We Need to Grow Up!

I have an intention that I read every day - “What will I do today to raise the vibration/maturity level/consciousness, personally/individually/collectively?”? Even writing this note…I had 15 minutes until lunch with my husband. It would have been easy to blow off that small increment of time, but I remembered that this post gets to be about the adult maturity model I am using with my clients and why I am obsessed with it!?

I think it is a huge part of how we can invite people to shift.

Think of this metaphor. We have this beautiful city we want to build, complete with the tallest buildings in the world and housing millions of people in a beautiful and perfectly functioning environment.? Yet, we don’t even have any streets built to send the construction trucks in to start the work on this beautiful and amazing city.?

We have big ideas in our organizations, visions of beautiful design, world problems we want to solve, and innovative and creative products to build. Companies also say they want work environments that are open, connected, transparent, empathetic, and humane. Not to mention that companies want to fix the big problems we need to solve in the world.? We don’t have the leaders at a level of development that can hold and manifest what is needed.??

With those big ideas comes a need for an infrastructure that can manifest that work.? According to S. Cook-Greuter, most leaders in our workplace are at earlier levels of maturity; 67% of leaders are in conforming (my identity is the same as my group)? and specializing (my identity is my job and my technical skills). They may lack the ability to look beyond their emotional reactivity and stand on the balcony and see the different systems at play in their organization, how to help those systems work better, and how to bring different systems together to make something even more robust and creative.?

We often have leaders who turf protect, compete in a nonproductive way, backchannel important feedback, and act out of their emotional reactivity.? In other words, they lack the mental and emotional maturity to stand above their personality and leverage their wise self.? We don’t have leaders who look beyond their egos. We also don’t have the continuity of thought, vision, and purpose that we need to make these more complicated changes and shifts either. Leaders often bounce from job to job following their own self-direction.?

It is important for me to live my work, and continually focus on my intention – “What will I do today to raise the vibration/maturity level/consciousness, personally/individually/collectively?”. If I can have the slightest impact on the maturity level of those around me, I can make wide-reaching changes to the world at large.

So ask yourself the same – what will YOU do, to raise your maturity level?