Horizontal and Vertical Growth
... And Three Resources to Reframe Our Mindset Missteps
Here’s how my Integral® Coaching methodology responds to the big question: how do we grow, and by what mindset shifts do we make meaningful change?
People come to coaching with a pivotal aspiration. We want to uplevel our career. We want to find our purpose. We want to take care of ourselves. We want to be better parents, partners, people.
Whatever the aspiration, successful achievement depends upon movement along two axes.
The horizontal axis is how we do or don’t get things done. This is the domain of productivity, of project design and SMART goals, of tactically visioning an ideal future and drawing the map of a successful approach, of day-by-day pursuing the next right move.
The vertical axis is whether our way of being is aligned with the aspiration, whether our inner compass is dialed. This is the domain of deeper questions: what’s my “why”, does this situation light me up, and do I have hidden mindsets keeping me from succeeding.
My “why” is to derive a just-right combination of these axis strategies to grow and empower ourselves.
Here’s three resources that approach that just-right combination.
Four Thousand Weeks, A Tribute
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman is one of the best productivity books. It explores how we can accept the reality of our brief life and flip the script on time management. We have, if we are lucky, four thousand weeks to live. How can we accept that, and break from the culture of busy-ness to concentrate on what matters.
The book itself is 100% worth the read. But I was just made aware of this unique, instructive tribute to the book and its thematic core.
Who or What is Across the Table from You?
A simple mindset shift to go from arguing to collaborating (h/t Dr. Becky):
In any circumstances, with any combination of people, there are two modes of solving problems with someone. Whether it’s two parents, a parent and a kid, business partners, employer and employee, etc., think of it this way:
You two are sitting across the table from each other and one of you is the problem.
You both are sitting on the same side of the table together looking at the problem.
Check in with yourself any time there is a problem to see what mode you’re in. Guess which mode makes for better solutions.
One Good Humiliation
Albuquerque-based priest and writer, Father Richard Rohr is a prolific, beautiful thinker. In Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he wrote:
I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.
For many of us, myself included, humiliation usually takes on a pretty stank flavor in our memory. What a beautiful reframe to consider a humiliation in this way, as a solve for our hidden mindset mistakes.
Bye for now, and best to you,
Griff