2016 was a rollercoaster but it may all just be part of the process of personal and collective transformation.

As Bob Dylan put it, the times they are a-changin’.

The election of Trump as the leader of the “free” world threw me for days and I was so infuriated and saddened by the result that I needed time to process my extreme reaction.

I explored the root cause of my fury. I felt that millions of Americans had voted out of fear. It semeed like a dismal attempt to cling to a world that was always an illusion anyway.

I felt powerless and deeply saddened for the those that were feeling disempowered by the result.

And then I thought:

• What if Trump’s election was a desperate plea to uphold a dying status quo?
• What if this is the beginning of a counter-movement?
• Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the world?!
• What if people are looking for a drastic solution to a problem that we cannot even properly identify?

A Crossroads

The truth is, we won’t be able to answer those questions for some time.

It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we’ll begin to see how all of these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle come together.

In any event, the US election and Brexit has put in a place a chain reaction of events that are going to fundamentally change the world.

I think we’ve reached a crossroads in human evolution. We’re entered a period of transformation that will for many of us, feel very uncomfortable.

Chaos = Transformation

In the The Aquarian Conspiracy, Marilyn Ferguson shares that the very chaos of contemporary existence provides the perfect material for transformation, innovation and evolution. This theory was first presented by Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Prize winner in 1977.

Similarly, in Reinventing Organisations, Frederic Laloux refers to scholars that have traced the journey of human consciousness. Those scholars found that in the roughly 100,000-year history of humanity, we have gone through a number of successive stages.

At every stage we made a leap in our abilities — cognitively, morally and psychologically — to deal with the world.

What Laloux is describing is a paradigm shift in human thinking first identified by Thomas Kuhn, a science historian.

A Paradigm Shift

A paradigm shift can be described as a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events.

According to Kuhn, a new paradigm cannot be slowly embraced. It must occur at once. As Marilyn Ferguson puts it, the new paradigm is not “figured out”, it is suddenly seen.

A Second Curve

In The Second Curve Charles Handy explores the idea of the necessity of change. Handy suggests that most societies, businesses and careers follow a sigmoid curve (see below).

The original curve starts out, dips as it establishes itself and then rises to a peak. What follows after this peak is the inevitable decline and it’s this decline that explains the fall of great empires, societies and businesses.

Handy suggests that we can avoid this decline by starting out on a second curve while we are still rising up on the original one. This way, we can avoid decline and renew ourselves.

The problem lies in identifying when that first curve will peak. I would suggest that in many respects, our society has already peaked and we’re already on the decline.

But what if we haven’t peaked yet? What if we’re being presented with the perfect timing to start the second curve?

Handy suggests that second-curve thinking doesn’t come easily as it requires imagination, intuition and instinct more than rational analysis.

It also demands the courage to step into the unknown even when all of the signals, and all of those around you, tell you that don’t need to.

The most exciting breakthroughs of the twenty-first century will not occur because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human_ John Naisbitt

This is what our careers, our lives and our society is calling for . It’s calling for people that are willing to step out of comfort and towards a better future than one they could ever have imagined.

It’s during these times of transformation that we set out in search of new myths, new visions and new ways of thinking.

I’m a firm believer that this transformation begins with transformation with self.

Self-Transformation

The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to overthrow the rest of us. ~Rob Brezsny

My purpose in life is to help people change the way that they think so that we can begin to change the world.

Our evolution as human beings has required us to move to higher and more complex ways of thinking and perceiving this world. 

Every few generations, it’s almost as if we are required to shed the layers of what we believe it is to be human into order to step into even greater potential.

I have unshaken faith in the ability to humanity to transcend our current ways of thinking and to move towards a kinder, more complex, more conscious way of living and working.

Moving Forward

I see it around me every single day in my work and in my relationships. We’re beginning to redefine business and what it means to be human.

• With this in mind, self-transformation requires:
• An awareness that change and growth is possible, and necessary;
• The ability to redefine who we are and get rid of conditioning and self-limiting beliefs;
• The courage to shed the layers of who we are told we should be;
• The redefinition of what is means to be successful;
• A movement towards love over fear; and
• The power to figure out our purpose, live an authentic life and step into our full potential.

Once we have commenced the transformation of self, we have the ability to transform the places we work, the businesses we run and the society we participate in.

L x