Jim Kleiber went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study electrical engineering. In his junior year, despite being at the top of his class, he switched to Intercultural Communications. To many, this seemed like a disconnected and ludicrous leap. To Jim, however, it made complete sense: he switched his focus from computer language to human language.
His career also may seem quite discontinuous to others. During university, he held two summer internships at Caterpillar in the technical marketing department. After university, at age 22, he moved to Tanzania to manage a start-up consulting firm focused on economic development. After about two years, he returned home to Michigan to join a consulting firm that helped Fortune 500 companies with innovation R&D. He then contracted with another consulting firm that focused on helping large companies innovate around their company culture. In his time in consulting, he noticed how empathy seemed to play a very large role in business and yet he didn’t see anyone building tools to increase empathy.
So he left consulting to spend two years building iFeelio, a mobile phone app to help himself and others get better in touch with how they felt. He then created Emotional Self-Defense, to bring these tools for empathy to a different format. The goal was to have a martial art for practicing how to respond to hate with love, how to protect our hearts from emotional abuse.
While he continues to focus on empathy, he maintains the engineering mindset that he developed early at college, and thus the tools that he builds are very practical, systematic, and simple. He likes to say that what he does is help people practice the fundamentals of communication.