Why Was the CIA Studying Consciousness?

What if one of the greatest advantages in leadership has nothing to do with strategy, intelligence, experience, or execution, and everything to do with something far less visible?

A few weeks ago, I came across a declassified CIA document known as the Gateway Experience, a research project exploring consciousness, awareness, perception, focus, and human potential.

You can read the original document here:  https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf

Before diving into whether every conclusion is correct, I found myself asking a different question, one that felt far more interesting than the document itself: Why would one of the most analytical organizations in the world spend time studying consciousness at all?

The CIA exists to gather information, understand human behavior, recognize patterns, reduce uncertainty, and improve decision-making. It operates in a world where perception matters, where the ability to notice what others miss can change outcomes, shape strategies, and influence history. When an organization built around intelligence begins exploring consciousness, it invites us to pause and consider whether there is something here worth paying attention to.

The more I reflected on it, the more I realized that consciousness may be one of the most overlooked topics in leadership. We often place it in a completely different category from business, performance, and success, yet every strategy begins as a thought, every decision passes through a mind, and every conversation, negotiation, promotion, hire, partnership, investment, and vision for the future moves through a filter before it becomes action.

What fascinates me is that consciousness influences the one thing intelligence agencies, entrepreneurs, executives, and investors all depend on every day: perception.

Most people assume they see reality as it is. Yet reality rarely arrives untouched. It arrives filtered through our experiences, our beliefs, our expectations, our fears, our confidence, our stress, and the things we pay attention to.

Two people can sit in the same meeting, hear the same conversation, review the same information, and walk away with completely different conclusions. One sees risk, the other sees opportunity, one notices a problem, the other notices potential. The difference is not always information, sometimes the difference is perception, and perception shapes everything that comes next.

This is where the conversation becomes surprisingly practical.

When most people hear the word consciousness, they imagine something abstract, yet its influence appears in places that feel very real. It appears in the quality of a decision, in the ability to stay calm during uncertainty, in the conversations that strengthen or damage a relationship, in the stories we tell ourselves about what is possible, and in the opportunities we recognize or overlook.

Whether we notice it or not, consciousness quietly participates in every result we create.

This observation became one of the foundations of YogiCEO.

Over the years, I noticed that many successful leaders invested enormous amounts of time developing external capabilities while giving far less attention to the internal patterns influencing those capabilities. They learned how to lead teams, scale businesses, increase revenue, and execute strategy, yet often remained unfamiliar with the assumptions, reactions, and beliefs shaping the way they approached those challenges.

That gap fascinated me.

Because if consciousness influences the way we perceive reality, then it also influences the way we lead within it.

The more responsibility we carry, the more important this becomes.

Most people can explain the decisions they make, yet far fewer can explain what influenced those decisions in the first place. We can describe the strategy, justify the outcome, and explain the action we took, while the forces shaping those choices often remain hidden beneath the surface.

Old experiences, emotional patterns, expectations, fears, and unconscious assumptions influence the way we interpret reality long before logic enters the conversation.

When we understand ourselves more deeply, we begin to notice patterns we previously missed. We recognize when stress narrows our perspective, when fear disguises itself as caution, when ego presents itself as certainty, and when intuition is trying to draw our attention toward something we have not fully understood yet.

That awareness does not guarantee perfect decisions. It gives us a clearer relationship with the person making them. And perhaps that is what stayed with me after reading the Gateway research.

Beneath the theories, the language, and the debates surrounding consciousness sits a question that feels surprisingly practical: How well do we truly understand the mind through which we experience our lives? 

For me, that question sits at the heart of YogiCEO. Because leadership is never only about what we build, but also about who we become while building it.