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The Future is Mastering Newer Mindsets That Enable Fluid Skill Sets

The Future of Education is Not Math and Science, But Curiosity and Compassion – The Debrief
Perttu Polonen makes a case for an approach to child education that will be critical to preparing them for a marketplace defined by change.
thedebrief.org

In September of 2021, Polonen sat down with The Debrief to share his thoughts on the type of individuals most likely to succeed in the coming decades and the “soft skills” these future workers will have to master to survive an ever-changing marketplace.

There are no secure degrees or jobs anymore. We have to face that fact. We cannot guarantee anybody a lifelong career anymore, that this one type of skill set is what will help you for the next forty years.

I think we now need to learn to live with uncertainty. Find peace in uncertainty. I think that’s [going to be] a challenge for many, but we need to learn to live a happy, peaceful life in times of uncertainty.

I think we need to update our skill set as we update our phones. That has to be the mindset for the future.

We’re talking about compassion and creativity, curiosity and empathy. People think it’s like secondary, but I think these will be the most important skills.

I really believe that after the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Revolution, which is where we are now, the next one would be the Human Revolution.

In the first page of my book, I kind of explained that brief history that we have gone from the muscles to head, from head to heart. So the resource that you needed at work was muscle, like early days, because it was physical work. Then machines outperformed our muscles, so the education system went to, you know, industrial society. And we’re still there. You get a job if you can show it with your head. I believe the next step is from the head to the heart.

Interviewer: So are you saying that in the future, the top skill you can have is to be a good human?

Yes, precisely! I think it all starts with compassion. You know, develop your compassion, and everything will follow.

What I find remarkable about these insights is that they directly correlate with what I’ve been researching and learning about Creativity, Social Innovation, and The Future of Work for the past two decades and more importantly how they integrate and are encompassed within Vertical Development (aka Leadership Development).

That’s because vertical development is effectively learning about how to “level up” psychologically and expanding your mindset and worldview in the process, thus transforming the way you perceive your self, other people, and the world as a whole.

What’s even more remarkable though is that if you look at the stages of psychological development below which in turn allow us to “level up” our consciousness, you can directly see a correlation with the above article and how they are focusing on the very same “values”, especially those beyond the conventional stages of psychological growth (i.e. 5. Creativity, 6. Empathy, 7. Compassion), often referred to as post-conventional, as shown below.

Values by Stage of Development & Level of Consciousness, Barrett Academy for the Advancement of Human Values

This is why I find vertical development so fascinating because it effectively provides the touchstones that can help us in finding our way (aka wayfinding) towards a future of greater possibilities and potential for all. So it’s not providing us with a clear and concise road map but rather waymarkers that helps us know when we have reached the psychological “territory” we are striving for.

And most important of all though, it’s realizing that the future is not just about leaders “levelling up” but followers as well. Why? Because in a future where leaders (levels 6 & 7) let go of control, giving more space for collaboration and contribution from the collective leadership of the group, it requires followers (levels 4 & 5) who authentically know what intrinsically motivates them, thus taking responsible accountability for their work without being told what to do.

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Getting Vaccinated Was Seen as Being Patriotic in War Time

During WWII, getting the flu vaccine was patriotic. Some no longer view science that way.
Scientific breakthroughs such as the influenza vaccine, which helped the U.S. win World War II, were hailed as miracles that would help define a new generation of discovery.
www.inquirer.com

Decades later, at age 98, Costantini would recall in crisp detail how he waited, alongside other young soldiers, to receive a handful of vaccinations that the Army required. “The government was worried about their soldiers,” he said.

It didn’t occur to Costantini to question the necessity of the vaccines, or to refuse them in the name of personal freedom. “We didn’t give a crap. OK? It was that simple. You got in line, took your shot, and that’s it. It was no big deal.

Great article that perfectly fits in with my previous post about how we need to change the narrative around getting the vaccine and show how it promotes freedom and responsibility to your nation and to the society you belong to at large. Again it would great if someone created vintage war-like propaganda posters that showed how “citizens can contribute to this greater effort to restore our freedoms” (i.e. Be a Liberator! Getting vaccinated today and help restore our society’s freedoms!).

