Part 1: Primer on Personal Development — Kegans Stages of Adult Development
Not so long ago, many believed that personal development stopped as soon as someone turned 18. Thus, reaching adulthood was considered the final stage of development. Luckily, this view has changed over time and now “Learning never stops” is a widely known aphorism of our time. Many understand and would agree with the idea that you have to develop throughout adulthood to keep up with the world. By this, they generally mean getting better at what you do by acquiring new skills and knowledge.
Some progressive organisations and experts like Professor Kegan, formerly a psychologist at Harvard and the author of In Over Our Heads, would disagree and like to extend this understanding. They reveal the possibilities and benefits of looking at oneself as a constantly changing organism with the capacity to radically transform oneself. According to Kegan, becoming an adult isn’t only about learning new things (adding things to the ‘container’ of the mind), but also about transformation — changing the way we know and understand the world (changing the actual shape of our ‘container’).
Ronald Heifetz, Kegan’s colleague at Harvard who views personal growth in the same way — distinguishes between two kinds of challenges — technical and adaptive.
Technical challenges are easy to identify and can often be solved with the knowledge of experts rather quickly. Learning new things — like online marketing, or how to land a plane — are largely technical. Technical challenges are not necessarily simple, neither are they less or more important than adaptive challenges.
However, many, if not most of the challenges nowadays require more than just learning new technical skills. These are the adaptive challenges: they are complex, volatile, difficult to identify and easy to deny. The person with the problem is normally the main actor that needs to do the work solving it, and often resists. Solutions to this type of challenges usually require people to learn new ways of doing things, change their attitudes, beliefs, values, norms, relationships, adopt an experimental mind-set and approach on how to accomplish goals.
You can tackle them only by transforming your mindset by advancing to a more sophisticated stage of mental development.
This first article dedicated to personal development covers the different stages of personal transformation. In the next article I will focus on the framework you can apply to help with the transformation, while the third article respectively demonstrates how some companies are applying these theories and techniques to create deliberately developmental organisations.
Transformation
Prior to Copernicus, we thought the Earth was the centre of the solar system. Then Copernicus came along and showed that the sun is at the centre. Hence, while nothing physically changed, our entire conception and understanding of the world were transformed forever. These things happen to us all the time. Think, for example, of a book you re-read after reading it in high school. While the information is the same, the way you experience and understand it is fundamentally different.
This is what transformation means. Only through transformation can we transition to the next stages of development. This development does not unfold continuously — instead, there are periods of growth and stability. When we reach new distinct levels — the plateau — we tend to stay there for some time. Reaching a new plateau of development is akin to a personal Copernican shift.
Kegan shows that adults go through five distinct developmental stages, just like children do. Becoming an ‘adult’ means developing an independent sense of self and acquiring personality traits associated with wisdom and social maturity. It means becoming more self-aware and gaining more control of our behaviour, as well as being better able to manage relationships and the social factors affecting us.
Subject-object shift
Transitioning to higher stages of development requires a subject-object shift — moving what we know from Subject (where it is controlling us) to Object (where we can control it). The theory is based on the premise that the more we view something in our lives from the perspective of Object, the more clearly we can see the world, ourselves and the people in it.
Subject (“I AM”) — Concepts of self that we are attached to and, hence, cannot reflect on or take an objective look at. They include personality traits, assumptions about the way the world works, behaviours, emotions, etc.
Object (“I HAVE”) — Concepts of self that we can detach ourselves from — those we can look at, reflect upon, engage, control and connect to something else.
Kegan’ Stages of Adult development
He defined the following stages:
- Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)
- Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)
- Stage 3 — Socialised mind (58% of the adult population)
- Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)
- Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population)
Stage 1 & 2 — The Impulsive & Imperial Mind
In Stage 1 and 2, the primary emphasis is on one’s own needs, interests and agendas. Relationships are transactional. Stage 2 individuals view people as a means to get their own needs met as opposed to a shared internal experience involving a mutual feeling. They care about how others perceive them but only because those perceptions may be linked to specific consequences for them. For example, when Stage 2 friends do not lie to each other, it happens because of fear of consequences or retaliation, as opposed to valuing honesty in a relationship.
Stage 3: The Socialized Mind (58% of adults)
- Object: HAS needs, interests & desires
- Subject: IS interpersonal relationships, mutuality
In Stage 3, external sources shape our sense of self and understanding of the world. While in Stage 2 the most important things are our personal needs and interests, when it comes to Stage 3, the most important are the ideas, norms and beliefs of the people and systems around us (i.e. family, society, ideology, culture, etc.).
For 64% of people, the process of maturing stops here and they do not proceed to develop a more complex mental model. However, it does not have to stop there.
Stage 4 — The Self Authoring Mind (35% of adults)
- Object: HAS relationships, mutuality
- Subject: IS self authorship, identity and ideology
In Stage 4, we can define who we are independently instead of being defined by other people, our relationships or the environment.
We understand that we are a person with thoughts, feelings and beliefs that are independent of the standards and expectations in our environment. We can now distinguish the opinions of others from our own to formulate our own “seat of judgment”. We become consumed with who we are — this is the kind of person I am, this is what I stand for.
Self-authorship is about defining and reshaping (authoring) what you believe (epistemology), your sense of self (intrapersonal), and your relationships with others (interpersonal), rather than uncritically accepting them from others.
Stage 5 — The Self-Transforming Mind (1% of adults)
- Object: HAS self authorship, identity and ideology
- Subject: IS nothing
In Stage 5, an individual’s sense of self is not tied to particular identities or roles but is constantly created through the exploration of one’s identities and roles, as well as continuously honed through interactions with others. This is similar to the Buddhist concept of an evolving self — a self that is in constant flux and is ever-changing.
More characteristics:
- We are both self-authoring and willing to work with the authority of others. We cannot only question authority but also question ourselves.
- We are no longer held prisoners by our own identity. We see the complexities of life, can expand who we are and be open to other possibilities — this way, we are reinventing our identity. Our identity is limited — our circumstances in life will continuously change and our identity needs to change with it.
- We can hold multiple thoughts and ideologies at once. We can understand things from many different perspectives.
— — — — SOURCES — — —
1) https://www.amazon.de/over-Our-Heads-Mental-Demands/dp/0674445872
