Also, PSA, check out the two workshops on intention setting for the New Year I’ll be hosting this January (for the 10th year in a row) - learn more and book your place here for the workshop in English (17th Jan) and here for the one in Romanian (10th of Jan).

Like many others, I choose to pause and reflect at the threshold between a year past and one just beginning. I’ve written before about my practice of setting intentions (versus goals), but this year I’ve realised, as the pen was gliding across the pages of my journal, that there is one essential ingredient of my intention-setting ritual that turns it from a mental into a full-body exercise and is worth exploring more: gratitude.

Gratitude is a fascinating emotion and one I’ve got a particularly interesting history with. Growing up, I distinctly remember this sense of ‘thankfulness’ for all the big and small things in my life, one that’s never left me and has carried me through some of the darkest valleys and sunniest peaks over the years. For a long time, gratitude lived inside of me alongside optimism, so close that I could not quite tell them apart.

I seem to have been born with plentiful reservoirs of both, so much so that my sunny disposition may have been ‘too much’ a times. In fact, one of my oldest friends once told me (only half-joking) that I was “disgustingly optimistic” because of my (annoying) Pollyanish tendency to always look on the bright side of things. My default was trusting that, however gloomy things might have looked, there was always some good in that situation, and there would always be a way out.

In time (after much heartbreak and much therapy), I discovered that irrepressible optimism has a dark side and can become armour that fuels denial and prevents you from experiencing the full gamut of life’s trials. It can fuel avoidance or denial and hold you back from being transformed (rather than crushed) by hardship. As I’ve later learnt from vertical development research, we grow from our most confusing, most painful moments, from those ‘disorienting dilemmas’ that break us down and tear us apart with gut-wrenching ‘edge emotions’. But there is a twist to this messy growth journey: pain is not enough.

What if the antidote to our hardest emotions isn’t to push through them, but to feel them and hold space for both them and also something else entirely?

In my research on leaders’ vertical development, I discovered that the leaders who transformed weren’t the ones who muscled through their edge emotions - feelings of confusion, fear, inadequacy and disorientation that arise when our world stops making sense. The ones who grew were those who found ways to stay present with those feelings long enough for something new to emerge. And they did this, in large part, by cultivating what I came to call ‘contrasting emotions’, feelings that don’t take away the pain of growth but somehow make it possible to stay in the fire without being consumed.

Curiosity was the first of these I identified in my study. It seemed to work almost like an alchemical ingredient, helping temper the dread of not knowing and making room for the thrill of discovery to live alongside it. But, as I continued exploring what helps humans stay at their developmental edge, I became increasingly curious (sic!) what other emotions might act as a ‘contrasting emotion’, helping us find our way through the disequilibrium of life’s hardest moments?

Enter gratitude.

As I’ve grown into my middle years, I've found I’ve become less optimistic. I am acutely aware of life’s transience, and, over the last few years in particular, I’ve grown painfully aware of the huge mess our world is in as the metacrisis meets the polycrisis. My inner Pollyanna is often wrecked with existential anxiety, worrying about everything - the rise of extremism, wars, climate change, the self-destructive phenomenon of democracies choosing autocrats to lead them, my and my loved ones’ health, my child’s future in a world reshaped by AI. But as I’ve let myself feel all of my anxiety, accept it as an intrinsic part of being alive, I’ve also discovered the full breadth and depth of gratitude. It’s become not so much an antidote, but a trusted companion, a conduit for seeing, feeling and savouring the good in a messy world. And, as I’ve dug deeper into the science of gratitude, I realised there is so much to this emotion I’d never known.

The science of gratitude

The word gets thrown around a lot, often in ways that make it sound like a pleasant but seemingly superficial practice. Keep a gratitude journal (I have done that, and found it incredibly impactful, by the way!). Count your blessings. Be thankful. These can be seen as the stuff of wellness culture, making it easy to dismiss gratitude as lightweight self-help fluff.

But the research tells a different story. When psychologists examine gratitude at close range, what they find is an emotion with a very particular structure and function that sets it apart from most other positive feelings we experience.

Gratitude belongs to a special category of self-transcendent emotions, a family that also includes awe and compassion. Unlike hedonic emotions such as joy or excitement, which are largely self-focused and centre on our own pleasure, self-transcendent emotions evolved for a different purpose altogether: to help us take care of each other, cooperate, and coordinate in groups. They help turn our attention outward, toward others and toward something larger than ourselves.

This distinction matters a lot. When I feel joy, my attention is largely on my own experience. When I feel gratitude, my attention is on someone else, on what they have done, on who they are, on the relationship between us. Gratitude seems to be a glue that binds us to one another.

Sara Algoe, whose work has shaped much of how we now understand this emotion, developed what she calls the “find, remind, and bind” theory of gratitude. The idea is that gratitude evolved to help us detect and hold onto high-quality relationship partners. When someone does something that truly benefits us, especially when it costs them something, and when it signals that they understand and care about our needs, we feel grateful. That feeling serves three functions. It helps us find responsive people who might make good long-term partners/friends in life. It reminds us to keep those relationships alive and not take them for granted. And it binds us to those people by motivating us to nurture and maintain the connection.

This reframes gratitude from something passive into something active. It is more than a pleasant feeling we experience when we receive something good from others; it is a sophisticated social-cognitive system that helps us build and maintain the relationships most likely to support our flourishing.

Gratitude versus Optimism

As it turns out, I was not alone in conflating gratitude and optimism. These two emotions are often lumped together as “positive psychology” constructs that make people happier. And they do share some common ground. But they are fundamentally different emotions, and understanding that difference matters.

Research directly comparing the two has identified several key distinctions:

Temporal orientation. Gratitude orients us to the present and recent past, to what has already happened, to benefits already received. Optimism orients us to the future, to positive expectations about what’s coming. Gratitude is inherently retrospective; optimism is inherently prospective.

Social focus. Gratitude orients us toward others and what they have done for us. Optimism orients us toward ourselves and our confidence in our own ability to navigate what comes. Gratitude is fundamentally relational; optimism is fundamentally agentic.

Their impact and benefits. A large daily-life study found that gratitude was a stronger predictor of feeling appreciation toward others and finding pleasure when reflecting on the best parts of the day. Optimism, by contrast, was a stronger predictor of sleep quality, lower stress, and rating the worst parts of the day as less unpleasant. In other words, gratitude helps us savour the good, while optimism helps us buffer against the bad.

Gratitude versus Indebtedness

Growing up in Eastern Europe, at the historical junction between communism and post-communism, I was taught to avoid ever being in someone’s debt. During the last (and darkest) decade of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania, people survived by trading favours. Those in a position to have access to food (in the late 80s, food was rationed, and people often went hungry) would trade that privilege for others. A barter system would be in place - my father, a doctor, would often get paid for his services in live chickens or boxes of vegetables from his patients who worked on farms.

If the exchange was mutual, that was fine, but being in someone’s debt was considered dangerous. In a climate of generalised distrust and fear, any misstep (like criticising the regime) could be reported to the authorities; nobody wanted anyone to hold any power over them. So, people would swiftly repay any favour with a gift or a counter-favour. Interestingly, such a culture, where indebtedness is avoided at all costs, leaves less room for gratitude.

One of the most important findings in the research, and one that genuinely surprised me, is that gratitude and indebtedness aren’t even close relatives and, in fact, run counter to each other.

When someone does something for us, and we feel we “owe” them, that is not the same as being grateful. As researchers have shown, indebtedness arises when we feel we must repay what we’ve received. It’s essentially a negative feeling, driven by obligation and the discomfort of being in someone’s debt. Gratitude, by contrast, arises when we perceive that someone has acted toward us with genuine care and responsiveness, just because they could and wanted to, not because they are waiting for something in return. It’s a positive feeling, and it motivates a sense of proximity, warmth, and a desire to continue the relationship.

Interestingly, studies show that when someone does something for us with an expectation of return, our feelings of indebtedness increase, but our gratitude actually decreases. The expectation of exchange kills gratitude. What evokes gratitude is the perception that someone has acted for our benefit without strings attached, that they have been genuinely responsive to who we are and what we need. I’ve recently written an article about some of the people who have supported me in my career without waiting for anything in return. My heart was overflowing with gratitude as I was writing it, and it does the same any time I think of any of these people, precisely because they offered their guidance and mentoring so selflessly.

The trouble is that people like me, who have been raised to see any act of goodwill on someone’s part as having an ulterior motive, might need to learn to appreciate that positive, selfless intent. Even after all these years (and despite a firm belief in human goodness), I am amazed when someone helps me out of their own sheer goodwill, and I still struggle with accepting help or feeling overly indebted when no debt is expected. It takes time and lots of unlearning and re-learning to feel safe enough to feel grateful without feeling overly vulnerable.

Gratitude and the Body

If gratitude were just a nice feeling, it would still be worth cultivating. But the research reveals that gratitude actually changes our physiology in measurable ways.

An eight-week gratitude intervention in patients with asymptomatic heart failure reduced multiple inflammatory markers, including C-reactive protein, TNF-α, and interleukins. Grateful people show increased heart rate variability, a marker of cardiac resilience and parasympathetic activity. The practice of gratitude appears to lower heart rate and decrease diastolic blood pressure. These are significant effects. Inflammation is implicated in everything from cardiovascular disease to depression, and the autonomic nervous system touches virtually every aspect of how we function. If my existential anxiety fuels my cortisol and inflammation, my gratitude helps lower it. As it turns out, contrasting emotions have contrasting correlates in our bodies, with measurable effects on our health.

There’s also emerging evidence that gratitude is associated with longevity. A study using data from over 49,000 women in the Nurses’ Health Study found that those with the highest levels of gratitude had a 9% lower risk of death over four years compared to those with the lowest levels. The effect was strongest for cardiovascular mortality. This held even after controlling for social, demographic, lifestyle, and psychological variables, including optimism. While we cannot yet say that gratitude causes longer life, the association is robust enough to take seriously.

What might be happening? Gratitude seems to work through multiple pathways: reduced inflammation, improved sleep quality, greater emotional resilience, stronger social connections, and perhaps even healthier behaviour patterns.

The brain ‘on gratitude’ changes too. Research from Berkeley found that people who wrote gratitude letters showed mental health improvements, like shifting attention away from toxic emotions such as resentment or envy, and they were more likely to express gratitude in turn, and these effects lasted for months after the study’s end. They also found that gratitude interventions helped enhance the positive impact of counselling, so if you are in therapy and practising gratitude, that helps boost the impact of your therapist’s work.

Gratitude and Relationships

I ended the year watching the fireworks by the beach, in the pouring rain, with my husband and my daughter, and my most poignant feeling was one of deep gratitude. For these people I love. For this small miracle of being together, in a country that adopted us seven years ago and which became home. For the smile I exchanged with another mother waiting in a line for doughnuts, both of us soaked through, both of us holding our respective girls’ hands, both girls chatting away, oblivious to the rain. We silently bonded over our children’s joy and the small miracles of motherhood while the smell of fresh doughnuts tickled our noses. I later felt overcome with gratitude again, dancing in the rain with my girl to a song that was cool when I was her age, but she too seemed to love.

Some of the most compelling research on gratitude focuses on what it does to our closest relationships.

Studies show that couples who regularly express gratitude toward each other feel more positive about their partners and, intriguingly, also feel more comfortable expressing concerns about the relationship. Gratitude doesn’t just create warmth. It seems to create safety, the kind that allows for honest communication.

Expressing gratitude leads to more spontaneous physical affection, hand-holding, kissing, and the small embodied gestures of connection. It’s linked to improved sex lives. It’s also associated with more equitable perceptions of household labour, which is no small thing in the ongoing negotiations of domestic life.

But here’s a crucial nuance from Algoe’s research: the effectiveness of gratitude expressions depends significantly on how responsive the partner is perceived to be. When the person receiving the gratitude is seen as genuinely responsive, the well-being benefits are amplified. When the partner is perceived as low in responsiveness, gratitude can feel hollow or even backfire. When my husband hugs me and says, “I’m so grateful for you too,” that is gratitude well-received, and it amplifies the gratitude I feel, which in turn creates a virtuous cycle of connection.

Gratitude at Work

The workplace research tells a similar story. Managers who remember to say thank you to their teams see measurable differences in motivation and performance. In one study, fundraisers who heard a message of gratitude from the director made 50% more calls the following week than those who didn’t.

Longitudinal research shows that gratitude is positively related to both task performance and intrinsic motivation over time. Grateful employees are more likely to engage in what researchers call “organisational citizenship behaviours”, the things people do that aren’t technically their job but that make workplaces function: welcoming new colleagues, filling in for coworkers, going the extra mile. Gratitude and kindness seem to create a positive loop.

But again, context matters. Gratitude can backfire when it feels manipulative or inauthentic. The brain seems to know the difference between genuine appreciation and performative gratitude. That’s why just ticking the box of thanking your team while you feel anything by thankful doesn’t work. Neuroimaging studies show that authentic gratitude activates reward centres and emotional processing regions in ways that forced or obligatory expressions of thanks do not.

Gratitude as a State versus a Trait

Researchers distinguish between gratitude as a temporary emotional state and gratitude as a stable personality trait, or disposition. State gratitude refers to the feeling of thankfulness and appreciation that arises in response to receiving a specific benefit. It's situational and time-limited. Trait or dispositional gratitude, by contrast, refers to a general orientation toward perceiving and appreciating the positive in life. This perhaps best describes ‘disgustingly positive’ people like me, those with a stable tendency to notice and feel grateful for benefits across many circumstances.

McCullough and colleagues identified four facets of dispositional gratitude: intensity (how strongly grateful feelings are experienced), frequency (how often gratitude arises, even for small favours), span (the range of life circumstances prompting gratitude), and density (the number of people one feels grateful toward for a single outcome).

Wood and colleagues' social-cognitive model showed that trait gratitude operates through "benefit appraisals" - dispositionally grateful people interpret the same situations more positively, seeing help as more valuable, more costly to provide, and more altruistically intended. In essence, a person with a grateful personality has a lower threshold for experiencing state gratitude - it’s easier for them to access this emotion in all sorts of big and small contexts.

Both forms of gratitude predict well-being, but the mechanisms may differ: trait gratitude shapes how we interpret the world, while state gratitude reflects our response to specific circumstances.

Reading about the research made me realise I feel intensely grateful often, in many contexts, large and small, and I do feel grateful towards many people, and not just people - I feel lots of gratitude towards an ambiguous (and all-encompassing) entitity (that more religious people than I might better names for, but which I choose to just call ‘the Universe’). ‘Grateful’ is very much a part of my identity, and I know better than taking it for granted. I am conscious that not everyone is born with a similar disposition towards gratitude. The good news is that gratitude can be a skill to practice and a muscle to strengthen.

Gratitude is not a Silver Bullet

I want to be careful here not to oversell gratitude. The research is genuinely promising, but it’s also messier than the wellness industry would have us believe.

Meta-analyses examining gratitude interventions have found that the effects, while real, are generally small to moderate and vary significantly across cultures. What works in one cultural context may not translate to another. In some collectivist cultures, gratitude interventions may actually be counterproductive.

Far from being a silver bullet, gratitude interventions can backfire. One study found that students with medium levels of gratitude showed increased online aggression after a gratitude intervention, perhaps as a response to the perceived forced nature of the exercise. “Be grateful!” given as an order, clearly doesn’t work.

Research from Harvard with children and adolescents found that writing thank-you letters made the recipients happier but didn’t necessarily improve the writers’ own well-being. This suggests that gratitude as a developmental capacity may require a certain level of emotional maturity to yield benefits. It’s not something you can force people into.

Why This Matters for Vertical Development

So what does any of this have to do with vertical development and the challenging emotions we encounter when we’re facing disorienting dilemmas?

I think gratitude functions (alongside curiosity) as what I’ve been calling a ‘contrasting emotion’ - one that doesn’t eliminate the pain of edge emotions but makes it tolerable and allows us to experience intense discomfort without collapsing or fleeing. My most interesting observation from lived experience is that gratitude serves me best on my hardest days. The capacity to be genuinely grateful for the glimmers of goodness during a really tough time isn’t making me forget why things are hard, nor does it make me feel less pained, but it does give me the resilience to look for the learnings and to keep putting one foot in front of another till I reach the other side. It also helps me remember I don’t have to carry it all by myself.

Consider what gratitude actually does. It shifts attention outward, toward others and toward what we have received or toward what is good in our lives. It activates a sense of connection and safety in our relationships. It reduces inflammation and increases parasympathetic tone, calming the body’s stress response. It reminds us that we are not alone, that others have seen us and acted on our behalf. For me, it’s a constant reminder that life itself holds gifts I can be thankful for, and it’s ok to ask for help.

Now consider what happens when we’re at a developmental edge. We feel confused, frightened, perhaps ashamed of our confusion. We want to flee back to familiar ground. We feel isolated in our not-knowing.

Gratitude, in such moments, might function as an anchor. It won’t pull us away from the edge; instead, it will give us enough stability to stay there long enough to find a way to cross the chasm in front of us. When I can feel grateful even in the midst of struggle, grateful for the people who are supporting me, for the opportunity to grow, for what I already have, something shifts. The edge emotions don’t disappear. But they become bearable and make room for something new to emerge.

This differs from what optimism can do. Optimism might help me believe the struggle will pass, that things will work out, and that’s valuable. But gratitude connects me to others (to life itself) right now, in the present moment, reminding me that I am held even as I feel unmoored. Instead of just expecting a better future, it lets me recognise the support I already have.

This is speculative, of course. I haven’t conducted research on gratitude as a developmental catalyst. But I’m hoping this sparks some useful reflection for you and your own relationship with this rich emotion. Does it help you befriend discomfort? What’s your experience of being grateful? What impact has it made on your life?

If you’d like to join me in practising gratitude for the year just ended and setting our intentions for the new one, I’ll be hosting two playful workshops to consciously ‘dream up’ the new year, a tradition I started a decade ago and which continues every January. We’ll use tools from active imagination and ‘timeline therapy’ to identify and set our intentions visually and creatively. Learn more and book your place here for the workshop in English (17th Jan) and here for the one in Romanian (10th of Jan).

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and certification programs accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you choose to become a paid subscriber to this Substack, you will receive complimentary access to all our webinars and a 50% discount on our long-form online programs, including our “Vertical Development Practices for Coaches”.

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I do think this is largely a good thing (while openly admitting my own status as a biased participant in the field). I believe the shift from “more skills” to “expanded capacity” represents genuine progress in how we think about growing leaders. Also, if we merely look at the state of global leadership right now, it might be fair to say we can and really need to do better, so the case for vertical development’s utility seems pretty solid.

But as a ‘paracademic’ who has spent years immersed in this field, I’ve noticed that, despite its popularity, there is significant confusion about what vertical development actually is, how it is measured and, most importantly, how it can actually be fostered through deliberately designed learning experiences.

Different assessment tools get conflated as though they measure the same thing. Practitioners swear by one theory or another or equate ‘developmental work’ with a particular school of thought - usually the one they themselves got trained in. Organisational clients themselves often request programs to “move our leaders into ‘higher’ developmental stages” without clarity about what types of stages we are talking about, which dimension of development we’re targeting or even whether ‘higher’ is necessarily better or fit for purpose.

I watch thoughtful L&D leaders struggle to make sense of competing models and methodologies, and for good reason. The research landscape in our field is quite fragmented, and to date, there have been few attempts to cross-pollinate across the various traditions. There are many reasons for that fragmentation, some of which might have to do with the natural attachments of researchers to their own theories, which they have spent decades honing, and others might have to do with the challenge practitioners have of staying abreast a vast patchwork of scientific perspectives while also doing the program design, facilitation, intensive day-to-day client work that is their bread and buttter.

