Category: Vertical Development

Something has shifted within me the last few days that is making me consider doing a complete pivot with regards to how I approach my work and market myself. It arose after reading an extensive article that was written by McKinsey & Company in 2022 that talks about The Great Resignation (aka Great Attrition, Great Renegotiation) and the new talent pools arising from it.

While the paper was an amazing read (because it highlighted how workers are not just quitting jobs but they’re quitting entire industries to move to other ones), what really caught my attention was the latter part of it. It describes how the current workforce talent pool has splintered and becoming more complex by shifting into two primary groups: traditionalists and non-traditionalists. When reading this, I was basically dumbstruck because what it was describing sounded very similar to the difference between Socialized Minds and Self-Authoring Minds as described by Robert Kegan’s work.

For example, while it broke down non-traditionalists into four personas (i.e. Do-It-Yourselfers, Caregivers, Idealists, Relaxers) of different age groups, a common characteristic of these people is that they seem to be all valuing more freedom, autonomy, flexibility, and purpose in their work, not too mention wanting a greater focus on their health and well-being in their career development. In comparison, traditionalists often aren’t willing to strive or bargain for these things because they’re more risk-averse, thus they’re happy with just having a decent salary, good job title, and status at their company.

To understand the shift that’s occurring here in greater detail, it helps to focus on the values that people feel like they need to progress further in their work and development (as noted by this quote from the article below).

To navigate this new playing field successfully, hiring managers can look beyond the current imbalance in labor supply and demand and consider what different segments of workers want and how best to engage them. 

To do this, employers should understand the common themes that reveal what people most value, or most dislike, about a job. For instance, it cannot be overstated just how influential a bad boss can be in causing people to leave. And while in the past an attractive salary could keep people in a job despite a bad boss, that is much less true now than it was before the pandemic. Our survey shows that uncaring and uninspiring leaders are a big part of why people left their jobs, along with a lack of career development. Flexibility, on the other hand, is a top motivator and reason for staying

Why this is important is that it directly correlates with vertical development and how our values change as we “level up” our consciousness and move from one stage of development to another. Richard Barrett has an awesome chart that shows this in greater detail below. Not only does it show the newer positive values one desires as they level up, it also shows the limiting values at lower levels that one is looking to step away from. Note how this corresponds with what people are looking for within organizations right now and what they wish to avoid in companies now (often represented by potentially toxic leaders and culture).

And what’s most remarkable of all is how this chart and its attributes correlate with what I said above about how traditionalists are like Socialized Minds and non-traditionalists are like Self-Authoring Minds. In effect, traditionalists as Socialized Minds would be those who have reached level 3 (recognition, self-esteem) above. In comparison, non-traditionalists as Self-Authoring Minds would be those who have stepped beyond level 3 and are now desiring the values associated with level 4 (freedom, autonomy) and 5 (meaning).

This is why this extensive article seems so profound to me. For the longest time, I’ve been harping that we need to help people to “level up” their consciousness, awareness, and perception, thus enabling us to collectively tackle the more complex issues arising within our world today. But what’s happening here is almost the reverse. The increasing complexities and challenges within the world of work are causes people to seriously question the way that work works and making them desire to “level up” and strive for something better.

To put it another way, I believed my challenge before was trying to make people understand the deeper complexities and paradoxes of vertical development. What if it isn’t? What if my work is simply making people aware of the vertical development that is going on all around them and within their lives already? In doing so, it can help them to see a larger context and framework to life that they can begin to navigate with beyond their current limited frameworks or mindsets that often don’t describe what’s off the unknown, uncertain edge of their worldview and beyond the horizon of their mind.

AI Platforms like ChatGPT Are Easy to Use but Also Potentially Dangerous

Systems like ChatGPT are enormously entertaining and even mind-bogglingly human-sounding, but they are also unreliable and could create an avalanche of misinformation

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-platforms-like-chatgpt-are-easy-to-use-but-also-potentially-dangerous/

As the last example illustrates, they are quite prone to hallucination, to saying things that sound plausible and authoritative but simply aren’t so. 

