how that led me through a series of events that taught me about energy and I want to share it and I think it’s very practical and I break it down so that people learn a little bit and then have a chance to soak it in, practice it, learn another thing. It’s a book slash workbook, and so it’s available on Amazon. You Have the Power TO LIGHT THE FIELD. Alice Marie Brink.
And You Have the Power TO LIGHT THE FIELD.
Yeah.
Because, yeah ––
Yeah, light the field. The field.
The field, like the field, like the grassy field, energy fields.
Oh, yeah. I always think there’s so many good analogies. Yeah.
Well, congratulations on both of you for being published authors and for bringing this energize your message kind of together to help people through all aspects of it. Real quick, as you go about helping people, do both the internal and external work, as far as creating and like building themselves as well as building their businesses, which is you build the person, you build a business, or you build the relationships within their career and stuff like that, what do you see in the future of the world and how we interact with one another given some of the stuff that we’re realizing and some of the messages that you’re bringing to people and helping people build more genuine connections?
Well, I think we hear a lot about authenticity. It’s the big buzzword right now, but it’s also, it’s true. Social norms are breaking down. Social institutions are breaking down. We’re getting down to what is it to be a human? I mean, we have to ask ourselves, what is it to be a human? And then what’s mine to do? And if we can connect those things and be more authentically human, I think any tools that we can learn, anything that helps us along that path, anything that helps us to do the work that we came here to do is the important work and that’s what we align with.
One of the things that I’ve learned so much from Alice in the time that we’ve been dating and now have been married for almost a year, nine months, is I learned empathy that –– is that we’re at a point in the world where, and I suppose we’ve always been at this point, I don’t think it’s brand new, but where empathizing and working with each other to help each other is one point of view about the direction of humankind and another is more of a “I’m gonna take care of myself, you take care of yourself and I don’t wanna know about your troubles.” And to say which is a legitimate point of view, I really can’t say, but I can tell you which one’s the kinder point of view. And I believe that we’re meant to be here to help each other out. We’re meant to be here to help each other to communicate with each other. And as I’ve said, exercise the platinum rule, understand how people want to be communicated with, because there’s an overlay not only of behavioral styles or communication comfort zones but there are gender differences in the way our brain is structured. There are cultural differences that can play an enormous role as we become so much more of a multicultural world, because every corporation that you work with now has got people from all kinds of different cultures and they’ve got to be able to get along and interact and sometimes that’s a challenge.
Yeah. And then to wrap up, if anyone listening is interested in joining one of your seminars or finding out about any more offerings, is there a website that someone can go to?
Sure. It’s energyinterplay.com. Super simple. Energy Interplay.
Energy Interplay, and so people can find information about 90-minute workshops as well as other any offerings that you have.
Well, they can see what our different offerings are, is we really tailor everything that we do as much as possible, so we push people to just have a discovery call with us. It’s free, but just give us a call, talk to us about what your situation is, and we can then recommend a course of action.
Right.
Excellent. Alice, Ed, thank you very much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, talking to us about the full picture, the internal and external work that we all need to do in order to communicate our vision, which is one of the most important things that anyone that takes on a new business or a new organization, a new nonprofit, anything else, needs to do.
Well, thank you. It’s a pleasure, Stephen. It’s a lot of fun.
Definitely. And as always, I’d also like to thank everybody out there for listening, for tuning in, and being open minded into hearing about new stories as well as hearing about new tools that you can use on the way to building the life that you really want as opposed to living by the script.
Important Links:
About Alice Marie Brink and Ed Moehlenkamp
Alice Marie Brink, BSEd, MCLC
Mindset, Energy, and Mindfulness Coach | Founder of the Energy InterPLAY™ Method
Speaker | Healer | Author
Alice Marie Brink is a transformational coach and speaker with a passion for helping individuals reconnect with their innate brilliance. As the founder of the Energy InterPLAY™ Method, she empowers people with practical tools to shift their energy, rewire their mindset, and create a life and work they truly love. Her work centers on reducing stress, fostering genuine connection, increasing joy, and boosting both personal and professional satisfaction.
With over 25 years of experience as a corporate trainer, public school teacher, Reiki Master, and wellness center owner—and over 30 years as a real estate professional—Alice brings a rich, multidimensional background to the world of personal development. She is also a Certified MAP Method Mindset Rewiring Coach and Advanced Veriditas Labyrinth Facilitator.
Based in Denver, Alice enjoys the city’s natural beauty and vibrant culture. Her interests include writing, speaking, hiking, kayaking, dancing, spiritual exploration, and world travel. She is happily married, a proud mom and stepmom to three remarkable adult children, and doting grandparent to a very royal grand-dog.
Website: energyinterplay.com/light-the-field-book
Contact: 816-365-9496
Ed Moehlenkamp, BA, MA
SeniorConsultant | Leadership Development & Speaker Training Expert
Ed Moehlenkamp is a dynamic leadership consultant, speaker, and trainer with more than 35 years of experience working with international organizations and Fortune 500 companies. With deep expertise in leadership, communication, sales, and presentation skills, Ed has trained thousands of professionals to communicate with confidence, clarity, and impact.
His journey began with stand-up comedy in college and quickly evolved into high-stakes corporate presentations that launched his leadership trajectory. By 23, he was overseeing a $6 million operation at Gulf Western. By 26, his communication skills propelled him into a headquarters staff position at PepsiCo. Since then, Ed has developed a reputation for creating and delivering customized training programs that drive measurable results.
Ed holds a BA in Economics from UCLA and an MA in Organizational Leadership from Chapman University. His engaging presence, extensive experience, and tailored approach make him a trusted guide for executives and teams looking to elevate their influence and effectiveness.
Website: energyinterplay.com/unlearning
Contact: 360-561-6189