Unleash your full potential with Next Level Coaching

1. The trajectory towards complexity via enhanced cognitive-affective and behavioural complexity and hierarchical integration
2. The reproductive trajectory via an improved capacity to control our environment and thus change it to meet our needs or to eliminate threats and thus ensure our own survival and reproduction.
3. The trajectory towards ‘knowledge that coincides with reality’ via an improved capacity to view oneself and the world in an unbiased and undistorted way
4. The trajectory toward eudaimonic well-being via the pursuit of fulfilment and well-being through purpose and meaning, and
5. The Ethical trajectory via an enhanced ability to make decisions that take into account the well-being of a greater number of people and living things

So what does this mean when looking for help in each of these areas?

We could prioritise one focus on this before moving onto another. 

Or, we could seek the support of multiple coaches, guides, or experts in each area. 

But what if there was a way that we could find a single ‘developmentalist’ that could offer us a solution to developing across all of these trajectories simultaneously?

Sound like a ‘silver bullet’? Maybe, but some silver bullets exist outside of myth!

You might be thinking that complexity is a bad thing. Certainly there is a general drive toward reducing complexity in businesses and in many other areas of our lives. However, there is the concept of Requisite Complexity, that is to say that things should be “as simple as possible but no simpler” (a phrase often misattributed to Einstein).

Our ability to make sense of and respond to increasing complexity in our lives as our spans of responsibility and influence increase in one or more areas of our lives, depends on having requisite complexity in our thinking and behaviour.

Next Level Coaching address this, as above, by developing greater balance (Awareness and Choice) between Cognitive Intentions. This increased balance creates greater differentiation in our thinking, which when integrated into combined forms, creates greater complexity in our thinking and, thus, our behaviour.

Our ability to construct a more accurate view of ourselves, others and our worlds - a “more useful” model of reality against which to make judgements and decisions - depends on our ability to think about ourselves, others, and our worlds in a more unbiased way. 

Next Level Coaching reduces our biases by targeting the imbalances in our Cognitive Intention usage which drive them. 

As the Choice in our thinking grows, our biases diminish, and our model of reality becomes more accurate, and thus “more useful”.

This “more useful model” also supports The Reproductive Trajectory since our capacity to control our environment, and just as importantly, to discern what it is useful to control, is, in large part determined by the accuracy of our model of that environment.

Eudaimonia means the pursuit of fulfilment and well-being through purpose and meaning, and Greek philosopher Aristotle contended that this was the highest human good.

According to Carol Ryff, Professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, eudaimonic well-being has six dimensions: purpose in life, self-acceptance, environmental mastery, positive relationships, autonomy, personal growth.

Clearly any form of development satisfies the personal growth dimension, and we’ve already covered environmental mastery above. So what about the others?

By focussing on creating greater balance in our thinking, and in particular our awareness of the relationships between ourselves and others, Next Level Coaching helps us to separate ourselves from our relationships so that we can see them more objectively. 

This separation affords us greater control over them and thus an increased ability to construct them more positively (or more easily choose to abandon them!).

It also enables us to be more autonomous since we are no longer subject to the limiting and unhelpful constraints that relationships can impose upon us when we aren’t aware of them.

The increased Choice in our usage of Cognitive Intentions that Next Level Coaching develops also provides us with greater Choice in how we Construct ourselves, thus rendering self-acceptance rather moot!

This phrase, credited to American author Dr Martha Beck, neatly sums up a core claim made by Dr Darren Stevens for Constructed Development Theory, that it is the the bridge between general and domain specific thinking.

What the preceding paragraphs have outlined is how the practical application of CDT via Next Level Coaching bridges the five trajectories for positive adult development proposed by Dr Oliver Robinson.

Each of these trajectories further encompasses multiple domains: our home life, our social life, our work life, our academic life, in fact all aspects of our lives.

This is the power of Next Level Coaching, to help us to develop across all trajectories and domains in our lives, allowing us to unleash our full potential.