Because such systems contain literally no mechanisms for checking the truth of what they say, they can easily be automated to generate misinformation at unprecedented scale.

When I started using ChatGPT, I completely missed the fact that it can’t go out and read article links on the web. But when I asked it to summarize article links initially, it actually did so with some accuracy. Once I understood it couldn’t go out and read article links, I realized what it was doing and created a false article link…which it proceeded to summarize because it was using the keywords in the link itself to imagine what the article was about.

BTW I only realized that it couldn’t go out and read articles on the Web, when I asked it to provide three of the best articles on vertical development. What it provided was three article names and links with notable authors in the vertical development field for each. When I clicked on them, they went to the appropriate site (i.e Harvard Business Review) but no such article could be found. It was then I realized that not only was it making the article and links up, it was making up the fact that it was reading the links I had asked it to read earlier.

These bots cost almost nothing to operate, and so reduce the cost of generating disinformation to zero.

Nation-states and other bad actors that deliberately produce propaganda are unlikely to voluntarily put down these new arms. Instead, they are likely to use large language models as a new class of automatic weapons in their war on truth, attacking social media and crafting fake websites at a volume we have never seen before. For them, the hallucinations and occasional unreliability of large language models are not an obstacle, but a virtue.

While I’m enjoying using ChatGPT myself, there’s something evident about it when you use it. If you don’t understand and comprehend the deeper meaning of what you’re asking from it, all you’re doing is highlighting your ignorance rather than hiding it. To use it critically, you need to comprehend what it’s communicating, so that you can alter the prompt parameters more effectively and thus get it to communicate more clearly and accurately.

For example, imagine people relying upon it so much in the future for their work that they begin to fear talking to other real people about their work because it will quickly become apparent to others that they don’t understand the deeper meaning of their work.

I think this is part of the problem of the world we live in right now, which is why tools like ChatGPT are kind of exacerbating the misinformation issue. Most of us don’t understand things because we misperceive the meaning of things. But we like to bolster our ego and portray ourselves as knowledgeable “experts” on the subject matter, having perhaps read a snippet from an article or two on the subject, because it helps meet our base psychological needs.

So no one wants to be ignorant but most of us are in one way or another. Until we can get over this hump and let go of this facade, we won’t be able to truly collaborate on the serious issues before us and make any serious headway. In effect, we can’t learn and grow, if we don’t accept that we don’t understand something and begin to question it to better learn about it.

So this is so much more than just about people perhaps misperceiving knowledge, this is about people misperceiving information which they use to live and navigate their daily lives. And what’s scary about this is that people in power are aware of this and using it to their advantage.

All of this raises a critical question: what can society do about this new threat?Where the technology itself can no longer be stopped, I see four paths. None are easy, nor exclusive, but all are urgent.

Fourth, we are going to need to build a new kind of AI to fight what has been unleashed. Large language models are great at generating misinformation, because they know what language sounds like but have no direct grasp on reality—and they are poor at fighting misinformation. That means we need new tools. Large language models lack mechanisms for verifying truth, because they have no way to reason, or to validate what they do. We need to find new ways to integrate them with the tools of classical AI, such as databases, and webs of knowledge and reasoning.

The ending of this article completely misses the bigger picture here though. It’s not about coding new AI to help us fight other AI, thus making us reliant and dependent upon it.

What we need to do is recode ourselves. We need to level up our consciousness, helping us to become more self-aware and more capable of dealing with complex issues. This is why helping people with their personal development using vertical development is to me the number one way to do this. It actually transforms and upgrades their perceptual interface of reality and helps them to see past their previous misperceptions as the illusions that they are, helping them to navigate the ever increasing complexities of life today in a whole new way.