While it is easier to just pick one theory and stick with it, I would argue that in the current global context, where the polycrisis meets the metacrisis and humanity seems to be in SO much trouble, we need to step beyond our ideological differences into a bigger understanding of the adult (vertical) development field and more effective interventions that shift the needle on good leadership in this hectic age.

Both research and practice point to the fact that there is no single “vertical development” we can speak of.

What we casually call ‘vertical development’ actually draws on (at least) three distinct academic research traditions, each examining related but genuinely different aspects of how humans grow. Recent research (from Aiden Thornton) suggests these traditions measure (and seek to develop) substantially different things, with only about 12-27% overlap between major developmental assessments. This turns out to be a feature of the field: it reveals complementary lenses rather than competing accounts of the same phenomenon.

What this means for L&D practitioners is that they need to first uncover the actual developmental needs of their clients or internally, of their teams/organisations, then understand what each tradition seeks to measure and develop, and then choose the right combination of theoretical perspectives (and psychometric tools) to build their programs in a way that effectively addresses the actual developmental needs of their target audience.

The challenge for us working in leadership development is that the academic literature, while rich, isn’t always accessible. Different researchers use different terminology. The same words sometimes mean different things across traditions, and different words are sometimes used referring to the same thing. Also. The practical implications often remain buried in methodological discussions, and there are few maps for answering the question:

“How do we actually design learning for vertical development?”

So I wrote a white paper. I aimed to provide an accessible map of the terrain while honouring its genuine complexity. Think of it as a guide for practitioners who want to understand what’s actually going on beneath the surface of the tools and frameworks they’re using.

The paper distinguishes between three research traditions, each illuminating different aspects of adult development.

Ego Development (Loevinger, Cook-Greuter, Torbert) examines how we construe ourselves, others, and the world. It tracks transformation of meaning-making, identity, and interpersonal style: the qualitative shifts in how we manage impulses, relate to others, use power, take perspective and relate to rules and norms.

Constructive-Developmental Theory (Kegan, Lahey) focuses on the progressive movement of what was “subject” (entrenched, invisible to us) becoming “object” (something we can step back from and examine). This tradition has given us powerful tools like Immunity to Change for surfacing the hidden assumptions that keep us stuck.

Hierarchical Complexity (Commons, Fischer, Dawson, Thornton) measures how structurally complex our reasoning is: how many elements we can coordinate and integrate when we think, how able we are to engage systemic thinking as we solve complex problems. This dimension is particularly relevant to strategic thinking and navigating gnarly problems with many interacting variables.

One key idea for us, practitioners, is that each tradition has its own measurement tools, and a leader who scores highly on one dimension may score quite differently on another. These traditions are measuring different (and equally valuable) aspects of developmental growth, which explains the variation and with this comes an invitation for client and consultants to choose their tools mindfully (and combine them when needed).

Those of you who have read this substack for a while are familiar with the piano metaphor I often use to describe vertical development (and invite a different metaphor from the ‘ladder’ image often used in the field). The ‘ladder’ suggests we leave earlier stages of development behind as we ascend, that “higher” is “better,” and that the goal is to reach the top. The piano invites a more nuanced understanding.

As we develop, we gain access to more ‘octaves’, and more notes within each octave. We don’t lose access to earlier capacities; we integrate and transcend them. We can use all our previous perspectives when we need them. A skilled pianist chooses the right notes for the right moment. Similarly, a developmentally mature leader draws on a wider repertoire, selecting what fits the situation rather than being limited to a single way of making sense.

The piano metaphor also reminds us that we can fall back. This means we can, under certain circumstances (like stress, cultural pressures, trauma) to lose our developmental capacities either temporarily or even for longer periods of time. Vertical development is, in fact, not ‘vertical’ at all - it looks more like “two steps forward - one step back” (Valerie Livesay’s work is a treasure trove on the topic if you are keen to dive deeper).

The white paper explores this metaphor in depth, including how leaders develop unevenly across what we might call “lines of development” - distinct aspects of human growth that run underneath stages, like notes making up an octave. Things like cognitive complexity, perspective-taking, self-awareness, relationship to power, time orientation, and others. You might be sophisticated in strategic thinking while remaining conventional in your relationship to power. This is normal. And it means effective developmental interventions need to target specific lines rather than simply some generic “stage.”

It also means that, in a sense, the three traditions I mention above focus, in their own way, on particular lines of development, which makes them at times seem unmoored from each other. If hierarchical complexity studies specifically the way people think, constructive-developmental approaches look closely at how they understand themselves in relation to the world, and ego-development looks at how their identity or interpersonal dynamics are shaped. A leader could think in very sophisticated ways (hierarchical complexity), but have low emotional self-awareness or self-regulation (ego-development). This means there likely is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to developmental leadership programs.

Despite different theoretical starting points, researchers across all three traditions tend to converge on what makes developmental programs work. Nick Petrie gave us two seminal white papers that laid out the foundations of how to build developmental programs. He wrote about creating heat experiences that genuinely stretch leaders’ current thinking; colliding perspectives that challenge existing meaning-making and elevated sense-making.

In my own research, I explored the role of disorienting dilemmas that create discomfort at the edge of current capacity and the way difficult emotions (so-called ‘edge emotions’ (Malkki 2010)) play a huge role in vertical development when met with curiosity instead of denial or avoidance. I also studied how facilitated reflection enables leaders to transcend old mindsets and access broader, more complex perspectives.

All existing research suggests effective developmental programs require sustained engagement over months or even years rather than intensive short-term interventions. So vertical development does not lend itself to a ‘quick fix’ approach, as is often preferred in fast-paced, hyper-busy corporate environments.

The white paper covers the three research traditions in depth, with their origins, key contributors, assessment methodologies, and business examples. It explains why different assessments measure different things, and why you might want to consider selecting psychometrics for your learning projects based on purpose rather than just familiarity. It explores the concept of developmental “lines” and why leaders develop unevenly. It presents practical methodologies from each tradition: Thornton’s pedagogical strategies, Dawson’s VCoL, Kegan’s Immunity to Change, polarity work, and the Vertical Development Institute’s own D.E.C.I.I.D.E.D.™ framework. It outlines program design principles that create conditions for genuine vertical development. It maps the landscape of developmental assessments grouped by tradition, with guidance on selection. And it sets realistic expectations about how much time and consistency vertical development actually takes.

I wrote this for practitioners who want an overview of the field with enough depth to help inform program design decisions, but without the need to wade through academic journals. This is for HR leaders, L&D professionals, coaches, and learning designers who are creating developmental programs and want to understand the science behind what they’re doing.

It is worth mentioning that I do not claim this to be a complete representation of the field, and I regard it as a work in progress that can get perfected, updated and evolve as new perspectives emerge (or feedback from other researchers points out important aspects I might have missed).

There are so many significant contributions to the study of human development that went beyond my scope (and ability to synthesise in one paper), such as work in attachment theory, wisdom research, contemplative practices, therapeutic schools of thought that impact L&D (such as IFS, or trauma work), cross-cultural work and (very importantly) Indigenous perspectives. All deserve attention in their own right. I have chosen to focus on the main academic traditions, specifically in developmental psychology and with direct implications for leadership development (program design, coaching, facilitation).

If the questions I’ve raised here resonate, if you’ve been wrestling with how to make sense of the vertical development landscape or how to integrate different approaches into your work, I hope you’ll find the paper useful. You can access it here.

If you are short on time, you might instead want to watch this short video synthesis of the paper (mind you, this does simplify things quite a bit - the paper gets into more detail and holds plenty of academic references for you to follow up).

As always, I’d love to hear your reflections. What tensions have you noticed in applying developmental frameworks in your own work? What questions do you wish had clearer answers to? Drop a comment and let’s keep learning from each other in service of helping grow those wiser, more mature leaders the world needs right now.

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and certification programs accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you choose to become a paid subscriber to this Substack, you will receive complimentary access to all our webinars and a 50% discount on our long-form online programs, including our “Vertical Development Practices for Coaches”.

Explore the Online Programs Library

If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, check out our ICF Level 1 Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching - next cohort starts in Feb 2026 (now running on Americas/Apac time zones) and we have very few places left. Check out the Program Page for details and reach out for an interview.

Explore the Foundations Diploma

Spread the word…

If you want to do your bit to build a wiser, more conscious world, I hope you share this article with others who could benefit from the learning.

Share

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I always share this ‘mantra’ the beginning, though nobody truly believes it until they reach the ‘dark deep pit’ and see their own existential anxieties reflected back at them in every session. If they themselves are struggling with job insecurity, a client comes worrying about their job. If they’re embroiled in deep conflict with someone in their life, a client pops in complaining about the relationship to their boss. If they’re afraid of conflict, a combative client comes in who really needs some challenge and forces them to step into deeply uncomfortable territory.

In the ‘dark deep pit’ it becomes obvious great coaching is not so much about the topic of the conversation, but the shape of our - coach and client - thinking. It’s not so much about the ‘water’ as it is about the ‘cup’.

The metaphor, born out of Robert Kegan’s work, is simple but powerful. The mind is like a cup. Inside it sit all our thoughts, beliefs, stories, and emotions. As we grow vertically, the cup itself expands, giving us more space to hold complexity. The content, the water, doesn’t vanish, but it’s experienced differently. It moves. It rushes. It flows. It takes on the shape of whatever vessel contains it. And sometimes that shape isn’t working.

When people come to coaching, they usually bring their “water.” The content of their lives. The dilemmas, tensions, decisions, and messy problems that fill their mental cup. The coach’s instinct, especially in the early years of practice, is to swirl that water around, to help the client see it more clearly, analyze it, or decide what to do about it. But developmental coaching invites a more radical question:

What if the problem isn’t in the water, but in the shape of the glass itself?

In coaching, this means that the practical challenges clients bring - the team conflict, the career decision, the struggle between ambition and impact - are all held inside a particular mental structure, the “glass” shaped by the client’s meaning making system. When a client feels stuck, it’s rarely because the water is the wrong temperature. It’s because the glass is too rigid, too small, or not quite the right shape for the choices they’re trying to make or the life they are now wanting to live.

Developmental coaching doesn’t dismiss content, it uses it as the entry point. The outer world dilemma a client brings into a session is the anchor that helps us, coaches, understand where the client is heading, what they are trying to get to, what is the destination we can accompany them towards. But the work of the coach isn’t about helping the client figure out how to solve their problem. If it were that easy, they would have done it already. Our job is shedding light on how the client is thinking about the situation, on illuminating aspects of their thinking structure that don’t allow them to see other possibilities or make it seem like the problem is intractable.

“What makes this decision significant for you?” “What assumptions are you holding about ‘success’ or ‘failure’?” “What does ‘impact’ mean to you?” “Who would you be if you didn’t have this [whatever they’re afraid of losing]?” These are all ‘cup’ questions. They turn the client’s attention from the water to the invisible structure that holds it, from ‘content’ to ‘process’.

As one coaching student put it, “focusing on the cup keeps us out of the solution trap”. The moment we zoom into content, we risk slipping into problem solving. We get tangled in the client’s concerns, in facts, details, narratives. When we zoom out to the cup, we often step into intriguing territory, shifting the client’s attention to notice the shape of their thinking, that which holds all their stories. In those moments we’re not trying to empty or clean the water, we’re exploring the nature of the vessel itself. But that is easier said than done.

We, coaches, have our own mental cups to contend with and the shape of our own thinking can make it hard to notice what is happening to the client in front of us. In one of our recent practice sessions, the coach held space for a client who was contending with some very unpleasant challenges at work. A difficult relationship. Unfairness. Being given ill-intended feedback. Anger.

The client talked and talked, downloading their emotional baggage, and the coach patiently listened and listened, almost not daring to interrupt. Then came a moment when the client spoke of what annoyed him in the other person they were in conflict with: “He talks and talks and never stops to listen or reflect,” the client said. By this point the client had talked almost without taking breath for some 15 minutes. Here was a golden opporunity. To pause. To invite reflection. To notice ‘the cup’.

Could it be possible this client was blind to their own moment of talking without slowing? How might the coach have gently and courageously invited them to pause and reflect in that very moment, to notice their talking? To make it ‘object’, watching how their own process of dealing with difficult things seemed to mirror that of the person who angered them? What might have emerged from such a moment of capturing the dynamic of the ‘cup’ as it revealed itself in dialogue with the coach and inviting the client to notice the form of it, the impact of it, the way their cup shaped their content?

What about the coach’s ‘cup’ prevented them from interrupting? Was it a desire to not upset the client? Was it a fear of breaking their flow? Was it over-identifying with their coaching strength of being a wise, calm, gentle presence? Was it an uncertainty about what to do/ask/say in that moment and worries about their own competence? Was it a discomfort with the client’s discomfort?

As we debriefed that session, which had been observed by several other coaches, we held these questions about the cups. As I offered my feedback, I held my own questions about how do I give honest feedback to the coaches I support, nudging them to see what they’re not seeing, while also holding them with kindness and full expresion of my complete faith in their potential to grow into exceptional coaches. My own discomfort-avoidant cup mirrored my student’s, but staying aware of it allowed me to do my very best speaking my own truth with kindness, balancing challenge and support, and then to encourage open feedback from my students, just as they stay open to mine. I have my own blind spots as a mentor, and their honest feedback is the biggest gift I could ask for.

This process is never-ending. It’s fascinating. Every person’s glass is different. Some are square, some oval, some a little (or more) warped from past heat and pressure. The coach’s work is not to judge the shape, but to help the client see it. Because when the client can see their glass, they can also begin to reshape it. A coach’s work is also to notice how their own glass skews what they can see of the client’s.

A square glass will always produce square water. If the shape of the mind limits what we can see or imagine, no amount of stirring will change the result. Our work is to make the shape visible, to gently tilt the glass, to notice how our assumptions contour the flow of experience. Does the shape of our glass fit how we want to show up in that moment? Does it, more broadly, fit the shape we want for our lives in this season?

There’s a beautiful paradox here. We work on the glass in service of the water. The goal is not abstract insight, it’s movement in the world. As another participant from our session the other week noted: “We explore the cup in service of making a different choice in the outer world.” Developmental coaching isn’t a detour from action, it’s an enabler of wiser action.

Ultimately, success in developmental coaching isn’t measured by the elegance of our questions or the brilliance of the client’s insights. It’s measured by subtle shifts in the shape of the mind, the small expansions that allow new choices to become possible. The glass grows. The water finds new ways to flow. And with each round of reflection and experimentation, a little more of life can be lived.

If you are a coach, how do you keep track of your own ‘cup’ in your coaching? How do you train your attention so you can stay curious about your own assumptions, particularly when you catch yourself not able to respond to the world in a way that feels balanced or fulfilling? How do you keep an eye on the in-the-moment process when your cup might clash with the client’s?

Think of one context of your life where you feel stuck, caught in the ‘content’, drowning in water. What might happen if you rise above it to see what is holding the water? If you’re keen to experiment, you might want to write down what your ‘cup’ is made of: what do you assume, believe, have taken as ‘truth’ in a situation that feels challenging? What might happen if you gently question some of that? Do any interesting (small) experiments arise, where you might try something different, just to see if the ‘cup will hold’?

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and certification programs accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you choose to become a paid subscriber to this substack, you will receive complimentary access to all our webinars and a 50% discount on our long-form online programs, including our “Vertical Development Practices for Coaches”.

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If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, check out our ICF Level 1 Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching - next cohort starts in Feb 2026 (now running on both Americas/Apac and EMEA time zones). Our early bird runs to 30th of November. Check out the Program Page for details and reach out for an interview.

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Dear friends, today is a really special day when I get to share with you all a soul project I’ve been working on for some time now with my dear friend and adult development researcher . Val has been one of the researchers whose work got me into the field of adult development years ago. From the very first article of hers that I read, I have looked up to her for her wisdom and ability to articulate how our worst moments can become our most precious springboards of growth.

While her research has been a huge gift in my life (and an inspiration for my own work), Val the human has been an even bigger gift. When we finally met a couple of years ago, I felt that deep connection you usually expect after years of friendship. In the meantime, we have built what has now become one of the most cherished friendships in my life: a truly developmental relationship, where we learn from each other, hold space for one another, curiously discover new and rich insights and create moments of personal growth at the intersection of our two minds and hearts.

Beyond our work we are both mothers, and the powerful lessons from our parenting journeys have featured heavily in many of our conversations. Nobody has tested our capacity to walk the talk of our own research on human development like our respective children have done. They don’t care about the theories we know and the papers we write. They do care about how we show up every day in relation to them. Are we able to walk the talk of wisdom on the hardest of days? That is the ultimate test! It is a test I have to admit I have failed more than a few times in my 9 years of motherhood. Luckily I do get up after every failure and every time I feel I grow a little more. I’ve come to accept this work will likely never end.

Both Val and I have read a lot about parenting, and both of us have felt it's often so hard to apply great parenting advice in practice. Being a parent is a huge test of your personal maturity, and neither of us has received support to better understand ourselves as we raised our children. That is something we've had to figure out the hard way and perhaps has become, for us both, a catalyst for stepping more deeply into developmental research and striving more passionately to turn that research into practice.

As we shared our trials and lessons as mothers, we started wondering what might a developmental space for all adults who raise kids look like. A space where nobody tells you WHAT TO DO with your kids (which is the focus of much of the field of parenting), but instead where you are nudged to reflect on HOW YOU are showing up in the process of raising the children in your life. This is how "Growing Humans" was born.

Growing Humans is a space where we will write regularly (and invite others to write) and a podcast we will record with guests who inspire us - the first episode of which you can listen to here:

Growing Humans

The Birth of "Growing Humans"

If you are new to Growing Humans, we encourage you to start with this podcast's first episode! In this conversation, we - Valerie and Alis - share a bit about how this learning space came to be and our intention behind the articles, podcast and, very soon, the Growing Humans Course…

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2 years ago · 2 likes · Alis Anagnostakis, PhD and Valerie Livesay, PhD

Soon, we will also share the course 'Growing Humans: How Raising Children Raises Us' - a program supporting adults to systematically apply the science of adult development to foster their own growth, as they raise and educate children.

My focus here - on “How Grown-ups Grow Up” and in “The Developmental” podcast will remain on leaders, coaches and those who apply the lessons of adult development in their workplaces. If you are not a parent, this space remains the best one to follow for the latest musings on vertical development.

However, if you are a parent, grandparent, educator - or in any role where you support the education of children and experience the challenges to Self that come from doing this most important job - then I hope you also join me and Val on Growing Humans. We have many wonderful plans for that community and we hope you will help us shape its evolution from this moment of inception.

For those of you who wonder what link is there between leadership (where most of my writing to date has focused) and raising kids - I’d say that in my view the connections run deep (and plan to write more about what these are soon). I can't think of a single leader I have ever worked with, who is also a parent (or has kids in their life), who has not reflected on the connection between growing their leadership and becoming a better parent/mentor for their children. Perhaps the birth of “Growing Humans”, alongside “How Grown-ups Grow Up” signals a time to make more of those lessons and cross-pollinations visible. Both Val and I will be very grateful to learn with and from those of you who straddle these worlds and join both communities. Perhaps raising the great leaders of tomorrow does start with fostering the more conscious parents of today...

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and certification programs accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

Explore the Online Programs Library

If you are a parent, an educator or play any role in raising children, do also check out - Growing Humans - the Substack space I have co-created and am curating together with my dear friend - a place where the science of vertical development meets the practice of parenting.

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I call it a “whole-body sensing, sense-making and action system” because it feels like it involves every part of me, not just my brain, and it feels like an alternation between picking up relevant cues, interpreting them and then choosing my next action as a coach.

