Scott Picard
Teacher of embodied and relational intelligence for leadership teams, companies and private clients.
Based in Los Angeles and Dallas. Teaching around the world.
Your mind answers first.
Your body answers true.
Our bodies are more equipped to navigate the unknown than any other part of ourselves. Scott teaches leaders and teams how to use that intelligence at work.
GoogleNikeYahoolululemonBumbleUltragenyxKINRGYSimple FeastBeat of the WeekDelighted BySaybrook UniversityAnandaGoogle SustainabilityKnockout LAArt2LifeVenice Biennale
Leaders and teams at these companies and communities have done this work with Scott. Featured in the Los Angeles Times and Vogue.
Across more than two decades, his governing principle has remained the same: the work succeeds when authority returns to the person living the answer.
About Scott Picard
His work begins where explanation stops.
Scott was born in Montana and relinquished through a sealed adoption. His biological grandmother Florence, Bangii Ogichidaa Ikwe, Tiny Warrior Woman, was an Ojibwe elder of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, described to him as one of the few full-blood Native American elders. Then, without warning, his kidneys failed, and he was told he needed dialysis immediately to stay alive. He kept teaching from the dialysis chair until a man he had met once gave him a kidney, then went back to his life. That is the ground Scott teaches from.
Scott is a teacher of embodied and relational intelligence. He works at the point where body, unconscious, relationship, creativity, and action meet, helping people perceive what is operating beneath the visible problem, give it accurate language, and turn that perception into choice.
His range is unusual. Scott has worked with global companies and leadership teams, senior executives and people building companies and movements, film directors, leading actors and dancers, couples, and individuals navigating consequential moments in their lives. His work has ranged from intimate groups of ten to rooms of 1,600 people. On one film, the director asked Scott to direct the final scene: no dialogue, all movement. Whether the setting is a boardroom, a rehearsal room, a relationship, or a theater, the work asks the same thing: become present enough to receive what is actually happening and act without abandoning yourself or one another.
Before teaching full-time, Scott worked in global partnerships at Yahoo!, where he began bringing this work into company culture. His Fire Sessions in Los Angeles were profiled by the Los Angeles Times.
Behind the work is a roughly nine-year apprenticeship in a lineage that passed through a dancer and teacher who entered rooms without a script and attended to the bodies in front of her. It gave Scott an alphabet, earth, fire, water and air, for a language he had already been speaking. Work like this travels on thin threads: one body to another, one room to another, changed by every person who carries it.
A leader can say every right thing about trust, and still create none.
People read the body before they hear the words. A team notices when your breath speeds up under pressure, when your shoulders rise at disagreement, and when your face leaves the room a moment before you say, tell me more.
Most leadership training works on what people say and do. Scott works one level down, on what is happening in the body before anyone speaks. That is where trust is built or lost.
What runs you runs the room.
Not the values on the wall. You.
The work
What happens in the room
It is practical and it starts with your feet. No dance experience, no meditation practice, nothing to believe. As Scott says, the entry point is your feet, and everybody has those.
1
Ground
Everyone stands. Attention drops to the feet. Scott asks people to breathe as if their feet were a pair of lungs.
2
Ask twice
Scott asks a real question. The mind answers. Then the room stands quietly, and he asks it again. This time people notice what the body does: a shoulder turns, a hand opens, the breath changes. The second answer is often different.
3
Put it to work
That second answer goes straight into the work in front of the team: the feedback that has not landed, the decision that keeps stalling, the conversation people have been avoiding.
“There are two answers. They are both yours. You have simply spent most of your life interviewing only one of them.”
Three rooms.
60 people
Google Sustainability
Part of a tech giant worth trillions of dollars. Two half-days.
The words did not change. Where they came from did.
Some of the best intellects in the world, in a hierarchy where the biggest fear was losing your job. Feedback was the number one problem. Day one, ten executives from around the world. Day two, all sixty: grounded through their feet, then two lines facing each other, giving the same feedback twice, first from habit, then from the body.
The other person felt seen, heard and respected. The next day, the ten executives taught the work alongside Scott to everyone else.
1 year
Ultragenyx
A publicly traded biotech company, worth more than a billion dollars.
Conflict became an energy they could use.
The conversations were polite. The resentment was still in the room, and conflict either polarized or leaked into gossip. It began with belonging work for the human resources team, then the whole group. Scott came back two or three times through the year, with Office Hours with Scott on Zoom in between.
They moved together toward a common goal. After the off-site, the team asked for more, and in Scott’s words, the results were even more powerful than at Google.
2nd year
The California desert
Ten women entrepreneurs from across the country and Australia, most of them returning.
Most of the room came back for a second year.
Dinner the night before. In the morning, the chairs moved back and the résumés set aside: movement before discussion. Then pairs. One moved, one watched. The mover spoke first about what happened in her; only then did the watcher say what she saw. Four hours, lunch, two more hours of questions.
Asked what she would tell the newcomers, a returning woman said: “Less thinking, the better. If your body’s gonna move, let it move.”
Intelligence is relational.
“A résumé can tell me many true things about you. It cannot tell me what happens in your body when another person stands across from you and watches you move.”
Try it before you book
The Ask Twice card
The practice on one page, to do standing up, anywhere. Use it before your next hard conversation, or forward it to your team.
For organizations
For rooms where the stated problem is not the whole problem.
The meeting keeps circling. The feedback lands badly. Everyone agrees on the goal, and the room still divides over how to get there. Scott designs each engagement around your team and the room you are actually in.
The brightest mind in the room still has feet.
A single session
One hour on Zoom: a first experience of the work for your team.
