Ayishat Akanbi is probably the first hypersane person I’ve ever come across, recommended by Scott Barry Kaufman to follow. Her sense of self-awareness is so broad that she can articulate complex things quite simply. Yet what she’s saying will be very hard for people to swallow because it requires taking an emotional and mental U-turn on what we believe, so that we can build upon and live what we say we truly value. To do this, one really needs to go beyond one’s sense of self, letting it disintegrate, so that a newer larger sense of Self can reintegrate and be born. Painful, yes…but with a beautiful truth.
I don’t see a lot as exceedingly complex. Many things are fairly simple, but the trouble is that simple isn’t easy.
If you think black, and brown people don’t feel silenced, alienated, and threatened by the mainstream narrative that turns our everyday interactions into a game of power, you might be unaware of the variety of thought that exists in people who look just like you.
We should revel in the discomfort of the current moment to generate a ‘new paradigm’, not a ‘new normal’. Feeling unsettled, destabilized and alone can help us empathize with individuals who have faced systematic exclusions long-ignored by society even before the rise of COVID-19 — thus stimulating urgent action to improve their condition. For these communities, things have never been ‘normal’.
The phrase, “new normal,” erroneously implies that the pre-Covid world was normal when, in fact, it was profoundly disbalanced, destructive, and devastating for many. We had normalized an unnatural and aberrant world order where 26 individuals across the globe owned more wealth than the bottom 50%, where it was ok to acidify oceans, clear-cut forests, mine the mountains, and exterminate life as long as the GDP grew. None of this can be defined as normal by any stretch of the imagination.
Transition is the inner psychological process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the new situation that the change brings about. Empathetic leaders recognize that change can put people in crisis. The starting point for dealing with transition is not the outcome but the endings that people have in leaving the old situation behind.
Change will only be successful if leaders and organizations address the transition that people experience during change. Supporting people through transition, rather than pushing forward is essential if the change is to work as planned. This is key to capitalizing on opportunities for innovation and creating organizational resilience.
An enormous vacuum in leadership exists today—in business, politics, government, education, religion, and nonprofit organisations. Yet there is no shortage of people with the capacity for leadership. The problem is we have a wrongheaded notion of what constitutes a leader, driven by an obsession with leaders at the top.
That misguided stand often results in the wrong people attaining critical leadership roles. When problems surfaced at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, and dozens of other companies, the severity of the leadership crisis became painfully apparent, creating a widespread erosion of trust in business leaders.
Over the past fifty years, leadership scholars have conducted more than a thousand studies in the attempt to determine the definitive leadership styles, characteristics, or personality traits of great leaders. None of these studies has produced a clear profile of the ideal leader. Thank goodness. If scholars had produced a cookie-cutter leadership style, people would be forever trying to emulate it.
The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not an imitation … You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else … Leaders are defined by their unique life stories and the way they frame their stories to discover their passions and the purpose of their leadership.
Our current world of work often becomes increasing more complex and confusing because of the limitations of our current beliefs. When we learn to let go of these outdated beliefs and step beyond them, we’re able to shift our entire perspective of what’s possible in the process.
Additionally, we need to move away from an educational system that trains people to do only one thing in only one place. By doing so we create path dependencies that increase individual fragility. Specialization is beneficial in predictable, low-volatility environments, but in uncertain, high-volatility environments, specialization can slow or inhibit adaptation. The optimal state involves people with an array of specialties who can learn new skills and switch between specialties quickly and efficiently.
Taking a reflective step back from this, we need to move away from a business system that values this which is causing an educational system to value it in turn.
And the focus isn’t so much on finding “an array of specialities” for an individual but rather reframing the meaning of specialization within the larger context of this new age based upon what’s valued within it which is adaptability. Thus the meaning of specialization transforms from being something within a specific domain of knowledge to something that allows one to bridge an “array” of different knowledge domains.
Illustrating how The Big Shift transforms an individual’s sense of identity.
