I wanted to provide a quick overview of how life is a role-playing game but one that starts from an experiential perspective and then leads to an explanation of the knowledge behind this.
However, I realized that before I can do that, it’s essential to quickly clarify what a framework is, using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as an example because it’s the foundational primer that helped me to unlock my own framework for growth and development.
Right now on Substack, I see person after person saying that they don’t want to follow someone else’s “map” but instead forge their own path. What these people mean by this is that they don’t want to follow someone else’s framework.
What I find interesting though is that then these people proceed to forge and map out their own unique path which they then want to share with others as their framework. And then another person will see their framework and in turn say, “I’m not going to follow your map or framework. I’m going to forge my own path.”
This is why I’ve stated before that the number one obstacle to your growth and development is your own limited perception of what growth and development is. Why? Because in misinterpreting what growth and development is, you will in turn misunderstand it and spend more time avoiding it, rather than embracing it.
Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is the epitome of this, as it can be considered a mythic framework but only if one truly understands that it’s not about writing epic stories but rather about psychological development. The beginning of the hero’s journey highlights this.
In the departure part of the narrative, the hero or protagonist lives in the ordinary world and receives a call to go on an adventure. The hero is reluctant to follow the call but is helped by a mentor figure.
Hero’s Journey, Wikipedia
All this is saying is that you will reach a point in your life where the way you navigate the world will eventually no longer work and in doing so, you will question your assumptions and beliefs about life that embody this way of navigation. As I mentioned before, this will feel like a cataclysm whereby your life will feel like it’s falling apart, not literally but psychologically.
Note that I’m not saying that someone else will approach you and tell you to change your way of navigating life. No, this is an internal process that begins with you. You are the one who is questioning your life because it feels like it’s falling apart, so you are the one initiating the transformation of it.
And the refusal of the call is simply your current limited mindset disbelieving the experience that is happening to you because it doesn’t feel “normal”, since a sense of certainty has been lost. In effect, it is your outdated mindset giving its last gasp at trying to maintain itself as your current constructed sense of identity.
More importantly, the mentor in this mythic framework doesn’t need to be an actual person. In fact, it could be a framework that the person stumbles across in the questioning of their worldview (like I did). The key thing here is what the framework represents as a “mentor.”
Now back to what I said earlier, in terms of understanding what growth and development is truly about and what a framework should embody in relation to it.
Growth and development is a process of change and transformation, whereby the certainty in the way you see the world and yourself begins to shatter, causing you to enter a period of uncertainty.
Thereby a framework for growth and development is a narrative that helps you traverse uncertainty, primarily because you’re undergoing a process of creative transformation in terms of your constructed sense of self.
To clarify this further, a framework for growth and development is not a “map” that you follow. Rather it helps you to explore the unknown and uncertain terrain within you and helps you to map a larger sense of Self on your own.
This is why everybody and their dog has a framework for growth and development now.
It’s not about, “Hey, be dependent upon me, follow my map, and I’ll help you get through this.” It’s more, “Here’s some adventuring techniques to help you independently forge and explore your own path, mapping out your own larger sense of Self on your own. And here are some waymarkers you might see along the way, to help you triangulate where you are on your journey overall.”
This is why the byline for my framework describes it as “the adventure of your life.”
In effect, you can’t truly experience an adventure without embracing the uncertainty that goes with it. And when people truly begin to embrace an adventurous lifestyle, they begin to become addicted to experiencing this uncertainty. It’s why most role-playing games are filled with it. In other words, if the path you took was completely certain, with no sense of risk, it would be a pretty boring adventure. So the unknown and uncertainty of it are what make adventures feel epic.
But why does everyone and their dog have their own framework for growth and development then?
It’s because everyone sees the world uniquely from their own perspective and experiences.
This is why my framework for growth and development is about perceiving life as a role-playing game. It’s because the experiences within my own life primarily revolved around playing role-playing games (i.e. Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft). So naturally what emerged from within me (and is still emerging) was a framework that used a language and metaphors similar to role-playing games (i.e. quests, monsters, treasures, experiences), as well as with the hero’s journey.
All said and done, the number one thing a framework for growth and development should be doing for a person is helping them to forge their own path. In effect, instead of having to constantly listen to someone else as a mentor and be dependent upon them for advice as to “which way should I go?”, it’s learning to trust yourself and listen to your deeper sense of Self as to which way you should go.
But here’s an additional essential thing to realize. Even if I told you what the terrain was going to be like, the monstrous fears you would have to face, it doesn’t mean your journey is going to be easy or even certain for that matter.
This happens all the time in games like World of Warcraft. Guilds create walk-through guides on how to tackle a certain boss monster in a raid dungeon. This would be the equivalent of an organization tackling a wickedly complex problem within it that they’ve never tackled before and they use someone else’s case study of how they tackled a similar complex problem within another organization.
So they may ask a consultant specializing in organizational transformation (the one who wrote the case study) to assist them. But the consultant can only help them so far. Why? Because each individual within that organization, starting with the CEO, has to forge their own individual transformation within the context of the larger organization transformation.
In other words, as Richard Barrett noted, organizations don’t transform, people do.
This is why I’ve repeatedly said time and time again that knowledge only gets you so far. To truly transform yourself, you have to step into the process and fully experience it yourself, to truly understand the meaning of the knowledge that you’ve been told.
There are no shortcuts or ways to bypass it, even though everyone and their dog is looking for one, a “hack” for life.
This is why most individual and organizations transformations fail. People are looking for shortcuts when it comes to growth and development and there are none.
In other words, if you think you can treat it like a weekend retreat, you’re misinterpreting and misunderstanding what growth and development really is.
It’s a lifelong journey.
Therefore, with all of that in mind, the singular question you need to ask yourself in potentially using someone else’s framework for growth and development is this.
Can I relate to this framework, the language and metaphors used within it?
If not, if you can’t relate to it in any way, then most definitely don’t use it. Find another one.
And if you can’t find another one that you can relate to at all, then create your own, especially if you feel like you have the capacity to do so because you feel like something is emerging from within you.
But if you can relate to a framework, especially if it relates to the experiences in your own life, don’t avoid it just because you think it’s someone else’s “map” that you don’t want to “follow.” It’s not.
Frameworks for growth and development aren’t maps in the conventional sense. Instead they teach you how to adventure within unknown, uncertain psychological terrain, whereby you have to learn how to map it yourself as a newer sense of your Self.
BTW if you reach the point where you can begin to understand different frameworks as just different perspectives of the same thing, then I would love to talk to you, as this is where I’m at on my journey as well.
In effect, you can see past the unique words and language on the surface of the framework and you understand the deeper meaning below the surface of it that relates to all growth and development frameworks as a whole.