The human brain receives around 11 million bits of information/second - gathered by our senses from our surroundings. Out of that massive ocean, the brain only consciously processes about 50 bits of information per second. This means that normally there is A LOT of information left out and a lot of possibly useful information missed. This is a painful reality for coaches as they start their journey and they embark on the difficult ‘learning to stay present’; ‘learning to bracket off the thoughts/judgements in your head’; ‘learning to be curious and follow the client’.

How do you ‘stay present’ exactly? How do you tell apart thoughts that are polluting your attention (such as ‘What will the client think about you"?) and thoughts that are useful and relevant to the conversation (such as “The client has just said the word ‘try’ 5 times in a row - what might that mean?”)? I believe a lot of the work in the first years of coaching goes into maximising our already narrow window of conscious attention. If I can devote most of my 50 conscious bits of available awareness to the client, our conversation and the internal cues that help me orient in that conversation - then I have a better chance of coaching them effectively.

So as a pre-requisite to any coaching conversation, I strive to put my brain in a state of “I am fully here for the next hour”. A few minutes of mindfulness usually do the trick. So does visualising my client and stating clearly in my head the intention for how I want to show up as a coach in the session. Finishing any urgent work beforehand, creating a silent comfortable space, and putting all notifications on silent helps a lot too. I do anything I can to create mental space for this human who is about to trust me with their challenges. On the rare occasions where I have felt sick, or so concerned with something that was taking over all of my attention to the point where none of my usual strategies worked, I’ve preferred to be honest about it and postpone the session. As one client said a long time ago - “rather than giving someone the ‘leftovers’ of you, better give nothing”. I’m curious what are your strategies for clearing the decks? Do share them in the comments!

Once that work of making inner (and outer) space is done and I am truly attuned to the conversation, my sensing - sense-making - acting system kicks in.

What I’m about to describe here is a very personal experience, born out of the unique way my brain works. So I invite you, as you read through this, to consider how your own brain learns and processes information. What unique mental ‘quirks’ do you have, which, similar to mine, might end up helping you in coaching?

Sensing

I am a very visual learner. I can easily conjure up images in my head and those images usually have an emotional tinge to it. So my visual and somatic perceptive systems are very strongly connected. This is why metaphors of all kinds come very easily to me - they are, to me, the best way to turn what often feels like abstract or boring information into a visual, compelling, memorable story.

I also feel emotions (and not just emotions) very intensely and I’ve trained myself to recognise the cues in my body and be able to put words to them easily.

Interestingly, curiosity is one key emotion that I found plays a central role in my coaching. It feels like a forward movement in my body, an intuitive pull towards that which is truly relevant. I let curiosity inform what I choose to do next, every step of the way and strive to stay attuned to this emotion throughout every coaching session. I somehow feel my curiosity is a powerful channel into the inherent wisdom of the coaching process itself. I do believe there is inherent wisdom present in the space between me and my client (when both of us are present and animated by positive intent), which I trust and seek to stay attuned to, through this fascinating emotion called ‘curiosity’.

Auditory processing, on the other hand, is not my strength. I don’t easily remember things I’ve heard unless I connect them into a visual in my head, or a feeling in my body or write them down, which engages my somatic capacities) or, better yet, write and draw some visual connections between different bits of information.

I found that knowing how you best process information is crucial to good coaching. For example, to keep the red thread of a session (from ‘contracting’ to ‘next actions’) you need to remember what the client said and follow the thread of the conversation - to notice contradictions and paradoxes, to bring to the surface beliefs that seem to hide under challenges the client is describing. To do all of that, you need to remember what they said every step of the way!

Someone like me, whose auditory processing is not strong, needs to get a bit creative with remembering. Note-taking in the session doesn’t work for me, because it prevents me from staying fully present and attuned to my client (I know it works a treat for other coaches, which is why you need to test things out till you find an approach that truly works for you and your mental system).

So what I do instead is that I turn the auditory input into images in my mind. I use the metaphor of a tapestry that I imagine I and the client are weaving together. The tapestry always starts with the first thread (I call it ‘the red tread’) and that is the one I focus on finding at the beginning of the conversation. Having clarity on the intention for the coaching (I like the word ‘intention’ better than ‘goal’), then helps me keep track of whether my questions stay in service of that intention throughout, or we’re veering off course.

I often notice how coaches skim over the beginning of a coaching session, conflating the topic the client brings to the session with the goal/intention for the session. To me, the topic is just the entry point. The real red thread is the intention, and that usually takes a bit of time to clarify.

So as the client talks, I picture both of us looking for that thread - the REAL thing we want to accomplish. The thread might have a colour (red is my favourite) or a particular texture. It’s always something I recognise. Once we have that first thread, and the conversation unfolds, I imagine myself holding on to that original thread and then weaving, with the client, new threads around it, creating a tapestry that has consistency and harmony to it.

This metaphor of the tapestry becomes a powerful tool for my sense-making.

Sense-making

If the client starts changing the topic away from the red thread, I almost instantly see my tapestry unravelling, as they seem to start weaving another one. I then know it’s time to check if our original intention has stayed in place, or perhaps it’s time to ‘re-contract’ the session.

If the client says contradictory things, it feels to me like they are holding two loose threads, which both seem important - so I often mirror the contradiction back to them to explore how those threads can find their proper place in our tapestry. This is where practices like polarity mapping, or Immunity to Change might find their way into coaching - they are powerful ways to weave together the paradoxical (but equally important) threads.

If a certain theme keeps popping up - for example, the client keeps repeating a certain word that seems to be holding important meaning for them - I ‘pull out’ that thread and investigate its importance, as it may well prove to be a central element of the tapestry.

I am always looking to weave a coherent tapestry, that feels ‘sturdy’, with no significant ‘holes’ in it and that helps the client put together an understanding of the topic they brought to the coaching, gain new insights and, very importantly, find a path forward that is new and makes sense for them.

Beyond this visual of the tapestry, which plays a big role in my coaching and engages my rational brain in very creative ways, I also stay on the lookout for other cues, which I pick up somatically.

I make it a point to keep a little beam of attention focused inwards when I’m coaching.

I notice subtle shifts in my body. A feeling of constriction, my heart picking up pace, an ‘unease’ or a vague sense that something is ‘off’ - all of these are, to me, cues to slow down the conversation and investigate. These feelings are often in close connection with shifts in the client. Their shoulders slumping, their voice rising, their rhythm of speech picking up and slowing down.

Quite often these small cues turn into a question, which might be as simple as “I am noticing a change in your tone. What is happening to you right now, as you talk about losing control?”. As I say that, I invite the client too in this shared field of awareness, where often they pick up on insights that were bubbling just underneath the surface, unexamined.

I believe that ‘stepping away from the conversation’ and ‘noticing the process’ is a hugely important aspect of sense-making in coaching. HOW we talk is just as important (and often even more revelatory) than WHAT we talk about.

This is why I often invite my clients to pause and notice HOW we are going about the conversation - their feelings, their unconscious movements, and their sense of progress/stagnation in the dialogue. The insights they gain from such moments of witnessing the process versus getting lost in the content often unlock new perspectives and possibilities in a way that merely ‘talking about it’ seldom does.

This becomes the moment when sense-making meets action.

Action

Action in coaching describes several things. It’s the moment-to-moment action of the coach - how I use the cues I’m picking up via my own quirky ‘sensing’ system. It’s also the client’s action - how do they turn the insights they are gaining into meaningful actions that can move them towards what matters to them?

Action for me as a coach, in the moment, implies trusting the cues I’m picking up and letting them turn into my next question, mirroring, or silence. I don’t think about what my next action should be but merely act in the way that feels appropriate in the moment. This helps create a flow that may look seamless and natural from the outside but is in fact honed over many hours of practice.

‘How do you know what question to ask next?’

I don’t, I let the question emerge from my sensing into where we are and my intention to hold on to that first thread I picked at the beginning, which gives us direction and purpose for our tapestry. Of course, that most appropriate question does come from somewhere. It cannot emerge if you don’t already have a background of knowledge to inform your inquiry.

Here, in the ‘action’ phase, is where all the technical coaching know-how accumulated over years of practice - the theories, the models, a solid understanding of human development - come together to inform how what you have sensed can turn into an action that is appropriate for your client, their context and their intention for the session. You might say this is where your ‘horizontal development’ as a coach meets your ‘vertical development’.

A dear coaching mentor of mine used to say:

“Learn all you can, then let go of everything you KNOW and just BE!”

It took me years to understand and embody that.

I’m a huge believer in investing time, effort and resources to get thoroughly trained in your chosen profession. I think filling up your cup of knowledge about your field is crucial, as all that content then informs your intuition and in-the-moment choices. I will write more about continuous learning in Part 3 of this article, where I’ll share some of the practices that have supported my growth as a coach over the years. I will only add here that once you have done your homework and you’ve built a solid foundation of knowledge, the challenge seems to be to keep your full attention on your client, following the threads, sensing into the conversation and trusting that the right words or the right moment of silence will simply pour out of you, without any conscious effort on your part to retrieve any particular ‘right question’ or ‘right statement’ in the moment.

This brings me back to ‘threads’ and the tapestry of meaning I have been describing. This same visual helps inform my actions in several ways.

I picture every move my client or I make in the conversation as a ‘thread’. Every one of the client’s statements (and often their nonverbal cues) are threads. Every one of my questions, reframings, invitations, pauses - are also threads. I always seek to ‘keep the threads tight’ and weave the relevant ones in the tapestry, while relinquishing the ones that belong to a different tapestry (conversation).

In practice, this means that I keep my questions short and mostly open-ended. Beginner coaches often ask multiple questions - that’s like throwing your client several threads - which one should they pick up? I’ve also often seen (and done it myself) coaches explain their question, making it much longer than it should be - that’s like throwing your client a very long and tangled thread that they can’t really unravel and weave easily back into the tapestry you’re co-creating.

It also often happens that the client throws you threads that are hard to weave. They might talk too much - the thread gets long and convoluted and you might need to gently stop them, and summarise (make the tread shorter and easier to manage). They might jump from one topic to another, throwing you multiple threads - that’s when you might want to again gently stop them, sum up the threads you’ve heard and invite them to choose which thread to focus on (always keeping in mind that you hold a ‘red thread’ - which is your client’s intention for the session - so the thread they choose to follow next should be the one that weaves in best with the core red thread). Or it might be that the threads they are exploring are somehow connected, so you can actually weave them into a coherent whole, finding the underlying theme/pattern.

The client might also be on the opposite end of the spectrum - speaking very little - giving you very short and unsubstantial threads to work with. That’s when you might need to ‘pull the tread’ a bit more - asking follow-up questions, inviting them to share more or give more detail. Or they might give you threads that don’t seem to easily fit into the tapestry - speaking in too abstract terms (then you need to ask for examples to make it more concrete) or speaking in too many details (then you might need to ask a ‘chunking-up’ question - ‘what does this all mean to you?’ - to find the core thread connecting all their details).

I could go on and on describing how ‘threading’ informs most of my choices and actions in coaching, but I hope you’re already getting a sense of what this whole realm of ‘action’ looks and feels like for me.

This is the first time I have ever attempted to turn inside out and make visible for others what is a very colourful inner universe. I believe each coach has their own version of this universe.

Some coaches I know have ‘aphantasia’ - they cannot form pictures in their heads. The mechanisms that inform their coaching are completely different (but just as effective) as mine. Some coaches I’ve worked with are neurodivergent - they might have incredibly ingenious mechanisms to work with distraction or to support their time-keeping during a session and also they often are creative in their coaching in ways that amaze me - as you can see in this podcast I recorded with my friend, Dr. Tracy Winter.

I hope my offering of this glimpse into my coaching universe inspires you to consciously reflect on and map out your own. How do you sense, sense-make and act during coaching? What have you learnt from your practice that the rest of us could learn in turn?

This is the end of Part 2 of the series “Inside the Mind of a Coach”. Next week I’ll invite you to Part 3, where I share some of the personal (and professional) practices that have helped me evolve and hone my coaching over the years, but, most importantly, that have helped me grow as a human being alongside with growing as a coach.

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and certification programs accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, admissions are now open for the next group of our Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching starting in July. Check out the Program Library for details and reach out for an interview.

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Those of us who train and mentor other coaches know it's not that hard to convey a list of competencies and models. Coaches in training love lists of questions, steps for the conversation, and the safety you get from having a clear map in front of you. And for good reason! The map is important. Methodologies matter and boundaries and ethical standards are crucial. But once all that groundwork is done, and people start practising, they quickly discover that the map is NOT the territory.

The same question that creates a massive breakthrough moment for a client falls flat with another. The same strategy for setting goals brings clarity to one client and is perceived as cumbersome and confining by another. Having watched and assessed hundreds of coaching sessions, while also coaching some thousands of hours over the past 16 years, I’ve come to believe that masterful coaching is somewhat of a science and very much of an art - one that I’ll never be done honing.

I’ve learnt that, beyond formal credentialling competencies and knowledge acquired over time, the embodied 'skill' of a coach is as unique as the psyche of the coach, which then intersects with the psyche of each client, and finally, both intersect with the broader context and moment the coaching is taking place in.

You coach from who you are as much as you coach from what you know and you are a different coach for every one of your clients. You are even a different coach for the same client from one session to the next. So how can you teach any of that?

As I watch coaches practice in our Developmental Coaching Diploma, I often notice small details, nuances of energy, and opportunities to ask a certain question or go down a certain path. These often go beyond the basics of “Did you set a clear goal for the session?” or “Did you ask open questions?” or “Did you refrain from giving advice?”. They are more in the realm of sensing something in my body, noticing a small grimace as the client spoke about that particular topic or noticing how they suddenly started talking in the second person (while still talking about themself) as if trying to distance themselves from something too painful to take ownership of; or perhaps picking up a word uttered one too many times, that seemed to have a particular meaning for the client. I might be noticing how the coach’s energy dropped, or a quiver in their voice or a speeding up of their speech at a certain moment in the conversation - as an unconscious reaction to something the client had said.

I always feel (but not always give in to) the impulse to share these observations with the coaches I train, to invite them to notice some of the things I notice, to wonder what else might have been possible had they pulled on a certain thread in the conversation. I always wonder how to support them to see and learn more, to grow faster. But then I know that growth happens in its own time.

The challenge is these observations seem completely eclectic. That little cue that might have unlocked something in this conversation will likely not come up in another. So even if I share it with the coach, how can they add it to their ‘tool kit’ if they might never use that ‘tool’ in the same way again?

Similarly, when I do demo sessions and someone later asks: “How did you decide to ask that particular question?” or “Why did you choose not to say anything at all at that moment?” - it’s challenging to go looking for the rationale to something that at the moment feels profoundly intuitive - a choice born out of my unique inner world in a moment of presence and attunement to the human in front of me.

I’ve long wondered if there is a hidden structure to these seemingly intuitive choices experienced coaches make. What exactly happens inside their minds as they are coaching?

What do they look/listen for in each client? How do they know a particular thread is truly important to pursue and another not so much? How do they choose their response? How do they know if one client needs more space and another needs a push? How do they tell apart their thoughts/projections from the genuine signals from the client? When they do listen to their 'intuition', what is it exactly that they are listening for and how do they do it?

As I’ve sat with these questions, I became more aware of a certain architecture of the mind, which informs my coaching approach - a sort of inner compass that guides my choices. There is a certain ‘logic’ to my intuition, which can be brought out of the unconscious space where it normally dwells. I’ve been able to track some pathways forged in my brain over time, that inform the way I make meaning of and with each client. I’ll do my best to take you down some of these paths, not to provide some recipe - as I believe our coaching is as unique as we are - but to stimulate your thinking.

Why is your approach working, when it is working? What does your version of the ‘architecture of a coach’s mind’ look like?

My coaching is informed by a few key elements, all of which work together in the moment, in every conversation with a client.

First, there are three core principles I always abide by - I find they help keep me on track. Secondly, there is a whole-body sensory system that I’ve developed over time, that allows me to attune to the client and the flow of the conversation and helps steer me in the right direction, even when I can’t see exactly where I’m going. Thirdly, there is a set of personal practices that help keep me aware, honest and continuing to grow as a coach (and, more broadly, as a human being). In this first part of this article series, I’ll share my principles. In the second part, we’ll dive into the ‘sensory-system’. And in the third part, we’ll explore some practices.

The principles.

As a coach, I am in service to the client. Always.

Not to my ego. Not to my need to help/fix/save the client. Not to my intellectual interests. Not to my need to be liked or needed. This means that every decision I make as a coach - within every session and in the coaching process as a whole - is informed by this core question:

In practice, this means that I am careful to take time to help the client understand what they want (not what they don’t want) and I follow that thread as my guiding light throughout every conversation. I coach the client on what they need, not what I think they need.

It also means I diligently work to make myself redundant. My true success as a coach is when my clients don’t need me anymore. This helps me do everything I can to empower my clients, to get them to ‘do the work’, and to put the onus on them to find their own answers, always.

This has been my best antidote against the trap of sharing unneeded opinions or advice - one that so many coaches struggle with as they start in this profession. By giving advice, am I still serving the client? Am I empowering them to not need me anymore? Most of the time, the answer is NO. In fact, by giving advice, I’m likely to steal their learning.

This same principle informs the questions I choose to ask in a session. I often see coaches in training asking a lot of questions about the client’s context, rather than the client themself. That often comes from the coach’s need to understand (and the underlying assumption is that if we understand more, we can help more). When clients talk about their context, they tell you things they already know. They’re not reflecting, or learning anything new. They are just conveying their stories and they feel good doing that too, because it’s great to ‘download’ in front of an empathic listener. Meanwhile, the coaching conversation isn’t moving forward.

Here are some questions I ask myself to make sure my inquiry stays truly helpful to the client:

This same principle of always staying in service to the client also helps me find the courage to challenge my clients, to create developmental discomfort because I truly believe that will benefit them. This brings me to the second principle.

Humans grow through a careful balance of challenge and support.

My research in adult (vertical) development has shown that the right balance between challenge (being taken out of the comfort zone) and support (being in a trusting, psychologically safe space) is crucial to human growth. As I studied a group of executives going through a long-form leadership program, I consistently found that the leaders who had measurably grown (vertically) post-program had experienced this ‘magical’ balance within their peer-coaching groups and also in the program as a whole.

This finding has had a huge impact on my coaching. It made me much braver in asking difficult questions that invite my clients to confront actions or parts of themselves that are not easy to see. How do you contribute to this conflict? - is but one small example of a question I might not have asked a client so readily a few years ago. I am less worried about my client’s potential defensiveness than I used to be.

This same principle has also confirmed my prior values around care, empathy and compassion for my clients. Care had never been an issue for me. But the courage to challenge did not come easy.

I am noticing in the coaches I train that many have a preference for one or the other. Some are warm, caring and so gentle that they never disturb a client’s mental status quo for fear of being intrusive or causing discomfort (or sometimes for fear of no longer being liked by the client). Others go for the opposite pole. They ask incisive questions way before having enough rapport with the client and without investing time to build trust and a space of ‘unconditional positive regard’ where the client can welcome the challenge and feel open to being made uncomfortable.

I encourage coaches to notice what is their preference and to explore what might help them tap into the opposite pole.

I also use this principle to guide me during a coaching conversation - I might spend time listening and allowing the client to ‘download’ as I feel they need to take things off their chest. But then I might notice they need a little jolt, a bolder invitation to reflect, to notice self-defeating patterns or tap into something hard they might have been avoiding. I might bring in some challenge to ‘spice up’ a coaching session that feels too ‘tame’ or neutral.

