Stumbled across this talk on TV today, only to go online and find out it’s from a couple of months ago but a great round table discussion nevertheless on the current upheaval affecting the work world.
One thing I felt while watching this was flashbacks of pain and frustration from previous work experiences. I’ve mentioned before that due to my highly sensitive personality, I’m kind of like a canary in a coal mine, thus I’m able to detect and empathetically feel the cultural atmosphere of the organizational environment based on its people. But trying to talk to management and get them to understand the feeling of the needs of their people can be an exhausting affair.
We can’t even get to the table to talk to people.
Of particular note was one employer in the restaurant industry saying it’s even difficult to try to start a conversation with potential employees because many don’t show up for interviews and others even quit and disappear without giving notice as to why.
And as soon as I heard this and another employer complaining about potential employees ghosting them without notice, it’s evident to me that this is effectively decades of horrible business practices by employers that are effectively coming back and haunting them. In effect, employees are only mirroring the hiring practices of most business in that they often don’t respond, indicating if you’ve gotten a job or not, or even if why.
And it’s only the beginning, once you’re hired. Trying repeatedly for days, months, or years to talk to management to get them to see and understand issues is exhausting. Employees have had enough. They’re exhausted trying to talk to someone who won’t listen and won’t try to understand their perspective.
Why this is poignant is because over the Christmas holidays, I spent time with my wife’s family and a discussion came up about the labour issues in Canada and the feeling for some was that people are “lazy and don’t want to work anymore.” I immediately turned around and disagreed with this.
I indicated that work is one of the primary ways people feel a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and of being valued by others. People want to work. They’re just exhausted working the old way and have had enough of it because work is no longer working for them.
And this is most evident by the one employer indicating how her remaining employees are being overloaded because she can’t find and hire people, as if she has no choice but to overload them with work. As usual, employees always become the ones who have to stretch and fill the gap. The only problem today is that you can’t fill these gaps anymore because they’re too bottomless and can’t be hidden.
All said and done, I find the situation somewhat ironic in that here we have employers now finally in distress and knowing what employees have felt like for decades in trying to talk but no one was interested in truly listening to them.
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.”
Robert Kegan’s Three Plateaus of Adult Mental Development
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.
This discrepancy in evolutionary development between the individual and the cultures the person is embedded in, is one of the reasons people decide to leave the corporate world. As they get further along in their evolutionary journey, they reach a stage in their development where they no longer feel aligned with the values and beliefs of the organisation they are working in. They become gradually more stressed and begin to feel burned out, either because their needs —the opportunities they require to move ahead with their development—cannot be met by the culture they are working in, or because they no longer feel a sense of alignment with the values of the organisation.
Many people put up with such situations for far too long. Because of their loyalty to the organisation or their commitment to their work, they stay longer than they should. They justify their actions by entertaining the dream that somehow the culture will magically change. Others stay because they believe they will not be able to make the same level of income or get the benefits they now enjoy, elsewhere.
They lock themselves into a cultural environment where they feel they have to park their values in the car park every time they enter their place of work. Spending long periods in such a state of misalignment sickens the soul. Eventually, most people get to the point where they cannot stand it anymore. They feel so unhappy that they look for alternative employment, perhaps accepting a lower-paying job, one with fewer benefits, or part-time employment. They will be willing to go anywhere, to get away from the toxic environment of their current place of work. The more talented and courageous among them will start their own businesses.
I think it’s kind of curious to now see that how in this world do you do things that are equally crazy and how do you have the courage to believe in your imagination for things right off the bat mathematically seem incoherent.
John Seely Brown
Found this amazing quote by John Seely Brown in a speech he did, that I watched online back in January 2020. This is pretty much how I feel about my work right now. It probably seems completely crazy to most people on the surface but if you start going below the surface of it, you start seeing how it psychologically connects to everything, relating very poignantly to the world we’re living within now and The Future of Work we want to step into.
For me, this embodies creatively playing with the very perception of your reality, your worldview, which is why I call it “playing on a whole new level” because it requires stepping into a whole new psychological terrain of being human that “levels up” your level of consciousness in turn, making what was previously impossible seem possible.
Pushing beyond the limits you’ve set for yourself, or others have set on you, is called edgework. Here’s how to “play the edge” in the name of growth and thriving.
In the natural world, the edge is where the action is. The zone between two ecosystemswater and land, or field and forest—is where the greatest diversity and productivity are found, as well as the most predation. This is fitting, as the Greek word for this region, an ecotone, means tension. But it’s characterized by a fertility that biologists call the edge effect.
In human affairs, the ecotone between the life you have and the life you want, between your status quo and your potential, is equally fruitful if not fitful, full of passion and suffering, productivity and predation. The exercise of pushing beyond your assumed limits into this zone of intensity and virility, in search of fulfillment and new possibilities, is rightfully referred to by sociologists as edgework.
It’s a kind of personal anarchy, an affirmative revolt against your own stuckness,as well as the entrapments and over-determined nature of everyday life (they don’t call it the “beaten” path for nothing). It’s not loss of control, though, but an acute sort of self-control, says Jeff Ferrell, author of Making Trouble. It’s self-control in place of control by others, whether church and state or job and gender, and it’s based on the understanding that if you don’t control yourself, somebody else will.
