Nollind Whachell

There’s something I’ve been reflecting upon the last day or so and I’m trying to makes sense of it. It relates to patterns I’ve experienced in the past of having major breakthroughs but then also stretches of drought, where I feel completely detached from my work.

The keyword that keeps appearing relating to this is immersion.

In effect, within vertical development, to level up one needs to step outside of the worldview they are immersed with, so that they can understand its hold upon them and how it can limit them. I’ve describe this as turning around and stepping back from your life (and perhaps up out of it), so as to be able to reflect upon it and your sense of self from an objective distance.

But to level up, one needs to explore, navigate, and storylive a new worldview, of which the final act is to fully immerse oneself within it and thus live and embody it.

If you think about Dave Gray’s work within Liminal Thinking, including his illustrations relating to our “bubbles of beliefs”, it’s almost the exact opposite of what he’s showing. In effect, he shows a person standing on a tiered pedestal with a bubble of belief encompassing them at the top of the pedestal. To transform themselves, the person steps out of the bubble and down the tiered pedestal into the unknown. But eventually they step back up another tiered pedestal, perhaps with a broader worldview as a larger bubble of belief.

What I’m saying here though is that your worldview is paradoxically like the water you’re swimming within. It’s like the water that’s around you, like the water in a goldfish bowl which represents your bubble of belief. And similar to water in a container, it creates a lens which distorts one’s perspective of the world, just like our bubbles of belief do.

And transforming oneself and one’s worldview is like stepping up out of one container of belief and stepping into another (via a series of tiered steps). It’s a completely disorientating experience that seems completely unnatural, even though it’s a natural process of change and growth itself.

But getting back to the focus of this post though. Why I think I’m experiencing obstacles in my work and development is that I’m not fully immersing myself within it on a daily basis to fully complete the process of my transition and transformation. What I mean by fully immersing myself is filling my mind with work that has a deep emotional connection to me, thus sparking this bigger picture of it which I can then fully step into.

For some reason, this reminds me of something I read about creative work, perhaps from The Marginalian, whereby highly creative people don’t wait for inspiration, they create it. In effect, they create and cultivate an environment that emotionally stimulates them and creates a creative work flow for their work.

Whoa, wait a minute. While this relates to creating a conducive, physical work space at home, this also touches upon my digital workspace online. In effect, this is perhaps what I’ve been struggling to try to create with my work. That being a digital space as a website that I can return to daily that will help me to quickly immerse myself not just within my work but within the worldview it’s trying to create as well.

I was reflecting on the people within Dave Gray’s School of the Possible and how it reminded me of something Deborah Frieze said in her TED Talk on how change happens within a living system and how there are different roles to be fulfilled in this process (i.e. illuminator, hospice workers, protectors).

But what I just realized as well is that you can actually have multiple people working in the same role, yet they can be achieving it differently from others, as they’re approaching the role from their own disciplinary perspective as well. For example, you could have one person who helps people transition using creativity and another person helping people making the transition using the Hero’s Journey. But both of these people are doing the same thing because the Hero’s Journey embodies the creative process itself (the transitioning between different stages of development and levels of consciousness).

Yet what I realized here, based upon my vertical development knowledge, is that there are different levels of transition going on here as well, as everyone needs to level up where they are at. In effect, employees before would follow and do what they’re told by leaders but now they need to level up to effectively take leadership over their own lives and manage themselves, become a new type of follower. And leaders as well need to level up and become a new type of leader, something paradoxically different from a conventional leader.

What I’m getting at with all of this though is that it’s making me realize there are a myriad of roles to be filled in this web of change that people can fulfill. So just like Deborah said in terms of asking yourself which role are you fulfilling, it also asking yourself at well level are you assisting people make the change as well.

For myself though, it’s evident that my life’s work is not focused in just working in one specific role but instead showing people the web of roles available at different levels in the larger process overall.

So I’ve got in my mind what I want my initial website to be for my life’s work and I’m in the process of creating it.

I effectively want it to be something like The Marginalian whereby it focuses on using quotes by notably authors and explains the deeper meaning of what those quotes mean (which effectively relates to vertical development as well).

However instead of creating posts to show the relationship and meaning of similar quotes of meaning by different authors, each post will be a separate quote by a separate author with a category keyword attached to it. Then when the user clicks on the category keyword, it will list all the related quotes to that keyword and explain the deeper meaning of it at the beginning of the category list.

