Lifeshifts to Worldshifts — Future Human Alchemy
We all have dreams — frequently they also include dreams of a better future for ourselves and others. We also have nightmares — about what could go wrong, sometimes in the worst possible way. Our subconscious and conscious minds prepare us for possible futures and hopefully steer us toward better versions of those futures. Living systems are anticipatory by nature. In many ways, we already instinctively know what better looks like, even if we find it hard to articulate or realize.
“We are at that stage where the real work of humanity begins. This is the time where we partner Creation in the recreation of ourselves, in the restoration of the biosphere, and in the assuming of a culture of kindness where we live daily life in such a way as to be reconnected and charged and intelligenced by the source of our reality so as to become liberated in our inventiveness and engaged in our world and tasks.”
Author and Cultural Philosopher, Jean Houston, Personal Communication
I sometimes dream of a world powered by renewable energy, where all human beings thrive in flourishing habitats; where businesses operate in a circular economy that regenerates natural capital, without a particle of waste, led by enlightened leaders whose goal is to maximize the thriving of all stakeholders.
A world where each individual is empowered to pursue their passion and make a living in service to others; where governance systems are transparent, effective, and wise in how they deliver their services to their communities and populations; and where intercultural appreciation and insight enriches the exchanges between the diverse worldviews and cultures embraced by humankind.
And I am fully aware that for that world to become a reality on a planetary scale, would take a major worldshift. And for that worldshift to happen, the earth’s human inhabitants all need to make major lifeshifts.
“Lifeshifts” are often sold as a personal development package for people in the developed world, many of whom are consuming between four to ten planets of resources in their current lifestyles. They are also sold as part of “get rich/famous/successful quick” packages that promise miraculous transformations if we can just “shift our consciousness” and “resonate at the right frequency” to attract what we think we so desperately need or want right now.
In this article, we are more interested in lifeshifts that can help deliver worldshifts that enhance our ability to thrive on a flourishing planet within the environmental ceilings and social floors that will enable us to survive as a species, given the six interconnected, escalating mega-crises we face right now.
In previous articles, we’ve covered several related, “big picture” topics dealing with the global transition we are in from Game A to Game B, as well as the evolutionary strategies that can catalyze a regenerative civilization. So now we are going to zoom into the nano level, where all change and transformation begins: YOU!
We all face the same dilemma: how can one person change the world for the better?
That is the subject of this article. We will build on several of the other 12 insights in this global change agent series, so hang on for a riveting ride.
If you are interested in finding out more about how you can personally accelerate your own development and lifeshifts, you can find more insights at changeagentprogram.
You can also purchase my recent books on Amazon to dive deeper into the underlying research, maps and models that I synthesize in my Medium articles.
Thanks for reading this far- please clap as many times as you like and share this article if you’ve found it helpful.
TEN KEY LIFESHIFT CONSTRUCTS
There are ten key constructs that we will explore in the process before we get practical and explore how this applies to you in this and future articles:
- Future Attractors — pockets of the future are all around us once we let go of the past and begin to open up to future possibilities. These attractors range from simple choices such as deciding which subjects to take in a course, to more complex ones like deciding who you can trust with your heart or your money, and major career and organizational decisions.
One of the emerging global attractors is the need to develop a regenerative, inclusive, collaborative, and multicapital “Game B” that can address global overheating and biodiversity loss. The major attractor for 80% of 18–25-year-old centennials surveyed globally is to deal effectively with climate change and maintain global overheating below 1.5C, while 75% of millennials will not work for, invest in, or buy from businesses that do not walk the talk on sustainability.
The future is already here, it’s just that many people over 40 are out of touch with what is really going on at the forefront of conscious evolution, and many under 40 are aware of the challenges but not yet possessed of the authority, power and influence needed to trigger major worldshifts.
We need to expand our horizons to see the possibilities emerging all around us, but which we cannot yet see clearly as we remain focused on short-term, easily visible attractors. Most disruption of traditional industries and ways of doing things comes from “Unknown Unknowns” outside those industries. The same pattern repeats itself with our lifeshifts.
If we remain too attached to our “Known Knowns” and only make weak efforts to explore the “Known Unknowns”, we are likely to be trapped in the past, and unable to realize our true future potential, as illustrated in the diagram below. This process of letting go and seeing what unfolds as we probe into the chaos around us to generate new information and start to recognize emerging patterns in the noise is full-spectrum- physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. This takes a great deal of courage and discernment.
2. Vocational arousal — the future exerts a pull on all of us. The stronger that pull, or calling, the easier it is to recognize it and make some moves toward realizing it. Vocational arousal is our response to future attractors, which can be both visible and invisible to us, as we demonstrate in the diagram above with the “cone of possibility”.
