The Elegant Self: A Radical Approach to Personal Evolution for Greater Influence In Life
Robert Lundin McNamara is a professor of developmental psychology in Boulder, Colorado and is a highly respected authority on the higher reaches of adulthood.
The Elegant Self, A Radical Approach to Personal Evolution for Greater Influence In Life
Rob is author of Strength To Awaken, a speaker, performance coach, psychotherapist, and expert in helping high-achieving adults make greater impact in their lives. Kindle Edition , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Dec 22, Neelesh Marik rated it it was amazing.
A few sparkling quotes from arguably one of the best books on personal development I've read: When the adult mind fails to cultivate his or her own internal development, a compensation is often made. Conflict is a way to recapture complexity.
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It can serve as a reminder that we have an engrained habituation to formulate positions and pretend for them to be complete… the self-transforming mind allows the problem s to co-create and co-construct systemic transformations that are in an ongoing creative dialogue with the underlying tensions. The self-without-form is empty, yet this mysterious open and unconditioned seat of subjectivity is intimately connected with the self-as-form……the self-as-form provides the essential seat of incompleteness while the self-without-form offers the second taste of completeness…….
The grand liberation of formlessness is an integrated gesture of intimately engaging with and as the form of your life. The greater influence of elegance moves freely between dramatic destabilizing changes and rigorously defended homeostasis. Elegance is often born from an intentional confrontation with the many layers of habituation in order to free up your ability to participate more skillfully with novelty.
Elegance as you is a creative flexibility of mediated and unmediated intelligence. Biasing premature integration diminishes the creative dynamism between polarities and paradoxically inhibits higher order integration and the free functioning of the extremities inside polarities. The larger proficiency in life, in every domain, is a dialectical oscillation between effort and surrender.
Grace and your most fierce devoted effort merge and co-create something inexplicable.
The Elegant Self
Yet, one of the pervasive traps many adults fail to navigate successfully—sometimes for decades—is this movement toward the body, feelings, and intuitions at the exclusion and expense of the discursive intellect. This false substitution privileges feelings over thinking The divorce between body and mind, thinking and feeling, thought and emotion is a costly one.
It is a shift away from the integrative capacity elegance demonstrates. You cannot remain fixated in a struggle to get out of habituation…..
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The elegant self is here; perhaps it merely awaits our larger participation. Be explored by elegance Good and difficult I started easier than i finished the book. The content and concepts are for sure very interesting but if the reader is not informed about integral and developmental psychology it can get ready difficult to read and grasp what is being transmitted. Anyways, I appreciate the author and his work.
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Strength to Awaken Robert McNamara. Reinventing Organizations Frederic Laloux. The Escape David Baldacci. Customer Ratings We have not received enough ratings to display an average for this book.
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There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. The Elegant Self is a useful and important book. It focuses on what has been termed "cognitive development" psychology or, alternatively, subject-object theory, as popularized by Robert Kegan in his book "In Over Our Heads". It does a decent job of summarizing this and other related approaches to psychology and, more importantly, provides some guidance to individuals interested in evolving to higher ways of experiencing the world.
Basically, this involves the making into objects of understanding what had previously been an unacknowledged part of the subjective self. Much of the focus is on moving into the fourth of five stages, or from the autonomous self to the transforming self. Other reviews do an excellent job of describing this process. The importance of the issue addressed in the book would indicate a five star rating, as seen by the other reviews posted here.
I have downgraded the review to four stars based on two factors. First, the writing style is needlessly complex.
While a difficult subject, the role of an author is to present it as simply as possible. The author here has not done this. In particular, the sentence structure is overly difficult, and as a result I found myself slowed down to simply identify the flow of a particular sentence. Second, the author seems to go out of his way to avoid any spiritual language in favor of psychological terminology. However, this transition form stage three to stage four is precisely where the spiritual begins to assert itself as more primary than mere ego functioning.
In one particularly egregious example, the author refers to an exercise to "inhabit the technology of stillness" when he describes what is clearly mediation but without mentioning the word itself. Likewise, there are numerous examples where the concept of witnessing is explained in complex psychological terminology rather than using a word that might be too closely aligned with the spiritual.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in personal growth, enhancing their relationships and performance at work, or simply achieving a better understanding of the dynamics and processes as you aspire to become that "next version of you" that you may be interested in achieving. Deeply inspiring and insightful in ways that few books are. It is sometimes slow going, some passages requiring multiple re-readings for me to feel that I understand it well enough to move on. There are some overlaps here with ideas I recognize from Integral Theory around adult developmental growth, and some very nice considerations of and practical applications of Robert Kegan's work.
Filled with great questions and exercises to stimulate your thinking around your own situation and to help personalize the lessons and insights to make them more durable and sustainable.
I expect to go back to this book many times, personalizing it with notes and dog-eared pages - the reason why the Kindle version alone was just not quite up to my needs. I really can't recommend this book highly enough. If you find it's not your cup of tea, gift it to someone in your life with interests that run this direction - they'll enthusiastically thank you for it. And no, I don't know this author.
But I wish him all the success with this book that he deserves. Deeply grounded in research, but making it accessible and understandable by describing where the challenges and benefits of further growth show up in our lives and work.