“It’s self-control for the sake of self-determination,” Ferrell says. “Self-control in the interest of holding on to your life while letting go of it. Self-control that gets you hooked on the autonomy of self-invention. It’s a defiant disavowal of secondhand living. It’s the refusal to live in a cage and have food thrown in.”
In fact, the primary evolutionary advantage of these behaviors comes down to exploration. Some members of any tribe, especially in new environments, have to investigate what’s dangerous and what’s not, and test the limits so that others will know what they are and either avoid them or exercise caution in approaching them. The explorer and aviator Charles Lindbergh rightly asked, “What civilization was not founded on adventure? Our earliest records tell of biting the apple and baiting the dragon, regardless of hardship or danger, and from this, perhaps, progress and civilization developed.”
Thus the importance of supporting the dragon-baiters, both in society and in ourselves. Of keeping alive the role of edgewalker, outlier, provocateur, and imagineer, the one who stands outside the shop window looking in and questioning; who lives in the liminal zone between civilized and wild, conformity and rebellion; who dives beneath the surface of life to its depths.
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that “civilized” society is defined by having five qualities: beauty, truth, art, peace and adventure, and that it preserves its vitality only as long as “it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.” And the same goes for its civilians.
I mentioned before that I had imported my older archives recently, going all the way back to 2005, and there were a lot of importing issues within them that I realized I had to correct. Today I spent part of the day doing that, cleaning up older posts, but I have a lot to do still.
What was amazing about scrolling through and reading my older posts though was that it helped me to reflect on who I am and what I’ve doing in a larger sense.
It was a weird feeling doing so. It was almost like stepping back outside of yourself to actually see your Self. There was this sense of clarity that I haven’t experienced for some time.
More than anything though, what it made me realize was that my issue isn’t articulating myself. It’s accepting myself.
I remember something Dave Gray said in his book Liminal Thinking about the need to suspend disbelief when trying to learn something new. I think this principle applies as well when trying to be something new, a larger sense of Self.
In effect, I think for the longest time, perhaps even a decade or maybe even more, I’ve been disbelieving who I am and where I’ve been going, even though I have a journal of my journey on this site as a record of my travels, experiences, and knowledge that I’ve acquired.
Reflecting back on my journey through my journal here today changed all that though. It helped me to believe and accept who I am…even if for a brief moment.
Perhaps I need to do this reflection more so, just to consistently provide a solid footing in remembering who I am and how far I have come on my journey.
Interesting, that almost sounds like having a sense of gratitude for everything I’ve experienced so far which has got me here.
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.
Levels of Consciousness, Barrett Academy for the Advancement of Human Values
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.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been increasingly feeling detached from certain things to the point that they feel meaningless or irrelevant to my life, whereas before they may have provided a lot of joy to it. At first I was concerned why I was feeling this way but recently I’ve come to the realization that this is a natural part of the process of my ongoing transformation and transition to a larger sense of Self.
The best way I can describe this is something Beau Lotto said within his book Deviate.
…if you want to go from A to B, then you must actively engage with the world. But the first step to get to B is to go from A to not-A. To be in not-A is to be in uncertainty, to experience the stimulus without the requisite meaning of the past. The key is to choose to look away from the meanings we have been layering onto stimuli. Stop your reflexive response with awareness… as one can do when one is able to see the cause of a reflex.
Beau Lotto
Basically this detachment I’m feeling is the process of me going from “A to not A.” It’s me stepping away from things in my life because they aren’t provide any substantial meaning to it like they used to (kind of like how people are stepping away from the old concept of “work” today, as it’s not providing the meaning it used to provide). But what’s strange is that instead of “looking way from the meanings,” I’m actually 1) seeing them for what they are, 2) seeing how they helped me in the past, but 3) realizing that they are no longer enough for me to move forward on my journey.
Two examples of this are movies and video games.
I used to love watching movies voraciously. Today though, I’m finding the more I look for something to watch, the more I’m seeing patterns that are old and outdated, rather than new and wondrous. Lately, it’s almost as though there is this resurgence of shoot ’em up type movies, where the lone good hero goes about killing all of the bad guys.
I also used to love playing video games. In fact, video games and their communities were integral to my development and growth as a young adult, helping me to step out of my introverted shell and really take a leadership role with things I cared about. Today though, I’m finding video game environments almost like microcosms of what’s happen in the world today. It’s like there is the same attitude in these video game communities as in these movies, everyone thinks they’re righteously the “good guys” and everyone else is the bad guys that need to be removed or controlled to make “everything better.”
As I noted above, what’s happening with movies and video games is that I’m seeing the underlying meaning of why they are so popular with people but also why they are meaningless to me now because I want to go beyond these meanings and find something deeper. To visualize what I’m talking about here, Richard Barrett has a great chart showing the various levels of consciousness and the values associated with them.
