Becoming an Evolutionary Agent

Surfing Change and Learning in Public

My professional mission is to be an evolutionary agent, helping humanity see the handwriting on the wall, face inconvenient truths more quickly, and develop the new human capacities that are needed to deal with the many challenges facing us today. My personal mission is to practice what I teach.

Today I am thinking about how complex, multi-faceted, and interconnected these challenges are and how our current mode of thinking, of processing data and making decisions, is too slow and cumbersome for the job we face. Our minds get easily overwhelmed—even when we’re just dealing with family relationship problems, like an estranged adult offspring or a difficult spouse. And when we try to grapple with the bigger picture, the culture wars in the human family, the poly-crisis related to our addiction to economic growth, and our general tendency toward denial, then we can get really discouraged.

In this blog, I want to describe a few of the areas where I believe we as individuals can play a meaningful role in helping to speed up evolution, while at the same time, improving our own lives for the better.

What if we all committed ourselves to noticing and seeking feedback about our impact on others?

What if we all got better at owning our mistakes publicly?

What if we all took more risks to express unique or minority viewpoints? 

What good would this do? How would this contribute to society? And how would this make my life better?

Noticing and Seeking Feedback

Feedback is how we learn. The more attuned I am to the cues I’m getting from my environment, the more quickly I can see if my actions are having the intended result, allowing me to course-correct. At the same time, I am also noticing cues from my inner world—my sensations, feelings, and thoughts. And, once again, noticing these gives me important information about my own inner resources: Am I getting overwhelmed or triggered? Are my actions making me more energized or depleted? Am I feeling like continuing what I’m doing or stopping?

Imagine yourself as a surfer, surfing an ocean wave. Your sensitivity to internal and external cues is so refined that you almost feel at one with the waves and the ocean. You are constantly course-correcting based on the various sources of feedback available to you. Can you imagine living this way all the time—in relation to your friends, your family, and your work? We’re always getting cues from our internal and external world. But how often are we aware of and responsive to these cues? How in touch  are we?

To make good decisions in today’s complex and sped-up world, we need more information more quickly from more sources than ever before. The human brain has a tendency to shut out information when it has reached a certain limit, when the information starts to become overwhelming. This is normal and healthy. Humans do have limits to how much we can process. But our processing capacity can be expanded through intentional effort. And I think our current crises are calling us to expand how much our brains can handle.

So, what if each of us chose one area of our lives, or one relationship, where we committed ourselves to this sort of expansion? If I’m a manager or team leader, what if I regularly asked my team mates, “How is my management style working for you? Tell me both what works for you and what doesn’t work so well.” Of if I’m a parent, what if I took a similar tack, asking my children, “What can I do as a parent that would feel more helpful and supportive to you? I know I’m not perfect, and I need your feedback to help me grow.” (And remember, after you ask, to be quiet and wait for an answer—even if the silence feels uncomfortable.)

For most people this type of thing will be a stretch, and if it’s not, pick something that is. Any stretch of your comfort zone will expand your capacity to adapt to new information more easily….and with continued practice, more quickly. Each one of us who takes on the challenge of consciously evolving ourselves contributes to the development of humanity as a whole.

Our actions have effects that ripple out to those around us. Take a moment to see if this idea fits with your own intuition. In this way, you are checking in with the feedback from your own internal world—which is another type of feedback you may want to keep noticing.  

Owning Mistakes Publicly

An unfortunate norm in our culture is to hide one’s mistakes. We may have been shamed or punished in school or at home. Or we may have seen people who get caught screwing up get ostracized, fired, or worse. This norm needs to be challenged. Not only does it promote an unrealistic standard for human behavior, making us feel terrible about ourselves when we make normal, forgivable mistakes. But it also robs us all of the opportunity to learn from each other’s mistakes and offer our own hard-earned lessons to the wealth of human knowledge.