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Shifting The Heroic “Freedom” Narrative for Anti-Vaxxers

Anti-vaccine protesters fueled by existential anxiety, psychologist says

‘We want to feel something that is larger than ourselves, that transcends our personal lives’

www.cbc.ca

People refusing to get COVID-19 vaccine may be doing so as a result of a deep existential anxiety, a psychology professor says.

Dr. Joseph Hayes of Acadia University says vaccine skeptics such as the ones who organized demonstrations near Canada’s hospitals earlier this month are looking for a sense of meaning.

“The way people manage this deeper existential anxiety is by investing in a world of meaning and try to live up to standards of value that would give us a sense of personal significance or personal value,” he told CBC during an interview aired Monday on Island Morning.

We want to believe that life is meaningful and worthy of meaning, essentially. So where you see some hesitancy or even some resistance to getting the vaccine, I think what you’re seeing is people affirming the value of freedom. That the value of freedom is so important that we need to defend this. That life would be not worth living without it.

This directly correlates with what I said before about the primary reason people don’t want to get vaccinated is more about their identity than anything else and it relates to a feeling of a loss of control in their lives. More specifically, a loss of control that first occurred with the pandemic itself and then was further compounded by the government and officials imposing lockdowns that took away the very things that gave these people a strong sense of identity on a basic psychological level (i.e. belonging to a group, socializing, etc).

In effect, if you prevent people from doing the very things that give them a sense of identity, it can literally feel like you’re trying to kill them. This is no different than a person losing their job or even their entire way of life as a career path and it feeling like their entire sense of identity and life is being ripped away from this, thus causing them to implode by suicide or explode by killing others.

The sad thing about this though is that these people experiencing this identity trauma obviously aren’t realizing that pretty much everyone is experiencing this same feeling. It’s just that other people are better able to cope with it, possibly due to their greater psychological capacity for dealing with change.

Hayes says that while it would be difficult to convince an anti-vaxxer to change his or her mind, one way to do it that could prove to be effective would be to highlight “the personal value or heroic nature” of getting vaccinated.

“This could be looked at [as] some historic moment in time,” he said. “We want to feel something that is larger than ourselves, that transcends our personal lives. You could get that by taking part in protest movements that affirm the value of freedom. But you could also get that by feeling you’re part of ridding the world of COVID.

This is a remarkably brilliant idea to shift the narrative for anti-vaxxers by agreeing with them that freedom is of the utmost importance for us all which is why we do need to get vaccinated, so that we can return to the freedoms we had before.

It’s funny because I find that people with conventional mindsets love continually to tell stories about their parents or grandparents and how they sacrificed so much in the previous wars throughout history. It’s almost like they would have loved to have lived during those times and participated in that “great effort” to rid the world of the “evil tyrants” of that time who were trying to take away their freedoms.

The reality is that they can actually participate in a similar great effort within the context of world today, as the pandemic can be seen as this “enemy” that is trying to take our freedoms away from us. Seriously, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t already started creating propaganda-like posters similar to those during the war effect of World War II, showing how everyday citizens can contribute to the “greater effort” of stopping it so as to “return our freedoms”.

It’s funny. I remember one news article when vaccine mandates were first implemented. An anti-vaxxer lady within a White Spot restaurant shouted “Is this communist China?” when asked to show her vaccine card. I thought it was ironically hilarious for her to say that when she was effectively shouting to a bunch of people who were enjoying some semblance of their previous freedoms by being vaccinated.

As for those hesitant to get vaccinated because they believe the risks of the vaccine outweigh those of the virus, Hayes says they might be refusing to get the shot in order to avoid personal responsibility.

“If you’re really concerned about side effects, it can feel a little daunting that you would be responsible, essentially, for your own fate or hardship,” he said. “Whereas just sort of passively laying low and waiting for the whole thing to pass, you can feel less responsible… for anything that may happen.

This is also a radical insight as well. As I’ve already stated before, many vaccinated people see most anti-vaxxers as completely irresponsible people because it seems like they don’t care about the lives of other people. This insight shows how anti-vaxxers are actually trying to be responsible in a twisted sort of way because they don’t want a wrong choice (i.e. getting the vaccine) coming back to haunt them and ruining their life (i.e. vaccine side effects), thus making it impossible for them to continue fulfilling their responsibilities to others.

