Scaling intimacy with Jenny Sauer-Klein

In the latest Out of the Clouds episode, I speak with consultant and experience design specialist Jenny Sauer-Klein.

Jenny is passionate about how we get together as groups and how we learn, and she regularly consults for organisations like Google, Airbnb, and Dropbox. She is a wonderful facilitator who has spent her life creating lasting experiences for many different audiences and is a frequent speaker at international conferences. She's also been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc., as well as Tim Ferriss’ book “Tools of Titans”.

In this conversation, the native New Yorker shares her personal journey with me, how she went from theatre to yoga, which led her to therapeutic acrobatics and then on to launching AcroYoga with her co-founder.

Jenny tells me how she stepped away from this previous career despite having scaled AcroYoga to an international brand, community and organisation with millions of practitioners, and how important it is when we leave a career, to let ourselves experiment to figure out what could come next. We talked also about how she came later to understand that the values that AcroYoga was based on -- trust, connection and playfulness -- were still her core values, which guided her into her new ventures.

Jenny’s current work - as a consultant and CEO of Scaling Intimacy School of Experience Design - is about teaching us how to put connection and community ahead of content.

So together we dig into the principles that have made her title program - Scaling Intimacy, which I took last year - so powerful and how it helps people make a crowd of 100 people feel like a gathering of 10. She also offers guidance as to how we can create safe containers for our events and how she and her team brought inclusivity to the forefront of her Scaling Intimacy program.

Finally, the new mum talks about her experience of pregnancy during COVID and distils the essence of the TED talk she gave (whilst eight months pregnant) in January 2021 on the Three Keys to Virtual Connection.

If you are into leading engaging events or want to create meaningful connections and inspire your team or community, this is the episode for you. Listen here

PS! Here’s a treat for you:

If you are interested in experience design, you can use this link to get 10% off the next Scaling Intimacy training or use the coupon code ANNE10 at checkout.