Category: Vertical Development

There’s something that Rupert says near the end of this video that feels somehow connected to something I’ve experienced in the past.

When King Lear is miserable about his relationship with Cordelia, John Smith’s enjoying himself on stage. He’s happy. He’s not saying no to Cordelia.

So even in the midst of our suffering, the inherent nature of consciousness is shining. All you need to do is take a step back from your mind into the true nature of your awareness and immediately your happiness is restored.

Whenever I’ve experienced a deep realization or almost revelation about something, it’s almost as though the deep emotions from it are catalyzing and connecting a bunch of previous memories and experiences that I’ve had, so much so that it feels like you’ve stepped back from your life and are almost watching it cinematically on a screen as a flashback.

When this occurs, even though the separate experiences within your flashback may have been painful, sad, or frustrating ones, there’s almost this deep profound sense of joy in the overall collective experience of watching the flashback, as it reveals a deeper sense of meaning within your life that reveals who you truly are at your core.

So it’s like revealing the “player” behind the “character” that you’re roleplaying (when we see Life as a MMORPG), just as John Smith the “actor” is behind the “character” of King Lear that he is playing (when we see Life as a stage).

Life is much more paradoxical than we believe it is.

And it is definitely much more paradoxical than we expect it to be.

The first represents what a person experiences when they struggle to shift from a Socialized Mind to a Self-Authoring Mind and begin to realize that life is paradoxical.

The second represents what a person experiences when they struggle to shift from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind and begin to realize that life is even much more paradoxical than they first realized.

Whenever we expand beyond limits, the ego experiences it as a death. Whenever we go beyond ourselves, the ego experiences a little death because the ego is defined by its limits. That’s what the ego is, a limitation or an apparent limitation on our true nature.

The ego says, “Ah, if Darren gets a job working at a higher level, he’s going to expand beyond his current limitations.”

So the ego says, “I will not survive that expansion. I will die.”

That’s the voice of doubt in you. That’s the voice of the doubt.

It’s the ego telling you, “No, no, no, no, don’t, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t expand. I’ll die. I’ll die. You don’t, don’t do that. Just stay comfortable. You’re fine. You’re well paid. You’re well respected. You have a nice life.”

Really the ego couldn’t care less about you. It just wants to stay. It just wants to stay. It doesn’t want to die.

Fortunately the impulse for truth is stronger than the ego’s resistance to it, sooner or later. To begin with they kind of battle with each other. They go backwards and forth. But sooner or later, truth—our intuition of truth—overrides our fear.

So it’s helpful to have the right interpretation for the doubt because when it rises again. you’re less likely to listen to it, if you understand the mechanisms behind it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you find that just by having this confidence in this intuition that you have and no longer listening to the doubt because of this correspondence between our inner life and the outside world that just having this understanding will in some way somehow reconfigure the world that you live in and some new opportunity will open up. There’ll be this magical response of the world to this inner change in you and all the inner changes.

You’ve understood the doubt. You no longer listen to it. You’re going to listen to this deeper voice inside you. You’re going to acknowledge it, validate it, follow it, and not let the doubt prevent it. And chances are the world will respond to that.

Rupert Spira

Rupert’s words above are a beautiful embodiment of the hero slaying the monster within the Hero’s Journey. The monster embodies our fears which stands in our way, blocking our progress. But it is created from our limited beliefs which are a part of our current identity, now having become outdated.

So to go beyond it, we have to let go of our old sense of self and our old sense of beliefs which effectively feels like we are killing ourselves by letting go our old sense of self and discarding it by the wayside, thus no longer giving it the attention it feeds from and desires. But in the process of doing so, we are able to expand our sense of self-identity, become more than we thought possible.

This is the struggle I am going through with my old sense of self right now. And the more I struggle with it, the more I realize that you just can’t ignore it and “get busy” to try to overcome it because that’s the very thing it feeds off of. Instead you have to fully stop, turn towards it, stare at it, sit still with it, and say, “I see you for what you are.”

This is why vertical development to me is like playing within a MMORPG. Your True Self is the “player” and your identity, who you misbelieve you are, is your “character.” When your character has achieved enough experience in life to outgrown itself and level up its level of consciousness, it does so without fear or grief of losing itself. Instead it’s seen as a wondrous experience of greater opportunities and possibilities, as it expands itself.

