Cliff Kayser

Cliff Kayser

Founding Author & Publisher, XperienceIT Press

  • Author
  • Executive Coach
  • Leadership Educator
  • Organization-Development Practitioner

Cliff Kayser writes from more than four decades in conversation with the Tao Te Ching and more than twenty-five years helping leaders, teams, and organizations work with consequential change and persistent, interdependent tensions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C

liff’s books bring Taoist philosophy, Polarity Thinking, human development, leadership, and lived experience into conversation. They grow from sustained reading, professional practice, relationships, loss, recovery, and the continuing challenge of living what we recognize.

These books are interpretive works, not direct translations from Classical Chinese. The Tao remains larger than any interpretation. Polarity Thinking gives Cliff a contemporary way to notice some of the recurring tensions within human life; it does not contain or explain the Tao.

Cliff is the author of It: Forty Years in Conversation with the Tao Te Ching and the first four books in the Guided Tao Series: It is What It is — A Place to Begin with the Tao Te Ching; What We See AND What We Carry — Finding Our Way with the Tao Te Ching; Common Sense, Uncommon Practice. — Knowing AND Living with the Tao Te Ching; and Holding Power AND Sharing Power — Leading Yourself AND Others with the Tao Te Ching.

He also writes the free Just Tao It companion essays and the Wiser Decisions series. Cliff founded XperienceIT Press to steward this long-arc body of work while protecting authorial voice, source integrity, reader value, and the relationship between a book and the person reading it.

A mountain-bike accident in 2021 interrupted Cliff’s work and began a long period of recovery. It did not create this body of work; it changed the conditions under which he returned to it and deepened his attention to practice, relationship, limitation, and what a life carries forward.

Read Cliff’s work

A foundational work

  • It: Forty Years in Conversation with the Tao Te Ching — the interpretive foundation beneath the Guided Tao Series and Just Tao It essays.

The Guided Tao Series — Short books for long journeys.

  • It is What It is — A Place to Begin with the Tao Te Ching
  • What We See AND What We Carry — Finding Our Way with the Tao Te Ching
  • Common Sense. Uncommon Practice. — Knowing AND Living with the Tao Te Ching
  • Holding Power AND Sharing Power — Leading Yourself AND Others with the Tao Te Ching — in development

Recommended reader links

Where the Work Lives

Cliff is an owner/partner and Chief Learning Officer of Polarity Partnerships; founder and publisher of XperienceIT Press; and president and founder of Xperience LLC and Kayser Ridge Retreat and Learning Center in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. He is also founder, emeritus, and senior fellow of the Polarities of Democracy Institute.

Cliff has served on the faculty of George Mason University’s Coaching Academy since 2011 and as adjunct faculty in American University’s KEY Executive Leadership Program since 2009. He is also an Inner Development Goals Ambassador and leads the Washington, DC Polarity Retreats Hub.

Education and Selected Credentials

Cliff holds an M.S. in Organization Development and an M.S. in Human Resources Management from American University, and a B.A. in History and Business from Lenoir-Rhyne University. He completed Georgetown University’s Leadership Coaching certificate program.

His selected professional credentials include Professional Certified Coach (PCC), International Coaching Federation; ICF Mentor Coach specializations at the PCC and ACC levels; and Certified Master Practitioner and Trainer, Polarity Partnerships. He completed additional preparation in AI ethics and governance and has been recognized with the Gestalt Center for Organization and System Development’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Selected Earlier Publications

  • And: Making a Difference by Leveraging Polarity, Paradox, or Dilemma, Volume Two—Applications — author or co-author of nine chapters, including “Multarities: Interdependencies of More Than Two” (HRD Press, 2021).
  • “Paradox and Polarities: Finding Common Ground and Moving Forward Together,” co-authored with Margaret Seidler and Barry Johnson, in The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox (Oxford University Press, 2017).
  • “See Well-Being Through a Polarity Lens,” TD Magazine (July 2022).

My invitation

Begin with the question already traveling with you.