At twenty-one, during his third year of undergraduate business studies at University of Victoria, Olen encountered a decisive inner turning point. What had once seemed like a clear educational path began to lose its sense of meaning.
More importantly, it began to interfere with what he would later recognize as his “other education,” the unwritten curriculum of adult life largely absent from conventional education, including business studies. Here, learning comes alive through lived experience, purpose and presence.
During this period, he immersed himself in the writings of thinkers whose work spoke to this uncommon wisdom. Authors such as Hermann Hesse, Joseph Campbell, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and David Bohm, alongside the broader current of Existentialism, became close companions. Their works offered a helpful form of guidance while opening a space for deeper reflection and radical questioning, through which the life he was called to live gradually came into expression.
When he wasn’t photographing, he could often be found hanging out in artist cafés in different cities, engaging in wide ranging conversations and inquiry with friends and those he met along the way. These conversations woke up a conviction to dare and build his life from the aliveness and sense of possibility he was discovering with others in these spaces.
Over time, this inner movement began to take outward form. What started as a period of questioning matured into a committed way of living. Photography emerged as a central medium through which he could engage the world. Both as a practice of attention and as a means of expression. This led to a five-year period as a contemplative fine art travel photographer.
Between 1993 and 1998, Olen traveled extensively: along the west coast of Canada, through the southern Caribbean, across Western Europe, and into Southeast Asia. These years were marked by a sustained openness to experience and a willingness to follow the path as it revealed itself. In retrospect, this period ignited a lasting sense of immediacy and aliveness, a carpe diem fire that continues to shape how he approaches both life and work.
What began as a quarter-life crisis gradually unearthed the foundational ground of what he would later come to refer to as his first mountain chapter, a way of living that continues to guide and shape his life today.
After returning to university on the west coast of Canada in 1999 to complete his undergraduate degree, Olen continued to carve out his livelihood path with a renewed sense of direction and focus.
This period marked the maturation of a self-directed research path shaped by dialogues with diverse communities of practice, both locally and internationally. It was a time of bringing together lived experience and disciplined inquiry, allowing earlier insights to be tested, refined, and more fully integrated into the fabric of his life.
In ongoing dialogues with friends and lineage-holding teachers, he pursued a deepening interest in both the timeless wisdom traditions and contemporary transformational methods.
Out of this lived inquiry, and continuing to this day, his life came to be shaped through three foundational paths: meditative practice, collective practice, and presencing-based practice.
Following his return to university to finish his undergraduate degree on the west coast of Canada in 1999, here began the subsequent period of many years of dedicated inner and intersubjective forms of practice through a self-directed research path, that drew its inspiration in part from a broad array of different communities of practice locally and internationally.
In dialogue with a broad cross-section of practitioners as well as lineage-holding teachers, his path was pursued with an unbridled passion for both the timeless world wisdom traditions and contemporary methods of transformation.
During this chapter, he pursued (and continues to pursue) three integrated paths: meditative-, collective- and presencing-based practice.
On the meditative path, Olen immersed himself in various awareness-based traditions. To date, he has logged over 2,500 hours of personal and group practice within Zen, Tibetan, Theravada, and Pure Land Buddhist traditions, as well as Nondual, Contemporary, and Integral meditation retreats. Since 1995, he has practiced under the guidance of diverse teachers across North America, Europe, and South Korea.
For the meditative path, he pursued meditation practice with different awareness-based traditions. To date he has sat for over 2500 hours including extended personal and collective Zen, Tibetan, Theravada, and Pure Land traditions of Buddhism, as well as Nondual, Contemporary, and Integral meditation retreats with different realized teachers in North America, Europe, and Korea from 1995 onwards.
For the collective path, Olen lived full-time as a student and core participant from 2001 to 2003 at the visionary Holma College of Integral Studies in rural Sweden. During this time, he became deeply involved in co-directing and co-leading a community of idealistic change agents and emerging leaders, committed to exploring new ways of being, worldviews, and progressive forms of collective life.
From 2003 to 2005, he returned to the west coast of Canada for graduate studies, where he continued this work through the development and early prototyping of a multi-generational integral community of practice in West Vancouver.
Across these years, Olen cultivated practices and research in generative dialogue, inquiry-based collective wisdom, and collective intelligence, often referred to as “we-space” work. These lived experiments in community became a foundational ground for his Master’s and Doctoral research at University of British Columbia, and later for his postdoctoral work at Simon Fraser University.
Today, he continues to refine and develop these collective approaches within his MBA teaching and group coaching, where his work has been recognized through five faculty awards for excellence in teaching across universities in Canada and the United States.
Olen’s journey into presencing began in the early 2000s through an initial encounter with Theory U–based practices, first engaged through an early distance course with Otto Scharmer. He went on to explore Theory U-based presencing practices in his Master’s, Doctoral, Postdoctoral, and Faculty research, as well as his global MBA classrooms as a tenured Professor of Leadership & Coaching in the department of Management and Faculty of Business at a leading research university in Canada.
Since 2015, his independent research in Dynamic Presencing has been shaped through an ongoing interplay between personal practice, coaching, and teaching in global MBA contexts. Rooted in lived exploration, this work has gradually evolved into a distinct way of being and relating, giving rise to what he now refers to as the Way of Dynamic Presencing.
Emerging from this foundation, Olen is the founder of Dynamic Presencing Coaching (DPC). As his principal vehicle for applied research, DPC continues to be developed, tested, and refined through ongoing dialogue with MBA students, international colleagues, and diverse communities of practice.
Alongside his research and teaching, Olen has been actively contributing to the broader emergence of the field of presencing with colleagues internationally. This included serving as lead editor for the three volume series Advances with Presencing, a publishing initiative that brought together an international network of scholars and practitioners, including contributors affiliated with the Presencing Institute. His work also include over 55 article publications, as well as his role as the editor in chief of the International Journal of Presencing Leadership & Coaching, a peer-reviewed journal advancing thought leadership and inquiry in the field.
Looking back over this body of work, he has come to recognize two distinct, epochal chapters in his livelihood. While the earlier chapter was generative in building and contributing to the field, the current chapter is arising more from the depths of his presencing nature in the field, as a lived source rather than a pursued direction.
More recently, this path has opened into embracing the life he shares with his partner Tacia, their three daughters, and Saga, their eccentric Weimaraner affectionately known as “donkey”, at their custom built Scandinavian home near Montreal, set on a three acre nature estate.
Here, the Way of Dynamic Presencing continues to mature through his work and, more essentially, through the rhythms of family life in nature.
Across his research, teaching, and work with students and practitioners, this way of being unfolds as a converging expression around a single, persistent calling.
Today, his work contributes to a growing ecology of practitioners, scholars, and cultural creatives exploring presence and presencing as transformative paths for coaching, leadership, relational practice, post-conventional human development and cultural renewal.
