Going Nowhere

Pitfalls and Paradoxes in Pursuing Personal Development

Hosted by Simon Cavicchia

Overview

A two-part webinar exploring tensions which can arise as a result of our “systems of development” and how to navigate these in ourselves and with clients.

We are born into contexts in which pre-existing systems concerned with development abound. From infant growth percentiles, school and university curricula through to good parenting and leadership development criteria, to mention but a few, we are subtly and not so subtly inducted into observing ourselves in relation to these systems of development and corresponding measurement and evaluation mechanisms.

The field of personal development including the psychotherapies, consciousness studies and maps of vertical development have their own systems of thought which include ideas about healthy functioning, maturation, growth, what constitutes change and how it happens or can be “helped” to happen. These maps are often sophisticated and some provide well researched pointers to enable us to orient to the specific territory of personal development we might be interested in. At the same time, systems, and particularly those with a clear developmental “trajectory” at their heart, can give rise to a series of tensions in the lived experience of those of us who are attempting to make use of them for our own growth and that of our clients. These include:

• Activation of the “development superego” resulting in tendency to compare oneself to the map (and others) resulting in feeling deficient relative to perceived “higher” stages or others perceived to be functioning at higher stages.
• A striving attitude as the system continues to keep calling us toward the “next” or later “stages”.
• Striving towards, and idealisation of, later stages can give rise to a future focus and a rejection of where we find ourselves in the here and now.
• Rejection of the here and now can limit curiosity and capacity for reflection and inquiry which are necessary for personal development.

This is not an exhaustive list, but Simon’s own experience of these phenomena, along with observing them in clients, leads him to the paradoxical proposition that the pursuit of personal development can, if we are not careful, at times limit development potential.

In this webinar Simon will explore a number of tensions that can arise as a result of the systems of development we are embedded in and which can lead us into “pursuing” personal growth. Simon will draw on Beisser’s paradoxical theory of change and Bion’s theory of thinking (as well as other lenses) as alternative maps (the irony is not lost here!) that might support us to engage with our systems of thought in a more light-touch way.

As with all Simon’s webinars, he will offer some conceptual input with time for experiential collaborative inquiry as we pay attention together to the impact of ideas on our experience and vice versa. The invitation will be to notice how ideas, maps and systems, such as vertical development, might shape our experience and that of clients in helpful and less helpful ways. Simon is intentionally not attempting to describe objectives and expected outcomes lest these become a constraint to our collaborative inquiry. In this he is invoking the sentiment of G. K. Chesterton and his exhortation:

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”

Simon Cavicchia is a Gestalt Psychotherapist, Supervisor, Executive Coach and Consultant. He has been working in the field of vertical development for over a decade. He is currently on the faculty of the Ashridge Masters in Executive Coaching and for 8 years was the Programme Lead for the MSc in Coaching Psychology at the Metanoia Institute in London.

DATES:  16 and 23 June

TIME:     0900 - 1300 UK

COST:    £280 + VAT (if applicable)