I am constantly, as a coach, turning the client’s attention towards themselves, while making it safe for them to face whatever it is they will find within. And I trust they will get to where they need to. Which brings me to my third (and last) principle.

People can and do change. In their own time. A coach’s job is to be ‘undisappointable’.

My third core principle allows me to be patient. It’s helped me let go of my own need for results in coaching and trust that my clients will make their shifts, in their own time. It was born out of lived moments of despair when a leader I was working with seemed beyond change and then, it turned out, they weren’t.

The most memorable example was a long time ago when I worked with a group of young leaders in a small financial services company run by a brilliant enthusiastic and visionary entrepreneur. He had gathered around him, over 10 years of building the business, a small and passionate team and together they had grown the company beyond all of their wildest dreams. Now time had come for the CEO to consider succession and he wanted me to coach his highest potential employee.

This gifted young man, in his late twenties, offered one of the most incredible examples of asynchronous development (some aspects more developed than others) that I’ve seen. Cognitively, he was brilliant. Sharp, witty, connecting the dots way ahead of anyone else. He cared deeply about the company. The quality of his work was outstanding. Clients loved him. His teammates not so much.

This was a man who had set up a mobile wall within a friendly and informal open office so his peers would know not to disturb him. Part of his role was to check the work of junior consultants before it got sent to the client. He had a red pen to mark all the mistakes he found in every report that crossed his desk. He openly told me that the only reason he was meeting with me was because he deeply respected his boss and he had told him that his ‘people skills’ needed improvement. He said:

“But I think others’ quality of work needs improvement! If they made fewer mistakes I would not have to give them so much feedback. And I can’t understand why someone would get upset from receiving feedback!? I just want them to learn - wha’t wrong with that?”

We met for a couple of sessions, in which every single attempt at turning a mirror towards him failed. We lost contact for the next couple of years. Then, all of a sudden, he reached out to apply to join my coaching school. He wanted to train as a coach.

I read his email and my first thought was that it was a joke. Then, when we met, I could not believe this was the same person from two years previously. He looked the same as the last time I’d seen him. His discourse was as direct as before. But his energy was completely different. He spoke more calmly. He asked more questions. He told me how our short encounter two years previously had opened up something in him, and then a series of events in his life had led to a reckoning of sorts.

He had finally realised his impact on others. He had managed to see the dark side of his drive for excellence - the perfectionism that had led him to relentlessly criticise and push the team, the demotivation he had sparked, the impact this had had on the team morale and ultimately the threat it had caused to the business. He had realised how deeply he cared about his colleagues and how much he wanted to help them grow, but how toxic his approach had been. He went on the coaching program and was one of the most considerate, discerning and empathic coaches I have ever trained!

If you had asked me if this man had it in him to become a professional coach, I would have said ‘Not in a million years’! But that was years ago. Now I am (hopefully) a bit wiser. You never know what a person might become! Now I step into each client relationship with unrelenting hope for my client’s capacity to grow. How fast? How far? I’ll never know. But this trust helps me stay patient. Meet the client where they’re at and challenge them one step at a time.

I don’t believe that a coach’s measure of success lies in how fast clients change. I think it lies in how deeply you can accept your clients for who they are and how much you can trust their potential to become more, however messy the road might be to them getting there. It lies in your patience to step alongside them on that winding path. Sometimes it lies in your generosity to let them go if they’re not ready and trust they will come back if they ever are. As a client of mine said:

The biggest gift you’ve given me was that you have been ‘undisappointable’.

It is to this day the most beautiful feedback I’ve ever received. I strive to pay it forward. In working with other coaches and supporting them through the frustrations of trying, failing, learning and growing, I ask myself this question:

This is the end of Part 1 of the series “Inside the Mind of a Coach”. Next week I’ll invite you to Part 2, exploring the cognitive/sensory/somatic landscape of my mind during a coaching session. I’ll strive to explain how I make sense of the client’s words and narrative thread, how I choose to ask certain questions (and not others) and how I practice staying aware (and utilising) the process (HOW) of the session as well as the content (WHAT).

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, admissions are now open for the next group of our Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching starting in July. Check out the Program Library for details and reach out for an interview.

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Why was it so hard for people to turn inter-personal knowledge into action?

I soon realised that people could not bring themselves to do what they knew to be right by their teams/clients/colleagues not because of any intrinsic fault, but because there were powerful, unacknowledged psychological mechanisms at play that prevented them from changing. Beyond the individual, such patterns ran in teams, fuelling miscommunication, lack of trust and at times outright toxic environments. I also noticed that, more often than not, the broader organisational culture/system actively worked against the most positive intentions for change - in a company where mistakes are routinely sanctioned and leaders’ standing depends on their teams’ measurable success, constructive feedback quickly turns into harsh criticism and delegation is way too risky, so everyone just hoards information and strives to show they did a good job so they can’t be blamed if something bad happens.

So it seemed to me that the ‘immunity to change’ was individual, collective and systemic. I believed then, as I do now, that all dimensions need to be addressed for sustainable change to happen. I chose to focus on first two dimensions in my own work, as I felt that was where my own skills and capacities could be put to best use. That’s when coaching entered the stage.

Coaching as a vehicle for transformation

Back then, in the market I was operating in, topics such as self-awareness, self-regulation or systems thinking were fringe concepts and coaching was in its infancy. I was simply blown away when I came across coaching as this dialogical art designed to empower people or groups to reach the goals that mattered to them through a curiosity-led process that purposefully avoided telling them what to do and intentionally pushed them to reflect on what they were actually doing, why and with what impact. I loved the power of coaching to nudge people into thinking beyond action/reaction and diving more deeply into exploring how their own beliefs, assumptions, worldviews were informing their actions every day. I noticed very quickly that coaching is much more than a goal-achievement tool. It can be a powerful human transformation tool.

I got exceptionally lucky to do my first ever coach training with Sir John Witmore, who was (and remains to this day, despite having sadly left us years ago) one of my best models for embodied wisdom. He walked the talk in being as non-judgemental, curious, insightful, deeply listening in his interactions with his students as he told us we could be in our coaching with our clients. Later on I would realise he gave my my first lesson in developmental coaching:

You, the coach, ARE the Instrument that facilitates your clients’ growth!

Or, as Otto Sharmer so beautifully puts it:

This means that whatever your blindspots, unacknowledged patterns, projections may be, they directly impact your efficacy as a coach. I loved coaching both because it opened up a pathway to facilitate others’ learning in a whole new way, but also because it became a profession which forced me to constantly look in the mirror to know and grow myself.

Becoming a coach completely changed how I engaged with groups. It turned me from a trainer into a facilitator. I started to listen more and talk less. I started to question my assumptions. I started to notice not just what people said, but how they said it. I started to get more and more curious to learn how people had come to the ‘truths’ they held or what pay-offs they had for not changing their minds or their habits, even when they said they desperately wanted to change. Coaching taught me to look beneath the surface.

Coaching also gave me a renewed respect for other people’s freedom to choose for themselves. Instead of trying to get leaders to become better delegators or feedback-givers, I started to inquire what it was that mattered to them and more humbly walk with them side by side towards goals they had identified and cared about, rather than goals others imposed on them.

Over the years I started training and mentoring coaches and learnt immensely from being invited into the sacred spaces of other coaches’ sessions. I noticed, both through my own work and through the work of others I mentored, that certain coaching processes seemed to lead to incredible breakthroughs for clients while others’ didn’t - all while the coach was seemingly following the same fundamental principles/models/skills. That too intrigued me.

Why did some clients seem to fly towards their goals and experience profound insights in the process and others ran around in circles, stuck in patterns they could not control, nor change, despite (often) being aware of them?

Through developmental research, I started to better understand the deeper mechanisms at play in human growth. I became aware of the readiness factor in coaching, as well as the idea that the coach’s developmental lens plays as powerful a role as a coach’s skill in picking up (or missing) subtle cues that can completely shift a coaching process towards deeper impact. Along the way, a few interesting insights emerged, which are now informing and enhancing the way I coach, as well as my practice as a coaching mentor. They have helped me sense into what developmental coaching might be and what it has to offer.

I’ll share them not as certainties, but as invitations for reflection for you reading this. Please test them against your own experiences as either coach or client (or both) and notice what emerges for you.

When clients are ‘stuck’ - an opportunity, or a problem?

When I say a client is ‘stuck’ I mean they don’t seem to be making much progress towards the goals they said were important to them. Often we coaches think of ‘stuckness’ as a problem to be solved. From a developmental perspective, we might think of it as a cue that more profound growth is afoot.

Kegan and Lahey’s notion of “immunity to change” is a powerful explanatory theory for why clients often act against their best interests or stay stuck in behaviours they consciously want, try (and yet fail) to change. Their research shows that humans often have ‘hidden agendas’ (Kegan and Lahey call them “hidden competing commitments”), unacknowledged needs to protect something that is in fact very important.

For example, a leader might consciously want to encourage their team to be confident and empower them to work independently or try new things, but instead finds themselves always micro-managing and controlling, having the last word and pushing the team to do things as they have been done before. Upon reflection, the leader might discover that while their conscious commitment is to empowering the team, their unconscious commitment is to avoid failure at all cost. These two needs/commitments create a tug-of-war and lead the leader to constantly sabotage their own best intentions of being more encouraging and supportive.

Digging even deeper, the same leader might discover that their hidden commitment to avoid failure at all cost might be rooted in an old (and likely unexamined) “big assumption” - such as “I am nothing without my professional success”. As long as they are ‘held captive’ by this assumption, never acknowledging or questioning it, they cannot shift their behaviour in the desired direction.

So we might say that when coaching helps make our hidden assumptions visible it becomes, at the core, developmental. Such coaching helps clients ‘look at’ that which before we were ‘looking through’ and turning a mindset we were ‘subject to’ into an ‘object’ they can investigate, inquire into and question. As they go through this process, they change as their whole worldview shifts. We develop ‘vertically’.

Challenging emotions in coaching - something to manage or something to utilise?

I have written about this before, as it was the core discovery of my doctoral research. I encourage you to read the previous article - “The Way Out is Through” - to better understand the theory I will be mentioning here.

The gist of it is that whenever we are in the process of changing or growing, we inevitably feel very powerful, very unpleasant feelings (also called ‘edge emotions’): confusion, anxiety, fear, anger, shame. Most people would do anything to avoid such emotions, most of the time. Most coaches are trained to hold space for them when they arise, but they are not trained to harness them in the service of a client’s growth.

What I found in my research was that when leaders allowed themselves to slow down, feel their painful feelings (instead of avoiding, numbing or rationalising them), and then chose to become curious about what that emotion might teach them, some very interesting things happened. Curiosity seemed to tame the intensity of painful emotions by creating a “contrasting emotions space”. In turn this helps unlock powerful, often transformative reflection, new insights and then the motivation to turn the light bulbs into action.

However, not many people are able to bring curiosity to their pain all by themselves, and here is where coach with a developmental orientation might make the difference. This discovery made me way more open to introduce somatic approaches in my coaching and way less likely to simply ‘talk through feelings’ the way I used to before.

A coach’s attention - mere tool or transformative super-power?

Adult development research taught me that ‘attention’ - what we look at (and for) in a coaching process - can be an incredibly sophisticated capability, which can be honed through practice.

William Torbert writes about 4 territories of experience - where our attention goes on any given moment. The first territory is the outside world - simply noticing what happens around you in this very moment means you are in this territory. The second territory is our own behaviour. Noticing how you are responding to the outside world places you in this second territory. The third territory encompasses your feelings, thoughts, assumptions - noticing what you think, feel, and what you believe (which informs your feelings) allows you to tap into this third territory. Finally, the fourth territory is both the capacity to observe all the other territories at the same time as being fully aware of your intention in the moment.

The way this translates in developmental coaching is that the coach might be aware of the client telling the story of an issue they are having at work with a colleague who obviously needs help but refuses to acknowledge that and keeps making costly mistakes which are impacting the client and the rest of the team. The client might be talking about how they have tried to help this person and their frustration at being rejected. They might talk about their worry those mistakes will have serious consequences.

In Territory 1 - the coach hears the client’s words and the content of the story itself, notices the client’s body language, the tension building, the voice raising, the client’s face turning red. As they shift attention to Territory 2, the coach might notice how they are nodding and listening, the questions they are asking to help the client find a solution. They might notice how the client refuses to reflect on themselves and continues focusing on the person that is frustrating them at work. If the coach shifts attention into Territory 3, they might notice their own breathing growing faster, the tension in their body, the panic rising as they have no idea how to help the client deal with what seems like a very unfair situation. The coach might also notice their fear of letting the client down, their need to say something relevant.

If the coach is aware enough, they might be able to zoom out into a ‘witness’-like perspective, taking it all in at once - the client speaking, the tension in the room, their own fear of not knowing how to handle and they might realise their intention is to be seen by the client as being in control. They might also notice a concurrent intention to help the client and a belief that ‘help’ means ‘solving the problem’.

If the coach is able to grasp all 4 territories at once, they might choose to breathe deeply, relieve some of the tension in their body and perhaps pause the conversation for a moment, inviting the client to notice their own feelings. They might draw the client’s attention to the change in posture and invite them to become curious for a moment as to what that might mean. The coach might also acknowledge their own impulse to help and might ask the client what their own intention is in that very moment.

The coach might realise that in that moment, both coach and client are ‘acting out’ the very situation the client is describing: a person needing help who refuses to see that and another person desperately wanting to help and fearing the consequences if their offer of support is rejected. The coach might notice how their client has just become the very person they are describing - one in need of help but oblivious to it. And the coach has started to do exactly what the client does with their colleague at work - trying to ‘save’ the client from themself.

When the coach is able to notice all of this and invite the client into Territory 4 - through a question or simply through an invitation to pause and notice the dynamic playing out in the coaching session then and there - the client might just become able to ‘look at’ that which before they were ‘looking through’. And in that moment, I would argue, the coaching becomes developmental, as both client and coach are slightly transformed by this moment, this encounter, this noticing.

If you are a coach, how are your clients ‘growing you’?

It is my belief that all coaching can be developmental, under the right conditions, which seem to occur in the liminal space between the client’s readiness, the coach’s maturity and their skill in noticing what happens beyond the words, within themself and ‘in-between’ them and the client. I hope you find the three insights I shared useful and choose to experiment with them in your coaching (or beyond it).

I know many experienced coaches are reading this newsletter and I’d love you to share in turn, if you’re so inclined, some of your experience and hard-won wisdom for the benefit of all the rest of us. And if you have a passion for adult development, alongside coaching, I’m keen to learn what do you believe makes coaching ‘developmental’?

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, note that next week is the final week of admission interviews for our upcoming Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching (the first developmental coaching training to be accredited by ICF as Level 1) - starting in February 2024.

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While the benefits of vertical development are quite exciting and hope-giving for all of us who believe our world badly needs more mature and conscious humans, it’s quite easy to get starry-eyed and start imagining vertical development as a silver bullet for great performance, or some straight-line to wisdom and mistakenly think of late-stage leaders as some superheroes who are going to sort out the mess we’ve collectively gotten ourselves into. If only things were so simple!

I’m often seeing organisations looking for programs that might ‘fast-track’ the vertical development of their leaders - preferably directly into the very late stages - such as ‘Transforming’ - without the mess and pain of going through the previous, transitional stages - such as ‘Redefining’ (learn more about each stage here and here). And for every client request, there will be a supplier promising they can ‘transform’ leaders. Three big assumptions are implied in this dynamic - all of which I believe to be demonstrably false (and if perpetuated, damaging to the whole adult development field and limiting its real potential to support growth and change).

The first is the assumption that the late stages are automatically ‘better’ and that people operating from those mature planes of development are automatically wiser than the average person.

The second assumption is that some sort of recipe exists for fostering vertical development. Following that, it is assumed that experts who hold that ‘recipe’ can just come into an organisation, apply the ‘magic formula’ and ‘transform’ people.

The third assumption is that vertical development happens in isolation - that it’s solely a function of the individual who can keep on growing regardless of the context/system they are embedded in.

Perhaps it is these unfortunate assumptions floating around in the business/consulting space that motivated quite vocal criticism of adult development theories of late. Unfortunately, in rightfully calling out the falsity of these assumptions, said critics ignore the fact that all serious developmental researchers had been already dismissing these same assumptions for a long time. It seems somehow that all words of caution from academics who study adult development end up being drowned by the commercial hype. Lots of oversimplified and exaggerated statements are thrown around, often obscuring the science, which is always more reserved in the promises it makes. In their outrage and rush to crush the hype, critics often end up dismissing the whole field of adult development (with all its genuine value) and thus end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think neither idealistic hype nor blanket criticism are useful - neither teach us anything, nor help us investigate and test genuine new pathways for fostering wiser human beings.

I believe we learn much more from staying curious about nuances rather than sticking to the broadest brushstrokes, so here’s my best attempt to unpack each of these false assumptions - every one in a separate article. I’ll try to take out the heavy academic language, but preserve the rigour. I aim to explore both the potential and the limitations of vertical development and and perhaps show you that, even without being a silver bullet, this lens on consciousness evolution remains a fascinating field to study (and turn into practice) and does hold immense potential for helping us reinvent the way we learn and grow as human beings.

Myth 1: Later stages of adult development are ‘better’

Elaine Herdman Barker, a foremost developmental researcher and practitioner, reminds us of the dangers of idealising the late stages.

(…) it is this urgency we feel toward the many endeavors we face including climate change, the global economy, and widespread violence (Knefel, 2015) that propels some of the fervor alive in developmental consulting today: transform to later action logics to “save the planet”, “save the organization”, “save the market”! Some consulting firms are explicitly devoted to ‘creating’ more leaders at this Transforming action logic. Yet in our monetization of development and the drive for Transformational leadership we’d be well advised to remember the balance of yin yang. For, ironically, we may find ourselves caught in the dogma of eras gone by, that of believing that there is a prescriptive way out of the problems we have wrought; holding to a simplistic hierarchical notion of leadership capability, belittling the worth of one end of the development “scale,” deifying the other and so obscuring the complexities of the developmental process.

Extract from: Elaine Herdman Barker “Imperfect beauty: Hierarchy and Fluidity in Leadership Development”

When I started my own research I fell for a short while in thrall with the late stages. I did allow myself to imagine a world full of post-conventional leaders who seek not just profit, but purpose; not just performance, but the wellbeing of their teams and who care not just about making money, but about helping the planet and making the world a better place. I vividly remember a conversation with Elaine, who tempered my enthusiasm with just a few wise words:

“Alis, just because someone is a very complex thinker, it doesn’t automatically mean they will put their complexity in the service of doing good in the world.”

Think of that intelligent leader, able to connect the dots faster than anybody else around them, but who seems to have little self-regulation, is prone to bouts of anger and toxic behaviours in the workplace.

Consider the charismatic, inspirational leader, able to light up rooms of hundreds of people, create compelling visions of change and who then fails at implementing that same change because of their inability to collaborate and their addiction to hero-leadership and doing it all alone.

Consider the expert, who is recognised as an innovator in their field and praised for their valuable contribution, who gets so attached to the product/framework/theory they created that they cannot tolerate any alternative views, criticism or contrary opinions and rigidly sticks to the ‘one truth’ - their own.

Consider the incredibly knowledgeable individual who takes up the whole space in every conversation, never pausing to listen, ask a question or show any trace of interest in the other people in the room.

Consider the beloved leader who might have started a movement, followed and revered by thousands, who is then proven to have abused their power and acted unethically.

