The first hallucination arrived shortly after Peggy Van de Plassche finished her serving of dried psilocybin mushrooms, pulled down her eye mask, and laid back on a Japanese-style futon. “I saw a man standing above me,” she recalled. “He was a shaman and he was pulling snakes and rats from all over my body.”
Van de Plassche, a former banker and venture capital investor, was at a luxury resort in British Columbia’s Okanagan region where she was experimenting with a large dose of psychedelic mushrooms for the first time. Although it was her inaugural “journey”—as wellness gurus call mushroom trips—the symbolism behind the vision was immediately clear to her: “It was all the self-hatred and self-loathing I have for myself.”
With each creature’s exorcism, she gained a surer sense of her self-worth, apart from her professional achievements. It was a radical concept for the 45-year-old high achiever, who told Fortune, “I had always measured my self-worth in terms of what I bring to the table.”
That was two years ago. At the time, the French-born Van de Plassche sat on several corporate boards in her adopted home of Toronto, including startups Impak Finance and FrontFundr, and was a director at a major government-run agency that seeks foreign investing in Canada. Among other things, discovering that her self-esteem was fundamentally poor changed the way she relates to people as a leader, she said. Under the mushroom’s chemical spell, she learned to have a better relationship with herself, which also gave her more patience for the executives she oversaw and fellow board members. For instance, directors tended to derail meeting discussions by talking about their past achievements and stroking their own egos, Van De Plassche said. Instead of being outwardly aggravated, she found compassion and learned how to gently redirect the conversation. Where she was once prone to being more confrontational at work (and beyond), a trait she said she sees as typically French, she has mellowed out. She has even published a book about microdosing, inspired by the changes psilocybin has brought to her life.
Van De Plassche knows she’s not the stereotypical customer for a consciousness-expanding mushroom retreat. She isn’t a Silicon Valley or Hollywood founder self-medicating with psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, or MDMA. She is a former director in banking for the IT consulting company CGI, and has held executive roles at the Bank of Montreal and CIBC, two of Canada’s largest banks. She has never taken drugs recreationally. As such, she represents a less splashy, more buttoned-down cohort of psychedelics seekers who are quietly turning to companies like the Journeymen Collective, which runs the retreat Van De Plassche attended in British Columbia, in search of anything that will catapult them to the next level of their careers. “If you want extraordinary results, you have to do something extraordinary,” she said.
Her before-and-after story about how mushrooms changed her management style adds credence to the most common sales pitch in the psychedelics-for-executives industry. The Journeymen Collective’s site, for example, says its “purpose-driven psychedelic intensive journeys”—a.k.a. mushroom trips—for executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals will “revolutionize their conscious vision for life, love, and business into reality,” and give them deeper self-awareness.
I had always measured my self-worth in terms of what I bring to the table.
Peggy Van de Plassche
That’s nothing to shrug at, said Gabe DeRita, an executive coach in private practice in Boulder and a freelance facilitator of psychedelic retreats. “People focus a lot on competence in leadership development, but it's actually character that sets good leaders apart,” he said. Psilocybin can help an executive become more authentic—and therefore more compelling—by surfacing their bad patterns and limiting behaviors. “It makes it easier to see the ways that you're kind of tying your own shoelaces together, holding yourself back,” DeRita said, “and allows you to see it in a way that's not only piercingly insightful, but that generates self-compassion instead of self-judgment.”
Van de Plassche’s self-insights allowed her to develop empathy for others without lowering her standards, she claims—and ultimately made her an eager collaborator, rather than a near dictator. “I realized that without self-worth, you can’t have terrific relationships,” she told Fortune. “You’re not a great vessel.”
The fungi revival
Corporate types like Van de Plassche who have tried macro doses of psilocybin in recent years tend to be surprised by their own adventurousness. After all, consuming the psychoactive ingredient psilocybin is still technically illegal in many places. Lately, however, it has been shedding its image as a party drug for rock stars and tech CEOs. The drug is being investigated as a treatment for depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imaging studies, psilocybin has been shown to greatly boost communication across the brain’s various regions and functions. Researchers believe it does this by disrupting activity in the brain’s default mode network, which comprises brain areas that influence a person’s sense of time, space, and self.
