Playing to Grow
Keys to ignite personal change in modernity
*Article inspired by Giant Steps — John Coltrane
Have you come across the idea that “kids of today will have jobs that don’t exist yet”?
Yes, our world is changing. The “pace of change is itself getting faster,” eloquently demonstrated by management guru Gary Hamel, a professor at London Business School.
We all know that by now. We live in times of complexity where new ways of being with ourselves and with others are required. Nothing new here, is there?
This feels quite overwhelming, many say. Still, I think sometimes there's an overemphasizing of macro explanations for what humanity is going through, without going into the specifics of what we are going through.
And by we I mean you and me, and people around us.
Which leads me to wonder: How are we coping with it all?
A product of this change is seen in the Millennial Generation (which I roughly consider myself to be a part of) known to be not only one that is taking over the majority of workforce leadership positions but also the one that will have up to five different careers across their lifetime.
I don’t mean jobs, but careers.
Those who have gone through any career change, myself included, know how hard it is. In my case, it felt like a snowball inside of me. Though, despite a growing discomfort and irritation toward what I was working with at the time, I couldn’t yet figure out where to steer my career.
Recently, I came across a post on Medium that resonated quite a bit with me.
In How To Live The Life You Want, Dan Pedersen quickly builds a series of powerful suggestions to mitigate what in Life Design I call a disconnect between Self-and-Self .
In specific, two short paragraphs called my attention:
We get into professions we hate in order to buy things we don’t need, so we can impress people who don’t really give a crap about us. We also take jobs we hate because of the social status that comes with the job.
We sometimes avoid jobs we really want, because they’re unpopular or difficult to enter. So we enter a field we don’t really care about because it seems economically and socially safer.
I’ve been there — and done just that. A decade later, with the clarity only time provides, I’m able to pencil that, in reality, the path described above is entirely natural, and I risk saying it is expected in our adult development.
Here’s why.
A Shift From Socialization to Independence
Robert Kegan, a psychologist and former professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education specialized in in Adult Learning and Professional Development, is the mind behind a theory which supports that development of adults to happen in stages — as it does during childhood.
In his brilliant The Evolving Self and In Over our Heads, Kegan comprehensively elucidates that becoming an adult, in its purest sense, is a process of navigating through five stages of development towards what he frames as an independent sense of self.
It entails being more aware of who we are and our behavior, and how to better be in relationships and in the world around us.
According to Kegan’s research, the vast majority of adults — 58% — orbits around what he defines as the Socialized Mind (Stage 3) while the second largest group — 35% — gravitates to the Self-Authoring Mind (Stage 4).
This shift, therefore, not only is the most relevant statistically speaking but explains why we have to go through jobs we hate until we shift to jobs that fulfill us.
To put it simply, in the Socialized stage our sense of self-worth stems from being accepted and included by others. Our interpersonal relationships are paramount because it’s through them that I understand who I am. Feedback gives me the bases of comparison and understanding where I sit (picture being graded after taking a test), and it helps me craft my sense of identity (as Freud would say that our identities are a mesh of all of our relationships).
Most of our thoughts, beliefs, morals originate from that which is external to us, and we overly take personal responsibility for how other people experience ourselves. We seek for validation from parents, friends, and colleagues, as we aim to be in accordance with (their) norm assuring we are ok.
Nevertheless, even in the moments where we chose jobs we hated, I would argue that we partially did so because it was imperative that we felt accepted and validated by (significant) people around us at the time — even at the expense of not being validated by our own selves.
The shift to the Self-Authoring stage commences when we begin to define who we are and stop being determined by the environment. It resembles putting glasses on and seeing an entirely new reality, where we’re able to distinguish our thoughts and feelings from those of people around us, and develop the capacity to take stands and set boundaries that guardrail our own trajectory.
In this phase, we are ready to take more responsibility, including that for our emotions, and agency in the decisions we make in our lives. Our sense of self-worth relocate to our inside, and it manifests through who we are and what we want.
Why is this relevant?
The Space Between Socialized and Self-Authoring
Transitions between stages are gradual. There’s a period in which we vacillate between different ways of being, and the truth is that feels really painful. In my trajectory, I knew something in what I did professionally didn’t make sense anymore, but I didn’t know what did make sense just yet.