This often involves complex emotions, images, dreams, and synchronicities that enable us to unexpectedly jump tracks and move in a different direction. But you will definitely feel it in your gut, just as you can feel sexual arousal slightly lower down. This is not an academic exercise!
3. Evolutionary Transformation — the illusion that we are all separate, rational, choice-making individuals who can reason our way to success through “perfect markets” and “trickle-down economics” has landed on the rubbish dump of history in the past few decades. We are each part of something much bigger than ourselves, and so the question is not what you want to be when you grow up or “make it”, but what problems and challenges you want to solve, and how you can be in service to something much bigger and rewarding than yourself. Every one of our lifeshifts provides the fuel that powers worldshifts.
Our consciousness, especially our awareness of our profound selves beyond the stream of thoughts and reactions that most people mistake for consciousness, is the source of our ability to shift. Many people live their lives in a trance of stimulus-response, unaware they are being controlled and manipulated by their families, friends, authority figures, and the media. Without the ability to “observe the observer”, think critically, or systemically, they are easy prey for autocrats and authoritarians.
Consciousness can undergo a transformation as radical as water turning to ice, snow, or steam. Think of falling in love, a universal experience that changes everything in a person’s psychology. There are “aha” moments, sudden glimpses of bliss and ecstasy, and so-called peak experiences that are transformative. There are also negative states of consciousness such as grief and chronic depression.
How does one achieve transformation of the positive kind? Falling in love, “aha” moments, and glimpses of bliss and ecstasy are transient. But there is a permanent aspect of consciousness, known as transcendence or going beyond. At the most basic level, you can identify with mental activity or you can shift your allegiance to the silent mind that lies deeper than mental activity, something meditation, reflection, mindfulness and a variety of practices open up for us.
4. Outside-in Shifts —our lives can evolve as a result of the pressure of external forces and life conditions so that we find our destiny determined by the dominance of the external world over our inner life. For many in the developing world, this is the case: without the resources and education, the lives of those in poverty usually limit their options for personal development and conscious evolution, with some rare exceptions.
In the developed parts of the world, those with an obsessive attachment to “progress” and “success” often become victims of their obsessions. The happiness of such obsessives then depends on the beneficence or harshness of their environment, with their life strategy being reduced to “get rich, be recognized, be successful”, no matter how.
Equally the fatalists and collapsists who seek to escape the Darwinian pressures of the rat race in the belief that the entire system is doomed, become victims of their escape, and hence powerless to make much of a real difference, even as they feel safer and less stressed as a result of playing the victim.
Never before have so many lived in such comfort and security, despite the major disruptions and wars of the past century. In the developed world, we are the most materially privileged generation in history. Great strides are also being made in eradicating disease and poverty in the developing world, even as we face the six interconnected, escalating mega-crises and the prospect of human extinction.
The problem is that our obsession with control has led us to expect perfection, and granted the privileged few their wish to live in paradise. Yet for the most part, our artificial urban paradise is completely divorced from nature and relies on an unsustainable global production machine that must work 24x7x365 to grant us our every consumer wish. Not only is this completely unsustainable, but it also produces a legion of different kinds of hell on earth for the inhabitants of these overcrowded, false expectation machines.
5. Inside-out Shifts — the greatest leaders of change and transformation in history have become world transformers, whether it’s a Gandhi, a Mandela, a Martin Luther King, or an Einstein because they started with their own personal interior, their consciousness, their intentions, their visions, and they then worked that into a certain level of capability. Their calling and mindshifts became capability and culture shifts. They developed the skills and the ability to describe what’s next and how they can get there. From that capability shift, they triggered world shifts.
The arc of our civilization and our evolution has slowly been turning from a preoccupation with exploration and conquest (whether military, economic or cultural), to a focus on interiors, both physically and spiritually. At the physical level, particle physics, nanotechnology, genetics and epigenetics, cell biology, information technology, to name just a few disciplines, are taking us ever deeper into the substance of our material world and enabling us to transform it in clever new ways.
At the spiritual level, we find philosophers and cultural leaders exploring and mapping the clash and fusion of all the cultures and ideas that have ever arisen on the planet, while developing new ways of developing ourselves as post-modern avatars of enlightenment.
6. Conscious Evolution — human beings are conscious, reflective creatures, who form intentions and plans, who are social learning collaborators, and who form memories, opinions, attitudes, and beliefs through their interaction. We also grow and develop through predictable stages of development physically, psychologically, and socially.
The realization that cultural and social evolution can be guided through conscious decisions has been in increasing evidence since approximately the mid-19th century when the rate of change globally began to increase dramatically.
Consciousness is no longer merely the way in which we apprehend reality — it now powers the way in which we create reality itself.
Our consciousness of evolution becomes a springboard for leaping into conscious evolution. How can we use our newfound evolutionary consciousness to select the best evolutionary paths, merging intuition with reason in order to find the path that leads to conscious evolution?