The problem as stated before though is that they don’t seem to have the psychologically capacity to handle this Catch-22 situation that the pandemic is causing because not getting the vaccine could kill them and prevent them of fulfilling their responsibilities as well. This is effectively the cognitive dissonance they’re experiencing that I mentioned before. To get around it, they make believe that the coronavirus isn’t as deadly as it seems, thus disbelieving the reality of it which resolves the conflict within their mind and allows them to continue justifying their freedoms to connect and socialize with others.

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A Game That Maps The Evolution Of Your Self & Your Worldview

Will Wright discusses his upcoming game that maps your conscious and subconscious mind.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to take psychological development and make it more accessible and understandable to people by making a Player’s Handbook for The Game of Life that metaphorically describes psychological development similar to an MMORPG, whereby you “level up” consciously by going through different “expansions” or stages of development and overcoming your “monstrous” fears that are standing in your way (which in turn embody the psychological metaphors within Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey).

The primary benefit of this approach is that it helps you to create an externalized visual map of your subjective life adventures so far that they enable you to objectively begin to psychologically manage your “self” going forward, something which Robert Kegan indicated was essential for the growth and development of a person, describing it as a Subject-Object Shift.

A simplified example showing psychological growth & development as a map.

While I’ve always wondered what it would be like collaborating with an actual game developer on something like this, it seems like I don’t have to imagine much more so now since Will Wright is effectively creating something very close to this concept with his next game called Proxi.

I actually now want to get into the players mind. I want the players mind to become the landscape of the game in some sense.

Can we find a game format in which we can acquire these memories from your life. They’re really important memories, not you know we had Starbucks yesterday, but the things you remember from 10 years old, 12 years old, 15 years old.

Interviewer: The touchstones of your life, the things that define you.

Ya exactly. Can we now analyze, put them into a deep AI, start doing associations between the different aspects that they share and start building a model if your mind. You know not just your conscious mind but as well as your subconscious mind. You know how do you deeply feel and think and behave with the world around you based upon your life experience.

BTW I also find it fascinating about how later in this conversation he describes using AI to help a person understand themselves. This is something I’ve touched on before, with regards to how social media companies like Facebook are using AI on the data they have on you but effectively using it against you, as they can see your psychologically weaknesses and thus use them to their advantage.

This is why I think companies like Facebook are completely clueless as to the goldmine they are sitting on because if they used this data and AI to help their customers in a similar way, say charging them a minimal monthly fee to do so, they could pivot and become social leaders in helping the growth and development of people, rather than using psychology to take advantage of them.

So you know I think that’s about half of Proxi is riding, surfing this wave of AI that’s happening right now in a way to where it’ll help you understand yourself in a way that you never thought possible before.

And then how do we bring that to a way that you value very highly as opposed to just targeting advertising to you.

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Freedom to Choose? How About The Freedom to Live

Freedom without responsibility leads to a dangerous, degenerative world.

In seeing more articles of anti-vaxxers harassing restaurants in Vancouver this morning because of the vaccine mandate, I started pondering more about what is psychologically going on in their heads to make them think and react in this way. And it made me realize that something way, way deeper is going on inside them, beyond what they are saying on the surface of their arguments.

Their number one argument is that society is not respecting their choice to not get vaccinated, thus society is trying to “control” them and making them feel like the Jews in “Nazi Germany” (as quoted in the article linked above).

Yet what I find amazing about their mindset is that it shows just how selfish they are in not respecting other people’s lives by not getting the vaccine. This is pretty much the number one thing vaccinated people are saying about anti-vaxxers now. Forget freedom of choice, how about the freedom to actually live your life without someone else carelessly jeopardizing it (especially since younger generations are now the greatest worry, since they can’t be vaccinated yet).

Yet what I find remarkable is how these anti-vaxxers are handling these protests. They are harassing and even threatening people, sometimes with their lives. So yes, it does sound like “Nazi Germany” but with the anti-vaxxers being the ones creating scapegoats (ie restaurants, school boards, and even nurses now) and using intimidation practices on them. Perhaps they need to look in the mirror more and reflect on their own actions.

What’s evidently clear here is anti-vaxxers aren’t just upset about their freedom of choice, they are psychologically feeling like their very lives are being threatened which is why they are responding so angrily and threateningly. The question is why?

For myself, I believe they are undergoing a greater existential crisis that relates to how our world is changing so rapidly and they don’t have the psychological capacity to make sense of it. To cope with the change, they are psychologically regressing back to a lower level of consciousness, which is quite common for people to do during times of crisis, when they feel like they are losing control of their sense of identity and their worldview.