Any of those people, if tested with a developmental assessment tool, would be assessed at the very late stages of development. They are likely very complex thinkers, articulate, able to conceptualise and discuss competing ideas and perspectives. They are sophisticated in their interpersonal capacity - deftly reading the room and skilfully communicating in compelling ways. And yet none of these aspects of late-stage development guarantees that these individuals are also humble, generous, moral or able to act with integrity when their personal interests dictate otherwise.

So how come do late-stage people become ‘brilliant jerks’?

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A developmental lens on that question invites to look deeper than the stages themselves. Underneath each stage run a multitude of lines of development - themes, threads or vectors - that develop asynchronously - some faster, some slower - and collectively contribute to the developmental capacity of the individual.

Ken Wilber has done more than most to illuminate what these lines of development are and inform our understanding of how they inter-twine to make us who we are. He distinguishes over a dozen lines, including cognitive, emotional, self-identity, moral/ethical, interpersonal, intrapersonal. Other researchers, such as Bill Torbert, zoom in on lines particularly relevant to leadership and organisational life - such as time and power.

I’ve written about lines before and plan to devote a whole series of articles exploring each one in turn, as I believe there is no way we can ever gain a more nuanced understanding of human development if we don’t look at these threads making up the intricate tapestry of who we are as humans.

For the purposes of debunking the myth - ‘late stages are better’ - suffice to say that not all late-stage people are the same. Imagine two leaders both assessed at the ‘Transforming’ stage of development (in Bill Torbert’s version of the stages). Both have a highly developed cognitive line - able to grasp complex concepts, connect seemingly disparate ideas in novel ways, perceive and work with paradox and polarities. One of them also has a highly developed (so called ‘post-conventional’) moral line, is motivated by universal values and embraces a world-centric worldview, which pushes them to act with integrity and uphold the highest ethical standards in their work. The other one’s moral line is less developed, functioning at the conventional level - they are more motivated by performing in the context of their own team/organisation - with less concern for the systemic impact of their actions.

Now imagine the first leader is also highly self-aware and has a highly developed emotional line - so they are able to inquire into their own thoughts/feelings with ease, but also able to sit with the emotions of others and lean into emotionally charged conversations. The second leader on the other hand is less in touch with their emotions and prefers to inhabit a highly cognitive space, where they feel most comfortable. So they are less likely to be aware of their emotional impact on others and tends to avoid difficult conversations that might bring out any kind of intense emotions.

Finally, imagine the first leader’s ‘self-regulation’ line is as developed as their self-awareness line - they are able to observe themselves in action and regulate their emotions and reactions in real time. The second leader, meanwhile, is not as good at self-regulation. They might have trouble reacting constructively when triggered, which leads to snappy behaviours and at times impulsive decisions under pressure.

While both these leaders might be highly effective in their roles, their capacity to respond with wisdom - which, in most definitions, assumes an orientation towards the common good - might be very different. The first ‘transforming-stage’ leader might just be wiser than the second.

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We could explore many more combinations of lines and ways in which the asynchronicity of various lines plays out in the unique context of each individual. Add to this the messiness of gravitational pulls from organisational culture or social context - which in itself skews how individuals show up - and you realise that ‘late-stage’ does help people see more and be more, but does not not automatically guarantee more humanity. That is something we each have to really work for every single day, all while recognising how much of what we are is dictated by context/system, versus our own individual choice/will.

Even the most developmentally evolved people have their shadow.

I believe that by acknowledging this simple truth we might just clear the path towards more sustainable growth and take off the pressure and the expectation for ‘late-stage’ people to somehow be ‘better than’. It might also take off some of the pressure to ‘grow’ everyone into the later stages and orient our efforts in the learning and development space towards supporting people to honour, integrate and skilfully embody the full extent of their present developmental repertoire, without feeling like they need to rush towards some glorious end-goal.

In my own work with leaders, I notice how often the biggest lessons are found when a person turns towards the ‘darker corners’, disowned and neglected parts of self. The parts they might be ashamed of, reject or project onto others instead of acknowledging in self. Highly intelligent and mature leaders often put extraordinary pressure on themselves to be ‘at their best’ all the time. There is a certain fear of vulnerability, of the bad days and immature versions of ourself. But it is precisely in those bad days and those immature selves that further growth is often hiding. It is in the moments of fallback that the seeds of a bigger self can be found.

I am also reflecting how crucial it is to look at individuals in the context of the systems (family/work/society) they are embedded in. No-one grows and evolves in isolation and honouring both individual AND system (versus just one or the other) is, I believe, crucial in finding more sustainable and scalable ways to foster development. But that leads us into another myth - of development as function of the individual alone - and is a topic which deserves its own separate article.

So what are you noticing about your own lines of development? What are your ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ lines? What enables you to show up as the most mature version of yourself? When do you notice the ‘smaller’ selves pop up? What is your shadow - which corner of yourself are you most afraid to look into? Do you know ‘brilliant jerks’ or perhaps even catch yourself becoming one from time to time? If yes, when and how does that archetype appear in your life and what might it teach you in service of a wiser you?

We hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into Vertical Development learning, check out our online library of webinars and ICF-accredited programs for coaches and leaders.

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Preface

One of my (Alis’) coaching mentors once said: “The biggest gift of coaching others is the growth you gain yourself”. She also added: “We always have the clients we need”. It was an early reminder for me that coaching is not something you do to others, but a mutually transforming process of evolution that leaves you - the coach - changed - just as it impacts and supports your clients to actualise their potential, achieve their aspirations and grow in the process.

The meaning of ‘we have the clients we need’ is that every client presents us with a precious opportunity to discover new, unexamined corners of our own psyche. In supporting them to explore their belief systems we are confronted with our own. In encouraging them to face their limitations we unavoidably encounter our own. To remain the clean, clear mirrors our clients deserve, we, coaches, need safe spaces to process our own discoveries, fears and inner obstacles. And a great supervisor is the person who provides that safe space for us, coaches, to download, bring into awareness, integrate and do all the inner work we expect our clients to do in turn.

I have deep respect for the mastery required to be a coaching supervisor. I also believe this profession - and this aspect of coaching development - is still insufficiently understood and appreciated. So I jumped at the opportunity of inviting Ursula Clidière, a dear friend and experienced coaching supervisor, to share some perspectives I believe all of us could learn from. I am even more excited knowing that Ursula is not only a supervisor, but a developmentalist. She and I have nerded out extensively about the differences between coach mentoring and supervision and about the links between vertical development and coaching supervision - the latter being a territory that has hardly been explored. This article, written in Ursula’s voice, emerged from our conversations. It is an invitation for you - coaches, coach mentors, coach supervisors, curious minds with an interest in coaching - to take a step into the world of supervision with a developmental lens. If you’ll find it valuable, Ursula and I would love to have you join our webinar on the 5th of October, where we plan to deep-dive into this question: How can coaches ‘grow up’ just as they support their clients’ growth?

Image credits: ‘Lady of Supervision’ by Ursula Clidière

Supervision - a catalyst for coaches’ vertical development?

If you are a coach, you will likely have experienced the isolation that often comes with this profession. We most often practice in a ‘bubble’ - just us and our client(s). We might (and hopefully do) spend time after a session reflecting on what went right/wrong and, while that self-reflection is precious and necessary, it often isn’t sufficient to show us what we cannot see for ourselves. To keep learning and growing, we need external feedback and support. And that often comes with mentoring and supervision - which are related, but not identical.

“Supervision is what you think you don’t need in advance and appreciate hugely in hindsight!” (Ursula’s client - P.T. - 2023)

For internationally accredited coaches, a certain number of hours with a mentor are a formal requirement for credential maintenance. They are also an important ‘hygiene factor’ - more coaches are seeking mentors as a way to increase the quality of their practice. Mentoring is quite often pragmatic - focusing on unpacking and improving a coach’s technique. Yet, for many coaches, it’s not enough.      

Less well-known than mentoring, coach supervision (often also called ‘coaching supervision’)  is growing in popularity. Supervision goes beyond mentoring, working with the whole person of the coach, supporting their growth as a person and as a professional, just as it is supporting the honing of their craft. In supervision, coaches will often bring their own challenges, fears, reactions to clients, moments of stuckness, professional anxieties and a host of other emotions, beliefs or patterns that play out in client interactions. The premise of supervision is that the coach themself is the main ‘instrument’ of coaching, and that instrument needs honing and tuning so it resonates with clients at the right frequency, at the right time.

Wright et al (2019) affirm that given the increasing focus on the maturation of coaching and developmental frames, there is an increasingly critical need for coaches to engage in supervision as part of their continuous professional development and reflective practice. Also, just as the diversification and overall investment in coaching has grown, so has the need to develop and support coaching practitioners, or even entire organizational cultures using coaching approaches.

In this article, we will “toe-dip” into coach supervision with a vertical orientation- the purpose and value it can offer to coaching practitioners- be they coaches, HR professionals, or leader coaches - regardless of whether their practice is deliberately vertical or not. We invite you to consider that, just as coaching itself can be developmental for the client, supervision can be developmental for the coach.

It’s worth noting that, increasingly, corporate clients are asking that coaching practitioners be in supervision, and more and more of the professional coaching bodies are now adding supervision as a mandatory requirement (alongside mentoring), e.g., for accreditation purposes. What is emphasized in those contexts are the qualitative aspects of coaching (referring to ‘quality of work’, skills, tools, relationships, the client system, and context) and the restorative aspects (how the coach takes care of themselves). Today though, we are toe-dipping into the third offering supervision brings- the vertical development of a coach, and here we are exploring how supervision itself might enhance its impact by using adult development principles.

The ‘vertical’ in coaching and supervision

Vertically trained practitioners (be they coaches or coach supervisors) can offer a safe container for growth and can discern the developmental voyage a client is on. Vertical development is based on reflective inquiry, awareness raising, and personal introspection and requires inner work. This in turn can heighten awareness, help deepen connections and relations, bring new perspectives to light, allow the person to engage in dialogue more effectively, and offer new pathways for self-regulation. It can also support adaptive changes, help create a greater bandwidth for dealing with complexity and for noticing interconnectivity.

In supporting the adult development of others, coaches may themselves be in need of support, energy, making sense of their client experience, seeing other perspectives, challenging their coaching approach, or simply recharging by tuning into the inner dialogue and needs. Wright et al (2019) highlight the centrality of the “self” and the role of developmental supervision in supporting an evolution of complexity in thinking, meaning making and coach maturity.

“Supervision is tuning the instrument of coaching: the coach.” (Ursula’s client - C.O., 2023)

When looking at adult development stages through a musical metaphor – different stages of development can be seen as octaves we can inhabit or ‘play’ on our ‘developmental piano’. There are octaves we ‘play’ naturally and that we recognize as our ‘Center of Tonality’ (Center of Gravity). Then, there may be other scales we find ourselves playing without fully understanding why and without feeling exactly ‘in tune’ with the scale - in other words, we may find ourselves showing up with much less maturity than we know ourselves to be capable of. Dr. Valerie Livesay (2022) would call this a ‘developmental fallback’.

A coach’ stage of development does significantly affect how they understand their role, value in life or at work, how they relate to others, deal with conflict or complex issues. Therefore, when we have moments where we feel in complete flow, like the ‘reincarnated Mozart’, noticing octaves, tunes, and keys we did not know how to play beforehand quite as easily - and, suddenly, we can- it may be a ‘glimpse’ of another octave, another way of interpreting the piece of music - noticing another viewpoint or another way of making sense of the world. We know, with practice and reflection, these new, broader perspectives become more easily available, until we eventually inhabit or “own” this new way of seeing, making meaning and sense. And we also realize, it is not only practising the piece over and over again that will bring us there - it is because a different meaning/lens has emerged, allowing us to interpret the music differently.

One of my (Ursula’s) supervisees had contracted supervision initially for the same pragmatic reason many coaches seek a supervisor: accreditation. She was seeking to be supervised for a limited period, a defined number of supervision hours as was required by the professional body. And then? She discovered an intrinsic value in the supervisory process, that made her stay on turn supervision into a practice. She asked to deepen the developmental aspect of our explorations, as she had experienced a heightened sense of agency and joy in her own coaching, better communication with her clients, and feeling more equipped to tackle some of the dynamics she kept encountering with a corporate client.

In working with her, I reflected on another wonderful aspect of our musical metaphor of development. While many times, as coaches, we ‘play’ beautifully alongside our clients, harmonizing our ‘octaves’ to theirs, at other times we may find ourselves out of tune, or out of touch with their needs, their situation, and their context. And here, supervision offers a safe space for reflective practice so that, in relationship with the supervisor, the coach can explore their experiences. The supervisee is invited into a reflective dialogue on their practice, thoughts, feelings, and actions in a supportive and non-judgmental environment. Supervision becomes a dialogue space or, what can also be called a “We-Space” (De Visch and Laske, 2018).

It is a space where both supervisor and supervisee, engage in co-creative exchange, explore emerging thoughts, reflect on practice, and invite gentle challenging of actions taken. In short, it invites us to look at a coaching setting from all angles and all stakeholders involved. It allows for space to let what needs to emerge, emerge.  Bachkirova (2016) echoes this when stating that the principle of ‘coach as an instrument’ implies that the depth of practice comes from the depth of the practitioners.

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Supervision is a space for coaches to walk through Fear

Here is a quick story. One day, Robin (yes, Robin as in Robin Shohet, 2022) found himself with another traveller, a stranger, in the backseat of a taxi, being shuttled from the airport to a conference venue. Robin recalled, his friendly fellow traveller wanted to know what he did for work and when Robin mentioned ‘supervision’, his travel partner had no idea what ‘supervision’ was and wanted to know more. Robin hadn’t expected to have to summarise what he did - and his first thought was:

“It [supervision] helps to reduce the fear at work”

With this, Robin offers a unique perspective on supervision that few definitions, supervision models, or supervision research offer up as readily. Indeed, looking at my supervision session notes from the past years, every single one mentions ‘fear’ in one way or another.

Fears may be camouflaged by deep-rooted assumptions and conflicting commitments (Kegan and Lahey, 2009; Helsing, 2019) and they may be so entrenched that they are unconscious. This can cause disequilibrium, which in turn can lead to falling back or regressing (Livesay, 2022; Laske, 2020).

Fear, indeed, is everywhere - in us, around us, in others, embedded in relationships, organizations, cultures, and so many life contexts. Robin went even so far as to say

‘I just find fear behind all [sic] everything’ (2022) 

Looking at ‘fear’ from an adult developmental perspective we might discover it can be experienced very differently by different developmental stages.

In her work at VDI, Alis often speaks about ‘edge emotions’ (Mälkki and Green, 2018) - the challenging feelings that arise at the end of our comfort zones - and then of contrasting emotions, as a gateway to vertical growth:

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When people experience edge emotions - such as fear, anxiety, or confusion – they generally want to get rid of them as soon as possible. What Alis’ research has shown is that when we add curiosity on top of an edge emotion, (creating a ‘contrasting emotions space’) this makes the discomfort bearable, facilitates deep reflection and makes bold experiments more likely.

What I have found is that edge emotions do have a prominent place in supervision, as they often compromise the capacity of practitioners to fulfil their roles - preventing them from feeling competent, capable, and at full capacity in supporting their own clients. Supervision is a space where these emotions can be surfaced, expressed, met with curiosity and turned into fuel for the coach’s growth.

Let’s stay with fear for a moment longer.

Concretely, for someone being “perched” at the ‘Diplomat’ stage, belonging is likely very important, and the person may experience fear of being singled out or rejected while for someone inhabiting the ‘Expert’ stage, fears may manifest more around making mistakes. At the ‘Achiever’ stage people may be fearful about not having a choice, being helpless, or failing at accomplishing a set goal. At the ‘Redefining’ stage, there is often a lot of fear around changing identity or loss of meaning. While at the very late stages - ‘Transforming’ or ‘Alchemist’, fear may start turning into a valuable resource in itself and invite a rich inquiry. Hence, the perspective and ‘meaning’ of ‘fear’ are very different at different developmental stages. If you’d like to explore the stages and reflect on your own, this short podcast episode is a good start:

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When coaches bring Fear into Supervision

Another supervisee, an Executive Coach, presented to supervision with the intention to explore her professional practice and a sense of ‘stuckness’ she had been experiencing for some time. After engaging in a brief check-in and centring exercise, I almost innocuously - as we were just both arriving at the session - invited her to share what came up in the brief check-in exercise. The response was unexpected, fast, short, and in the middle of the room: Fear.

In exploring this further and by contracting to take a vertical lens to the inquiry, we worked through several polarities and identified various misbalances between poles, such as one pole being ‘meaning’, and the other ‘financial security’. Another pair was ‘being-in-service’, poled by ‘success’, and a third pair was ‘purpose’, poled by ‘profitability’. As we were reflecting on how to consolidate and equally consider the pairs, the client already expressed relief from the pressure.

Becoming aware and seeing what had created some of the tensions that had held her captive and becoming aware of her options, helped her to regain a sense of autonomy and choice. In several of the subsequent sessions, we also did work using the well-known developmental process - Immunity to Change (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). Through that, the coach could identify a deep-rooted assumption of ‘having to’ succeed in a financially measurable form or risk being/feeling ‘rejected’ by her family of origin. It had a profound impact on her own coach-client relationships.

This client’s story served as a reminder of the value of bringing developmental tools such as polarity work, or ITC into a supervisory process. It also showed how powerful it can be for coaches to work with (and through) their most uncomfortable emotions.

As mental growth through the octaves is represented by shifts into consecutively more complex frames of reference, this process of making emotions ‘object’ - looking AT them - (instead of simply being ‘subject’ to - looking THROUGH them) can change the way one experiences strong emotions. For coaches, this may mean they discover new ways to utilize their own strong emotions in service of the coaching process, instead of them becoming triggers for fallback.

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Lines of development in coaching supervision

In similar ways, supervision can help a coach explore other lines/vectors/markers, of their own development and how they impact their behaviour and impact on the client, depending on the developmental stage at play. Such aspects include relationships, time, space, use of power, feedback, a coach’s identity, dealing with conflict, influencing others, decision-making, or motivation. We are using the term “line” here in the sense of a marker or aspect of maturity across octaves. They are themes that appear when you ‘double-click’ on a developmental stage - like notes that make up an octave on the 'piano’. Each of the above-listed lines, or markers, manifests differently from the different octaves’ vantage points. You can read more about these markers here:

At another time, we will come back to discuss the more established adult developmental lines - as captured in Ken Wilber’s integral theory - such as ego-maturity, self, cognitive, values, morals, or spirituality.

When bringing the concept of ‘lines’ into supervision, the coach might be invited to reflect on how their own preference for cognitive processing (versus somatic processing) impacts the way they engage with their clients. Could the coach’s discomfort with being fully present in their own body, with their feelings, interfere with their capacity to hold space for a client in a moment of intense emotion? Could their preference for intellectual ‘unpacking’ stem from an overdeveloped cognitive line and could there be an opportunity to tease out other lines which might help round the coach’s repertoire of meaning-making?

The core tenet of the developmental view is that our ability to act and connect is driven by how we individually construct, interpret and apply meaning to the relationships and contexts we are in. The more sophisticated our meaning-making becomes, the more choice we have. This means that in a coaching process (and in a supervisory process for that matter) our own maturity (from an adult development perspective) is at play (Sharma, 2018; Cooke-Greuter, 2004). To add to the complexity - in supervision we also explore how a coach’s ‘octave’/stage might interact with the client’s ‘octave’ - and how those ‘notes’ may or may not harmonize.

Food for thought

We’re offering this post as a first step in a broader exploration of vertical development and its value for coach supervision. Supervision is, at its core, a reflective dialogue and we believe that, when done through a vertical lens, it opens up new ways for coaches to build their capacity to access more ‘octaves’ and, ultimately, more wisdom.

