The Muscle of Consciousness

In honor of the release of my best selling book, Going Right: A Logical Justification for Pursuing Your Dreams, on Audible this Friday. I wanted to share an important antidote from it. 

My reason for sharing this is you’d be surprised how much you can advance between the ears if you pay close enough attention. This is true of training. This is true of your work. This is true of anything that garners your focused, best effort. Enjoy. 

“There is a strong case to be made that advanced stages of adult development will help with the ability to navigate life’s inexorable challenges. A higher level of consciousness has a utilitarian value to those interested in pursuing lofty goals. 

What is consciousness exactly? Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, professor in Jerusalem, and the author of several books on human history, including “Sapiens,” describes consciousness as the mind’s framework for navigating subjective experiences. Humans have consciousness and robots do not because we, as sentient beings, feel and crave. It’s the sensation and desire that defines consciousness. When it comes to what drives our decision making, it turns out that our consciousness can shape everything about our mental processes. 

The particular stages of our development can affect how we view what motivates us. To understand motivation, we must understand what the mind values. We need to understand where we believe value comes from. These values shape our sensations and our desires. Our consciousness can create value out of our desires. 

Ron Heifetz, the founder of the Center for Public Leadership, an academic research center at Harvard, and an expert and author on leadership studies, has examined the key differences between technical and adaptive challenges. In his book “Leadership Without Easy Answers,” a technical problem is an issue solved by experts. For example, a doctor treating a broken bone. Adaptive challenges, however, require new learning. The solutions in these cases have no definitive answer. For example, tackling the medical profession’s ever-increasing dependence on opioid prescriptions is an adaptive challenge for which there is no clear answer. In many adaptive challenges, it’s often difficult to discern exactly what the problem is. Adaptive challenges are solved through evolution. People and perspectives and ideas must change to solve them. Most people are affected by both technical and adaptive challenges. What often trips us up in our journeys, however, is when we attempt to solve adaptive challenges with technical means. This will never work because what we need is adaptation. This is where conscious adaptation has critical importance for us. 

Early adult stages of consciousness don’t have the ability to comprehend and solve more complex adaptive challenges. More mental complexity brings with it a broader framework through which to examine more solutions. This complexity brings advantages for a person in  navigating their struggles in complex personal relationships, work, and various aspects of life. 

As we evolve into later stages of consciousness we are able to trade black and white dogma for layers of understanding, like peeling an onion. Advanced development can alter an individual frame of perspective. Consider that anything that challenges our assumptions breaks our existing developmental frame and is a catalyst for progressive adult development. We’re living in a world with significant scarcity of later stage minds and getting more people to undertake a going right approach will be a compelling provider for more committed, deeply focused, risk-averse, potential maximizing, skill transferring people. It’s a prescription for moving the needle on our own conscious evolution. Going right not only has many tangible utilitarian advantages, it comes with a remarkable bonus in the form of conscious development.”

We’re all realizing with stark contrast just how much our conscious ability is underdeveloped for the challenges of the day. In that way, it may be more critical than ever that you engage in the kinds of pursuits that will push you into the next stages of your conscious development.