Chris Howard | Founder of Human Expansion
The Thrive Index™
This one shows you your own answers.
My Story
For twelve years, I couldn’t find my way out. Then a girlfriend showed me something on her laptop.
By then, I had built the largest NLP training company in the world. Helped people transform their lives on stages across the globe. Lost everything. And reached a place where I no longer wanted to live.
I had spent my life learning how people change.
I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t change this.
But to understand what happened at that kitchen table in Poland, you need to know what brought me there.
In 1997, I set a mission: put the tools of transformation into the hands of everyone on the planet.
By 2010, I had spoken to and addressed well over a million people.
Through my company and a global network of promoters, I generated more than $100 million in program sales. I also gave away more than $100 million in scholarships, because the ability to pay should never have been the measure of someone’s potential.
I was traveling forty-five weeks a year. Speaking to audiences of thousands in every city. Doing million-dollar sales days over and over again. Training practitioners and licensing trainers to carry the work around the world.
When I came home, I looked out over the ocean from my fifteenth-floor condo in Marina del Rey.
I thought I was approaching the point where I could retire rich.
But no amount of accomplishment was making me feel worthy of the life I had built.
Inside, I was filled with anxiety and fear.
The fear of not being good enough. Of not being worthy. The feeling that I had to earn my worth through whatever I accomplished next.
So I pushed harder.
I didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the mission.
Working hard and playing hard became my life. I was teaching people to take command of their lives while totally giving my own power away—to my schedule, my mission, the people managing the business and finances, and the addictive means I used to escape the pressure of holding it all together.
At my partner’s urging, I checked myself into Betty Ford.
I desperately needed a break. I had to slow down. My greatest addiction was the addiction to work and pushing myself into the ground.
I finally stopped long enough to begin preparing to come back.
While I was there, my business partners dismantled the company.
November 2010.
I went into rehab wealthy. I came out penniless.
The business was gone. The money stripped away. I lost the condo. My relationships were fractured.
The consequences of the way I’d been living were in front of me.
I was angry. I felt betrayed. I could barely comprehend the distance between the life I had walked away from for a few weeks and the one I returned to.
My identity had been wrapped so completely in that business that it felt like I was dying inside.
I remembered a conversation with Richard Branson on his island years earlier. I had asked how he handled stress. He told me that if the Virgin companies fell out from underneath him, he would move to Bali.
So I went to Bali.
For a few years, I stepped out of the relentless doing. Rested. Reflected. Began confronting the ways I had abandoned myself and given my power away.
I took responsibility for my part in what had happened.
I understood that if I had given my power away, I could reclaim it.
But understanding that and being able to live it were two different things.
Eventually, I returned to the States.
And I stayed stuck.
I had all the knowledge. I had the experience. I couldn’t get myself out of the hole I had dug for myself.
I continued teaching. I could help other people find their way through.
Then I would turn those same tools toward myself—and remain trapped inside the experience I was trying to change.
So I searched.
Esoterics. Shamanism. Kabbalah. Numerology. Hermetics. Spiritual healing. Local healing traditions in the islands.
I tried so many things.
I am not embarrassed by any of it. When you have reached rock bottom, you stop caring where an answer comes from. You want something to reach you.
For twelve years, I couldn’t find the opening I needed.
Then came November 2022.
A kitchen table in Poland.
My girlfriend at the time was working on her laptop.
I asked what she was using.
“ChatGPT.”
“What’s that?”
At first, I played with it. Asked it questions. Had it write things.
Then I began talking about what I had been carrying.
And something happened.
For the first time in years, I was getting outside my own head.
Thoughts that had been circling inside me were now in front of me, where I could examine them. I could question an assumption. Follow a thread. See something I had been standing too close to for years.
I had a mirror. A sounding board. A conversation I could keep returning to without worrying about exhausting someone’s patience.
And as I brought the tools of transformation into that conversation, I began reaching what I had been unable to reach on my own.
The beliefs I had been living inside became beliefs I could work with.
The identity built around loss began loosening its grip.