Developmental supervision offers us, coaches, a safe, quiet, and patient space to step into bigger versions of ourselves. It can support us to shift our relationship to time -  from scarce to plentiful - or it might offer courage to experiment with new approaches that might then lead towards further growth for both ourselves and our clients. It might help us gain alertness and awareness to gauge our own octave and whether we play it (or it plays us…) in the right pitch (or not) - at the right time, in the right way, for the right purpose.

We’ll invite you to continue this exploration of the value and potential of developmental coach supervision in future posts, a planned academic publication, and in our upcoming webinar scheduled for October 5th, 2023. Enrol to join us live or watch the recording - we’d love to hear your thoughts and questions on all.

In all of this, we are holding one central question: How can coaches continue to grow, just as they help their clients grow in turn?

We’re looking forward to your thoughts, questions, and perspectives as supervisors, coaches, HR practitioners, leaders, or curious explorers. Through them in the chat, come in with your own beautiful tune and join our orchestra!

For the nerdiest of you, here are a few references to help you dive deeper:

Anagnostakis, A (2022). Fostering conscious leadership: Exploring leaders’ experience of vertical development during an Executive Leadership Program. PhD Dissertation.

Bachkirova, T. (2016). The self of the coach: Conceptualization, issues, and opportunities for practitioner development. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 68(2), 143-156.

Bluckert, P. (2019). A comprehensive guide to vertical development. Expand the possible.

De Visch, J. and Laske, O. (2020). Practices of Dynamic Collaboration. A Dialogical Approach to Strengthening Collaborative Intelligence in Teams. Springer.

Ellison, S. (2020). Understanding Vertical Development. Ellison Consulting Group.

Helsing, D. (2019). The Immunity-to-Change Process: When Change Is Hard to Make, in Professional Coaching, edited by English, S., Manzi Sabatini, J., and Brownell, P., Springer Publishing Company

Kegan R. & Laskow Lahey, L. (2009). 'Immunity to Change,' New Haven, CT.: Harvard Business Review Press

Mälkki, K., & Green, L. (2018). Working with Edge Emotions as a means for Uncovering Problematic Assumptions: Developing a sound theory. Phronesis, 7(3), 26–34.

Laske, O. (2020). Mentoring a Behavioural coach in thinking developmentally: A dialogue. Conference paper

Livesay, V. (2022). Leaving the Ghostlight burning. Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You

Petrie, N. (2015). The how-to of Vertical Leadership Development- part 2.

Petrie, N. (2014). Vertical Leadership Development- part 1.

Sharma, B. (2018). Maturity Coaching: Enabling Vertical Development in Leaders. In Professional Coaching. Springer Publications.

Shohet, R. (2022) In Love with Supervision. Retrieved from: Robin Shohet presents on his book In Love with Supervision. - YouTube

Wright, A.,  McLean Walsh, M., and  Tennyson, S. (2019). Systemic Coaching Supervision: Responding to the Complex Challenges of Our Time. Philosophy of Coaching: An International Journal Vol. 4, No. 1, May 2019, 107-122.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into Vertical Development learning, check out our online library of webinars and ICF-accredited programs for coaches and leaders.

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Over the years, I’ve had my share of facilitating learning programs for reluctant groups of employees, who were there not because they had chosen the learning but because somebody else in their organisation had thought they needed it. After witnessing all flavours of resistance and studying in-depth the lived process of psychological growth, I have come to believe that the choice to participate and readiness for learning are absolutely fundamental to the impact of any learning program. Without one or both of them, learning initiatives are bound to be at best ‘momentary fun’ and at worst a painful obligation - a chore for all involved. Without these two conditions, I don’t believe meaningful change can happen.

My most memorable experience of participant reluctance was over 15 years ago, in the ‘good old days’ when ‘soft skills’ was a buzzword and companies were investing massively in ‘upgrading’ the skills of their workforce - putting people through countless programs in hope of teaching them to communicate better, delegate, sell, deal with ‘difficult’ customers or give more constructive feedback.

The client was a large multinational and the topic was ‘public speaking’ and ‘presentation skills’. I was part of a larger team of facilitators working with that client and I had had no involvement in stakeholder work leading up to the workshop - I was there to deliver on a piece of content for a group I only knew the basic facts about. They were all senior people, all medical doctors, part of an internal ‘workplace health’ department in their organisation. I was only a couple of years into my work as a professional facilitator and the participants could easily have been my parents’ age at the time.

I still vividly remember welcoming them into the room, introducing myself, and getting barely audible ‘hello’s’ and frosty looks. I remember us all sitting down in a half-circle and people sitting awkwardly, arms crossed, frowning and giving monosyllabic answers to my introductory questions. Nobody seemed to have any expectations from the two days and nobody seemed willing to contribute in any useful way. Some people threw in snarky comments and others seemed in total ‘freeze’ mode.

Not even 10 minutes in, I was feeling my stomach getting heavier, my heart racing, and the feeling of impending doom lurking in a corner of my consciousness. I remember the repetitive thought - “these people don’t want to be here” - followed by a slightly comforting thought - “it clearly isn’t personal, their attitude is not a reflection of me, they’ve been like this since they arrived, so something must be going on for them in the background” - and then another -” there’s no way we can spend two days in this energy!”. Then a question crossed my mind: “Should I carry on as if nothing’s happening and try ‘warming them up’ or should I just call it out and come what may?”. I chose the latter - my first conscious act of bravery in a workshop and one that stands, to this day, as a pivotal moment of learning that set the foundation for who I later became. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I paused the workshop and addressed the group:

“I’m noticing most, if not all of you, don't seem to enjoy being here. I realise there must be context playing out for all of you that I have no idea about. I have a lot of respect for the knowledge and experience you collectively hold and I believe your time is very valuable - nobody should spend two days doing something that doesn’t make sense for them. I am here to hold a space for your learning and my only intention is to make it a useful experience. But to do that I need to understand what is happening for you. Would you like to please share with me a bit more about how you came to be invited to this workshop?”

There was a long pause. People looked at each other. I felt something shifting in the room. The very fact that I had acknowledged their resistance seemed to strike a chord with the group. Then, the very person who had been sarcastic a few minutes before spoke up. She shared they had all been sent to this course by their department head, after receiving negative ratings on their annual evaluations. “Presentation skills” was identified as an ‘area of improvement’ and this course was like the ‘bitter pill’ they all had to ‘swallow’. Their leader’s feedback to them all had been harsh and condescending. They had been told they had ‘a problem’ and needed to ‘address it’. The date for the course had been chosen without consultation and presence had been made mandatory. Getting into the room and seeing me - a very young facilitator - did not help at all. They all had felt belittled and disrespected, believed they were wasting their time, and were thinking of the mountain of emails piling up while they were stuck there, with me.

Her share was met with nods all around. I drew in breath and said:

“Thank you for your honesty. I was not aware you had been forced to participate in this workshop. I look around and see a roomful of very mature people, who hold a wealth of lived experience, from whom I have a lot to learn. I am definitely not here to ‘teach’ you anything from a position of authority. I have no intention of holding you here against your will. As one who spends her life speaking in public and loving it, I would be very happy for all of us to explore this topic of presenting if that is something you might be keen to do and think there might be any value in it for you, regardless of what your boss wants. I would invite you into a safe space where we can hone our skills and experiment with public speaking in a practical and playful way. I could also just mark the attendance sheet and respectfully give you back your freedom if you wish to do something else with your time. You are the ones who should choose how you use your time and I will respect your decision, whichever it is.

I remember the silence again. This time it was less tense. More relieved. Brows seemed to relax and I even thought I saw someone smiling. They looked at each-other again and seemed to reach an understanding. “I’ll stay”, someone said. Others nodded.

What followed were two days that I still remember, like a shining beacon among hundreds of forgotten experiences. I even remember the themes of their practice presentations- which I encouraged them to build around topics they were genuinely passionate about. Most were, unsurprisingly, not work-related. The lady who had started off most aggressive and had spoken up for the group shared her battle with cancer with all of us. Her presentation was about having a voice and speaking your truth, as life is too short to do otherwise. People had tears in their eyes when she finished. Every one of those people could and did confidently speak in public when they genuinely felt it was an invitation, not an obligation. And I was never the same facilitator after that workshop. I learned how crucial choice is to a successful learning experience.

I started to say “no” to projects where participation was compulsory. I advocated with my organizational clients for the benefits of having participants’ buy-in for any program. Once I had my own learning company and total creative freedom around projects, I became bolder in co-creating with my clients and co-designing learning that they authored as much as I did. The more people were involved in the decision of what and how to learn, the more they were involved in the delivery of learning or stimulated to teach and learn from each-other instead of expecting an expert to deliver - the more motivated they were to give it energy, to share, practice, experiment, and to integrate what they were learning.

Choice matters

In my Ph.D. research, I looked at a prestigious cross-sector executive program where leaders had been invited based on being identified as top talents in their organizations. Most had joined not only willingly, but enthusiastically. Yet, I found that the motivation behind that enthusiasm still impacted people’s level of choice in fully participating and the value they were taking from the program. The leaders who had joined mainly because they felt it would help their careers to participate, seemed less likely to progress in their vertical development than those who had joined from pure intrinsic motivation, driven by curiosity and an urge to learn and grow themselves. The latter were more likely to be scored at later stages of development post-program and were more willing to lean into discomfort during the learning and take risks, turning insights into meaningful action. In short, choice seems to matter in very intricate and subtle ways and the more internal locus of control participants have (the sense that they are responsible for their own learning) the more likely they are to benefit from the experience.

As my own research and practice progressed, it became clear that not only choice was crucial for impactful learning, but also developmental readiness.

“You cannot stretch a person more than a couple of steps beyond their current worldview”

had said one of my earliest and most cherished coaching teachers - Sir John Whitmore. So if you don’t have a feel for their worldviews, for the lens they are carrying, it’s very hard to know what the right stretch is.

Developmental readiness impacts how much leaders gain from a learning experience

I’ve always been intrigued by the ways in which certain people seem to simply absorb a learning experience and emerge genuinely transformed, while others seem to go through the same experience and remain unmoved. While choosing to engage in the learning, to begin with, is a key prerequisite for impact, something else seems to be at play. That ‘something’ is developmental readiness.

Participants who are, for various reasons, on the cusp of a developmental shift - having reached the limits of their current stage of development, and feeling pushed by life towards a tipping point, seem most likely to measurably grow from a learning program. Those who enter a program nudged either by a sense of possibility, or often discontent with the status quo, those who are struggling with their own limitations, which they are aware of and fed up with, those who are hungry for personal change and keep saying “I can’t go on like this!” - are often the ones who progress most and fastest.

Considering participants’ current stage of development in the design of a program can help harness that developmental readiness in very targeted ways. Understanding where people are at in their growth can help learning designers and facilitators calibrate the right kind and level of developmental discomfort, alongside sturdy, safe holding spaces to create psychological safety and the right conditions for further development. And those conditions are not the same for each group and for each organizational context.

For example, groups of leaders who operate mostly from an ‘expert’ worldview might need a completely different learning experience, centered on challenging their certainties, exploring alternative points of view, and nudging them into small steps towards self-reflection or a shift from task-focus to goal-focus. On the other hand, a group of leaders operating from later stages - such as Achiever or Redefining/Individualist - might be up for deeper exploration of emotional and relational landscapes, or work with polarities or systemic perspectives. Often groups are made up of a breadth of developmental stages and needs, which only makes the task more interesting (and challenging) for program designers and facilitators.

And speaking of facilitators, checking our own motivations might make a big difference to our clients.

Checking your motivations as a facilitator

I’ve learned something else from that early pivotal experience. Overcoming participant reluctance, and seeing attitudes shift from “frosty” to “inspired” can bring a huge ego boost to a facilitator. It can make you feel like some sort of magician, melting people’s hearts, opening their minds, getting them from “I don’t want to be here” to “This has been mindblowing” through the sheer power of your charisma and passion for the topic.

I’ve met fabulously talented facilitators who were masters at turning a skeptical room around. I’ve had conversations with some of them, who spoke about getting a huge thrill from witnessing a passive group come alive with excitement and even feeling more stimulated by reluctant groups than they do by enthusiastic ones. I’m no stranger to that thrill myself. Yet, over time, I’ve come to reflect on how our motivations as facilitators might impact our choices of clients, projects, and ultimately our impact - both in the room, on the day - and also more long-term, on the organizations we are serving.

I’ve started to question the usefulness of the ‘facilitator’s thrill’. What is the true value of working with reluctant groups, even when we see reluctance turning into buy-in, thanks to our skillful handling of the group? Are we really helping create sustainable transformation by delivering a seamless experience of inspiration? Or might profound change come about more readily when we take the longer, less glamorous road of gaining early stake-holder and participant buy-in; working only with the willing; co-creating; doing less for our clients, and supporting them to do more for themselves - such as to run their programs internally; helping them minimize off-site and classroom-based learning and create more on-the-job, in-action or community-based learning? Might our clients gain more if we, facilitators, stepped away from the limelight and instead empowered them to shine?

I have fewer answers and certainties and many more questions than 15 years ago. What I do know is that learning should be a choice. Nowadays I for one get way more joy in working with those who have freely chosen to be there and who feel ready and willing to step into the discomfort of change. I also get a lot of joy when I see my clients taking full ownership of their own learning and leading it themselves. Sometimes success is making yourself redundant. And that has turned, slowly and surely, into my biggest aspiration.

If you are an L&D expert, facilitator or learning designer, how do you see the role of choice and readiness? How do you make sure your program participants are primed for learning? What’s your experience of the ‘facilitator’s thrill’?

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In my PhD research I studied a group of 35 senior leaders - part of a larger group of 180 participants in a top executive program in Australia and New Zealand. The intention was to map their lived experience of vertical development as they undertook this 6-month-long, intense learning journey. As it happened, just as the program was about to start, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and all of the group was thrown into one of the biggest experiments of their lives. The program moved online, more than half of participants were in lock-down for months, leaders shifted their businesses to work-from-home, parents were home-schooling, relatives were cut-off from each-other and a general sense of confusion and anxiety floated in the air.

Through the the program, participants took a developmental assessment (twice) and journaled every week for 28 weeks. They reflected on their brightest and hardest moments. They shared times when they were wise and times when they showed up at their worst. They shared the grief of losing loved ones; struggling with mental health or supporting others who were struggling. They re-discovered the joy of spending their days close to their children and pets, free of hours-long commutes to work; experienced the stress of being parents/teachers/entertainers - all at once. They had open, vulnerable conversations with their teams like never before; were inspired by people around them; felt out of their depth and were amazed at how rezilient they discovered they could be.

The journalling exercise, which started off as a research tool, became a learning and healing tool for many of them. At the very end of the program, as they re-took the developmental assessment and sat through an in-depth hour-long interview, many reflected on their sinuous journey through pandemic, life upheaval and what was often a challenging, confronting and inspiring learning program. Only a third of them developed vertically into the next stage. A third stagnated. And a third regressed into an earlier stage than 6 months previously.

What made the difference?

As I sifted through hundreds of journal entries, pages of interview transcripts and sentence stems in developmental assessments, I had all sorts of hypotheses and many more questions. Perhaps people already operating from a later stage of development were better equipped to deal with upheaval? Perhaps more developmentally mature leaders would approach a learning program, like the one they were undertaking, with more openness? What made people revert to earlier stages of thinking? Did they really lose their capacity for complexity, or was it only temporary? And if temporary, how might they recover their lost capacity? What, if anything, did those who developed have in common?

What emerged from the data both surprised me and, intuitively, felt like a confirmation - something I had seen for years in coaching leaders, but had never been able to properly articulate.

The single most powerful differentiating factor between leaders who developed and leaders who didn’t was the way they dealt with difficult emotions.

When our world is shaken to its core and everything we have ever held as true is questioned, we experience what Jack Mezirow (the father of transformative learning) called "disorienting dilemmas” - moments when your mind is stretched beyond its ability to get back to its original ‘shape’. Disorienting dilemmas are crossroads when life simply doesn’t make sense any more, when our current lens is of no use and we’re offered an opportunity to grow our minds into new ways of seeing and, with them, our hearts and bodies into new ways of being. That kind of ‘stretching’ leads to transformation and is, at the core, what we have come to call ‘vertical development’.

And yet, while all the leaders in my research were confronted with disorienting dilemmas, not all of them transformed. Some even shrank into smaller versions of themselves, reverting to less, not more mature mindsets and behaviours. That seemed to happen because disorienting dilemmas come with very difficult emotions. Anxiety, confusion, fear, grief, shame, guilt - a whole panoply of flavours of pain. If left unexamined and un-managed, these emotions become stoppers for growth.

Most people, as would be expected, naturally step back in the face of emotional pain. They reject the pain and, as it turns out, with it they unconsciously refuse the learning. A few, though, do something counterintuitive. They get curious about the pain. They choose to allow themselves to feel it fully and inquire into what it might teach them. They treat those hard emotions as indications that they’ve reached an ‘edge’, beyond which more personal growth awaits.

Those were the people who experienced vertical development from the turmoil. For them, the best way OUT was THROUGH.

This minority of leaders had a strong sense of agency and choice - not over the context, which was out of their control - but over how they chose to react to the context. They met their difficult (‘edge’) emotions with curiosity. They were eager to investigate what might be learnt from anxiety or fear.

Interestingly, curiosity did not make the anxiety disappear, but it did something remarkable: it made it bearable.

What these leaders did was to create an inner space, which I have come to call ‘the contrasting emotions space’ where pain/grief/fear could co-exist with curiosity and allow them to step towards that which scared them most. Once the contrasting emotions space was created, people were more likely to reflect further, to challenge their own mindsets, to let their mind be changed by new ideas and perspectives, to find new meaning in the situations they were in and, most importantly, to allow themselves to experiment with new behaviours that they had never tried before.

Their process looked something like this:

To make better sense of this process, think of a disorienting dilemma you might be facing at this very moment in your life. Perhaps you are facing a major life decision, like the end of a long-term relationship - or considering changing careers. Or you might be facing a health crisis or supporting someone you love through one. You might be dealing with the challenges of raising teenage kids or juggling work and parenting. Whatever your challenge is, if you are feeling that ‘what got you here, won’t get you there’, then you’re likely facing a disorienting dilemma.

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Here are a few questions to play with:

• What emotions are you feeling? You might notice sensations in your body - are you able to put a name to them?

• Do you feel you have choice over how you react in this situation, or do you feel like a victim of your circumstances?

• Are you at all intrigued by the difficult emotions you might be experiencing, or do you feel like numbing them or getting rid of them as soon as possible? If you are numbing, how do you do it?

• If you do choose to be curious, what are you curious about? What questions might you ask of your ‘edge’ emotions, if you did see them as possible teachers?

• What are you noticing happening when you do allow yourself to feel your feelings and hold your attention on them with curiosity?

• What old mindsets or beliefs are you finding yourself questioning or perhaps re-considering at this moment?

• What new perspectives are arising for you?

• What is one behaviour or approach that you have not tried, but might be worth experimenting with?

It was remarkable to hear the stories of people who had intuitively discovered how to create the contrasting emotions space for themselves. Here is one vignette from a research participant, who developed vertically after the program and was looking back on their growth and what might have facilitated it. As they remembered the feeling of fear when speaking out in front of a large group, they also became intrigued by it. They also reflected on how they transformed:

“Recognizing it, and being at least a little bit curious about it, you know, “I feel a tightening my chest again, why is that happening?", as opposed to just, you know, feeling terrible and reacting.