This hiatus exists because part of us is still very attached to our previous ways of being, where our sense of self-worth comes from what people tell us. Our sense of identity is predicated upon past memories of the experiences we lived and choices we made, and it acts out as a barrier keeping us from stepping into a new self.
It feels scary, because even if we rationally know that we want to change the old self, we sabotage the change because inside our Ego sounds the alert “If I’m not this me anymore, then which me would I be?”
It’s essential to own this hiatus and avoid being overly critical of ourselves. It sure sounds easier than it is, so a trick here is to drift away from self-criticism toward self-discovery. The more you’re able to treat yourself as you would treat your best friend, the better.
Obscure Forces of Culture and Environment in Personal Change
Our surroundings have a profound effect on how we think and feel about ourselves, and how we enact our behavior. The places we frequent and the relationships we have both reinforce in us the idea that we are in a particular way.
Philosopher Ken Wilber masterfully decoded in his Integral Theory that, in fact, both culture and environment have intimate relationships with our inner states and our external attitude. However, these relationships are non-hierarchical.
This is good news because it means that we can initiate change internally independently from the culture and the environment, yet in the gradual and challenging transition from Socialized to Self-Authoring self, it helps to be aware that the culture and environment are vectors. Using them our favor is crucial.
It is not uncommon in our progress towards self-authorship to find ourselves detaching from certain places and social circles. In my first career change, I stepped out of the world of marketing & strategy to venture into that of design & innovation. Although those are quite proximate careers, there was a significant change in minds, tastes, and places.
Distilling Who We Are: Beginning to Change
As I mentioned earlier, it can be quite hard to pinpoint where we want to steer our lives (and careers) to. I’ve gathered below a few ideas building on Robert Kegan’s work that you can experiment with. Important: these will be more effective if you are able to put on the hat of the researcher of you.
1) Nurture your Integrity
a. Getting clarity about What do I value? The purpose here is to narrow down to no more than 4 or 5 things that genuinely matter to you. Recently, I caught an interview with Brené Brown on NPR where she recommended that organizations be based on no more than 2 values — for clarity and focus.
Values and Beliefs are often used interchangeably, and that’s fine as long as you craft precise and concise terms or expressions that represent your core. For example: in my work, I value personal development, flexibility, and autonomy.
b. Ask yourself What is my intention? We rarely take time to think about the intentions behind the things we do, let alone our intention in life. Although this may sound daunting, pausing to reflect on what you want to bring forth in your existence is extremely helpful to separate the noise from what truly matters to you.
Another important aspect of living by your intention is to stop chasing outcomes. Instead, focus on what really moves you. In Buddhism, this relates to a detachment from thoughts, feelings, and emotions and allowing them to come and go without trying to control. In psychoanalysis, a similar idea frames this as containment of narcissistic and imaginary impulses.
c. Lastly, try to list out What do I want? Once you’re able to craft your intention, it can work as a filter for who, what and how you want and not want.
2) Prototype your way forward
a. More and more organizations are embedding prototypes as necessary ways to test something out. There’s no such thing as failure, only learning. The same applies to our individual lives: circling back to Dan Pedersen’s article, the only way one is able to gauge a job as right or wrong is by looking in hindsight. In the heat of the moment, we all try to make the best decisions with the information we have — otherwise we’d only be deliberately hurting ourselves. We can only know if we try.
b. Although life seems like a linear experience made of sequenced events, if we zoom in we see that in every single moment we have a chance to choose. Not only should we be grateful for this liberty, but be thoughtful on the why when we make our decisions — no wonder Simon Sinek’s work has gone quintessential this time around.
c. Change is hard, and usually, our minds and bodies opt for the path of least resistance — a natural biological response. Embracing change is a choice, not an obligation, and the only certainty is that it will be difficult. If you can, go for low stakes challenges first and aim for quick wins. Test your assumptions about yourself and ask someone who knows you well to give you an additional (and honest) feedback. It helps to hold ourselves accountable, and more importantly, it provides us with a perspective on the assumptions we create that generally do nothing but hinder our growth.
Don’t forget to have fun :)