Knowing this is one thing though. Living it is completely another.

You’re still expecting something to happen. That’s the problem.

Enlightenment is not an event. It’s not a marvellous event. It’s not a mundane event. It’s not any kind of event. It’s not something that happens.

Enlightenment is not something new. It’s not something that was lost and now has to be found. At best, and even this is not quite true, but at best we could say it was overlooked…

In fact, awareness doesn’t have problems, doesn’t know problems. Why? Because in order for there to be a problem, there needs to be resistance. There needs to be the, “I don’t like this.” That’s what makes a situation a problem.

But awareness is like empty space. It’s never saying to the current experience, “I don’t like you.” And therefore, it doesn’t have problems.

So it’s not saying, “My separate horrible self needs to be got rid of. I’m fed up with her.” The “I” that is fed up with her is another form of herself. In other words the separate self is perpetuating itself by trying to get rid of itself.

So you’re caught in this mind from which you are understandably tired of trying to get rid of yourself. “I, the separate self, want to get rid of myself, so that I, the separate self, can experience enlightenment.”

And you’re going round and round and round. And you’re rightly frustrated and disheartened because you’re engaged in a never-ending endeavour which is perpetuating the separate self by trying to get rid of it.

It’s just see the situation clearly. You cannot get rid of an illusion.

What can you do to an illusion, what do you need to do to an illusion, just to see that it’s an illusion? Don’t spend your life trying to get rid of an illusion. It’s a waste of a lifetime.

Just live what you understand. Take your stand there.

In other words, enlightenment is a fancy name for the most simple, the most ordinary, the most well-known experience there is. And all seven billion of us know it. However, because it cannot be found by the mind, in most cases it is deemed missing. And as a result of that, the peace and the happiness that are inherent in it are also considered missing. And hence, the imaginary self goes off into the world in search  for the missing peace and happiness.

And as we all know, it doesn’t live there. Where does it live? In the simple knowing of our own being. It’s knowing of itself. That is awarenesses awareness of awareness.

Instead of mistaking yourself for a cluster of thoughts and feelings, just noticed, “Oh no. I am the one who is aware of those. I’m not a cluster of thoughts and feelings. All those flow by. But I’m not flowing by, I’m just always here.”

Just allow that to come from the background into the foreground, more and more.

Rupert Spira

Rupert uses an amazing metaphor for life within this video as thought one were looking at a movie screen and seeing their life play out upon it (which mirrors Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) but then forgetting that what we’re seeing is an illusion cast upon a screen. (I, myself, prefer a more modern metaphor for this whereby life is playing out upon a VR headset screen that is covering our eyes which is why it’s hard for us to realize this.)

Thus this “screen” is what is often overlooked, as he notes.

Compared to the woman who Rupert is speaking to, who is experiencing this problem, I would say it mirrors my own experience in that I’m seeking some transitory and transformative event that will shift my perception but that in looking for it, even expecting it, I’m actually preventing it from happening.

In effect, so often how we think things will turn out is completely different than how they will because we often misinterpret the meaning of the experience itself, thinking we know it. When it’s actually much more paradoxical than we imagined it would be.

At the same time though, the reverse of this also happens! In effect, we often do things that we think are “wrong” but they are actually naturally right. Like I kept feeling like having a blog and taking things only one step at a time and just writing that thread of an experience separately, wasn’t enough. So I put a massive expectation upon myself to try to force it all out at once which only made it worse and made me stuck even more.

Yet you can’t force a seed to grow. You have to give it time, space, and room to grow on its own. Thus when finally in the right fertile environment and conditions, it flourishes rapidly upon its own.

It’s funny. I remember saying something a while back about the quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I said that the teacher is actually always there, they’re often just not noticed. This is remarkably similar to what Rupert is saying here. Our awareness, which is constantly with us, is always there.

BTW Rupert’s mention of defusing your vision to become aware of our awareness is also remarkable close to an experience I had many years back, while I was in a liminal state while preparing to fall asleep. Effectively my deep rhythmic breathing and a state of focus that was out of focus, both between what was I looking at and what I was, caused this experience to occur. But as I noted before, I never replicated this experience, even though I knew I could, because I was too afraid of the feeling of the experience of not being my “self” and thus potentially losing my “self” permanently in the process.

