Scott Sonnon: Born to Fail - Made to Succeed

What Comes Around - Better (How Companies and the Self Evolve and Succeed)

If you stick around long enough, and pay attention, things appear cyclical don’t they? “What comes around goes around.” Understanding why, will help you gain maximal benefit when you recycle those old interests, tasks or tools.

• Initially, when you trek into exercise, you may find yourself seeking the most ostensible goals: weight loss and muscle gain. “How can I lose 10lbs and get wash-board abs?”
• After time, these goals fade into by-products of newer goals, such as strength and endurance development. The questions then turn to, “what is the best set/rep scheme for accomplishing XYZ attribute development?” You start educating themselves in the tools of accomplishing goals.
• With greater investment, your goals turn further inward towards removing impediments to performance, releasing chronic tension, removing the bands of leathery immobility. “How can get rid of this nagging pain in my neck and shoulder and regain mobility in my back?”
• The investment turns into investigation as you discover that every chain of tension - strong or weak - acts as a physical analogue to your mental and emotional life; manifesting a cognitive/linguistic component, as you’re hard-wired to disclose the truth of your circumstances, “This person is a pain in my neck and I feel like I must shoulder the burden of his responsibilities.” 
• With intensive exploration, your goals evolve into service of how to best help others undergo their own unique process. You find yourself being asked for more and more advice, and even training others.“You look really great. How can I lose 10lbs and get back my washboard abs?” And you find yourself returning to the “basics” as well… with greater understanding, less blockage, clearer goals…

“With Greater Understanding Comes Greater Benefit.”

- CST Head Coach Mike Locke

From a top view, it looks like your progress is circular, but if you zoom out from the side, you can see that you’re not only moving cyclically, but also progressing… in a spiral.

Spiral Dynamics is a concept originally developed by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, and greatly researched by Clare Graves. The gist of it parallels with Abraham Maslow’s Pyramid of needs, though Maslow’s model is obviously very simplistic in comparison. In Spiral Dynamics, the individual evolves from:

1. Beige: the level of instinctual survival. Talk to a person near starvation, or facing an imminent threat of the need to improve their health or self and you’ll get a crazed rebuke. If you exercise Beige, you believe it’s about Darwinian survival - for your job, for tomorrow’s potential conflict - so you rationalize unsafe practices as excusable. But most people do not even take measures toward health here, because the attitude of conserving energy, of surviving the next day, prevail.
2. Purple: the level of magic where everything appears to be a product of chance, every activity a bad omen or a good sign, very external locus of control. Exercising Purple, coincidence and luck rule your training; you believe that the pains in your body are unrelated to your actions, and that when you’re strong and pain-free that it’s fortune, rather than your own programming. You can see the newbie to physical culture here, walking through the options like a spell-book and relying upon coaches like wizardry. Equally, because of lacking self-education, exercises are adopted with the hope that they will somehow magically transform you.
3. Red: the level of hero where the glory to win at all costs hazardously leaps “back into the breach.” Trying to be the hero in your training leads you to push hard through obstacles and compete against yourself and others to be better, but exercising Red can equally push you into injuries and illness, because victory seems more attractive, and you wear your scars like badges of honor. The no pain no gain, go to you puke, extreme mentality demonstrate the perversions of exercising Red.
4. Blue: the level of orderly ascribing to authority, where observing the rules and regulations of XYZ organization or leader dictates what should be done and when. Here you give yourself over to your coach, and follow religiously the programs prescribed; which is not necessarily bad or wrong. The negative here is when you mis-perceive an appropriate authority, like a celebrity, an professional athlete, or someone who does not have your individualized needs in mind. You must learn to discipline yourself to follow a program meticulously, but it must be YOUR program.
5. Orange: the level of the skeptic who relies only upon the universal truth of empirical science, where only what is objectively verifiable and repeatable is considered virtuous. Follow Blue for long enough, and you start to realize what works for your and what does not, and that’s when you begin to become autonomous… relying upon your good judgement. However, you only threaten your growth, when your skepticism turns cynical, and you believe that unless it can be proven to you that you don’t need to do it. You must have courage to take leaps of faith, to go deeper.
6. Green: the level of the empath, where one finds egalitarian consensus, and communal support to determine the path of mutual benefit. Everyone has a voice, even if that voice is detracting and negative. Exercising Green means that you develop a “team” mentality. You surround yourself with other motivated individuals. You seek improvement of your “4th Skin” - your social network, because you know that you can never go as far alone as you can together. But you must be picky, and select the right energy to include in your sphere… the wrong energy can scuttle the collective effort.
7. Yellow: the level of integration, where knowledge of various paths all leading to the same light are respected and nurtured. The social groups develop their own unique vehicles for personal exploration integrated into systems of development. Your team makes discoveries, identifying common path markers, and even unique approaches to avoiding pitfalls and expediting the individual journey. These coallesce into systematic methods for helping others. The hazard comes from believing your group to have the corner on the Truth… when in reality though you have a great system, there are many lanterns holding the same light illuminating a multitude of paths…
8. Turquoise: the level of the whole where although individual uniqueness is embraced, the entire tapestry is seen as one unending weave. Your group elevates to strategic alliances and partnerships with other groups… unthreatened by different perspectives. This Game reveals itself as just an opportunity to leverage your brand equity with that of the other groups to create greater impact, greater audiences and greater success.

Spiral Dynamics can be seen on the micro level in the evolution of the self, and on the macro level on the evolution of a culture.

If you’ve spent some time exploring your wellness that things appear to go away for awhile, only to reappear again later… but with a little more sophistication, a little deeper understanding. You can see it in something as simple as returning to “the basics” with a much better grasp on nuance that you hadn’t considered before even though you have not been practicing it for months.

This is why you should never have a junk pile which you purge. Yes, a junk folder is nice, since it’s helpful to indefinitely suspend things which just don’t fit in at the moment. But never think you’re throwing something away for good.

Although you may go ‘around’ in a circle, each time you challenge your evolution, you climb higher levels in the spring. This is why when you return to the same point along the circle, things may look similar but in fact you have a deeper perspective (being on a circle up the spiral chain.) Like when you first encounter an exercise it may overwhelm and frustrate you, but when you return to an exercise and you see it with the depth of minutia; and then even later as merely just another tool in the toolbox for your personal evolution; and finally as one who can even make new tools to fit the situation spontaneously.

Although it may be considered un-PC to think of oneself as “farther along evolution,” that’s because of a misunderstanding on the nature of mastery. Mastery is totally an individual, unrepeatable path. You can’t be farther along that another person, since each spiral is unique… though the challenges of the levels may be similar.

Thinking spirally will also help you avoid getting swept up in the tornado of “balancing” practice. The most balanced program or device doesn’t exist. You can’t include everything all the time. That is linear thinking. You can’t also just cycle through periods of different major attributes throughout the year and hope that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That’s circular thinking. You must go deeper.

Balance is not attained in a work week, nor in a season, and can only even be glimpsed over the course of years. As you swirl higher and higher along your spiral, you encounter layers of the same challenge, deepening your address of them… encountering your fears and impediments again and again, though each time with deeper satisfaction. Balance only happens over a lifetime, like tacking in a sailboat you zig-zag back and forth with forward progress over time.

Your physical practice is a laboratory for your personal development, where you explore the dynamics of what it is to be you, and the impact that your current level of evolution has upon how you see the world… And how you see the world impacts your contribution upon it.

flow thyself,

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