Is Chris Wilson special or not?
Now that his book The Master Plan has hit the shelves, Chris Wilson has been hitting the interview circuit and giving book talks around the US. He’s been interviewed by Wes Moore, and D. Watkins. He’s been on The Daily Show, Morning Joe, and The Today Show. A recurring question in these conversations with Chris is: Is he special? Is he extraordinary, an anomaly, an exception? Invariably his interviewers claim he is. He insists he is not. So which is it, and why does it matter so much how we think of him?
We love stories of redemption, but what do we actually believe about the possibility of change, in ourselves and in others? In their theory of adult development, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey describe three epochs of growth in adulthood, what they call socialized mind, self-authoring mind, and self-transforming mind. The word mind feels a little tricky here, but I take it to describe the way in which an individual makes sense of their experience, encompassing how they sense, understand, and navigate the both the world and their place in it.
I’m no expert on their theory, but I have pondered it for many years now and have gotten good mileage out of the light it sheds on situations like Chris’s. With that caveat in mind…
At its simplest, the socialized mind can be thought of as the first plateau of “adult” understanding. It’s what we believe to be “the way the world is.” I think of this as the epoch of should, ought, and “I had no choice”. One’s Identity is deeply enmeshed with the socialized worldview, making it almost impossible to challenge. The sad fact is (according to Kegan & Lahey’s research) that the majority of people never venture beyond this first plateau. Most often, the trigger for venturing beyond a functioning socialized mind is that it stops functioning!— the plateau falls apart underneath you. This is nothing less than a crises, demanding that you transform — like really: grow a new self that is bigger than the one you had. As a result, the world becomes a different place — one with more choices — even though it’s YOU who has changed.
It’s not hard to see this playing out in Chris’s story. His transformation is from victim to the author of his own unfolding life. It’s a wonderful, real-life example of why Kegan and Lahey call it self-authoring mind. You are no longer just a passenger in the car you found yourself born into — you can now drive the car.
Surviving one transformation makes you feel like a freaking butterfly, like, you’ve arrived! — pupate? check! — but the second round is where you really start to learn how to do it — how to transform yourself. I’m not sure if this last epoch makes sense as a plateau — it never stops. You want to keep growing, as opposed to simply adapting when life demands it. The language of the self-transforming mind is all over Chris’s book. He includes at least five versions of his master plan. Being a life-long learner showed up on the plan in 2004. THIS is why he is an anomaly, why he is an exception, why he is extraordinary. Not because of something innate, but because he is among the minority of humans that get this far.
The impediments to venturing beyond a functioning self are huge. Kegan and Lahey describe the biggest impediment being one’s own psychological immune system. If our physiological immune system protects us from harmful bacteria and viruses, our psychological immune system protects us from information that doesn’t fit with our models of self and world, right and wrong. The socialized mind is, in effect, a closed system, one that functions using a “good-enough” understanding of self and world. You and I both got to our versions of socialized mind because, over time, it dynamically organized itself through the experiences of growing up in a given body, family, and culture. One of the main reasons for venturing beyond the socialized mind is because it stops being “good-enough.” This explains why it often takes a crisis to launch a transformation— perhaps the only reason to venture beyond a working self is that it breaks.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave figures prominently in Chris’s book. He describes his evolving understanding of Plato’s story of how we can go through life mistaking our own shadows on a cave wall as reality, while never seeing the the source of that light. He opens the final section of his book with this quote:
“It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
So what do we DO if we want to help others grow — to realize a world in which the Chris Wilsons are NOT extraordinary?
When asked how we can help people grow faster, I’ve heard Lisa Lahey respond that while a crisis is the most common trigger for growing beyond the socialized mind — for seeking the source of light in the cave, instead of taking the shadows as reality — she doesn’t recommend we go around manufacturing crises for people. I’ve come across a few tools that do help, among them Bob and Lisa’s Immunity to Change process, but I think the biggest take-home here is the importance of believing in the possibility of transformation — for anyone… for everyone. This might be one of the reasons Chris insists that he is not special. What can we do to make sure he is not?