What I’m talking about here is something I’ve discussed and illustrated years back with a simple diagram called The Big Shift (which ties into John Hagel’s & John Seely Brown’s work). This future that is emerging presently causes a radical shift, like an earthquake shifting a building off its previous foundation, whereby our identity is no longer defined within a single job within a single domain. Instead our identity now slightly overlaps an “array” of what used to be considered different jobs (with different domains of knowledge each accompanying them).
Another more common name for this “slight overlap” is hyperspecialization.
And this new meaning of specialization that allows us to flexibly adapt across many different domains of knowledge is more commonly known as our passion.
In other words, an individual’s passion paradoxically allows them to hyperspecialize and do so across many different domains of knowledge at the same time.
Thus they are no longer trapped at a professional “dead end” of eventual obsolescence within the confining beliefs of the old world of work but are instead freed to flexibly adapt and explore endless possibilities specifically optimized for them within this new world.
To find out who you are, you will want to embrace adventure; you will want to discover and hone your skills and talents: you will want to become all you can become.
During the early years of our lives, while we are passing through the surviving, conforming and differentiating stages of our psychological development, we have to do two important tasks: develop a sense of self—an image of who we believe we are, and build our story—establish a set of beliefs that we can use to explain how the world around us operates. The image we create becomes our identity and the story we tell becomes our cosmology.
Our identity and our cosmology are conditioned by two factors: our parents, and the culture of the community/society in which we live. By the time we become young adults, who we think we are is a complex mixture of our own unique character overlaid by layers of beliefs we have learned about ourselves from our parents, other close family members, and the community/society in which we are embedded.
If parental programming and cultural conditioning was all there was to our character and story, then all children born into the same family in the same community and the same society would turn out the same. But this is not the case.
You don’t have to reflect for long before you realise that as far as our characters are concerned, we are all born different. We come into this physical life with inbuilt preferences, qualities, gifts and talents. You just have to observe how different siblings can be to know this is true. These differences are apparent even at a very young age. There is no scientific explanation for this: All we know is that every one of us is unique, special and different.
The parental programming and cultural conditioning we experience can either suppress our uniqueness, in which case we develop a false sense of our self, or can support us in discovering our uniqueness.
This is what evolutionary coaching is about—helping your clients examine and, as necessary, remove or reduce the layers of parental programming and cultural conditioning that have led to the creation of their false sense of self (the ego), so they can uncover and examine and explore their unique sense of self (the soul).
In other words, evolutionary coaching is about helping people find out who they really are and become all they can become—helping them to individuate and self-actualise—so they can be truly independent unique human beings and live the life their souls intended.
Technology today has made getting lost less likely an occurrence, with our personal mobile devices showing us exactly where we are at all times. Yet even knowing with exact certainty and obviousness of where we are, why do so many of us feel lost inside, uncertain of who we are anymore and what we’re supposed to be doing? The reason for this is because we’re lost in a different way, within the larger landscape of our identity.
Illustration from Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers
Here We Are, of all my books, seems the most relevant for the world’s current reality. It began as a sort of comedic routine in pointing out the obvious, but slowly it dawned on me the importance of re remembering the basic principles of what it is to be alive on earth in the 21st century.
Because of this, while some can help remind us of the obviousness of where we collectively are in relation to the universe around us (as shown above), what many of us really need is some way of obviously knowing where we are in relation to knowing who we are within the internal landscape of our evolving identity.
Yet even though we have been undertaking this ongoing journey and quest for identity since the day we were born, most of us haven’t really mapped out what this landscape of our identity looks like at all. The reason for this is obvious though because we were within a known territory where everything just seemed to make sense, so there was no need for explicitly stating the seeming obviousness of it.
Today though, we’ve obviously wandered off the edge of that known world and are exploring newer unknown territory which doesn’t make much sense to us. So we need a newer way of understanding and making sense of ourselves, one framed not from within just the last point of our journey but framed from within our entire journey overall.