In the research I did for the book, From Chaos to Confidence: Survival Strategies for the New Workplace, available on Amazon, I found that being a “team learner” was one of the new human capacities demonstrated by leaders and execs who exemplified an outstanding capacity for adapting to change.

Being a team learner requires a willingness to learn in public. Learning in public means you are willing to admit to your team mates when you don’t know something you think you should know—so you can get the help you need quickly and without wasting energy and time in needless trial and error. It means you are able to publicly acknowledge mistakes when this would serve the team’s learning. It means sharing your thoughts and perceptions with your group, partner, or partners, even if you think you’re the only one who feels this way or sees things this way.

Is there a mistake you have made or something you need help with that you haven’t mentioned to anyone? Is there something you have learned from this mistake or something you need help learning? Are you willing to go public about any of this? If you’re not used to doing this sort of thing, who would be a safe person to share this with? And, as I ask my coaching clients: What homework can we create for you to support you to get better at learning in public—even if public only means in the presence of one other person? Of course, what I am suggesting is to give yourself an assignment to take this sort of risk.

To be a team learner, you need to place more value on the good of the whole than on your own personal needs to look good or be accepted. Challenging this sort of ego-protection strategy will be good for you, anyway—because it helps you grow beyond depending on others’ approval in order to feel good about yourself.

Expressing Unique or Minority Views

Conformity pressure is something most of us deal with nearly every day. Any time I’m in a group conversation--like with friends, family, or work mates--I’m aware that this group has certain values and beliefs in common. And my natural tendency is to want to show agreement with these values. I like feeling that “I belong.” But what if I don’t agree with something? And what if it’s not just some frivolous issue, but one that involves one of my deeply held values like fairness, justice, honesty, kindness, or human evolution?

An issue that comes to mind in this regard relates to a feeling I have about the American pre-election excitement about one political party or the other: I wish I was hearing someone in politics speak intelligently about the need to re-think the prevailing progress narrative, the fact that our whole economic reward system is based on continually growing the economy in ways that are environmentally unsustainable. Sure, we give lip-service to sustainable growth, but our systems depend on continuing to overshoot the carrying capacity of the earth. And the world’s most exciting innovations are some of the worst offenders—cryptocurrencies, AI, and space travel.

No one is to blame for this, and there may not be a near-term solution. But I sure wish people in politics at least showed some awareness of our dilemma….and were talking about it. I do understand why. It’s hard to stay in office if you make people too uncomfortable, so I’m not expecting people to change anytime soon.

But it’s hard to respect anyone who professes to be a public servant when they seem ignorant of what may be the biggest challenge facing humanity today—even if there is no realistic solution. If that’s the case, maybe we should be talking about that! There’s always something we can do—even if it’s just “coming to terms with” our predicament. There’s not much I can do about my own death, either. But it wouldn’t serve me to deny my inevitable fate.

Here on Substack, there are many writers who do address this issue in their writing and teaching. ( Mike Meyer and Alex Beiner come to mind). And I respect the various ways this issue is being discussed. If any of you Substack authors are reading this, please forward some of your writing to me. (susancampbell99.substack.com)

As I write this, I realize I have included an action-challenge to readers in the other two sections in this piece. In this section, I want to challenge myself to take some small action that involves expressing a minority opinion. My challenge to myself is this (And if you are drawn to doing something similar, I hope you will do so):

I will reach out to at least one young congress person (I have someone in mind), and I will offer to pay them for an hour of their time (or make a campaign contribution) to speak with them about the American economy’s dependence on consumerism and continual growth. I will ask whether they have an interest in this issue, why it would be difficult for a political figure to speak publicly about this issue, and if they do at least have a sincere interest, I’d offer to forward to them articles and video clips that I have found valuable, and to have more discussions.

Okay. I am going to do this. Now comes the question I started out with: Can expressing a minority opinion contribute to a better world or a better me? What might I gain or contribute?  I believe that shared reality is a good thing for humanity. One thing that creates higher levels of shared reality is when many people express their views and listen to others’ views—even if this stimulates disagreement and conflict, and even if many views turn out to be half-baked.