When it comes to poetry, we should not demand that the poet uses words in too literal or rational a way. The words of a poem don’t operate on the rational mind, they operate on a deeper level. And the same is true of a prayer.

So the main thing to understand is that the god to whom we might pray, if we’re inclined to pray in words like that, the god to whom we might pray is the god that we are. It is a prayer of ourself to our self, couched in the limitations of language.

Sitting in abidance, abidance as being, is the ultimate prayer. Liberate your idea of prayer from the belief that it is something that is contained in words or expressed in words.

So abidance, being knowingly the presence of awareness or resting in being, is the highest form of prayer.

Understand you are the one you are praying to. It’s a way of speaking to yourself. It’s a way of personifying yourself, so that you feel that you can, in some ways in your mind, objectify yourself and have a relationship with yourself. But at some point that has to go, so that you feel that you are the being that you pray to.

I remembered a while back reading something that mentioned that people are “seeking something larger than themselves” and I intuitively realized at the time that this “something,” that was “larger” than themselves, was actually their True Self which lies beyond their current limited sense of “self.”

This video above by Rupert Spira mirrors this realization.

In fact, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero Path mirrors this realization as well.

And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero Path

That Rupert also mentions that it’s about having a relationship with yourself is also poignant, as I’ve noted before that this is what vertical development is really about at its core. It’s about beginning a lifelong journey of getting to know yourself by being within an intrapersonal relationship with yourself.

Why? Because when we reach a point of being able to truly accept and love ourselves as we are, thus truly becoming at “home” with ourselves, then will we be able to accept and love others as they are as well. This is the oneness, the “god”, within us all, as Joseph Campbell speaks above about.

This also poignantly ties into what I intuitively felt like was required to “level up” one’s level of consciousness. In effect, one has to completely trust one’s larger sense of Self would catch oneself, as one falls back into its embrace which occurs when one turns around and steps back from one’s life to understand it better.

Stop Looking for Your Authentic Self

Even though we are a blank slate at birth, we are programmed by our environment to be what everyone else says we should be. That is who we are and is our authentic self.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anxiety-another-name-pain/202212/stop-looking-your-authentic-self

Your “authentic self”

Your authentic self is right here in front of you. It is the summation of your life programming from your parents, siblings, peers, teachers, employers, societal norms, and the marketing world. In other words, you are the product of who everyone else has told you to be. All the messages are internalized and become your own inner voice telling you how you should be. The outcome is a lot of noise in your brain of self-judgement and that of others. We call it “self-esteem.” It is a mismatch of your powerful unconscious brain versus your conscious one. It is endless and wears you down.

When I read the above for the first time, I laughed and thought the author must be crazy because that’s not your authentic self. What he’s describing is your programmed self, something that most people are completely unaware of. In effect, just because someone thinks they are an “adult” and are “independent”, it doesn’t mean they are psychologically mature and psychologically independent.

In fact, if you look at Life as a roleplaying game, we are effectively non-player characters during the initial part of our lives growing up (similar to Ryan Reynolds character in the movie Free Guy) because we are so dependent on our societal programming to survive when we are younger.

That’s what the author is trying to get at here though. He’s saying that this initial stage is completely normal and thus our dependency is normal as well. So who we are at this stage is authentically who we should be. It would be like a caterpillar being depressed that it’s not a butterfly yet when becoming a butterfly is a part of its life process. This mirrors with the absurdity of youth today being depressed that they haven’t figured out who they are yet before they have even lived their life and had enough experiences to figure out who they actually are.

What becomes more problematic is that thoughts and ideals are perceived as real to a given person as a car or table. They become our version of reality or life filter. Once this life lens is set, it becomes reinforced over a lifetime—unless you choose to become aware of it and change it.

As we grow into adulthood this programming starts to become rigid and permanent, unless we become aware of it and realize it’s just a construct. Right now, for many people, they are becoming aware of it though because major life challenges often make you question your reality and your programming in turn. This is basically what the pandemic has been doing for a lot of people over the past few years, thus leading to the Great Resignation in the workplace, whereby people are questing for a better way of working.

You are who you are today. You can see yourself by becoming aware of what you react to, what makes you anxious and angry, what are your behaviors and attitudes towards yourself and others, how much personal responsibility you take for your actions, and what level of compassion and empathy you feel for others. 

