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Evolutionary Coaching Introduction July 2013
Evolutionary Coaching Introduction July 2013
Evolutionary Coaching
A values‐based approach to unleashing human potential
By Richard Barrett
You need a map of the territory if you want to successfully guide people on a journey.
This will be a book for coaches: but it is not a book about coaching. It is a book about
human emergence and personal fulfillment. Human emergence is the natural
evolutionary process by which an individual achieves full spectrum consciousness.
Individuals who operate with full spectrum consciousness1 are able to appropriately
address all life’s challenges. There are seven stages that an individual has to pass
through to reach full human emergence. Each stage is associated with specific needs
and has its own developmental tasks.
As an executive coach, life coach or personal coach, it is important for you to know, if
you want to fully serve your client’s best interests, what stage of development you
clients are at in their journey of human emergence. This is important, because every
goal your client is trying to achieve, every challenge they are facing, and every choice
they are trying to make is in some way reflective of the needs associated with the
stage of development they have reached. Understanding the developmental tasks of
each of the seven stages of human development will not only enable you to support
your client in mastering the stage of development they have reached, it will also help
you anticipate what potential challenges they will face as they move to the next and
subsequent stages of their development.
It is also important to understand that your clients cannot be successful in meeting
their developmental needs if the human group structures they are embedded in are
operating at a lower stage of development (lower level of consciousness) than
1
Full spectrum consciousness is a term coined by Richard Barrett to denote someone who has completed the
seven levels of psychological development and mastered the seven levels of human consciousness.
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themselves. They will be blocked in their emergence because they will be living or
working in an environment that is unable to support their emergence. This is what the
Arab Spring was about. Millions of people all over the Middle East had shifted from the
third to the fourth stage of human development but the governments and national
institutions that ran their countries were still operating at the third stage of human
development. The people wanted freedom and democracy, but the political regime
and institutional environment in which they were embedded was focused on control,
power, and authority.
If, on the other hand, the human group structures your clients are embedded in are
operating at a higher stage of development (a higher level of consciousness), it is
important to understand that your clients will only be successful in meeting their
needs if the human group structures they are embedded in —family, organisation,
community and nation—are also able to meet their needs. In such situations, personal
success is determined not by focusing on their own self‐interest, but by focusing on the
contribution they can make to the collective interest of the human group structures in
which they are embedded. When you care about the success of those you identify
with, they in turn will care about you.
Therefore to support your clients in their journey of emergence, it is just as important
to understand what stage of development the human group structures they are
embedded in have reached in their evolutionary development as it is to understand
the stage of development your clients have reached in their development. I believe
that this more holistic approach to coaching is just as critical to accelerating individual
human emergence as it is to accelerating our collective human emergence.
Each person who is able to achieve full spectrum consciousness becomes a role model
for those who are still working on their emergence. They are naturally admired and
revered by those who are still working on their emergence. We intuitively recognize
the qualities in these people that we would like to emulate. It is not difficult to think of
modern examples: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King are
names that immediately come to mind. I am not saying these people were “perfect”
examples of human emergence of full spectrum consciousness. Most full spectrum
individuals still have some issues they are working on; they just don’t let these issues
influence their decision making. These people became role models because of what
they stood for and how they behaved. They were able to give their unique gifts and
talents in service to the common good without focusing on their own personal self‐
interest.
Viewed from another perspective, one could say that they did serve their self‐interest:
but the self they served was a self that was totally embedded in the larger human
group structures they identified with. Their primary mode of identification was with
the “we” rather than the “I.”
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This is the fundamental basis of the new leadership paradigm I have written about
elsewhere.2 As we expand our sense of self to include those we identify with, we
realize we cannot be successful unless the organisations and institutions we are
embedded in are also successful.
The idea of uncovering your authentic self and the unique contribution you can make
to the human group structures you are embedded in is one of the key themes in Bill
George’s book True North. Bill George, former chief executive of Medtronic, the
world’s leading medical technology company and now professor of management at
Harvard Business School states:
An enormous vacuum in leadership exists today—in business, politics, government,
education, religion, and non‐profit organisations. Yet there is no shortage of people
with the capacity for leadership. The problem is we have a wrongheaded notion of
what constitutes a leader, driven by an obsession with leaders at the top. That
misguided stand often results in the wrong people attaining critical leadership roles.
When problems surfaced at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, and dozens of
other companies, the severity of the leadership crisis became painfully apparent,
creating a widespread erosion of trust in business leaders. Over the past fifty years,
leadership scholars have conducted more than a thousand studies in the attempt to
determine the definitive leadership styles, characteristics, or personality traits of great
leaders. None of these studies has produced a clear profile of the ideal leader. Thank
goodness. If scholars had produced a cookie‐cutter leadership style, people would be
forever trying to emulate it. The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be
like someone else. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not an
imitation … You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else … Leaders
are defined by their unique life stories and the way they frame their stories to discover
their passions and the purpose of their leadership. 3
George concludes:
Every successful business leader has to make the shift from “I” to “we.”
Fundamentally, this is what this book is about: It supports the new leadership
paradigm by providing a framework for coaching that focuses on the seven stages of
authentic human emergence; and it provides an approach to coaching which helps
individuals uncover their unique gifts and talents so they can make a difference to the
evolution of the human group structures in which they are embedded through the
service they offer.
2
Richard Barrett, The New Leadership Paradigm (Bath: Fulfilling Books, 2010).
3
Bill George, True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, 2007).
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Richard Barrett
July 4, 2013
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