Six Igsby, Ed.D., M.A.
CVO, Gentleman Pirate
Favorite Youtube Channel:
Mind the Game
Favorite Literary Characters:
Calvin and Hobbes
Inspirational Quote:
"Making people smile is a higher art than making people laugh." - Norm MacDonald
My Six-Year Self:
I live a quiet life near the water and good friends. I cook food that nourishes the mind, heart, and spirit, and the content I put into the world does the same.
Read his Peer-Reviewed Dissertation Here:
A Bit About Dr. Igsby
Six is a captivating paradox. He is a master storyteller and inspired learner whose natural state seems impossible: grumpy and grinning at the same time.
For decades, he turned his career into a living laboratory for human potential. As an educator, he sharpened minds in A.P. English Composition and Creative Non-Fiction. As a basketball coach, he guided teams to multiple state championships. And as a director of Kairos retreats at a Jesuit high school, he shepherded young men and women through transformative inner and social journeys.
Across these worlds, a single philosophy crystallized: storytelling is an iterative art and a cycle of experience → reflection → action → adjustment → repetition. It is a simple, patient discipline that turns possibility into mastery.
The Six Connection Points of Curiosity
In his doctoral work, Six explored the often-overlooked relationship between curiosity and the invisible boundaries that limit our connection to aliveness. His research uncovered six fundamental ways humans plug into the love of exploration:
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Observing
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Hunting
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Adjusting
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Storytelling
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Playing
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Coddiwompling
He argues that our culture typically champions only three and, as a result, nudges people into narrower modes of what stories can do. When that happens, as the theory goes, we lose touch with the deeper nourishment that a pursuit of aliveness offers the human spirit.
Where Six Stands Today
Today, Six thrives in intimate environments, inviting those who join him to see themselves not as students, but as people devoted to the craft of becoming vibrant storytellers. His work centers on helping them ask personal questions and iterate their way into new possibilities.
He calls the entirety of this storytelling journey Coddiwompling. It is a term Six learned from an Irish lady and it means "traveling with purpose toward a vague destination." This notion is at the heart of Spill the Water, and it's translated into an intentional, try-and-adjust-and-try-again orientation to a craft that fuels discovery, creativity, and, most importantly, vibrant, realized living.
gentleman
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Three Short Stories about Six
1990 (7 years old)
2012 (29 years old)
November 2022 (39 years old)
I was playing a game with my friend Ben, and I cheated. He told on me, and his father lectured me about fairness. A few days later, we were playing the same game and Ben cheated. I told on him, and his father lectured me about tattling.
I was earning my Master's in English. In an Argumentation class, a professor gave my essay an F, claiming "good arguments split the room." I countered that good arguments win the room. He let me revise the paper. I rewrote it, arguing that his understanding of argumentation was stupid. When I defended this to the disciplinary board, I informed them that I had followed his instructions exactly, and pointed to the result: both papers had evidently split the room! They didn't expel me, but they assigned me a new professor.
I hired two life coaches because I was beaten, exhausted, and resigned. I wasn't suicidal, but I thought about it a lot. Together, they helped me delineate me from my thoughts, emotions, and history, and they helped me build new habits for changing my relationship to reality. Did my life magically get better? No. It got better one painfully slow step at a time. Is my life perfect? Absolutely not. But I laugh a lot more, I smile a lot more, and I eat food and converse with people that makes my mind, body, and spirit feel infused with a humbling dance alongside the agonies and ecstasies of being human.