For example, most of us know that compassion is a good idea. But what happens when you are upset? You may say or do things that you are not proud of, and compassion goes right out the window. It is because compassion is a conscious construct and anger arises automatically from your unconscious brain. It is a million-to-one mismatch. That reaction in the moment is who you are because something in the present connected you to something threatening (or perceived as such) in the past. You are there and not here. It is also who you are.

What’s being described above is a person levelling up their level of consciousnesswhich increases their awareness of themselves and the capacity of their consciousness. In Robert Fritz book The Path of Least Resistance, he describes this shift as one from a reactive to a responsive state of being. For those familiar with Robert Kegan’s work, he would describe it as a shift from a socialized mind to a self-authoring mind.

Richard Barrett’s work further helps us to see how these levels of consciousness are constructs that can be mapped out and how the value of compassion requires quite a high level to fully achieve and truly live as a way of life (rather than just being occasionally compassionate from time to time). A good example of this would be someone like Mother Teresa whose compassion was a way of life.

Your real authentic self

This all sounds challenging but there is a lot of hope once you realize how the complexity and depth of your life programming are playing out today. The key word is “awareness.” Once you are aware of how your past is continually playing out in the present, you can direct your attention to where you want your brain to develop. It continues to change every second—the term is “neuroplasticity.” Awareness creates the “space” you need to redirect your attention. Any amount will allow you to begin your journey into your new life. The sequence is 1) awareness 2) separation 3) reprogramming.

As you learn to take full responsibility for every one of your actions without judgement, you can create any reality you want by consistently making better choices. This new evolving person is still your authentic self. You just don’t have to keep searching for it.

In effect, once you become aware of your past “self” as a programmed ego construct, you are on your quest of discovering your larger True Self that lies hidden deep below it. I’ve described this like a journey to a new world, whereby you begin to discover it “within the in-between moments of the old world.” So while the “search” may be over at this point for your authentic self, as the author notes, the evolution and emergence of this large sense of Self “like a New World emerging from the Ocean of You” can still take the rest of your life to fully understand.

This dude has the dumbest hot take yet about transgender people – LGBTQ Nation

Wait. What?

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/12/dude-dumbest-hot-take-yet-transgender-people/

Can you really become a male or a female if you’re born the other. I don’t believe you can. We’re too different psychologically as well as physiologically. And the psychological is much harder to change.

Dennis Prager, Conservative Writer & Radio host

Yes, psychological changes are obviously much harder to make. But that’s exactly the whole point of understanding transgender people though! Their internal psychologically is different than the norms. So it’s easier for them to transform their physiology than try to change their psychology back to expected norms.

In my opinion, society needs to try to relate to and understand transgender people more because they represent all of us in terms of trying to express a deeper aspect of ourselves that others often cannot comprehend.

For example, I believe there are many people psychologically “levelling up” right now in these challenging times of rapid change, yet they are often afraid to try to express the transformation they are going through because society norms may stigmatize them. So not only is their psychological development hard but stepping beyond societal norms makes it twice as hard.

I previously said that, “I don’t see how I can effectively communicate and continue my work anymore because the depth of it is often misunderstood and paradoxical to conventional minds.” This is just a cop-out because I’m afraid of expressing something beyond the conventional. So it’s not like I can’t do it. It’s more I’m fearful of doing it.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve stopped all of my work and have just been reflecting on things. I’ve done so because I feel like I’ve hit a wall, whereby I don’t see how I can effectively communicate and continue my work anymore because the depth of it is often misunderstood and paradoxical to conventional minds.

Simply put, my work seems counter-intuitive and thus illogical to most people.

The crux of this has to do with the conventional belief that most of the worlds problems are due to people being stupid (i.e. “vast empty minds needing filling”) and they just need to get smarter, obtaining more knowledge. Once they do, everything will be better. The problem with this approach though is that everyone thinks they are smart now and know everything, while everyone else is seen as stupid.

Therefore the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough smart people. The problem is that we don’t have people aware and conscious enough to know if they are smart or not. It reminds me of quote relating to Darwin which articulates how intelligence isn’t the end all and be all.