A half day
A half-day workshop for a leadership team or a whole department.
The Leadership Series
Two days with your leadership team, then monthly follow-up calls so the change holds.
A year of practice
Scott returns two or three times a year, with Office Hours with Scott on Zoom in between.
How it starts
A conversation with Scott. Send a note with the size of your team, what is at stake right now, and whether you need people in one room or across locations. The deepest impact comes with groups above fifty. Scott shapes the engagement around your people from there. Keynotes and summit sessions are booked the same way, from a table of ten executives to sixteen hundred people on their feet.
Ground up is the only thing that is sustainable.
Tell Scott about your teamThree engagements. Three ripples.
2 days
Google. The room changed.
2 months
Beat of the Week. The business changed.
1 year
Ultragenyx. The culture changed.
“If you have a company of, let’s say, a hundred people, and twenty of them just decide they are going to keep breathing through their feet, and the leader is one who walks the talk, it changes everything.”
Case
Beat of the Week
A music technology company, working remotely, reimagining and relaunching itself during the global pandemic.
Scott led the team through a workshop. Its chief marketing officer remembers what was different: “He didn’t tell us once how to feel or how to act. He asked us questions that forced us to search within ourselves for answers.”
“He led my company, Beat of the Week, through a workshop, and within 2 months, we started earning revenue where there was none before.”
Alexis Sones, CEO, COO and Co-Founder
“I owe so much of my growth connecting to myself as a human and leader to Scott. He has helped guide me, and countless women and men connect to their power. Their truth.”
“There’s a lot of pressure and stress breaking into a new market with a team that doesn’t know each other very well. But Scott brought this diverse group together.”
“The trust among us is completely different. This workshop was the missing link, and it’s so practical and applicable to daily life.”
“Our team is connected even though we work remotely, efficient even though we work in tech, and we have an unbelievably strong foundation that Scott led us to.”
“He encouraged us to wrestle with our internal and external conflicts in a way that strengthened our team relationships.”
Private sessions
Living Sessions, one on one.
For senior executives and people building companies and movements, film directors, actors and dancers, and couples.
“I call the encounters I do with people Living Sessions because I do not know in advance what the session will become.”
“My job is to ask a straight question and stay out of the way.”
You bring one question. One real question.
You stand, feet on the floor, and answer it once. Then Scott asks again.
The second answer is where the work begins.
“Scott is ruthlessly honest, which in my opinion is the only type of mentor that should exist. My relationships, my intimacy with my romantic partner, and the way I hold myself as a leader has all improved drastically.”
“Your body is the book that has been keeping your life while your mind was busy explaining it.”
From The Second Answer
Speaking
Sixteen hundred people stood up.
At the United Artists Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, Scott asked the audience to stand. Every person in the theater stood. Then sixteen hundred people moved, each in their own way, and moved together.
He has spoken for Google, Nike, Bumble and Yahoo, and at the Venice Biennale. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times and Vogue.
- The Inner and Outer Worlds of Diversity, Inclusivity and EqualityGoogle Women’s Summit, 2019
- Fire Marketing and the Power of VoiceNike, 2019
- Body, Sex, ArtVenice Biennale, October 2019
- Finding the Ultimate ConnectionBumble, 2018
- Transforming Conflict into Creation: The New ProductivityYahoo, 2017
The Second Answer
Your mind answers first. Your body answers true.
Scott Picard
The book
I was dying, and a man I had met once gave me a kidney.
Seven people had already made it into the testing sequence before him. My best friend. A friend who flew in from London. My sister Karen. One by one, for reasons that were nobody’s fault, they could not donate.
Chris was the eighth.
So afterward I asked him why.
It was easy. I love my wife, and my wife loves you.
I have spent twenty-one years learning to say something plainly.
The Second Answer is Scott’s story and his practice: a transplant, a sealed adoption, a grandmother called Tiny Warrior Woman, and what it means to let the body answer.
Hear first when it’s publishedExpected in the first quarter of 2027.
Q&A
What you need to know
Do people have to dance?
Not at all. No dance experience, no meditation practice, nothing to believe. The entry point is your feet, and everybody has those. No two people move alike, and nobody is asked to.
Is this therapy?
No. It is educational and developmental work, and it is not for someone in acute clinical care.
In person or remote?
Both. Workshops and offsites run in person or on Zoom, Office Hours with Scott run on Zoom, and Living Sessions run either way.
How many people?
From one person to sixteen hundred. Workshops are for groups of at least ten, with the deepest impact above fifty.
What do we leave with?
The second answer, in language you can use, and a practice people keep using after Scott has gone home.
Where is Scott based, and does he travel?
Scott is based in Los Angeles and Dallas and teaches around the world. He has taught thousands of people across the United States, the UK, Europe, and Central and South America.
How do we book, and what does it cost?
Begin with a note to Scott through the contact page: the size of your team, what is at stake right now, and whether you need people in one room or across locations. Fees are by inquiry.
Stand up.
Time to breathe through your feet.
Feel your feet. Ask yourself the question that brought you here. Answer it. Breathe. Ask again.
What was your second answer?
The second answer is not the final answer. It is the answer you have been leaving out.
Start with the Ask Twice card
The practice on one page, sent to you now. Then Letters from Scott: open workshop dates before anyone else, and first word when The Second Answer is published.
Workshops by Scott
Each begins on the feet, with a question the whole room carries. The measure is what the group can do after Scott has gone home: tell one another the truth. For groups of at least ten, with the deepest impact above fifty.
- The False Queen
- Beauty Betrayed
- Tiger Kings
- The Fifth Element: Fire & Water
- Expressing the Body Wild