An example of what this would look like is what is done within the book Zen Soup by Laurence G Boldt.

The idea again is to create something that lets me post smaller bite sized posts, yet they cluster and aggregate a deeper meaning over time that I can then build upon later, perhaps create a page from those posts that aggregates the deeper meaning of them as a whole (i.e, Levels = Levels of Consciousness).

Then later, I would take these pages and then show how the meaning of their keywords relate to one another, forming a larger narrative overall.

The last 24 hours have been a kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings, and newer pressures placed upon my life that have made me realize that I need to start effectively making my work a real reality that I can actually economically sustain myself with or I’m going to have to put it on the back burner and seek full time conventional work to help make ends meet but which means it will dramatically reduce the time for my life’s work.

With this in mind, I’ve giving myself until the end of October to actually begin embodying the knowledge I’m creating and if I’m unable to do this, then I’m going to give myself November and December to find conventional work, even if it means taking something menial to do so (which I’ve actually enjoyed in the past because the physicality of the work keeps me in shape).

To get started in embodying my own knowledge that I’ve been creating though, I see two primary areas, potentially even three, that I can add to my website.

Quests

Quests for a new explorer often initially revolve around questioning the assumptions and beliefs of their conventional worldview. As a somewhat veteran explorer though, I’ve gone beyond that and I’m quest(ion)ing what is required for this new worldview, based upon what I’m understanding and making sense of it. So I’ve explored this new world(view) and made sense of it (mapping its edges) but now I’m navigating a way to make it a reality now (so that I can actually step into it).

So you could think of these quests like Richard Feynman’s 12 favourite problems as questions you continually keep in the back of your mind. More on why this is important below.

Character Sheet / Levels

A Character Sheet is effectively my name for something that goes beyond a resume. It is something more complex that communicates a person in a deeper and broader way.

One of the number one ways I’ve seen to do this is by communicating the “level” the person is at. This is achieved using the values related to the level of consciousness the person is at, as it relates to values-based leadership within the context of vertical development.

For example, in terms of myself, I realize I’m nearing completion of one level, where I’m striving to attain an internal sense of cohesion with myself by fully communicating my passion and purpose in a meaningful, creative, and authentic way that truly embodies who I am. Yet at the same time, I’m beginning a new stage of development which will help me to level up and begin to make a difference in helping others than just myself, thus beginning to partner, alliance, and mentor with others.

BTW the reason why this is so important and why it goes beyond a resume is that most job-based work often doesn’t include the cultural environment that the work is contextually immersed within. In other words, it doesn’t take into account the culture and values of the leadership that defines the environment of that company which is often the very thing that makes or breaks a work experience within a company. In other words, a person may love their work but actually hate the environment it’s within.

So by defining the level of consciousness a person is at, you’re effectively not only defining the similar values they are seeking but often the similar questions they are undertaking as well. By doing so, these questions become like quests that bring a “company“ of people together, all adventuring in the same direction and seeking the same things of value that they treasure.

Heroic Company / Adventurers

And the most amazing thing of all is that all of these explorers as adventurers don’t even need to be collaborating synchronously, as they are often working asynchronously without even realizing it.

For example, a lot of my own life’s work is built upon other people’s work who helped me to articulate in words what I was intuitively seeing but often couldn’t put into words. So I see all of these people as other adventurers that I am in heroic company with, even though I haven’t directly worked or even chatted with most of them. So creating a list of these adventurers that I’m in heroic company with is something I’d like to do (perhaps highlighting how their work resonates with mine as well).

And I don’t use that word “heroic” lightly because many of these people have overcome their own fears ( just as I am struggling to do so) and in doing so, they have levelled up in their own lives and are showing us a way forward into a new world(view), just as I am striving to do.

To be clear, this isn’t about learning in the form of sharing existing new knowledge; it’s about learning in the form of creating new knowledge. Every context is unique and every context is evolving at an accelerating pace. To truly understand our contexts, we need to pull ourselves out of the classroom and immerse ourselves in the context, take action based on growing understanding of the context, and then learn even more as we reflect on the impact that we’ve achieved.

John Hagel, Navigating From the Industrial Age to the Contextual Age