You Are Already Wearing the Ruby Slippers with Cortney McDermott
There's a moment in every great talk where the room shifts. The energy changes. People stop scrolling, stop fidgeting, and just... listen. That moment happened at LoDo Studios recently when Cortney McDermott stood up in front of our District House community and said something that landed like a tuning fork struck against the chest: "You are already wearing the ruby slippers."
She wasn't talking about Oz. She was talking about you. Your mind. Your body. The inner intelligence you were born with and have been systematically talked out of trusting.
Cortney McDermott is a bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and coach whose work sits at a rare intersection: academic rigor and lived experience. She holds a Master of Science from the London School of Economics, has spoken at Oxford Saïd Business School and Mindvalley, and has worked with brands like Nike, Google, and Universal Music Group. She also speaks four languages and splits her time between Italy and the US. In other words, she has seen a lot of the world and thought deeply about what makes people tick.
Her keynote, "Give Yourself Permission: Unlock the Confidence to Lead with Intuition," is built around what she calls The Science of Trust. The premise is deceptively simple: at a time when we outsource nearly every decision to apps, algorithms, and external authorities, the most powerful technology available to us is the one we already carry. Inner Intelligence.
And she doesn't just ask you to take that on faith. She brings receipts.
Cortney spent 30 minutes walking our community through findings from three separate fields of science, each pointing toward the same truth.
Neuroscience is revealing how profoundly our thoughts and beliefs shape our neural architecture. The brain is not a fixed machine. It is a living, responsive system that reorganizes itself around the stories we tell and the attention we direct.
Epigenetics goes further, showing that our environment and inner states can actually influence how genes express themselves. The old story of biology as destiny is giving way to something far more dynamic, and far more hopeful.
Quantum theory, at its frontier, points to something even more profound: that consciousness itself may play a role in shaping physical reality at the most fundamental level. Your directed attention is not passive. It participates.
Three fields. One conclusion: your directed consciousness is determining your experience.
The practical implication is enormous. If that's true, then the question isn't whether you have power over your experience. The question is whether you're using it consciously, or letting it run on default.
After the presentation, our own Hannah Jo sat down with Cortney for a conversation that took the room somewhere even deeper. The kind of interview where people stop thinking about what they're going to say next and just absorb. They talked about what it actually looks like to direct consciousness in daily life, how to use your mind and body for what you want rather than what you fear, and where intuition fits into a world that has been trained to distrust it.
Then the audience showed up.
The Q&A that followed was a reminder of why we do this. The questions were honest, curious, and real. People weren't performing interest, they were genuinely wrestling with these ideas in real time. That energy is what District House is built for.
The District216 community has always been drawn to the intersection of consciousness and healing. We talk a lot about psychedelics as tools for expanding awareness, dissolving limiting patterns, and reconnecting with something deeper in ourselves. Cortney's work is a natural companion to that conversation.
Because whether you arrive at inner intelligence through a ceremonial experience, a meditation practice, or a rigorous engagement with neuroscience, you're arriving at the same place: the recognition that you are not a passive observer of your own life. You are, in some real and meaningful sense, its author.
Dorothy had the power to go home all along. She just needed to remember it.
So do we.
If Cortney's work resonates, find her books and upcoming talks at cortneymcdermott.com. And if you want to keep exploring ideas like these inside a community that takes them seriously, you know where to find us.
The full interview with Cortney, along with dozens of other District House conversations just like this one, lives inside the District216 community. Become a member at district216.com and get access to the video library, live events, and a growing community of people who take this stuff as seriously as you do.
