Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork

by Dan Sullivan

Harvard psychologist Dr. Robert Kegan has a term for this—The Transforming Self—and he considers it the highest form of psychological and emotional evolution. According to Kegan, the basest form of psychological development is the Socializing Self, which is when a person operates out of fear, anxiety, and dependence. You don’t make your own decisions. You don’t have your own goals. Instead, you are simply trying to be accepted by your peers and will do anything you can to conform with them. Above the Socializing Self is the Authoring Self, which is when you’ve gone from unhealthily dependent to a much more healthy independence. You’ve developed your own sense of self. You have a worldview, goals, and an agenda. However, you have a perceptual filter that you cannot see beyond. Everything you do is to confirm your bias and achieve your narrow goals. This is where most people stop in their development, highly convinced of their own perspectives and unwilling to alter those views. The Transforming Self is different from the Authoring Self in that rather than being individualistic and competitive, it is more relational and collaborative. When at this higher level, you engage in collaborative relationships for the sake of transformation. All parties have their own perspectives, beliefs, and agendas. Yet they come together for the purpose of having their own views, and even their own identities and sense of self expand. The whole becomes new and greater than the sum of all parts.