Because psilocybin is mostly well tolerated and remains a potentially promising therapy, Silicon Valley investors, including the influential Peter Thiel, are betting on a future where psilocybin and other drugs become commonly prescribed. But by the same token, their potential to alter brain functions is also why practitioners advise people to check in with their physicians before testing mushrooms. Certain medications shouldn’t be mixed with psilocybin, and in the worst cases, a “journey” can trigger a psychotic break or thoughts of suicide. (Remember the Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to shut off a plane's engine in midair last year? He had taken psilocybin 48 hours before boarding that flight and said that he was dehydrated and exhausted, and still prone to hallucinations.)
In light of such potential side effects, corporate boards might not look kindly on this practice, says Robin Ferracone, CEO of Farient Advisors, an executive compensation consulting company that works closely with company directors. “Boards would see it as risky, both reputationally and possibly just physically,” if a retreat were company-sponsored, she said. And even if an executive is curious about psilocybin and planning to try it on vacation, they should be wary of participating in any activity that might be illegal or “on the edge and unknown.”
But many leadership coaches aren’t waiting for the culture or regulators to give them a green light. They’re running pricey retreats in jurisdictions where mushrooms are either legal or decriminalized for various uses, including in parts of Canada and the U.S., such as Colorado and Oregon; Mexico; Colombia; Costa Rica; Jamaica; Spain; and the Netherlands. The programs usually involve pre-meetings and coaching on Zoom, more of the same at the retreat, and several hours of post-trip consultation, unpacking the experience and learning how to integrate the most powerful takeaways into your life. Executives can expect to spend several thousand dollars for the services. Journeymen’s program, which includes two psilocybin journeys during a five-day stay, and several weeks of virtual coaching, costs $15,000.
The companies behind the retreats are cashing in on a cross-section of growing markets. First, interest in the therapeutic uses for psychedelics is surging: As the Wall Street Journal reported, the Multidisciplinary Actions for Psychedelic Studies conference in Denver last year attracted 12,000 attendees, compared to 3,000 six years ago. Global demand for “wellness travel” and leadership development programs is also booming. The wellness travel market reached $720 billion before the pandemic, according to the Global Wellness Institute, and the leadership development market, already worth $81 billion globally, is expected to reach $217 billion in 2034, per data from Future Market Insights, a research company.
Still, other professionals are finding clandestine treatments closer to home. “It is much more common than I think people realize,” DeRita said of psilocybin therapy. Last year, a Rand survey of 3,800 adults in the U.S. also found that 12% had used psilocybins during their lifetime, while 3% had used them during the past year, making magic mushrooms the most popular psychedelic drug in the U.S. DeRita reports that several top Fortune 500 executives who have sought his leadership advice (outside of retreats) have come to see psilocybin as a bona fide leadership development tool, though he declined to share names.
How mushrooms changed their minds
It’s easier, though still not exactly comfortable, for owners of smaller companies to go public with their stories. One architect in Jacksonville, Fla., for example, agreed to talk to Fortune about how mushrooms altered his leadership ethos, but only if his name was withheld. “If I lived in a different state, maybe less conservative, it'd be a different story,” he said.
During his retreat, also at Journeymen, the architect remembered spending the first several minutes of his first psilocybin session in fear. He was used to being in control, and he found himself clinging to intentional thoughts as long as he could, until the psilocybin won. “My eyes were closed, and I saw a set of swirling colors behind my eyelids, and then you can almost feel yourself passing through a threshold,” he explained.
He received messages under the mushroom’s effects. “I encountered a consciousness I didn’t identify as my own,” he said. One message directly challenged his leadership approach: It told him there was no separation between himself and the universe. In other words, he experienced what many describe as a blissful “ego death.” (John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, says he got the idea for the pioneering grocery store during a mushroom-induced period of ego death in his youth.)