According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

Leon C. Megginson

There also seems to be this current belief that the world is getting stupider. I disagree. It’s not. If anything, we’re just becoming more aware of how many people are actually ignorant of things that we assumed they understood. Note I said ignorant not stupid. In effect, these people assume and believe they understand the world but are unaware that they don’t.

Why are we becoming aware of this now though? It’s because the world is rapidly changing. Back when things were more stable, everyone fit into their roles and place, with little cause to question things. Yet now that things are rapidly changing, people’s awareness and understanding of the world is being put to the test on almost a daily level, causing them to question everything. And how they answer these questions determines whether they truly understand the meaning of things or not.

And I think therein lies the problem which lies within us, lying to us. How we make our meaning is determined by how we perceive our world (aka worldview), thus relating to our beliefs and assumptions. Therefore, intelligence is not the end all and be all. What is more important than intelligence is our consciousness and awareness of things because it is the context of which our intelligence is contained within.

If acts of intelligence focus broadly on doing, awareness is more about a state of being.

In fact, you could say that awareness is the space inside of which intelligence lives. I mean, how can you be “intelligent” about anything that’s outside of your awareness.

The Precision Principle

What I find remarkable about this is that instead of the typical belief that we need more knowledge to make everyone smarter and everything better, it’s actually the opposite in a way. We actually need to unlearn. And I think this gets to the roots of vertical development. It’s basically about challenging your assumptions and beliefs…before they are challenged by life itself, as they will most definitely be in our rapidly changing world today, as Alvin Toffler notes below.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.

The responsibility for change…lies within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.

Alvin Toffler

Another way of looking at this all is realizing that how we make our meaning and understanding of our world arises from how we perceive and see the relationship between things within it (including ourselves). And how we adapt, or more aptly transform the way we perceive our world and its meaning, is by changing these relationships. When we do so, we transform the meaning of our world and the way we perceive it, in turn.

Kegan explains that transformation is different than learning new information or skills. New information may add to the things a person knows, but transformation changes the way he or she knows things. Transformation, according to Kegan, is about changing the very form of the meaning-making system—making it more complex, more able to deal with multiple demands and uncertainty.

Jennifer Garvey Berger, A Summary of Constructive-Developmental Theory Of Robert Kegan

Why this is relevant is because I remembered a while back stumbling across learning about concept maps which are effectively maps of meaning which show our understanding of knowledge by showing the relationship between concepts and allowing you to narratively describe the meaning of something by following the relationship flows within it.

More importantly, it can also help you to see how you are misunderstanding the meaning of something as well, since you’ve explicitly extracted this meaning from within yourself and mapped the relationships of it, thus allowing you to see and manage it more easily.

All said and done, I think concept maps are something that I need to explore further, as a possible way to get beyond this wall that I’m hitting. In effect, I need a tool that is extremely simple and basic but can be used as a building block to articulate and communicate complex, even paradoxical, ideas. Yet more than anything, I have a funny intuition that it might be more effective in articulating and communicating the basic understanding and meaning of things in our world today that so many people are often misunderstanding.

In a sense, imagine as a traveller ending up lost in a small town and being told that your map is out of date. Getting a new local map, you compare the old and the new, seeing the now evident primary differences between the two. That’s what I feel like I’m looking for. Some simple way to visually show people the difference between their outdated conventional meaning of the world compared to a much larger reality.

Best of all, if I can figure a way to do this, I can use it to continually test my own assumptions and beliefs with my own development as well.

I just realized something else with regards to letting go of control. It’s not just about letting go of controlling others but of yourself as well. In effect, our outward expectations of others are often entwined with our inward expectations of ourselves.

So this “radical openness” that I’m looking for applies not just to others but even more so to myself. That’s because by transforming my perspective of myself, I can in turn transform my perspective of others.

And strangely enough, I have been thinking about this the last few days, as I’ve been reflecting upon my life over the past couple of decades. When I do so, I see two aspects of myself. One aspect is the guy who was active in developing communities online around video games but was intuitively practicing Future of Work principles before I even understood what they were years later. The other aspects is a of guy who now understands many of these Future of Work practices but can’t find the right type of people to put them into practice.

In effect, as I said back around 2015 on Google+, I don’t feel like I’m meant to be helping organizations to transform. Instead I’m realizing I’m supposed to help people transform and they in turn will create new organizations. So kind of a bottom up approach rather than a top down one.