“It now remains for human beings to decide the ultimate course of human evolution. By imagining ourselves inside the process of evolution and by imagining the process of evolution working inside our minds, we may discover how to deal with the opportunities that might influence the direction of evolutionary choices.”
Dr Jonas Salk- American physician and medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective vaccine for polio
The raw power of evolutionary processes now begins to be harnessed by the emerging power of useful perspectives and the materials, infrastructure, tools, organizations, and practices that embody them. At each stage of evolution in human civilization, we find that consciousness, culture, behavior, and systems come as a package, each influencing and supporting the others in their evolution.
7. Crises Can Accelerate Evolution — people are waking up around the world to the consequences of their lifestyles and choices- too slowly, perhaps, but definitely paying more attention than before. Right now our species can be said to be on full alert to the unfolding global emergency around us.
Many of us are experiencing extreme levels of fear, uncertainty, anxiety, and doubt. Ours is an age in which an enormous and growing number of people suffer from anxiety. Anxiety is the most common psychiatric complaint by a wide margin and one for which we westerners are increasingly medicated.
The way in which we respond to to the six interconnected and escalating megacrises we face will determine whether we go down the route of near-term human extinction, or create a thriving new planetary society in a flourishing biosphere.
We can use this planetary crisis to accelerate our conscious evolution if we can only learn how. Which is the key insight of this article- how we can accelerate our lifeshifts so that they collectively become worldshifts.
Let’s put the fire on our planet out.
8. Complexity Catastrophes & Synergies— Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan tells us that we are “In Over Our Heads”. Kegan believes that we are facing a mismatch between our mental capacities and the complex demands of modern life. As parents and partners, employees and bosses, citizens and leaders, we constantly confront a bewildering array of expectations, prescriptions, claims, and demands, as well as an equally confusing assortment of expert opinions that tell us what each of these roles entails.
Kegan brings together the disparate and disconnected expert “literatures,” to reveal what these many demands have in common. He shows us that our frequent frustration in trying to meet such complex and often conflicting claims results from a mismatch between the way we ordinarily know the world and the way we are expected to understand it through the means of our technocratic culture.
This means we are experiencing both complexity catastrophes and complexity synergies, leading to breakdowns and breakthroughs coming at us and in us and from us, faster and more furious than ever before.
Breakdowns, everywhere. Road rage, tech rage, shopping rage, gun rage, social media rage, appliance rage, work rage, political rage, sports rage, and now covid rage- human aggression is unleashed when we find ourselves continually frustrated by our technologies, jobs, and each other. Much of the time we are overcrowded, hyper-competitive, and pitted against each other by Machiavellian politicians and powerbrokers. Even the twice vaccinated can now carry a lethal dose of Covid-19 that can kill others without a mask or a vaccination. Who can you trust?
Breakthroughs, everywhere, too. 30% of our electricity now comes from renewable energy, up from near zero at the turn of the century. Electric cars will go exponential too, from 10 million vehicles on the road today to at least 145 million by 2030. 1.9 billion trees are planted annually, with numbers rising fast, though much more needs to be done to reduce deforestation. Tens of thousands of corporations and 4 000 startups are tackling all kinds of waste globally. Ten percent of plastic waste is now recycled, and that number will rise rapidly with thousands of organizations coming together in many key industries to solve the problem within a decade. Over the last 25 years, the proportion of girls being educated around the world has risen to 89% — a 16% increase since 1995.
But the biggest breakthroughs will come from each of us making thriveable lifeshifts, and eventually, synchroshifts.
9. Know Thyself and Thy Potential — We each have a core. Something that makes us essentially who we are, sometimes called our character. Character is different to personality. We develop our personalities in response to our life conditions and upbringing, and the stresses and tensions we live through as we grow and develop. Character is both genetic and evolutionary- our unique evolutionary self that has always been there.
Around that core, we have options, we make choices. Our core has its strengths and weaknesses, and we adjust those choices to favor our strengths and minimize our weaknesses if we are wise. Our potential has its origins in our core but also develops according to the life choices we make. We are all gifted with one or more intelligences that we can develop throughout our lifetime.
The more we learn about ourselves, our potential, and work on developing that potential, the more rewarding life can become. Life is nothing but a series of choices, and if you make good choices, your life will improve. That’s a brief, rational statement that everyone lives by, since the opposite — improving your life by making bad choices — isn’t much of a plan.
Part of knowing yourself includes having a good idea of what is going on around you, including the trends and opportunities as well as the threats in the world that impact you.
10. Synchroshifting Evolutionary Models & Narratives—we humans tend to be prone to over-simplification about things, resulting in often dangerous generalizations, whether about nature, economics, politics, health or religion, for example. Over-simplifying generalizations have the same effect as a stream of lies- they corrupt, confuse and eventually lead to the downfall of the faulty meaning-making systems that produce them.