By doing so, by seeing this bigger picture, perhaps we’ll finally be able to dispose of our extrinsic societal compass, telling us where we are expected to go and how we are expected to fit in, and instead start guiding ourselves on our ownusing our own intrinsic “gyrocompass” that we’ve had all along but just weren’t aware of.
A Map of Days by Grayson Perry
There is little allowance for the complexities and occasional chaos of our lived experience. Where there is space for commentary of any sort, we are expected to apply a degree of narrative coherence, making sense of memories and past events, creating connection and continuity. It is necessary to supply a beginning, middle and end, summarising what has brought us to this current juncture in our lives.
Reality is invariably more shambolic than this. More a hyperlinked web of avenues followed and retraced, jump cuts to elsewhere, occasional returns, disappearances and new beginnings. It is a ball of wool, a tangle of spaghetti, rather than a long straight line or a ladder extending ever-upwards. There are parallel paths too, simultaneously followed, within this entangled mess. Both/and rather than either/or.
Perhaps, like Perry, we need to draw our own maps, reflecting our convoluted journeys, our diversity of experience, the lessons we have learned, the places visited, the destinations yet to be attained. These could be maps of possibility, of intersections, convergence and mash-up. Maps that look to the future and what might be.
“The Experiential Qualities of a Lifetime Path of Development”, Action Inquiry
Self-transformation toward fully and regularly enacting the values of integrity, mutuality, and sustainability is a long, lifetime path that most of us follow as we grow toward adulthood, but that very few continue traveling intentionally once we become adults. Each major step along this path can be described as developing a new action-logic: an overall strategy that so thoroughly informs our experience that we cannot see it.
The Diplomat, Expert, and Achiever follow a progression through what are identified as the conventional action-logics. The conventional action-logics take social categories, norms, and power-structures for granted as constituting the very nature of a stable reality. We are learning how to relate by gradually gaining increasing skill and control in one territory of experience after another—first, the outside world, as an Opportunist; next, the world of our own actions, as a Diplomat; then the world of thought, as an Expert; and then the interplay among all three as an Achiever. As persons operating within conventional action-logics, we typically do not recognize ourselves as seeing ourselves, others, and the world through a particular frame or action-logic. Nor do we realize that our action-logics have been transforming into different ones over the course of our lives.
Then, the Individualist action-logic is shown not as a destination, but as a path that somersaults reflectively through one’s previous history (reevaluating all prior life experiences) and through the growing recognition of alternative action-logics, until one reaches the Strategist action-logic (aka Teal stage within Reinventing Organizations). Then the journey from Strategist to Alchemist is shown as different in kind again. The double-headed arrows between Alchemist and all the earlier action-logics suggest an ongoing, time out of time process…
The Individualist is a bridge between two worlds. One is the pre-constituted, relatively stable and hierarchical understandings we grow into as children, as we learn how to function as members of a preconstituted culture. The other is the emergent, relatively fluid and mutual understandings that highlight the power of responsible adults to lead their children, their subordinates, and their peers in transforming change.
Although this illustration is offered from the outside in, giving no direct taste of this woman’s inner experience (as an Alchemist), it suggests one way that people who measure at the late action-logics of development tend to live at once “symphonically” and “chaotically.” One might mistakenly conclude that she and the other people we are profiling are in a constant rush. Quite the contrary. We found in all of them a sense of leisure, playfulness, or meditativeness at times; a sense of urgency, fierce efficiency, or craftlike concentration at others. (Indeed, a telling characteristic of their work and play is that they cannot really be distinguished; “work/play” is a conjugation that comes closer to describing the actual interweaving of business, art, and leisure in these peoples’ lives).
This example illustrates particularly well two Alchemist characteristics: (1) active attention to analogies across the individual, group, organizational, and international political scales of development and (2) the use of one’s personal “charism”—one’s personal spiritual energy—not to charm one’s associates and generate worshipful subservience, but, rather, to challenge them to engage in collaborative action inquiry.