This is why they are acting more authoritarian, angry, and aggressive, because in doing so, it gives back a greater sense of control in their lives again that counteracts what they feel like they are losing. Unfortunately this only speeds up the process of disintegration as I’ve noted before. For example, managers who feel like their organizations are falling apart will become more controlling, thus speeding up the disintegration of their organization because it’s actually their controlling nature that’s causing its downfall and upsetting their employees.

This is the paradox and paradigm shift that people often can’t comprehend about the future. It is a world in which we will be able to take greater control of our lives by reducing the controls in our society. Yet for that empowering shift to occur requires individuals who have a higher degree of responsibility, much more so than today.

And thus we return to where we are today. A world full of people who demand their God given freedoms but without being willing to take any responsibility for those freedoms. This is why we have governments and laws. And it’s why governments have to enforce stupid vaccine mandates, after giving people tons of time to step up and be responsible. Yet when they don’t, when they only think about themselves and are psychologically blind to what they are doing to others, that’s when harsh, strong choices have to be made for them.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Viktor Frankl
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The Need for Time & Space, Rather Than Superficial Talk

Companies Are Giving Lip Service to “Self-Care”—but It’s Not What Employees Really Need
Meditation tips and yoga breaks aren’t helping.
slate.com

But it can be hard to see those gestures as genuine, given that the same employers often expect people to work too many hours without breaks, discourage them from taking real time off, and ignore the stressors in their employees’ lives, from lack of child care to not earning a living wage.

Irritatingly, the push for self-care often burdens employees with additional demands on their time while preventing them from doing the work that could actually relieve some of their stress.

Moreover, the push for reflection and self-care is often remarkably out-of-touch with the realities of employees’ lives…

What’s perhaps most frustrating about the workplace self-care lip service is that often the employers espousing it aren’t doing the things they actually could do to improve employees’ lives and mental health, like providing good health insurance, reasonable workloads, and plentiful vacation time. Those are things they’re uniquely positioned to offer … but it’s easier (read: cheaper) to send out emails about yoga or bubble baths.

The key emphasis here is that these additional demands take even more of people’s time which makes things even worse for them. In effect, that’s the biggest problem. People are already overloaded with having to work in different ways due to the pandemic and they lack the time and space to stay afloat mentally and emotionally, let alone have the time for self-care.

My wife is a school teacher and she’s experiencing this same very thing at work. Her administration is saying that they “care about their mental health” in one sentence and then overloading them with more emails to read and additional tasks to perform in the next sentence.

What people need to be given right now is more time and space, not less, to mentally and emotionally process what they’re going through. Anything else is effectively just “lip service” and shows that you actually don’t care about the mental health and well-being of your own people over your own needs and profits.

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Management Needs To Listen & Act To Lead

This is what’s really behind the Great Resignation
On the latest episode of The New Way We Work we find out why so many people are quitting and how managers can get them to stay.
www.fastcompany.com

Although labor shortages in the service industry might be the most visible, Vozza pointed out that tech and healthcare have actually seen the most people quit in the last few months, and burnout has been one of the driving reasons. As for the other reasons? While lack of childcare options and low wages are at the heart of many job vacancies, the other reasons people are quitting en masse are the same reasons people have always left their jobs: lack of flexibility and lack of opportunity—meaning, lack of work-life balance.

The pandemic has caused a lot of us to refocus and reevaluate our priorities, and the old adage, “You don’t quit a job, you quit a manager,” has never been more true. If managers want to hold onto their employees, they should listen closely to what they want, especially when it comes to remote work.

Well, they need to go beyond just listening and act upon what they’re hearing, making changes to their work environments to show that they not only are listening to their needs but understanding the meaning of them as well. Saying “we’re listening & we care” repeatedly really doesn’t mean anything if nothing changes.

Unfortunately for most management this will be really difficult to do because it means changing their own identity and beliefs. So instead of trying to “take control of things” all the more to show that they are competent and “in charge”, they actually need to start letting go of that control and power, taking leadership by redistributing that power to their people to create a large sense of collective leadership instead.