All said and done though, I still feel like I am putting this ingrained expectation upon myself to be something that I’m not which is why I’m still hanging out with people who are focused on organizational transformation.

The key thing that is making me realize I don’t have to “play the same game” as others is Carol Sanford’s foundational story within her book Indirect Work of how Phil Jackson transformed the Chicago Bulls. The emphasis being that he was able to transform the level of consciousness of a bunch of people who were playing a game.In effect, what’s stopping me from doing the same thing within the gaming environments I’ve been playing within most of my life already? In other words, why force myself to change and act in a way that feels alien to me, when I’m obviously more optimally suited for these gaming environments which to me already have an embedded space and mindset for “playing” in the first place.

For example, the other day I joking said on Twitter that maybe I should create tours into games like World of Warcraft to show business people how The Future of Work will work by immersing them in a guild setting and helping them to translate the meaning of what they’re seeing, so that can put these principles into practice in their own businesses. So instead of me going into businesses and meeting people there, I instead invite business people into gaming environments and show them people playing, learning, and working on a higher “level” there.

Actually, I don’t even need to target business people. I can just target gamers who are frustrated with the way that work works in their own lives which is probably why a lot of gamers are gaming more because gaming environments are helping them to meet their psychological needs that they may not be getting in their work environments. So it’s almost like I’m showing gamers how they can start a work (ad)venture with a company of people and emulate an entirely new way of working using practices similar to what they used to using in MMORPGs (which people like John Seely Brown have already proven are innovative).

All said and done, it is something I should explore and play with more as a potential possibility. In other words, I don’t have to follow the forced societal expectations I seem to be automatically putting upon myself. I can instead choose a different path of my own choosing. One that’s more aligned with who I truly am.

In closing, I’m reminded of an awesome paper by Daryl Conner from Conner Partners entitled A Hero’s Journey for the Practitioner (which unfortunately appears to be gone now due them updating their entire web site platform).

Although Campbell’s storyline depicts a single movement from naiveté to wisdom, the same stream of events is replicated repeatedly for those on a mastery path. The heroic emergence from one set of challenges is the entry point for a new level of innocence and pursuit of the next Journey. Mastery calls for taking part in as many of these heroic cycles as is possible, related to a particular domain of knowledge, skill, or beingness. For those of us seeking mastery in the change field, this means repeating the heroic saga as frequently as circumstances and our courage and tenacity will allow.

In closing, I’d like to offer my bias about what is the most important lesson to be learned during these epic periods of professional/personal growth. All the illumination that takes place during these developmental leaps contributes to the wisdom we strive for but, in my view, there is one awareness that stands above all the rest in its creation of value for us and those we serve.

The profound awakening I’m referring to is the same one that unfolded for Sara—at a certain point during the Return phase of her Journey, she could see that all the hard lessons learned during her odyssey weren’t where her hero status proved its real value. Being worthy of the hero’s title isn’t demonstrated through endurance, dedication to a mission, or even slaying dragons, and certainly not by imposing “right solutions” on others. Ultimately, true heroes legitimize themselves, not by anything they do, but by being who they are. They come home from their trials and tribulations simply to live a different life. In doing so, they open the possibility of deeply affecting a relatively few people who, in turn, go on their own Hero’s Journey and return to impact a few more who are ready to learn.

As change professionals, the greatest leverage we have for affecting people is just to be who we are. Methodologies, concepts, and techniques are what we use when “exposing” large numbers to the technical aspects of how change can be orchestrated, but when deep impact within individuals is the agenda, there is nothing that comes close to the influence of a practitioner’s genuine authenticity on a small number of people. For Sara, this meant that the constituency she came back to serve was actually a relatively small number of her contemporaries who were already predisposed to grow in her direction and who naturally resonated with the full expression of who she is.

Daryl Conner, A Hero’s Journey for the Practitioner

Simply put, I think the issue here isn’t that I’ve been communicating over the years, it’s that I’ve been communicating it to the wrong people. I need to find my “tribe”, if you will. So I need to find my “constituency” of “a relatively small number of contemporaries” who are “already predisposed to growth in my direction” and who “naturally resonate with the full expression of who I am” (which sounds remarkable close to Carol Sanford’s description of “essence”).