Our modern, “Game A” narrative (degenerative, exclusive, hierarchical, mono-capitalistic system) and the out-of-date thinking and models that support that system, have produced a global crisis of faulty meaning-making.
Evolutionary, complex-adaptive, dynamic models and narratives are rich enough to adapt to specific circumstances, yet general enough to be shared amongst thinking humans and agreed upon as, more or less, what is currently emerging and evolving, without being fossilized by the need to specify any particular outcome in detail.
I’ve personally witnessed the power of these rich, evolutionary models and narratives in developing transformative strategies for several hundred global corporations, banks, and international NGOs over 40 years of transformation and innovation work. These evolutionary models create a space for conversation, dialogue, and learning that transforms both the participants and the outcomes in the process.
In other words, there is a shift going on both in those responsible for developing and co-evolving the models as well as in the strategies and policies they develop, which, if successful, become embodied in cultures in the “way we do things around here” sense. Such shifts in consciousness and culture, when accompanied by the appropriate shifts in capability (“the ability to do the appropriate things in specific contexts” at both individual and collective levels), result in “worldshifts”- systemic changes in the world around us at a socio-economic level.
Such shifts can take centuries, or they can be accelerated through transformative consciousness. In our current situation, urgency is of the essence — we must radically shift our dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energies while transforming our materialistic consumer culture into a more thriveable way of living the good life, by 2030.
We have ten years or less to make such shifts in order to avoid catastrophic consequences for ourselves and all life on earth. I call such accelerated shifts: “Synchroshifts”, where mindshifts, culture shifts, capability shifts, and worldshifts are catalyzed and coordinated so as to be embodied at scale.
If you are interested in finding out more about how you can personally accelerate your own development and lifeshifts, you can find more insights at changeagentprogram.
You can also purchase my recent books on Amazon to dive deeper into the underlying research, maps and models that I synthesize in my Medium articles.
Thanks for reading this far- please clap as many times as you like and share this article if you’ve found it helpful.
LIFESHIFTING FOR YOU
Our development and growth are a function of the interaction between our responses to external situations, events, and possibilities (outside-in shifts) and our ability to shape the world through inside-out shifts. When we are young, we tend to conform to the ways of thinking and being most respected in our local world, to “get along”.
As teenagers, we might identify with rebellious role models as we come into our own power and will and explore different aspects of ourselves and our world. The personalities and identities we form at this stage often become how we define ourselves and live the rest of our lives.
Our consciousness, culture, capabilities and co-creations can then stabilize around conventional norms and ways of living unless external forces significantly disrupt our world. Some 80–85% of our fellow nearly 8 billion fellow earthlings live most of their lives in pre-conventional and conventional modes. However another 15–20% continue their development into post-conventional stages, as illustrated in the following diagram.
In one of the other 12 insights in this series, we explore the adult developmental process in greater depth. For the purpose of Lifeshifting, it is important to know that inside-out world-shaping becomes possible mainly at post-conventional stages of development. If our stage of development is self-centric, group-centric, or skill-centric, we will largely shift in response to outside forces. As we approach the self-determining stage of development, we begin the journey from knowledge to wisdom, and the ability to intentionally Lifeshift in response to our aspirations for self-actualization.
Shifting mindsets (mindshifts) is potentially the most powerful, but also one of the more difficult lifeshift moves unless one is moving into or centered in a post-conventional systems view of the world. If we shift our capabilities (competencies, skills, knowledge, and behaviors) alone, we might be able to trigger a mindshift in ourselves and others, but that route is more haphazard.
Shifting cultures takes longer than the other three shifts in general, especially when we look at the center of gravity of a culture- for example, it took the Scandinavian countries more than a century to move from a deeply conventional, poverty-driven cultural milieu to their current state of post-modern, even meta-modern cultural leading edge. The interface between religions, politics and socioeconomic values shifts is key, as progression or regression in one or more of these has strong feedback effects on the others.
Worldshifts also require major systemic transformations, especially in the way investments in infrastructure and manufactured capitals are targeted. Politicians, activists, NGOs, leading business organizations, and power brokers need to become properly aligned in their visions and intentions to trigger shifts from fossil fuel to renewable energy for example. Shifts in education, healthcare, and the criminal justice system toward more inclusive, progressive models are also largely generational.
There are, however, several ways in which one can accelerate shifts, as we alluded to above in item 10- Synchroshifting Evolutionary Models & Narratives.
If you are interested in finding out more about how you can personally accelerate your own development and lifeshifts, you can find more insights at changeagentprogram.
You can also purchase my recent books on Amazon to dive deeper into the underlying research, maps, and models that I synthesize in my Medium articles.
Thanks for reading this far- please clap as many times as you like and share this article if you’ve found it helpful.