Curiosity is often about taking no action. (…) the sitting with it is about giving yourself some space and seeing that things will pass. And that the emotion you feel and of these thoughts that are racing, aren't you and don't define you necessarily. And that perceived threat that you have doesn't come to be. (…) I'm more self-aware. I'm less black and white, I'm less reactive. I'm more comfortable with being uncomfortable. (…) I think seeing the importance of that and how to model that sort of behaviour and create change, and how difficult it was just for me to do it - I can see that's going to be difficult to change others (…) [I] will try and create an environment that fosters change of others, which is probably a better way to put it.”

As you look at the visual of the Contrasting Emotions Space and the vertical development process, you might notice three words on the outer edges of it: Action, Inquiry and Holding Space. While being curious about our difficult emotions feels like an individual choice, what I found is that it’s never always up to the individual alone, and context does matter, A LOT!

It’s crucial to have a safe holding space where we feel supported, understood, allowed to be uncomfortable and to find our way through the darkness. That might be as simple as a having trusted friends, mentors or even a good coach or therapist who help us make sense of the mess when we can’t see our way out of it; or could be as complex as a whole system - an organisation, a community - designed to foster psychological safety (the latter is still so so rare!).

It’s also crucial to be able to inquire - reflect, ask questions, not jump to solve the problem but allow yourself to sit in the confusion and let insights emerge in their own time. Inquiry without action however is nothing but ‘analysis paralysis’. So it’s worth asking yourself, once you feel you’ve taken your time to reflect, what could you now experiment with? What small changes might you make? What manageable risks are you willing to take?

Sometimes people feel that transformation should be like an landscape-shifting earthquake, but in reality it often feels more like a series of small steps, none of which feel life-changing when we take them, but which together lead us to a whole new path we’ve never experienced before.

Mezirow was criticised for not paying more attention to emotion in his theory of transformative learning. So have many approaches in adult development - most of which emphasise the cognitive. The focus has mostly been on how our thinking evolves toward more complexity and how we get to this place of maturity as our mindset expands.

We have hardly begun talking about how painful the process of vertical development is. And we’ve barely explored what to do with that pain - how to befriend it, make it more bearable, create emotional space within us so we can create more mental space and, in turn, more freedom to deal with the challenges in our lives in new ways.

Perhaps it’s time we turned towards emotions as a gateway towards vertical development. All while remembering none of this growth happens in isolation. We need safe holding spaces where we can allow ourselves to be uncomfortable, to take risks, try new things and fail without crumbling. We need mirrors we can trust, environments where we feel seen and supported, while also being challenged and taken out of our comfort zone.

So how might we create these spaces for each other? And how might we begin doing the hard work of expanding our emotional space, so we can tolerate the inner growth pains that come with personal transformation?

If you’d like to have an experience of the practice I developed based on this theory, you can watch the webinar I facilitated for the Center for Applied Dialectics, where I walk participants through this process. You can also learn how to facilitate it as part of the curricullum in our Vertical Development Practices program.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation. We are currently finalising admissions for a new cohort of our ICF Level 1 Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching (starting in Jul 2025). If you are considering training as a developmental coach, please explore the program page and reach out for an interview.

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I am sure every facilitator knows the sense of joy at the end of a long day of training, when participants leave the room with a smile on their faces, expressing gratitude for an uplifting experience, or perhaps proudly carry a list of actions for change they had co-created in some hours of intense conversations, reflections and engaging activities. There is a sense of exhaustion one feels when that room is finally empty and, with it, the hope that the change will stick. But does it?

My years of practice have shown me that it rarely does.

Human beings can be brave and open. Take them out of their normal environment, create a solid space of psychological safety, bring in some developmental discomfort and see them open up, vulnerably share, courageously explore. Light bulbs turn on. Truths are spoken which had before been hidden. Tears sometimes come, and that’s a good sign. Insights and promises for action emerge. The commitment is real.

But human beings are also creatures of habit and creatures of context. Put them back into their normal environment, with pressures to perform, fears of failure and judgement, with nobody to curate the conversation, with real doubts on psychological safety and surrounded by people who have not been through the learning experience they have been through and see their immunity to change kick in and them promptly return to the dysfunctional behaviours of yesteryear.

Inspiration is energising and nourishing, but inherently ephemeral.

Over the years, I have been part of projects large and small, alone or with teams of facilitators, stood in rooms-full of hundreds of people moving/listening/breathing in sync - energised to the core and with tears in their eyes - witnessed moments of revelation, of true magic created by authentic speakers and charismatic facilitators. The experience was deemed ‘transformational’ by organisers and participants alike. And yet, research interviewing those same bright-eyed participants some months after the event, they could hardly remember details and many confessed feeling the inspiration and the impetus for change fading fast once they returned into the hecticness of their own lives. Moreover, when measuring the vertical development after what was experienced by most as a profound learning program, a third of participants had stagnated, a third progressed and a third had regressed developmentally - and a large proportion of the latter group were those who had been furthest in their adult development at program’s start. So what happened?

Inspiration is NOT Transformation

This has been my most humbling lesson in this profession. It’s a lesson which hit me like a hammer when I first understood it and had me seriously doubting the meaning and purpose of my work as a facilitator. Why would you pour your heart and soul into creating what amounts to mere moments of uplifting energy, with no long-term tangible impact?

For some, there is joy and professional satisfaction to be found in overcoming participants initial reluctance and winning hearts and minds for a few hours. Others might pragmatically (and rightfully) say that providing inspiration can make good business. And yet, for so many other facilitators, neither participants’ admiration, nor good business are enough if they’re not followed by impact. My hopeful assumption is that the majority in this profession are aspiring to help create a good outcome, to see a lasting sign of our work in the form of more conscious individuals, more functional teams, more purposeful organisations, perhaps a little bit more wisdom visible in the world of work and perhaps even a slightly more conscious world for us all.

The reason I did not give up was that I did also see genuine transformation through my work - and by that I mean real, palpable, measurable change. It was and is much more rare than inspiration, but real enough to get me curious and give me hope that organisational learning can indeed make a sustainable impact - on both individuals and groups - under the right conditions.

Theories of adult development provide us with an understanding as to why it’s hard for even the most uplifting experience, in isolation, to bring a lasting change on people’s behaviour.

It is the difference between States and Stages.

A peak state is a momentary feeling of barriers lifted, obstacles overcome, clarity of mind and heart, profound connection with those around you and perhaps with the world at large. A peak state is a moment of grace. A peak state can even be life-changing - as the recent research into psychedelic-assisted therapy has shown - because it can fundamentally alter people’s beliefs about the world and open up whole new possibilities for action. There is therefore much value to be found in a state that takes people above and beyond their day-to-day experience of the world.

In adult development we also talk about ‘fallback states’ - which are the opposite of peak states. They are momentary regressive states where people feel unable to show up as their fully mature self. Those too are temporary. People mostly tend to return to the baseline.

You might say there is generally lag between our states of mind or cognitive insights and capacity to translate them into sustainable day-to-day behaviours.

A state - be it peak state or fallback state - should not be confused with a stage in vertical development.

Stages are much more stable planes of development. A person’s current stage is, in many ways, their baseline. It’s the cumulative capabilities and behavioural patterns they return to when they’re not either hyper-stimulated by inspiring environments, nor ‘pulled back’ by toxic ones. A stage is translated into recurrent behaviours that we have practiced so many times to the point the start to feel ‘natural’ (‘unconscious competence’).

This means that one-off, engaging, relevant, profound learning experiences can and do open up the door to a higher state, giving people a glimpse of what it might feel like to see the world through a broader lens. However, most often they do not allow for the time and the complex inner shifts and outer iterations (and repetition) required to turn that state into a proper stage. Again, experience from the emerging field of psychedelic research supports the idea that powerful states need to be accompanied by proper integration in order to create long-lasting behavioural change.

No doubt, inspiration does play a powerful role. How can people recognise the good if they’ve never felt it? Taking a glimpse into what is possible can be a powerful motivator for change. Yet I believe it’s important to humbly remind ourselves that’s only the first step.

So how do we design learning experiences that go beyond inspiration and do help create the premises for genuine transformation?

Here are three of my own lived lessons and principles from working in this space and grappling with this dilemma. It’s not an exhaustive list by any means and it’s only my version of the truth. There is also plenty of good, solid research available validating effective approaches to organisational learning. And most of it points towards blended learning approaches, firmly embedded in the organization’s day to day life, rather than removed from it.

I know there are so many brilliant learning deigners out there who will have profound and informed insights on this - I would love to hear and learn from their wisdom. The following are mere foundational principles I’ve come to value in my work and hold as guidelines for avoiding the trap of conflating inspiration with transformation.

1. Long-term programs, with shorter, regular interventions, a curriculum firmly embedded in people’s work realities and plenty of live experiments outside classroom settings are more impactful than high-energy/high-emotion one-offs

I’ve learnt over time that small doses of learning with many opportunities for practice beyond the classroom are key to any effective program. The disorientation that comes from being taken out of your ‘normal world’ holds value to surfacing dilemmas and getting people seeing what they might be missing in their day to day environment. At the same time it’s paramount to bring the learning back into the workplace, to go beyond insight and embody the learning in organisational life through constant experimentation and iteration.

2. ‘Talking the talk’ is nothing if you’re not ‘Walking the Walk’

I have yet to see a learning program succeed when the leaders of the organisation did not participate in the learning or when participanting leaders could see their own managers doing the opposite of what was touted during the course of formal learning. However inspirational the speakers might be and however uplifting a learning event, people get cynical when they cannot see any evidence of those principles being applied in their day to day work. When top leaders behave as if learning is something other people need, when they are not modelling the vulnerability or sharing that they expect from their teams, or when they are the first to break the very commitments the team has spent days building - that’s a sure recipe for building resistance and mistrust in the value of L&D.

3. Transformation is an inside-out job and the best consultants are those who work at making themselves redundant

Finally, my biggest lesson is also a confronting one for any facilitator or consultant: success is when our clients don’t need us anymore. I believe this to be true for individual coaching, for team facilitation and more broadly for all organisational learning. Unless a client team/company develops the capabilities and skills to face their own challenges, access their own resources, find their own strategies and drive their own ongoing learning, we will not see any sustainable change.

To support a client’s independence from you, to actively work toward making yourself redundant - requires consultants to stomach a lot of uncertainty and to hold a strong ethical compass. It takes courage to design projects from the get-go in such a way that you transfer relevant knowledge effectively, ensure your clients make it their own and truly embed it into their ways of working - all with the specific aim that, by the end, your client has fully owned that learning and does not need your support anymore. It takes even more courage to intentionally seek that ‘end’ and do all you can so it comes sooner rather than later.

This is why I believe we, learning facilitators, cannot escape doing ourselves the work that we require our clients to do: staying true, self-aware, practicing, receiving and integrating feedback even when it’s hard to hear. All of this matters because transformation is an inside job, and our client’s growth journey might just start with the consultants themselves.

There is a moral duty I perceive - inherent in the work of a facilitator or learning consultant - to cultivate in themselves the maturity they hope to instil in their clients. To be effective at our work we need, it seems to me, to become the work itself. To help others transform we need to transform ourselves- face our fears, face our needs to be needed, monitor our own behaviours and how (or not) they align with our espoused values.

‘Transformation’ is perhaps one of the sexiest and most over-used words in the space of organisational learning at the moment - to the point where it loses its meaning. Everyone seeks it. We want to ‘upgrade our teams’ to the Transforming stage of vertical development. And we want our learning programs to be ‘transformational’.

But to do that we might need to pause and take a look in the mirror. What needs to transform in the way we as facilitators/consultants/leaders work? How do we acknowledge our limitations? How do we keep ourselves honest? How do we stop confusing inspiration with transformation and find the courage to do the hard, long, messy work the latter requires?

Please feel free to leave your reflections and lived experiences in the comments. There’s much learning we can gift each-other.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, admissions are now open for another group of our Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching starting in July 2024.

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As a coach, I’ve long accepted that no two clients’ paths to growth and change will be the same. An approach that works wonders for one will have zero impact on another. I found that to be a sobering realisation, bound to keep you humble and always on your toes in coaching, as you’re constantly reminded it’s not your ‘art and skill’ that creates transformation. It’s a dance between yourself, your client and the context. And no two dances are the same. 

As a trainer, mentor and assessor of coaches, I’ve noticed how tempting it is, particularly in the beginning of one’s coaching career, to rely on psychometrics for determining a client’s developmental stage/strengths/personality and to regard the results as a sort of ‘diagnostic’. I’ve also noticed how attached trainee coaches can get to theories/models that help bring clarity to the process, such as the famous G.R.O.W… To be clear, I think all of that is perfectly normal and we do need tools and models to help us make sense of the complex landscape of coaching. At the same time, I think we should always be mindful and wary of our inherent human tendency to over-simplify.

While I believe there is much value in measuring different aspects of a client’s psyche and having a map for coaching, practice has taught me it’s crucial to remember that the map is NEVER the territory. People are exquisitely intricate and, to add to the mess, they are embedded in unique contexts that shape their behaviours day by day. Striving to never pigeonhole our clients should be, to my mind, a cornerstone to any coach’s philosophy and ethics, as well as a daily practice. This, I think, holds true not just for coaching, but for leadership/education/parenting - you name it! For the purposes of this article, however, I will focus on coaching as the context for my reflections, with an invitation for you to extrapolate to other areas of your life/career, where you think it might be useful.

So what can we learn from the ‘maps’ we use to determine and work with vertical development stages? And what are their limitations?

Vertical development assessments are an interesting class of psychometrics. Most of them are different from the typical ‘multiple choice’ tests people are used to. They often present as ‘sentence completions’ - where test-takers receive the beginning of a sentence, which then they complete in any way they like (they can also be interviews or a combination of multiple choice and sentence completions). The scoring is done (traditionally manually, more recently increasingly with AI assistance) by trained scorers, who use a rigorous set of manuals/scoring rules. The results place the test-taker somewhere along the continuum of developmental stages. For an overview of reliable tools in this space, check out the “Theories and Measurement” section on VDIs Research Page and if you need refresher (or intro) into stages, check this short podcast:

Through my research work, I’ve been exposed, as a test-taker, to most of the major developmental assessments on the market.  I have also scored and written personal commentaries for hundreds of such tests and debriefed tens of clients after they took a developmental assessment. What I learnt is that understanding your current, emerging and fallback developmental stages can be a deeply insightful experience. At the same time, I’ve learnt that coaching clients whose test shows the same stage often have profoundly different developmental needs.

Two clients come to mind, let’s call them John and Anna. Both are successful executives. John, an entrepreneur whose company had just been listed on the stock exchange. Anna, a partner in a large consultancy. Both had received the same score on their developmental assessments, which placed them at a stage called (in that particular model) “the Achiever”. As the name suggests, individuals navigating this stage tend to be capable of independent thinking, driven, concerned with achieving goals and leading their teams towards meaningful outcomes. The “Achiever” stage is described as:

(…) open to feedback and realising that many of the ambiguities and conflicts of everyday life are due to differences in interpretation and ways of relating. They know that creatively transforming or resolving clashes requires sensitivity to relationships and the ability to influence others in positive ways. Achievers can also reliably lead a team to implement new strategies over a one- to three-year period, balancing immediate and long-term objectives.

Quote from David Rooke and William Torbert’s HBR Article “7 Transformations of Leadership”

Working as a coach with John and Anna, I soon discovered they could not have been more different.

John was very introspective. He was highly observant of both the world outside of him and also when prompted, he could easily direct his attention inward and analyse his own motivations, thoughts and behaviours. He was very pragmatic and driven to get results and he applied the same principles when it came to changes in his own behaviour. John would gain insight during a coaching session and then go out and turn it into practice. No postponing. No excuses. He had spent decades building his business, had cultivated a lot of patience in that process and found it easy to shift from thinking about the next 25 years to thinking about what he needed to act on next week. He was a man of few words, always seeming to want to go to the essence of whatever problem he brought to our sessions, unpack it, find a new perspective on it and then act on that. He was very clear on what his values were and found it hard to accept or empathise with people who seemed to operate by very different value sets. He was a risk-taker, who tended to give people in his team free rein to experiment with new things, yet could get very critical when they didn’t do what they promised to do, as that conflicted with his values.

Anna was a very sharp thinker, easily grasping complex concepts. She was deeply analytical - loved to understand every angle of a situation before she felt she could act. She was very empathic and caring towards her team and, at the same time, she felt the need to be present in every meeting and oversee every detail of her team’s work. Her biggest worry was that, if she didn’t, people would make mistakes and they might suffer, or the team as a whole might suffer. As a consequence, Anna was always working, perpetually in a struggle with time, always exhausted, trying to hold all balls in the air with little help. Anna could see what she was doing, but she found it very difficult to explore why she was doing it, and she didn’t like questions that invited her to introspect. Her attention seemed always focused on what others did (or didn’t do), how it was affecting her team, and what the impact on the client might be. Anna was highly appreciated by clients for her great ideas, exceptional customer service skills and her ability to deliver results under pressure. She was the go-to person in any crisis, as she was great at figuring a way out of gnarly situations and she had outstanding social skills, managing everybody else’s emotions in the best possible way. Yet all this reliance on her only made Anna feel more burdened, always feeling alone, despite having a large team. She always felt she was too busy and time went by too fast. Internally, she was struggling. As clearly as she was able to see others, she wasn’t able to fully see herself.

How can a developmental coach best support these two very different clients?

Their developmental stage can tell us some things about what is important to them, yet their personal stories seem to speak about very different and nuanced needs. John needed to become better able to put himself in the shoes of others, to empathise with and effectively work with people whose rhythm was very different from his own. Anna needed to become better able to direct her attention inwards, to acknowledge and reflect on her own feelings - even the uncomfortable ones - to explore her need to hold power versus relinquish it and come to terms with the idea of not being able to do it all alone.

If stages of development can be likened to the octaves on a piano - each subsequent stage allowing an individual to ‘see more’ of themselves and the world and ‘play’ a more complex ‘melody’ - you might say that with each of these octaves, there will be different ‘notes’ - themes or lines - of development which a coach can become attuned to and utilise in their work with the clients. Some clients are simply better at accessing certain ‘notes’ over others - all within the same ‘octave’ of development.

Take the following five lines of development: “Self Awareness”; “Social awareness”; “Attention”, “Power” and “Time”.

Self-awareness allows you to observe your own behaviour, and its impact on others, analyse your motivations and tolerate the discomfort of finding out things about yourself you might not like.

Social awareness is very similar to ‘self-awareness’ - but the focus is on others. Socially-aware individuals are very attuned to what is going on around them - others’ reactions, feelings, and relationships between people.

Attention is a very interesting line of development which describes your capacity to flexibly direct the light beam of attention inwards (observing your own behaviours, thoughts, motivations, and intentions), outwards (noticing the impact on others, their reactions, and broader context) or the capacity to pay attention to both at the same time. 

Power is a line of development particularly important in leadership contexts. It describes people’s understanding and use of power. Is power something people have? Hold on to? Share? Do they think of it as a finite resource? Something that needs to be held with care lest it becomes destructive? Or do they think of it as an energy that grows when it is collectively held? Leaders’ relationship to power can have countless implications on the decisions they make or the way they manage their teams.

Time is yet another line of development with huge implications in organisations. It refers to how people understand and use time. Like power, time can be viewed as finite and scarce or as abundant and flexible. It can be viewed as something that likes outside of us - something that influences us but which we cannot control - or something that is more internal, a subjective dimension of our being in the world. It might be something people think they ‘have’ or ‘don’t have’, something people ‘struggle with’ or something people ‘create’ whenever they need to.

