The Off-Ramp Project

Episode 6: Healthy charismatic leadership involves being willing to learn from others, instituting checks and balances, maintaining a sense of humor and a sense of humility, being responsive to complaints and corrections, and treating people well and respectfully. When the charisma of a person or group is healthy, people are drawn to it and invigorated by it. When it’s not, their choices get tangl...

Episode 5: Influence is everywhere, and it can be heathy or unhealthy. Here are ways to know which is which. SIGNS OF HEALTHY SYSTEMS OF INFLUENCE The system helps people feel welcome and important to the group as they are. The system encourages healthy community, teamwork, and camaraderie, as well as open discussion and debate about group projects, goals, and decisions. Members are role models fo...

Episode 4: Who Controls You? In healthy groups and relationships, members retain their own sense of what's right, their own voices, their intellectual freedom, and their own ideas. In healthy groups, the systems of group control are healthy and nourishing. In unhealthy groups, the systems of control will demand high dedication, high intensity, self-silencing, intellectual sameness, and extreme per...

Episode 3: It's not what you believe. It's how. In this episode, we're exploring the first aspect of Janja Lalich's Bounded Choice model of cultic control: The Transcendent Belief System. If you don't understand high-demand, high-dedication, high-intensity, self-sealed, and cultic belief systems, you can fall into one very easily. Or more than one! We look at multiple transcendent beliefs, which a...

Episode 2: Your emotions are the foundation of who you are, and in this episode, we look at how advertising, marketing, social media, and anyone who wants to influence you accesses your emotions as a matter of course (and as a matter of business). Becoming aware and skilled with your own emotions certainly benefits you and your relationships, but it can also protect you from manipulation and help...

Episode 1: How do we create (and survive) drastic changes? How do we leave unhealthy relationships, groups, belief systems, or entire identities? How do we take off-ramps when the crowd is pushing us forward, and how can we learn to create off-ramps for others -- especially when we've been taught to see them as our enemies? These questions are crucial in a time when so many of us have been drawn i...