Humans need better conflict skills. We need to practice this skill if we want to get better at it. And humans need better problem-solving skills—the ability to begin by generating many ideas, and then to patiently sort out the useful ones from the rest. Each of us who takes on a challenge like this will probably survive the risks involved. Self-trust grows from surviving risks. Who doesn’t want more self-trust?

In today’s world, openness to feedback and learning together are more useful than power and control, since one person cannot know the best answer for all. We are learning how to be in partnership not only with each other, but also with our environment—with the situations we find ourselves in. Being an effective leader is not about getting others to do our bidding or see things our way. It’s more about holding up a mirror for ourselves and others so we can see if what we’re doing is helping or hindering our evolution toward a good, true, and beautiful world that works for everyone.

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Upcoming Free Group Coaching Call Sept 3

On Tuesday, September 3 at 10-11am Pacific Time, I’ll be leading a discussion and guiding people through some awareness practices designed to help you spot your automatic thinking and communication habits (aka control patterns).

These mini-webinars are offered monthly on the first Tuesday of every month—unless otherwise noted in this Substack or on my Facebook page. (facebook.com/drsusan99)

They happen on Zoom using a different link each month—the link is always published at the end of my blogs in the section on Upcoming Events, as well as on my Facebook page.

Here is the Zoom link for the September 3 session with me:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87259650722?pwd=OgzprpIQeRPJIkSx39oKpQH50bZA3B.1

Meeting ID: 872 5965 0722

Passcode: 538372

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Other Upcoming Events

Getting Real: The Power of Conscious Communication 

There are be two versions of this workshop coming up: The first option is a 6-session Zoom-based webinar for $375 during Sept-Oct, 2024. The second is an in-person weekend workshop in Sebastopol, CA for $360 May 10-11, 2025.

Getting Real on Zoom
Six consecutive Thursdays, noon-2pmPT, beginning Sept 19, 2024 and ending Oct 24. (See description below.)
 

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Getting Real in Person: An in-person workshop in Sebastopol, CA (an hour north of San Francisco)
 May 10-11, 2025, 10 am-5pm both days

Cost: $360  

“You can only be as honest as you are self-aware.”

GETTING REAL teaches 10 truth skills that make you a more present, aware, spontaneous, authentic communicator. Most people have fears and insecurities which interfere with being fully present and honest. These insecurities can be healed. If you learn to put your attention on your here-now experience, rather than trying to control the outcome of your communications, you discover the real source of personal power, love, and inner security. 

In this workshop, you will learn how to:

•   communicate with presence, authenticity, and spontaneity (even when you feel fear about it)

•   be aware of how you impact others 

•   clear the air and keep it clear

•   repair rifts in trust and connection after a misunderstanding

•   keep your present relationships free of accumulated unfinished business

•   come back to being present after your fear-buttons have gotten pushed

•   communicate from the deepest parts of yourself—so you can be truly heard and accepted

•   notice and free yourself of all the ways you go on automatic as you communicate or listen

•   replace these control patterns with honest, spontaneous self-expression

•   recognize all the various disguises that mask the need to control

•   ask for what you want without being controlling

•   say No or mark your boundaries with compassion and sensitivity

•   embrace and value the silences in human communication

•   heal past trauma and unprocessed pain 

•   communicate about difficult topics in ways that foster deep intimacy and trust

This workshop is intended for people who want to join with like-minded others to explore honesty as a spiritual awareness practice, getting to the essential self that is beyond conditioned fears, beliefs, and control patterns. Emphasis will be on developing communication skills and relationship practices that you can take home and integrate into your daily life.

REGISTER NOW: Call or text Susan at (707) 695-4073 or email: drsusan@susancampbell.com 

Led by: Psychologist Susan Campbell has worked as a relationship coach for 58 years. A former professor at the University of Massachusetts, she is author of 12 books on relationships and communication. Her website is www.susancampbell.com

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