When the architect returned to his firm after the retreat, he felt comfortable handling workplace relationships with more openness, he said. For example, one day when an employee asked for a loan to prevent the bank from repossessing his car, the architect uncharacteristically broached a delicate topic. Having already suspected that the employee had a drinking problem and that his disorder explained his frequent tardiness and generally “meh” work performance, the boss was fairly certain that alcoholism was behind the car payment crisis. He gave the man $500 as a one-time gift, not a loan, but also explicitly asked his employee whether he was struggling with addiction.
“I have a history of alcoholism and have many family members who are alcoholics. I get it,” the architect recalled saying. He then asked the worker to take the rest of the day off and find an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. “See if it means something to you,” he said. The employee agreed to do it.
Though the architect doesn’t know whether that person found a 12-step group or continued to attend meetings, he did see improvements in the employee’s performance. The connectedness he experienced under the mushroom’s influence “gave me some courage to make myself vulnerable and to go there with [my employee],” he says. “[The employee] could have just told me to go f**k off, and that would have been perfectly acceptable.”
Faster than meditation
Ashish Kothari, a Boulder-based consultant who worked at McKinsey for 17 years and now runs his own leadership development business, Happiness Squad, believes psilocybin can be an ideal tool for leaders facing extreme uncertainty and complexity. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the loss of control that the architect experienced is useful for leaders who feel unprepared for the current political, social, and environmental chaos, according to Kothari. Leaders need to realize that control is only an illusion, said Kothari. “But cognitively, it’s difficult to get there,” he says, adding that psychedelics can speed up that process, which is part of the draw.
Psychedelics reshaped Kothari’s style of management in a manner that was similar to Van De Plassche’s makeover. After joining a high-end mushroom ceremony at Beckley Retreats in Jamaica, he came to see that for years leading teams at McKinsey, he had pushed himself to master his craft out of fear of falling short of perfection, and that led him to judge his direct reports harshly. “I'm not proud of it at all,” he says.
The biggest challenge of leadership is distraction, lack of attentiveness, lack of authentic focus and care.
Jim MacPhee, former COO of Walt Disney World
In this regard, he was not alone at the office, he added. Large white-shoe consulting firms and banks recruit for “insecure overachievers,” he realized. Whether consciously or not, a McKinsey partner sizing up a potential hire is thinking, I want you to push yourself more than I will ever push you, he said.
Now he’s in discussions with Beckley Retreats to design his own excursions for burned-out consultants, bankers, and others to help them “rediscover parts of themselves they’ve forgotten.”
Sure, psychedelic journeys can seem more efficient than slower methods like therapy or daily meditation, he said, but he’s wary of overzealous claims. “Those who say [psychedelics] is the only way—that's bullshit,” he says.
But he also expects mushroom retreats to explode in popularity as psilocybin moves through the adoption curve. Once it’s widely approved for medical use, said Kothari, that’s when “you’ll see an enormous wave of interest.”
Jim MacPhee, 66, the former COO of Walt Disney World, told Fortune that he never expected to join the ranks of early magic mushroom adopters after retiring from his C-suite job. MacPhee spent 42 years at Disney, leaving in 2021, and has since started his own leadership advisory company. He went to Beckley Retreats a few years ago, not to become a better leader, but to figure out who he wanted to be in retirement.
During his mushroom journey, he was gobsmacked by the colors and scenery, and felt a profound sense of oneness with the world. It hit him that in his life of privilege, he had on some level taken the world’s beauty and the people in his life for granted. “The biggest challenge of leadership is distraction, lack of attentiveness, lack of authentic focus and care,” he said.
MacPhee has since become an advocate for psilocybin but only reveals his dabblings when people ask. He keeps mostly quiet about the memorable highlights of the drug’s influence—how Tinkerbell appeared as a representation of his faith and his deceased mother—unless people seem genuinely interested. Too many people still have biases against mushroom use, he said, and he would never have sought out a retreat if he were still going into an office.