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Sleep & Dreams Help Us Navigate Towards A Larger Sense of Self

Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are
“Often the places we grow up in… influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us.”
www.brainpickings.org

The hippocampus has sometimes been described as the human GPS, but this metaphor is reductive compared to what this remarkable, plastic part of our minds accomplishes. While a GPS identifies fixed positions or coordinates in space that never change, neuroscientists think what the hippocampus does is unique to us as individuals — it builds representations of places based on our point of view, experiences, memories, goals, and desires. It provides the infrastructure for our selfhood.

Because a self is a pattern of experiences, memories, and impressions, constellated according to an organizing principle, and because sleep is when the hippocampus consolidates memories to draw from them those organizing patterns, sleep is essential to our sense of self.

During sleep you try to make sense of things you already learned… You go into a vast database of experience and try to figure out new connections and then build a model to explain new experiences. Wisdom is the rules, based on experience, that allows us to make good decisions in novel situations in the future.

What most people aren’t aware of is that they are navigating their life by their worldview which is a metaphorical map or GPS that helps them makes sense of their world. This worldview has evolved and expanded since they were a child. And right now, it is trying to expand as well.

Why? Because while it may have worked two to three decades ago, it’s slowly been getting more and more outdated the more our world increasingly changes around us. So what worked to 30 to 40 years ago, will probably no longer work today. The times have changed and we all need to upgrade and adapt.

This is something I’ve laughed about for the last couple of decades. We often love newer technological innovations, upgrading them every year, but how often do we upgrade and socially innovate our own beliefs, behaviours, and sense of identity? Very rarely. Often because it can be very traumatic to let go of an old sense of self and fall back into a larger one. It requires a very large sense of trust in yourself which is difficult.

Speaking from my own experiences over the past couple of decades, levelling up your sense of self can be very mentally and emotionally exhausting. It’s why I personally found sleep to be essential as well, even taking midday naps when I had the opportunity. Not just to recuperate from the “disintegration and reintegration” of one’s self but because I’ve found sleep and dreams to be a way of roleplaying through the trauma.

For example, I remember one dream where one experience after another put me within increasingly worse social situations that were impossible to resolve. The next morning I woke up and was like, “How the hell am I supposed to resolve a no win situation like that?” But then I realized that I wasn’t supposed to. The dream was effectively a Kobayashi Maru that was effectively testing how I reacted to a no win social situation.

More specifically though the dream was teaching me how to let go of the societal expectations upon me that were both crushing and impeding me from my own further growth and development. In effect, you have this internal tug of war with yourself until you realize that growing beyond your current identity and pattern of beliefs isn’t making you a heretic to society but rather a hero in the psychologically sense. Because only by growing beyond the basic need to fit in, can you truly stand out and discover your unique gifts that you can help the world with in a much larger way.

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Why We Often Defy Reason To Defend & Protect Our Identity

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
Philosopher of science Lee McIntyre shares 5 key insights from his new book, How to Talk to a Science Denier.
nextbigideaclub.com

Jonathan Swift once said that you cannot reason somebody out of something they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place. But if a denier’s belief is not based on evidence, then what is it based on? The answer is identity.

A denier will often tell you that they’re convinced by the evidence, but when you then ask them, “OK, so what evidence could convince you that you were wrong?” they have nothing to say. This precise thing happened to me when I visited the Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, Colorado in 2018. Although I didn’t convince any Flat Earthers to give up their views on the spot, I did learn that by letting them talk, then asking questions, I could get them to listen to what I had to say. I came away with the feeling that what they were missing was not a proper set of facts, but a sense of trust. They felt alienated and displaced from the larger culture, which was full of elites and experts who were condescending to them and always telling them what to do. In this environment, they felt justified in clinging to outlandish beliefs that defined an alternative community and identity. They thought that the experts and scientists were lying to them, and that the world was filled with either conspirators or sheep.

In some ways, they honestly believed that they were being more scientific than the scientists. That’s why you have to be careful not to shove facts down a science denier’s throat. If you want to convince them, you have to focus not just on what they believe, but why they believe it. Always remember that denialist views are not just what they believe—it’s who they are.

In trying to talk to people like this, I find I lose my patience almost immediately because more often than not, any “facts” they provide to try to refute my facts are often incorrect because they’re usually misinterpreting the meaning of what’s being said by the experts. Often it’s because they are just looking at one fact and base most of their argument on it, rather than looking at all of the facts all together and seeing the bigger picture (which is often highly complex).