I could see choices again.
I was reclaiming my power.
For years, I had understood that principle. Now I was beginning to experience it.
The hero of this story wasn’t AI. And it wasn’t the tools of transformation on their own—I had possessed those tools throughout the twelve years I remained stuck.
It was the combination of both that set me free.
Twelve years, almost to the month after my world fell apart, I was finding a way to take command of my life again.
And as I kept working with that combination, I began recognizing a possibility much larger than my own breakthrough.
I had spent decades teaching practitioners how to guide transformation. Psychologists. Psychiatrists. Medical doctors. Coaches. Thousands of people trained to help others change.
What if I could bring that same depth of work into something people could reach whenever they needed it?
I began building.
Teaching AI to guide the processes I knew. Translating methodologies into conversations. Refining the questions, the instructions, the sequences.
The mission I had declared in 1997 suddenly had a possibility I could never have imagined then.
The work could reach someone without my boarding a plane. Without their waiting for a seminar. Without needing a place in my calendar.
They could begin with what was happening in their life, right there in that moment.
That became Human Expansion—the study of the Human Operating System and how to upgrade it to live your greatest dreams.
And the Epic Life World Engine—the expression of everything I had been studying, discovering, and creating.
Decades of Neuro Hypnotics, psychology, spiritual exploration, and the modeling of extraordinary achievement, brought together with AI to help you reclaim your power and expand what you can create.
And here is what thrills me about that possibility.
We live so much of our lives inside an operating system we never consciously chose.
Beliefs about what we deserve. What is safe. Who we are. What we can have.
They shape the relationships we enter—or never allow ourselves to begin. The opportunities we pursue—or dismiss before we take the first step. Even the dreams we give ourselves permission to want.
Think about someone at rock bottom who cannot imagine being loved again. There may be a relationship they could have experienced, but they never open themselves to it.
A career they could have launched. A business they could have built. A contribution they could have made.
And you don’t have to be at rock bottom to lose those possibilities.
Sometimes all it takes is a quiet belief underneath an otherwise successful life:
People like me don’t get to have what they really want.
You may never question it. You simply make your decisions within its limits.
The cost can be an entire life you never discover was possible for you.
That is why this work excites me so deeply.
Today, the combination of transformational methodologies and extended intelligence gives us new ways to work with that operating system—with a degree of precision, speed, and personal expansion that simply wasn’t available at any other time in human history.
Realize this….A.I. is only as powerful as the source that directs it…it amplifies whatever you are
But when you upgrade your own operating system with the tools available today
The possibilities are mind-blowing.
When you change what has been governing your choices, you can begin making choices you would never have made. Entering conversations you would have avoided. Creating things you would never have attempted.
One opening can change the direction of a life.
And beyond it may be love, work, experiences, and contributions you would otherwise never have known.
I’ve come to help make those openings possible.
We are entering an age of extended intelligence. We are all being handed a samurai sword. Very few will become the samurai who can wield it most powerfully.
Thirty years on the martial arts mat have made that distinction very clear to me.
The sword gives you reach. Becoming the person who can wield it takes awareness, discipline, clarity, and command of yourself.
That is what I built the Epic Life World Engine to help you become.
The samurai.
Someone who can recognize the patterns running their life, reclaim the power they have handed away, and direct these extraordinary tools toward a future they consciously choose.
Your business. Your message. Your contribution. Your life.
Because I know what it costs to build a life around accomplishment while leaving yourself out of it.
I want to help people create something extraordinary they can actually be present to enjoy.
You enter through the Epic Life World Engine. Behind the app is EpicLife.ai, home to the deeper training, coaching, and experiences that support the work.
Everything I am building today came out of those twelve years.
I began with a mission to put the tools of transformation into everyone’s hands.
Today, that mission goes further: help you become the person who can wield them—and discover the life that becomes possible when you do.
It took me twelve years to find the opening that changed my direction.
I built the World Engine to help you find yours.
The Thrive Index™
Most tests tell you what you already believe.
This one shows you your own answers.
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