Chris Hoffmann Biography
• Motivational Speaker
• Innovation Leadership
• Emotional Intelligence Coaching
After appearing on multiple broadcast and Internet distributed Tech Shows, and Hundreds of print and online media articles, Chris’ life has been defined by innovation and entrepreneurship. Hand-built childhood boats evolved into catapults, cross-bows, and ultimately to designing industrial robotics for fifteen years in the Detroit Auto industry. He then went on to six years in technology and consumer product design, with a three-year immersion in a skunk-works like innovation lab.
Fighting to continually outdo himself, Chris went on to build a globally-positioned personal-transportation technology start-up RYNO Motors. Born from an electric one-wheel motorcycle his then-13-year-old daughter saw in a video game, he embarked on an archetypal gladiator battle between man and machine that almost consumed Chris for seven years.
Today RYNO Motors is expanding it’s reach to a global business where it licenses technologies to other companies to allow them to thrive and create new jobs.
Currently, Chris is focused on writing and speaking to diverse audiences around the world on his main passions: innovation, the future of transportation and the human culture of successful teams. Speaking talk titles include; The Vulnerability of Innovation, The Future of Urban Transportation and How Our Hands, Create our Reality.
Behind the scenes as Chris built RYNO Motors, Chris was tearing down his own ego and rebuilding himself into a force of clarity and sobriety. There he challenged is motivations for building the RYNO bike in the first place. Once he discovered what the market was telling him the RYNO really was, to then align to a much bigger calling on what was expected of him. As he confronted his own need to be externally validated to see how that very need, exposed him to being manipulated. Through that inquiry he became more self-referenced and capable of making tougher choices that didn’t always benefit himself directly but served a much greater good.
The second phase of self-reflection came as he began to take a stand for a culture that was more inclusive, to realize the depth of the oppression of women and minorities. At the center of this revelation was how by not opening themselves to the counter-balancing influence of women, men were allowing the desire for the accumulation of power to drive their motivations. It’s as simple as how cat calling in our culture is the act of peacocking, but backwards. Men in our culture think women are peacocking, but when men respond to what they think is a peacocking display and the woman doesn’t invite the man to come forward, most men get angry. A lot of men don’t want to peacock because men would rather not be in the vulnerable position of being naturally selected. To counter this fear, many men have systematically marginalized women and reduced their access to resources to keep them in a vulnerable position.
How we break this oppression is by not only recognizing women with equal pay but to recognize the equally influential role women must be allowed to play, to counter the power centric decision-making structures thereby freeing our culture to build a system that will allow us all to thrive together.
To be able to share these insights in parallel with his commitment to innovation, Chris has created HEART in GEAR as a teaching platform and portal to allow access to more heart centric teachings.
This portal is evolving to include seminars, innovation retreats, and other offerings that will allow clients to gamify their own awakening by being able to track their own progress and easily share what they have learned and accomplished with others.
The book; HEART in GEAR, isn’t just a men’s self-help book, it’s a visceral descent into the psyche of Chris Hoffmann as he claws his way through his start-up adventures as founder of RYNO Motors. Hoffmann boldly invites his readers to bear witness to his trials of the heart as he embarked on a journey to use his emotional explorations as his most liberating act of rebellion. Across these personal narratives and insights into how men can’t stand up in a culture until they know what they are standing up in, we follow Chris as he evolves from a rigid, up-in-his-head engineer into an embodied, awakened man and leader. From his dogged determination to build a global business as inventor of one of the world’s first single-wheel, electric motorcycles, to lessons learned to try to navigate single life after a 20-year marriage, these stories illuminate what it means to immerse oneself in tough challenges, impactful relationships, and true surrender.
