How IT Took Shape

I’m Jing, 贺敬. I help people and organizations decide with clarity and move with strategy and coherence. I believe decision-making is the soul of how we move through life. It is the very activation of free will. 

HeartHeaded™ best expresses the living philosophy and embodied practice that has taken shape through my life and work, and continues to guide how I live and lead. I hold this, admittedly, with a touch of hardheaded conviction.

The current of my personal and professional journey carried me here to serve. As a leadership and systems strategist, my work lives at the intersection of orientation, decision, and action. I work upstream to bring critical clarity to high-stakes complexity, enabling leaders and organizations to move forward with coherence.

My career spans decades across borders and cultures, with twenty years immersed in arts and cultural institutions where my leadership shaped strategy, alignment, storytelling, and culture. From boardrooms to rehearsal rooms and everyday realities, I served as C-suite executive, producer, thought partner, and advisor, alongside executives, artists, funders, and cross-functional, cross-cultural teams through pivotal periods of growth, transition, and change. From these front-row seats, I saw clearly what builds trust, what triggers derailment, and why even the best strategies fail to land. A pattern became clear: the root problem is rarely intelligence or effort, but a fundamental lack of coherence.

HeartHeaded™ emerged not from theory but from sustained, real-world observation and decades of straddling worlds: East and West, intuition and intellect, truth and conditioning, ‘heart’ and ‘head’. Where others saw conflict, I saw power in the in-between. The Paradigm’s Ten Wings is where my personal and professional paths meet, where modern leadership practice and systems thinking are grounded in the ancient Chinese wisdom lineage.

The rhymes I chanted on repeat as a child were never merely ants crawling across pages, as I once imagined, but a hidden convoy of wisdom waiting for life to unfold so I could recognize and decode it. Every crossroad carved it; every face-plant made it real. Without realizing it, this discernment of the ancients has accompanied me through shifts and reinventions, challenges and tough calls of the heart, across borders, identities, and roles, in what felt like many lifetimes in one. Sometimes it arrived as sparks; sometimes as old sages sipping tea in the far corners of my mind, quiet until the stakes were high and strategy met soul. It informs my perspective, shapes my approach, distinguishes my work, and guides how I live and lead.

It took a rupture I did not see coming to quiet the grind and the noise. In the rawness of peeling everything back, with nothing to prove and only nature as witness, I began to hear what had always been there, the rhymes again, except this time I get it, a little more each day. I let it unfold through me. From that honest exploration, HeartHeaded™ took shape as a living philosophy and embodied practice of intuitive decision-making with strategic execution, cultivated to restore decision–action flow in complex human systems.

The seen feels real because we can touch it, yet it is the unseen that shapes everything. This Paradigm calls forth our original compass so we can claim it, anchor it, and move forward soul-led and sure-footed. It is my way of helping steer how ideas move, how decisions become action, and how people and systems evolve.

Feb. 22, 2025 New York