Neuroscientist: Consciousness didn’t evolve. It creates evolution

Cognitive scientist Hoffman starts by trying to align his consciousness theory with standard evolution theory and then just chucks that and says what he thinks.

https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/neuroscientist-consciousness-didnt-evolve-it-creates-evolution/

How could it possibly be that true perceptions could guide useful behavior? And fortunately we have a nice metaphor with the advent of computers and laptops and user interfaces that I think can help us to see what’s going on here.

The whole point of the desktop interface is to hide the truth and to guide your behavior.

So what you want is an interface that hides the complexity that you don’t need to know so that you can do the things you need to do… It’s not lying to you; it’s actually helping you. But it’s helping you by hiding the truth.

So evolution has done the same thing for us. It has given us perceptions that are like a user interface…

So I’ve used Evolutionary Game Theory to conclude that everything that we see around us in our perceptions is not veridical; it’s just a user interface, okay. And that means I have to go back and rethink what do.

Consciousness didn’t emerge from a prior physical process of evolution. Consciousness is fundamental and so we have to rethink the whole history of the universe actually from this point of view, from The Big Bang up through evolution. We have to rethink it in terms of how to rewrite that story, consistent with all of our current science but understanding that it’s … consciousness is fundamental, not the physical universe (7:23)

And, you know, one thing that comes out of this as well is, no one has been able to give a reason for why consciousness would evolve. What is it for? And so my attitude is, it didn’t evolve. It’s the ground from which evolution occurs.

When I find articles like this, I get this immense feeling of elation because it verifies what my intuition has been trying to tell me over the past decade or more. That being that the evolution and transformation of our perception through vertical development isn’t just like a computer getting a new operating system / user interface but it’s more like a video game whereby when you level up your level of consciousness, your perceptual user interface improves in turn. And just as quoted above, this newer perceptual user interface empowers you and gives you the capacity to work with and understand complexity at a greater level.

This is the meaning behind my description of myself as “playing at a whole new level” right now in my life. In effect, when you level up your level of consciousness to a new stage of psychological development, you’re effecting playing within a whole new game and perceiving reality in a whole new way.

So no, consciousness doesn’t evolve, as noted above, but rather consciousness is what allows us to evolve in turn, gaining a greater understanding and clarity of it as we level up in life.

My quote above was written from the perspective of how to overcome the current issues within an MMO game I had previously been playing, as the developers of the game weren’t meeting the needs of the players within it.

What’s remarkable about these words though is that they also perfectly describe what happens when we undergo vertical development in life. The game you’re playing is your current mindset and worldview. The new “game” that you create within the old game is a new mindset and worldview, one that broadens your perception and space of possibilities.

And in a similar fashion, the reason for the leap between the two is often necessitated by your current needs not being met by the existing game due to the way it was created.

It’s funny. My last post has made me realize that I’m effectively being a gamemasterand world builder in trying to encapsulate my work within a narrative package that someone can understand and make sense of in turn. But the essential trick to it is laying a solid, believable foundation that I can then build off of and scaffold other aspects of this bigger picture upon it.

In a nutshell, this bigger picture is about “how play creatively leads us to our authentic selves” which embodies my Be Real Creative mantra and how I see The Future of Work as “being nobody-but-yourself.”

But to understand what this actually means on a visionary scale, you have to understand the practical psychological aspects of how we don’t see reality directly but instead are perceiving it as a constructed mental map that helps us navigate our lives. This is the essential foundation I’m talking about. If you can’t make sense of it then everything else that is scaffolded on top of it won’t make sense either. So you have to start with the foundation and work your way upwards.

In a sense, a lot of this is like wayfinding. But instead of exploring and navigating the world around us, we’re exploring a whole new world within us which in turn transforms the way we perceive our world around us.

Oh my god! This is a hilarious! I just remembered a realization I had some time ago that relates to my last post about how thinking we know everything often blinds us from growth and development.

