Make Sense
To make sense of the world today requires us to navigate complexity and overcome apparent paradoxes. Sense making has a direct relation to the stage of adulthood described by development psychology. Each next stage allows one to perceive the world differently. The stage to handle complexity and overcome apparent paradoxes gets described as the self-transforming mind.
Reaching higher stages of adulthood and gaining its wisdom, is a skill relevant for everyone. The skill has become a necessity for leadership who need to shape the world. Today most leaders have a self-authoring mind, which is the stage before self-transforming. Self-authoring minds can deal with the world of yesterday, being complicated, but only a self-transforming mind can shape a complex world.
Scale into Adulthood
In development psychology, adulthood gets described in sequential stages. According to Dr. Robert Kegan, almost all adults reach the socialized mind, but only 35% grow into the self-authoring mind and 1% reach the self-transforming mind. If we combine this insight with data from the historic EQ test, we notice how a century ago even our leaders had a socialized mind and only 1% reached the self-authoring stage. We could recognize the need to grow into higher stages of adulthood as a natural transformation. It is expected that 35% of the adults will grow into a self-transforming mind.
To give a short description, we can describe the socialized mind as one who can live in a society and has the ability to follow social rules. This mind can only deal with simple problems in a concrete world. The self-authoring mind is capable of dealing with complicated problems of a modern world by the ability to analyse situations. The self-transforming mind has the ability to create models to perceive the complex world.Modeling goes beyond the ability to analyse and is best known as the scientific method. In science often an apparent paradox exists and it requires counter-intuitive thinking (i.e. self-transformation) to solve the mystery.
Coach the Self-transforming mind
Theory of psychology makes a simplified picture. In practice boundaries are not so absolute. You may have a socialized mind for some capabilities and a self-authoring mind for other capabilities. You may also require growth in one aria, but not in other arias. Therefore, coaching the mental growth will be a tailor made path.
We start a journey to map out your personal landscape and path towards mental growth. Starting from general questions like: “what does not make sense to you?”; “how does your intention differentiate from your driver?”
The general questions transform to personal questions to identify personal challenges. This happens during an intake talk, next the actual coaching work starts. Based on your commitment a planning is made to guide you through this personal development.
Enter into the transcendent mind
The self-transforming mind is not the end stage, you can move on to a transcendent mind. In case you wonder, it appears to be an infinitive game i.e. there’s always a next stage. As one cannot see beyond the horizon, you first need to reach the next stage before it becomes clear what lies beyond.
We can journey into the transcendent mind. Now questions exist to understand where you reached self-transformation. From those points we can design a path to your first breakthrough. Before doing so, we also need to identify the psychological pitfalls. Shifting to a transcendent mind is serious work and the pitfalls can become life endangering obstacles. So for this transition it is essential to do shadow work.