What is evidently clear in discussions with them though is a repeated emphasis on wanting “freedom” and “choice”, as well as a disdain for an opposing force trying to “control” them. So I’m noticing the same thing as well. This has very little to do with facts and more to do with their sense of identity which is feeling jeopardized and lost by external forces beyond their control. And notice how closely this symbolically describes the pandemic overall which is why many deny the reality and severity of it.

In Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s book Immunity to Change, they talk about this exact very same thing. In a world which is rapidly changing, they talk about how we need to change with it, transitioning and transforming ourselves in the process. But often we can’t and the primary reason why is because our current sense of self-identity is actually impeding us from doing so (which is why creativity to me is the ability to “step out of your own way”).

But your identity, comprised of your current worldview, is not doing this to be malicious. It’s actually doing it as a built in defence mechanism. In effect, our identity’s “immunity system” is trying to protect and preserve itself and you along with it. Yet in doing so, it’s standing in the way of our own growth and development, even when we may have a strong desire to change (as I can attest to myself).

So the obstacles we often face to change aren’t fact-based but identity-based. So until we can go below the surface of ourselves and see how our patterns of belief are no longer helping us but hampering our growth, we won’t be able to course correct and navigate a new path for ourselves.

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Building Communities of Growth & Development

Transitioning to helping people with their psychological growth & development in RealLife.

Ever since I was a kid playing role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve loved creating characters and building worlds for them to explore. This was only emphasized all the more so when I started playing MMORPGs online like World of Warcraft, as I found I could develop characters all day.

However, during this same time though, while developing characters within these video games, my own character as a person was being challenged by some of the negative communities I was encountering and I decided to create my own community which was more culturally positive. In time, I realized I was creating an environment outside of these games that developed the character of the people who were playing with their imaginary characters within the game.

Today I’m realizing I’m trying to make another big shift. After researching The Future of Work, Social Innovation, Creativity, and Vertical Development over the past two decades, I want to step beyond playing within imaginary worlds and start imagining a “world of play.” What I mean by that is that I want to help reimagine our world so that people aren’t limited by outdated beliefs and the status quo but instead have the freedom and autonomy to reimagine themselves, their identity, in a larger sense.

My primary problem though is that I feel like I have no idea how best to do this. In effect, I’m just winging it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. All I know is what I’ve learnt and can do.

“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do.”

James Tiberius Kirk, Star Trek: Into Darkness

What my intuition (or soul if you will) is telling me to do is to do what I’ve always done throughout my life…but within a larger context. In effect, it’s telling me to build a guild-like community and help people with their growth and development…but instead of doing it around an imaginary video game, do it around a larger sense of life which could be described as The Game of Life.

Based upon my research over the past two decades, one can metaphorically understand The Game of Life as not one unchanging game but rather as a psychological metagame comprised of changing games that change as one “levels up” within the overall game. That’s because each stage of development that a person levels up within (representing their vertical development), dramatically changes their perception and worldview of life, making it exhilaratingly feel like a completely new “game changing” experience full of wonderful new possibilities.

Of course though, while building a community and helping people to level up within a video game is pretty familiar to me, building a community to help people “level up” psychologically in RealLife seems scary as hell to me. I mean I know I have the knowledge to help people see a large perspective of life but I just don’t feel “qualified” to do so. So there is definitely this inherit need to show what I’ve learnt to others to help them with The Game of Life, yet at the same time an essential need to relay that I’m not an expert at it but still learning as well.

By far my greatest obstacle in trying to achieve this though is how best to structure what I know into a sort of “Player’s Handbook” for The Game of Life that will make sense and be meaningful to people in a relatable way. Without a doubt though, obviously the tribe I’m trying to target, who will relate to it the most, will be other gamers.

But not just any gamer though. It has to be a gamer who is familiar with the language of MMORPGs but also familiar with the increasing frustrations in their RealLife work as well, so much so that they are beginning to question their belief of the way that work works and thus are already questing for a new way of working in their life.

All said and done though, what I’m trying to do here is simply make psychological development accessible and understandable to the average person by wrapping it within a MMORPG metaphor that hopefully simplifies the complexities of it and makes it seem much more familiar to them. Why I believe this is so essential today is because we all need to “level up” to be able to live effectively within the increasingly complex world that is emerging before us.