About Us
Zen Cryar DeBrucke is the founder of Smart Soul Academy, which makes accessible globally her seminal work on the Internal Guidance System® (IGS) that has made her an international sensation.
A member of the illustrious Transformational Leadership Council created by Jack Canfield, uniting many of the world’s top personal growth luminaries, Zen has worked with over 40,000 people, including training 4,000 master students, on the nuances of how recognize and act on the messages of their IGS to achieve a peak life in alignment with their life purpose.
An internationally renowned inspirational teacher, speaker, author and executive coach, Zen’s passion is teaching people to tap into their innate inner guidance to generate consistent, successful results in life. The result is replacing exhaustion, anxiety, fear and dread with ease, joy, flow and fulfillment.
Zen’s programs have helped thousands of people all over the world transform their lives for the better, with sustained positive changes in their business and personal lives. Her compassion radiates through her work, and her style is down to earth, practical, humorous and wise. Zen’s international bestselling book, Your Inner GPS is an easy-to-read how-to on the way to let this inner wisdom guide you to success, and the Smart Soul Academy provides a deeper easily-accessible online guide to mastering this art.
The key to Zen’s success arrived when she decoded her own Internal Guidance System® and learned that everyone was born with a factory installed Inner GPS. In the beginning, she used it fuel her own success, as founder and CEO of one of the first Internet design companies in the world. The company grew exponentially, and worked with Fortune 500 companies, including Applied Materials, IBM, Electronic Arts, BP and VISA.
“Zen Cryar DeBrucke has developed a brilliant yet simple way to listen to and interpret your inner guidance. Her ideas and exercises are profound, practical, and essential for living a successful and fulfilling life.”
Peggy Cappy
Author and creator of Yoga for the Rest of Us, as seen on PBS
After that firm dissolved in the dot-com collapse, she found herself filling the request of many of her fellow entrepreneurs and executives to advise them on how she was seemingly emotionally untouched by the rollercoaster they were experiencing. It was the springboard for her to become a full-time executive coach and IGS guide. She has since coached thousands of business leaders to use their IGS for success in every area of their lives.
Zen’s rise to fame and success capped a life that began in an abusive dysfunctional home, saw her experience sexual abuse at the hands of someone outside her family, forced her to seek emancipation at 16 years old, dropped out of high school and then struggled to make a living until she discovered her IGS.
She went on to earn a degree in Global Politics with Mandarin Chinese and Minor in Art History from U.C. Davis, before stepping into the rise of the San Francisco, CA, digital companies in the mid 1990s and became CEO and a founding member of The Netkitchen one of the first usability and internet design firms in the world.
Zen is a breast cancer survivor and busy home schooling mom, in additional to her Academy work.
More information on Zen can be found at:
https://zencryardebrucke.com
https://soundcloud.com/zeninamoment
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zen-cryar-debrucke-07045166
https://www.youtube.com/@ZenCryarDeBrucke
Lauren Gibbons is a founding member of Tide Rise Consulting, overseeing the Leadership Certification Program which guides students in developing a mastery of their own Internal Guidance System® as well as perfecting their ability to coach and teach this work to others.
Prior to working with Tide Rise, a majority of Lauren’s career has been spent in People and Development positions in Recruitment, HR Management and Work/Life Integration for some of the world’s leading media agencies including Havas’ Arnold Worldwide, Havas Media and WPP’s GroupM.
Lauren’s experience has enabled her to become an expert in knowing what companies value in their employee base. This knowledge, combined with her passion to assist professionals in their careers, inspired her to launch her own career consulting company. Lauren is proud of her work and of her many clients who have gone on to reach superlative status and national recognition in their respective disciplines.
Lauren discovered the Internal Guidance System® (IGS) work completely by accident. During an intensive Leadership Program in 2013 Lauren began to experience what she later learned were “openings” and “closings”, foundational components of the Internal Guidance System®. This ability led her to instantly understand the landscape within group dynamics in addition to when to contribute or listen in meetings, ultimately leading to the desired outcomes for the team.
Her leadership cohort and faculty took notice of this unique skill and began to inquire about this “knowing”. While her knowledge to explain what was occurring at the time was limited, Lauren returned home determined to achieve two goals: figure out what “this thing” was and how to recreate this new-found skill in the workplace.
After many weeks of researching every article, interview and podcast she could get her hands on, Lauren stumbled upon an interview with Zen explaining the Internal Guidance System®. It became abundantly clear this was what Lauren had been experiencing during her leadership program and her perceived knowledge was merely one drop of an ocean’s worth of work that Zen had decoded.
Lauren is passionate and committed to helping launch the work of the Internal Guidance System™ out into the world. What attracted Lauren to Tide Rise was Zen’s incredible ability to articulate the Internal Guidance System® work in a step by step, clear and practical way that is palatable to a wide range of personalities and environments.
When Lauren isn’t geeking out on all things IGS, this dyed-in-wool New Englander is enjoying life in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two school-aged girls.
“The greatest advantage of knowing how to use your Internal Guidance System® is the ability to harness unique and profound wisdom on the fly”