Levels of Consciousness, Barrett Academy for the Advancement of Human Values
If you look at the base three levels of consciousness (1 Survival, 2 Relationships, 3 Self-Esteem), you’re looking at what Robert Kegan describes as the Socialized Mind which encompasses our basic psychological needs and core “positive” values for life, like survival, belonging, and recognition. They help us to “fit in” within society, especially when we’re young and growing up.
Note also, however, that accompanying these “positive values” are “limiting values” as well, like control, blame, and superiority. Why these are limiting values is because they can limit our further growth and development to higher levels of consciousness by addictively trapping us at lower levels of consciousness. To put this another way, it creates a situation where you feel like you (as your ego) are standing in your own way.
A guild raid group tackling a “wicked problem” in World of Warcraft.
A way I like looking at these is seeing life as a roleplaying game and these are “monsters” standing in our way. More specifically, they relate to our monstrous fears. And to further “level up” in life and reach more evolved levels of consciousness, we need to overcome and psychologically “slay” these monstrous fears before we can do so.
What I’ve learnt with regards to my own life though is that you will feel like you have slain these monstrous fears and will have levelled up but then later in your life, these fears will revisit you at a much deeper level than you imagined. Thus you realize that the monstrous fears you felt like you had slain were just the minions of a much larger boss monster that is monumentally harder to overcome. So you have to revisit these monstrous fears and overcome them once and for all or say stuck at the level you’re at.
What I see happening with society as a whole right now is that our base psychological fears and limiting values are keeping us within a vicious addictive loop that we can’t get out of. It’s like we’re drowning but we can’t see what we’re drowning within. What’s even worse though is that people have been becoming aware of these psychological fears and addictions and have started using them for their own benefit, such as politically and economically, increasingly over the past decades.
While I won’t go into political examples, because I think they’re pretty evident, I’d like to show one example of how businesses and even an entire industry is using these fears and addictions for economic gain. I’m talking about the video game industry, as shown in this video below which explains how to psychologically manipulate your gaming customers for your financial benefit. Note that this approach is pretty dominant now in the video game industry, particularly within Free-To-Play games, as this video is from 2016.
Let’s Go Whaling: Tricks for Monetizing Mobile Game Players with Free-To-Play
Remember I said that most people are oblivious to what they’re drowning within? Well that’s what it feels like playing within these video games where these developers are using these techniques to psychologically manipulate their customers as players within it. From my vantage point, I basically can see all of these people around me, particularly males, being manipulated by these very same base limiting values (i.e. control, jealously, revenge, arrogance, pride, superiority) as I mentioned above.
For example, developers of a game will often market new features and items within the game as something that will help you “dominate” your opponents, thus playing into the need to be “superior” and have “control” over others, even if it means having to pay a fortune to do so. So some players in the latest Diablo Immortal mobile free-to-play game were paying over $10,000 to be able to dominate other players.
It’s no different with movies though. These lone good guy hero shoot ’em up movies are feeding off these same fears and limiting values.
Yet this isn’t how you deal with reality in real life. You can’t punch or kill your way out of life’s problems, especially wicked problems like climate change which are systemic in nature and are effectively being created by own ignorant behaviours and beliefs. In effect, as I noted above, we are own own worst enemy standing in our own way.
Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.
Antonio Guterres
It’s funny. There’s a common quote that a lot of gamers often use when they treat someone else rudely or discriminatorily within video games. They will often say, “it’s just a game”, as though the focal point of what they’re doing not “being real” means they can treat other people however they want. I’ve said to them though that while the game may not be real, the people playing it are very real though and should be treated with some human decency.
Lately though, I’ve realized that this “it’s just a game” quote has taken on a deeper meaning for me. I’ve realized that life is effectively a very deep psychological game of many “levels” of consciousness and most people are completely oblivious and unaware that they are playing it. In effect, gamers are often psychologically playing “a game within a game” when they interact with other players within video games. It’s just that they’re not aware of it.
That’s why I think I have this detachment with so many things I used to have a strong attachment to, like playing video games. They seem frivolous and meaningless now because I’m seeing the larger roleplaying game called Life at a deeper level now and I want to “play a different game,” even showing others how to play it as well or at least work on learning from each other within it.
What if Artificial intelligence could accelerate self-knowledge?
How interacting with artificial intelligence will boost your own self-awareness and teach you how to become a better learner Published on Medium and Hubfluence.com first It is still a common belief that machines will eventually know more about humans than we ever will, as they are able to absorb and
So, next time we ask ourselves how artificial intelligence could augment humans, perhaps another response may be, by making us more human. Artificial intelligence can help us understand ourselves better and faster.
There’s been a ton of chatter recently about Artificial Intelligence but I think most of the discussion is completely missing the point of its true potential. That being helping us to understand ourselves at a deeper level by learning about us and expressing who we truly are.
For example, I’m completely perplexed why someone hasn’t create an AI for this already, that harvests the decades of content you’ve written on your blog and then articulates who you are in a clear and concise way.
More than anything, we all want to be truly seen and understood. What if AI could achieve this by seeing the patterns within our own lives and understanding the meaningful relationships arising from them? This could create a completely new way to articulate yourself beyond the outdated and severely limited resume.