My greatest fear in stepping forward into my life’s work, and truly owning it and accepting it, is not knowing everything and thus being unable to provide “all the answers” that people may need relating to my work.

To put this another way, my very mindset and perception of what I need to be “successful” is a wrong perception of reality that’s actually impeding me from my own growth and causing me to suffer in my life, because I feel like I’m stuck in place.

Therefore to step forward and out of the way of myself (my ego), what I need to do is not avoid this but actually embrace it and leverage it as something that can help me going forward in my work. Why this is hilarious is because it actually describes the traits of leaders at the highest plateau of adult development, as pictured below, whereby leaders with Self-Transforming Minds are “leading to learn.”

In effect, leaders with Self-Transforming Minds don’t have all the right answers. They are instead the ones asking all the right questions.

This is pretty much why I’ve been unable to step into this plateau and realm of perceiving because my outdated mindset and perception is preventing me from understanding how it works differently as a whole, even though I’ve mapped and seemingly understood pieces of this terrain over the last decade or so.

Simply put, for me to truly step into this space, I actually need to live and embody the values of it in my very work. In doing so, only then will I be able to step beyond all of my “monstrous” fears and effectively “slay” them (as per Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey). Effectively as a whole, this means meeting my base needs of 1) economically surviving by doing my own unique work, 2) truly accepting the belongingof my core Self (as per Brene Brown’s True Belonging), and 3) finally satisfying my need for respect and recognition by truly doing something of deep value to others.

While I’ve been aware of these base needs for a while, I just couldn’t figure out the correct context and intention for my work to try to “package” it as a whole…because I’ve been trying to contain it within an outdated approach which never seems to eloquently fit these newer concepts, ideas, and methods. This newer, broader perspective may finally provide me with a larger space of possibilities to contain everything I’ve wanted, in a way that may finally make sense on so many levels.

I just realized something today that relates to what Carol Sanford said about trying to share the understanding of her work to other people in her book Indirect Work.

The number one thing impeding people from their own growth and development is their assumption that they know everything already (which is why they often listen to just affirm their own beliefs).

This in turn relates to a question I had a very long time ago about trying to help people in corporate environments but without much success. “How can you help someone who doesn’t want your help?”

The reason you can’t help them and they don’t want your help is because they think they know everything and have it all figured out already. In other words, they don’t realize that their own belief that they have everything figured out is in itself a misperception that is causing them suffering.

It’s only when someone goes through that repeated suffering and finally realizes they haven’t got everything figured out and actually asks for help…or at the very least steps back from their beliefs and begin to question them…that they can begin to grow and develop again.

That said though, I think our world is going to go through a whole lot more suffering before people begin to wake up and realize that they’re belief that they have everything figured out is the main reason why their world(view) is collapsing in the first place.

The one thing everybody wants and how to win the game we play to get it

Want to win the status game? Try being these three things.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90818529/status-brain-science

Life is a game. There’s no way to understand the human world without first understanding this. Everyone alive is playing a game whose hidden rules are built into us and that silently directs our thoughts, beliefs and actions. This game is inside us. It is us. We can’t help but play.

We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. Life is not a journey towards a perfect destination. It’s a game that never ends. And it’s the very worst of us.

This fits quite closely in with my last post about finding deeper meaning in life beyond our base needs, with “status” (aka recognition, self-esteem) being our highest base need that we value (as shown in Level 3 of the chart below) but with which it can have limiting values associated with it (i.e. arrogance, pride, superiority) that can bring out the “worst of us” as well.

But we need to realize that what’s gotten us here, may not get us to where we want to be in the future. That’s because each “level” of the game is like a whole new game in a whole new reality, kind of like a psychological multiverse.

So gaining “status” will only get you so far. You’ve got to go much further if you really want to understand the deeper game and the deeper treasure at the core of it.

It’s not about “winning” or “losing.” It’s about going beyond zero-sum games and seeing the bigger picture, the bigger arc to life, within the infinite game.

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.