2020
Adult Development Primer
Over Thanksgiving break, I wrote another one of those flip-through decks. It’s been a labor of love and I hope you find it useful in your journey. This one attempts to tell one coherent story about Adult Development Theory, based…
The Tree of Self
Diving into the Internal Family Systems (IFS) concepts and methodology led to these four insights at the intersection of the Four Needs Framework (4NF), IFS, and Adult Development Theory (ADT).
Transformational Learning
Building on the ideas in The Suffering of Expectations, I want to look more closely at the expectation gradients. These are predictions of future experiences, and they can have negative or positive values. Negative values indicate that I expect a…
Decoherence
There is no past or future. There are only stories of the past and stories of the future, and both kinds are mutable. We resolve the pervasive ontological uncertainty by matching the story we know (beginning, middle, end) and placing…
Somatic Signals: How I use the Four Needs Framework
This post marks a second anniversary of my self-work journey. Wow. 2020 has been kind of impossible, and I am grateful to have held on to my self-work routine and even to have made more progress.
The Suffering of Expectations
I have been thinking about the relationship between expectations and suffering, and this framing popped out recently.
The Existential Anxieties
So far, I’ve talked about the general framework and the tensions between the needs. To explore how the character moves across the Four Needs coordinate space, let’s study how the character might experience the tensions between the needs. In this…
Tension between Purpose and Safety
Now that I described the tension between agency and belonging, I’d like to look at how the tension between Purpose and Safety plays out.
Total Customer Satisfaction
Imagine that I am asked to design an organization whose mission is total customer satisfaction. What does it mean to totally satisfy a customer? If I give them exactly what they want right now, is it total? If my business…
The Fall of the Carapace
Let’s imagine that I am presented with a problem: I need to help people be more capable physically. They need to be able to lift heavier objects than they currently can. And I am asked to use technology to make…
The tension between Agency and Belonging
In the Four Needs framework, I identified a tension between two opposing forces: the need for Agency and the need for Belonging. Here, I want to focus on the nature of this tension.
The Four Needs Framework
The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world around us. Sometimes, these stories are incomplete, lopsided in ways that aren’t obvious to us. A world viewed through the lens of such stories contains the suffering of inescapable…
If I don’t wake up, I stay asleep
I had a beautiful experience early this morning. I was in the middle of a nightmare about our family network being actively attacked and all of my devices becoming compromised as I fruitlessly tried to fight back. The attacker was…