Two ‘diagnostic’ exercises that can bring vertical development into perspective
1.
Inner driving forces for vertical growth and development
People seek out vertical development for a variety of reasons and from several different starting points. These are some of them – fulfilment of potential, self-improvement and living one’s purpose. These are positive, forward-looking statements of personal intent. They reflect a desire and energy to stretch yourself – to push your frontier and be all you can be – an established mantra in business life and one that permeates most self-development and coaching approaches. We can refer to these kinds of driving forces as our leading edge – forging ahead to who we want to become and where we want to go. It’s our ascending purpose.
Examples of these include:
A desire to understand yourself better and discover your life vision.
Wanting to create a life consistent with your highest aspirations and what you care most about.
Wanting to be able to express your thinking and emotions with greater ease, tune into others and be in better contact (connection).
Wanting to build the confidence and capacity of those around you. In the work environment, this will include your teams and wider organisation. It may also include your family, friends and community.
Other kinds of driving forces emerge out of tensions, dissonance or pain – a sense of things not being as you would want them to be. Or more accurately, you not being how you want to be. They can arise from a crisis, a challenge or a set of problems that you don’t seem to be able to resolve from your current worldview. Developmental theorists point out that movement from one adult development stage to the next is usually driven by limitations in the current stage. When you are confronted with increased complexity and challenge that can’t be met with what you have and can do at your current level, there is a mismatch. And this can be an uncomfortable place to be. You recognise that you’re struggling and your tried-and-tested ways of thinking and acting aren’t working anymore. So, you do what most people do in these circumstances – you do more of the same but harder. It doesn’t work but it’s the best you’ve got. And the knock-on effect for others can be dissonance. Your increasingly negative moods have a toxic effect on those around you and your inability to see the problems, and solve them, leaves people doubting your abilities and competence. This then becomes a vicious cycle.
Or you try to simplify your life. In the workplace, one of the most common creative adjustments is to stay in the job but ‘go missing’ and hope people are too busy to notice. And if they do, and the pressure is ramped up, the solution can be to leave altogether and remove the source of the tension. When you’re experiencing a high level of stress, this is a perfectly understandable way of reacting. And in these circumstances people usually feel very much on their own with the problem. The idea of asking for help doesn’t often happen. Whether it’s pride, a fear of being seen as weak and not coping, or a belief that there is no-one out there who can help, the end result is the same.
Examples of driving forces that emerge from tensions include:
Regularly experiencing the limits of your current way of thinking, reacting and trying to solve things.
Repetitive patterns or historic shadow issues negatively impacting in the present.
Negative feedback or disconfirming data resulting in confusion and uncomfortable questions that don’t go away.
Feeing stuck.
The sense of having outgrown a level and a need to breakthrough – to go beyond where you are now.
Being in pain (existential).
Some of these suggest the mismatch between our capacity and the complexity we face into. Others can be seen as our trailing edge, which can include our unfinished business – the heavy rucksack as the poet Robert Bly described that we spend our life carrying, and hoping to empty. Or, at least lighten the load.
Neither list is intrinsically better nor worse than the other, although the first one will tend to feel better. Our hopes, aspirations and desires to be our best self are worthy and important. But we also have our struggles and it’s OK to be troubled. It's both of these that makes us who we are.
Please review the lists and identify any that stand out to you.
2.
Vertical development exercise – a series of questions
1.
What glimpses have you had recently of yourself when it’s felt as if you’re operating out of a higher or bigger sense of self – perhaps a different level of consciousness and perspective?
2.
What could you see that was different? In other words, how did the world show up differently to you?
3.
And, how did you show up differently – what was different about you?
4.
Conversely, what experiences have you had recently of yourself when it’s as if you’ve fallen back or regressed – you could call this, an earlier version of yourself?
5.
What did it feel like, and where did it take you to (in your inner world)? As you think about this now, are you aware of any repeating patterns?
6.
Do you recognise any relationships, or specific troublesome issues arising within those relationships, where you can see that you’re operating at an earlier developmental stage (an earlier version of yourself)?