Reading through this brief description of the previous lines of development, can you go back to the vignette on John and Anna and see what you might notice about their developmental strengths and opportunities?

As you might have noticed, John seemed more self-aware than Anna, while she seemed more socially aware than him. He had a harder time empathising with others, while empathy was one of Anna’s strengths. He was less judgemental of himself and didn’t feel crushed when he discovered his own intolerance of values other than his own. She avoided self-reflection as it meant facing aspects of herself she might not have liked and her self-criticism made that a very painful process. He was a risk-taker and didn’t mind sharing power while accepting that others will make mistakes. She in turn had huge internal standards and a hard time tolerating her own mistakes, which made her keener to hold on to power, over-protect and manage her team to make sure they didn't get it wrong either. He had an easier time directing his attention inward, she was really good at keeping hers focused on the outer world. He felt more in control of his own time and as a result tended to set firmer boundaries around his calendar, while she felt perpetually rushing to complete an urgent and important project for which she didn’t have enough time.

Both were extremely bright. Both were extremely successful. Both had been assessed as operating from the same developmental stage. Their context was markedly different too. He was the owner of his business and had always been an entrepreneur. She was a top executive working for a large, high-performing company, always feeling compared with others at her level and under constant pressure to prove herself. Would Anna have had the same challenges had she been in John’s place? Who can tell? It would be impossible to separate their contexts from their developmental challenges.

As their coach, it helped to remember that the developmental assessment was a good map - informative but not exhaustive. Their stage of development could only tell me so much about the way John and Anna made meaning of their world. I find staying deeply curious about clients’ particular contexts and specific strengths and opportunities around their various developmental lines can make a huge difference to the quality of my coaching. Most often, lines of development evolve asynchronously - which means some will be more developed than others. A client like Anna might be highly aware of her social network and not so aware of herself and vice-versa for a client like John. Or you might work with clients who are highly complex thinkers but whose emotional line of development is not at the same level of maturity as their cognitive. The diversity can be endless.

John and Anna are just two coaching clients. They are also the only ‘John’ and the only ‘Anna’ I will ever work with. There will never come others with exactly the same story and exactly the same needs. With every new client comes another interweaving of developmental patterns. Another opportunity to discover a unique human being. With it also comes an invitation to forget what I think I know as a coach. To let go of other clients’ stories. To hold all theoretical models lightly and to stay fully present and deeply curious in listening for the themes that emerge, the strengths, and the opportunities. To pay attention to context and how profoundly it influences my clients’ capacity to fully utilise the potential of their developmental stage.

If you are a coach or leader reading this, you might think of your own lines of development and how they play out in your work with your clients or your team. You might also consider the people whose growth you are supporting.

What does each of them need? How are their contexts different? What ‘maps’ have you been using in your coaching? How are psychometrics/models/theories helping you in your own growth/work and when do you sense they might become limiting?

As with most things in life, this is not an either/or conversation. It’s a ‘yes, and’. Having a thorough understanding of the research behind our coaching approaches can make a huge difference. Utilising validated tools to illuminate aspects of our own and our client’s development can help put words onto elusive patterns and guide a coaching process. Relying on any kind of assessment as a replacement for inquiry is, I dare say, always risky and potentially damaging. So let’s keep on learning and experimenting, yet holding our knowledge lightly. Supporting the development of human beings is both science and art. Let’s try honouring both!

I’m very curious to read your questions and musings in the comments section! If you’re keen to engage in a deeper exploration on lines of development and how they might play out at different stages or be utilised in developmental coaching, you can watch the webinar: “What Develops in Vertical Development”.

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Adult development theories and approaches have been around for a few decades. They're not new. For a long time, this research has unfolded on the fringes of developmental psychology, largely out of sight of the general public. So what has sparked the immense interest of organizations and leaders in this type of development, particularly in the last few years?

I believe the increasing interest is grounded in the idea that there is something special about this type of human development that makes a difference to a leader’s impact and effectiveness, particularly in disruptive, changing contexts. Previously we’ve explored what vertical development is and how it actually describes a process of maturity-building that is fundamentally different from simply acquiring new knowledge and skills. Such maturity has become more coveted than ever before in the leadership space, mainly because the challenges leaders are navigating seem ever more daunting.

In the last few years the world has seen huge disruption, a deepening of what Daniel Schmachtenberger and others call ‘the metacrisis’ - which forced organisations to adapt almost overnight, invent new ways of working, and go well beyond the confines of their industries and sectors find solutions to problems nobody in this generation had faced before. We are constantly, collectively pushed to face the unknown and co-create a path forward when no one knew the right answer.

All of this brought to the fore the realisation that we need more mature, wiser leaders at the helm. By ‘mature’ I mean leaders who are able to be equally collaborative and decisive, who are able to both step back to take perspective and swiftly act when the situation requires it, who are self-aware, empathic but equally pragmatic and courageous, leaders who can admit when they don’t know and harness the collective wisdom of their team in figuring out the next step and, most of all, leaders who walk the talk. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, countries and organizations with more mature leadership seemed to have a definite advantage and, perhaps for the first time ever, we could all witness in real time the impact of good/bad leadership.

While the case for vertical development seems strong, do we have any research proving that late-stage (more developed) leaders are better equipped to thrive in the disruptive, challenging environment of today?

The answer is: Yes.

Here are a few thought-provoking studies about the effectiveness of late-stage leadership.

Leaders high on the vertical development continuum - often also called ‘post-conventional’ (an umbrella name given to the most advanced cluster of adult development stages) - have been shown to be better at leading adaptively and considering multiple perspectives, as well as dealing with ambiguity. They also have been shown to perform better in highly complex roles and have been more likely to be identified as high-potentials in their organizations, or deemed highly effective by superiors, peers and subordinates.

In a fascinating early study, considered a classic to this day, David Rooke and William Torbert showed that post-conventional CEOs were significantly more successful at leading through organizational transformations than earlier-octave peers. Rooke and Torbert followed ten organisations (5 for-profit and 5 not-for-profit) for a period of between two and five years. They found that the five CEOs measuring at the late ‘Transforming’ stage of development successfully supported 15 progressive organizational transformations. By contrast, the authors state,

“the five CEOs measuring at pre-Transforming stages of development supported no progressive organizational transformations. The progressively transforming organizations became industry leaders on a number of business indexes. The three organizations that did not progress developmentally lost personnel, industry standing, and money as well.”

In a more recent study, Brandt & colleagues found some clues as to what exactly post-conventional leaders do differently. It turned out, they're more likely to empower employees, more likely to offer colleagues freedom within a frame, more open to being vulnerable and encouraging the expression of emotion in their organizations. These mature leaders were better at facilitating dialogue and holding space for divergent points of view. And all of these behaviors mitigate the pain of organizational transformation and created positive impacts in the culture.

Moreover, in a couple of very intriguing studies, Boiral & colleagues suggested that post-conventional leaders might even be more likely to embrace and push forward a sustainability and environmental responsibility agenda - both within and beyond their organizations. So in a world where climate change and corporate action are paramount, these leaders seemed more ready than others to take on the gnarly challenge of profit versus/and sustainability and walk the talk of climate action. The reason for this might be that late-stage leaders are more likely to embrace world-centric versus self-centric views, so they could be more capable to step back, see the bigger picture and envision outcomes beyond their immediate interests.

“Leading in complexity” is a much talked-about notion at the moment and, as it turns out, post-conventional leaders are consistently better at it. In a 2012 study, Barrett Brown has shown that

“these leaders are willing to not know, and will work with the uncertainties of the design process. They trust themselves, other actors, and the process they have created to navigate through ambiguity. This appears to help them manage complex initiatives in environments replete with unforeseen changes and influences.”

If you are interested to go deeper and broader, you can find a list of relevant studies on the Vertical Development Institute’s Research page.

While there is much more work to be done to explore other facets of vertical development as it impacts leadership, the proof is out there for investing in fostering vertical development at all leadership levels, and particularly at the level of senior leaders - as their actions and decisions have a disproportionate impact on organizational success or failure, as well as broader community impact.

While hopeful about the promise of vertical development, it’s important to stay cautious and not regard it as a silver bullet.

My own and other reaserchers' work, as illustrated in this article from Elaine Herdman Barker, is a constant reminder that later octaves DO NOT guarantee mature behavior. Post-conventional leaders are just as susceptible to fallback and reactivity as any other human being (to learn about fallback, listen to the podcast I recorded with Dr. Valerie Livesay).

Later stages (octaves) of development indeed come with more complexity and a broader behavioral repertoire. But there is no guarantee that all late-stage leaders will decide to put their complexity in the service of the greater good.

Leaders with the right intentions and competencies, working in supportive cultures, can create positive impact regardless of their octave of development. Quite often, a community-oriented 'Diplomat', a highly knowledgeable and disciplined 'Expert' or a focused, goal-oriented and action-driven 'Achiever' can be extraordinarily powerful catalysts of organisational progress. And the reverse is true. Late-stage leaders who work in an early-stage organisation can be profoundly impacted by the gravitational pull of organisational culture and revert to much less mature behaviours than those they would ideally be capable of.

Upon closer inspection, the impact of vertical development on leaders effectiveness might be seen as a both-and equation. You need the ‘right stage’ for the ‘right context’. You also need BOTH maturity and expertise.

When a late-stage leader misses all technical skills for the job, or lacks experience in the field and knowledge of the industry, that might make it as hard to excel in their role as when an early-stage leader is placed in a high-complexity, high-ambiguity role that they lack the psychological maturity for. Vertical development is one of several important attributes an excellent leader needs and should not be seen as a one-sided ‘superpower’ that can compensate for the absence of other, equally important, attributes of great leadership.

So let's hold in mind this intriguing paradox:

There is real value in advancing vertical development to the latest stages AND, at the same time, no stage is in and of itself a guarantee of highly ethical, mature or wise behavior.

Every stage, regardless of its position on the developmental continuum, holds strengths that can create a positive impact - the challenge is accessing the right stage for the right purpose and creating the organisational environments where people can thrive.

For those of us aspiring to be developmental coaches or leaders, it's important to remember we are not engaging in a race to the end with the people we coach or the teams whose growth we might be supporting. Rather we might think of ourselves more as gardeners who nurture their plants, provide the right nutrients/conditions at the right time and then trust them to grow in their own time.

We might strive less for pushing people into the next stage, and isntead hold space for them to consolidate their current stage, encouraging them to make the best use of all of its potential. We might focus on creating environments that are supportive for development. By learning about adult development - what it is, what triggers it and how it can be fostered - we might start gaining a perspective on what is possible, and start seeing the untapped potential in ourselves and others. This can help us staying on the look-out for developmental opportunities without fixating on pushing development at any cost. We might instead gently nudge our mentees to stretch into developmental discomfort whenever possible and allow them to grow towards more maturity at their own pace.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, note that our admission interviews are still open for our upcoming Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching - starting in February 2024 - with only a couple of places left.

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One of the strongest (and most frequently mentioned) criticisms of vertical development theories and approaches (and perhaps the reason certain scholars in the field avoid the term ‘vertical’ altogether) is the implicit hierarchy. It is easy to be seduced by the notion of fixed stages, unfolding in a pre-determined way. While there is mounting evidence that leaders at the later stages are better able to navigate adaptive challenges and thrive in turbulent times, this becomes an easy excuse to oversimplify the topic and conclude that ‘later is better’.

More than once in my work I’ve heard top leaders ask how might their organisation just ‘shift into the ‘transforming’ stage - ideally bypassing any earlier, messier, more inconvenient stages. When vertical development stages are spoken of as steps on a ladder, it makes it seem that a very complex topic and what is, in reality, a very messy process are straight-forward. It might even make it seem as if vertical development could be an easy-fix to many organisational ails.

While vertical development is indeed a pre-requisite of mature leadership, there is no recipe for growing through the stages, nor does inhabiting a later stage automatically guarantee mature behaviour. In fact, researchers - most notably Dr. Valerie Livesay - have shown that falling back into earlier stages happens often, even to the most mature individuals. Under stress, organisational pressure, as a result of trauma or other factors, people can revert back into immature behaviours and simply lose (usually temporarily, other times for longer periods) their capacity to think and act in complex ways. Interestingly, whenever people become aware of their fallback moments, they have a chance to grow from the experience and that in itself contributes to their ongoing vertical development. So it seems it is from our lowest moments we grow the most.

Furthermore, we’ve learnt from other contributors to adult development theory, such as Ken Wilber, that any individual can at times access peak states (either in meditation or in a moment of flow or transcendence) - glimpses into advanced stages of consciousness. It is easy to confuse the temporary state with the actual stage, starting to believe you have truly transformed, only to revert back to old patterns and behaviours and feel disappointed the ‘change’ doesn’t seem to last. It was still Wilber who threw another hammer in the works by suggesting each stage is in fact composed of various lines of development - thus someone might be highly advanced in their cognitive development but highly immature in their emotional development - with the result being something that looks very little like wisdom or maturity.

We also know from other great work by Elaine Herdman Barker and colleagues that later stage leaders inhabiting an early stage organisation might literally go into hiding, enacting earlier stage behaviours in order to fit in. So being capable of late-stage thinking does not automatically guarantee you’ll show up as such at work. Organisational transformation requires top-leadership commitment, creating developmental contexts and fostering the psychological safety that allows later stage leaders to take risks and show up as their authentic selves. It requires leaning into the discomfort of having late-stage employees challenge the status-quo - and that is a tall order for many organisations.

Hopefully by now it should have become obvious that, as seductive as the concept might be for both leaders and L&D practitioners, vertical development is by no means a silver bullet, it doesn’t represent a straightforward developmental trajectory towards some sort of super-human abilities, nor does it happen in isolation.

In my own research and practice I found myself challenging the notion of stages as boxes that people move from and into - as I know many other researchers in the field have done. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed to me that the true value of vertical development lies in the breadth of perspective it offers, with every step towards growth. It seemed much less like a stairway to heaven, as critics have with irony (and for good reason) called it, and much more like a piano, where brilliant music is made through a combination of technique (horizontal development) and breadth of notes/octaves (vertical development).

Some of the most mature individuals I have had the chance to work with seemed to be those capable of skilfully playing all the octaves in their mental, emotional and behavioural repertoire - thinking flexibly, adapting their behaviour to the circumstances while holding a high level of self-awareness. Reversely, I have met people who, when measured, scored at the latest stages, but who in day-to-day life had real challenges in taking perspective, managing their own emotions or forging healthy, balanced relationships at work or beyond.

If anything, researching vertical development and striving to translate those insights into real-world learning interventions and supporting others to do the same has taught me to stay curious and cultivate humbleness. I believe the work of vertical development is like learning to play the piano in more ways than one - it’s hard, non-linear; it rarely comes through major break-throughs and most often through hard day to day work with self and others; it requires patience, perseverance, constant self-inquiry and experimentation. As with piano playing, vertical development is real work - at individual and collective level. An instructor might support your practice, but they can’t do the work for you. This work that can be frustrating and uncomfortable. In fact, if it’s neither of those things you’re probably not developing much, because one of the things we do know for certain from the last four decades of research in the field is that vertical development occurs only when we step outside of our comfort zone.

There goes our hope for the easy fix and the golden recipe! In its stead we’re left with a fascinating, messy process that, when followed through, can truly lead to whole new perspectives and ways of being, just like years of loving musical practice can lead to the most uplifting symphonies.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation. Admissions to our Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching are in the final stage, with only 3 spots left for the group starting in February 2024 (groups limited to 12 participants).

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Vertical Development unfolds in predictable stages, with every stage being an evolution from the one before - including and transcending it - very much like Russian dolls - each larger one containing all the others. Researchers have different opinions regarding what it is exactly that develops through these stages.

Some, such as Robert Kegan, emphasise cognitive complexity as ‘the thing’ which evolves.

In his ‘subject-object’ theory, Kegan proposes that the mind gets ever more complex with each stage, as people become aware of perspectives which they once were subject to but which, with development, become objects which they can look at and reflect on. In practical terms this means that mindsets and assumptions once unconscious become conscious and with that shift comes more choice. This approach to development is rooted in the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who studied how children’s minds evolve to make sense of the world and assumed such development ends in adulthood. Unlike Piaget, Kegan showed that these shifts in the complexity of mind continue over the course of a life-time. Like Piaget, he too considered vertical development as the result of a ‘construction process’ - where human beings interact with their environment, are challenged by it, forced to make meaning in ever newer, more complex ways and, as a result, grow ‘vertically’.

Thus, an individual’s complexity of mind evolves from the self-centredness of childhood, when the mind is capable of one perspective - ‘mine!’ - and can’t even imagine other people might have different needs, towards the ‘socialised stage’, where conforming and belonging to a group become really important to the point where individuals have little awareness of who they are outside of their group. Later the mind shifts again into the ‘self-authoring stage’, where individuals start developing a clear sense of self as an independent being, while also being aware of relationships and connections with others. Few individuals progress into the even later stage of the ‘self-transforming mind’ - where they become capable to critically reflect on their own assumptions and realise their worldview is but one of many.

Each of these shifts comes with new mindsets turning from ‘subject’ to ‘object’ and represents a breaking-down of old ways of thinking and breakthrough into a new, more complex and nuanced perspectives - with them comes more choice and freedom to act with awareness.

Other researchers focus more on the self as the narrator of one’s experience and suggest it is this narrator which keeps on telling an ever more complex story as people grow through the stages. Enter Jane Loevinger’s ‘Ego-Development’ Theory.

Jane Loevinger did a lot of work on what she called ‘ego-development’ - which later inspired much of the modern vertical development work developed and popularised in organisations by William Torbert , Susanne Cook-Greuter, David Rooke and others. Loevinger’s approach was grounded less in cognitive theories and more in psychosocial /psychoanalytic theory. When she wrote about the ‘ego’, she referred to a process within the human psyche - that part of us which makes sense of our experiences - a sort of inner narrator who constantly tells a story about what life means and what the best way to live might be. Loevinger’s ‘ego’ comprised character, the way we engage in relationships and the way our sense of identity evolves over time (she was also the author of the first Sentence Completion Test - SCT - used to measure adult development - the WUSCT - which lay the foundation for most modern SCTs used today).

With ego-development come self-awareness and a higher capacity to curb reactivity, to reflect and take on multiple perspectives. Ego-development essentially means more maturity and wiser ways of being in the world.

While Loevinger did much for our understanding and measurement of ego-development, it was Dr. Susanne Cook Greuter who took her work to the next level by illuminating our understanding of later stages, as well as of the dynamics of development from one stage to the other.

Beyond these two main schools of thought there are others, equally valuable, albeit perhaps less directly relevant to the worlds of work and leadership. Among them, it’s worth noting philosopher Ken Wilber’s integral theory, which holds the very bold ambition of offering a unified understanding of the human psyche, both at the individual and collective level. Whether it has accomplished that or not is debatable, but one idea Wilber brings to vertical development, and which we’ll come back to in subsequent articles, is that of stages versus states and lines of development.

Wilber reminds us that vertical development stages are achieved over time and they are not to be confused with momentary peak states - those special, transcendent moments of utter awe or wisdom which might trick people into believing they have actually grown into superior level of consciousness. And he also explains that there are multiple lines of development that make up each stage - so for example a person can be highly advanced in their cognitive development but not at all that mature in their emotional or interpersonal development. The stereotype of the anti-social genius might have something to do with lines of development actually not evolving at the same pace.

Other ways of understanding vertical development: a life-time journey, a moral journey, a values-evolution journey

Another thinker who has broadened our understanding of development are Erik Erikson, who looked at the way human beings mature over the course of their life-time and did much to inform our view of the huge generative potential of old age - as a time of creativity, wisdom and legacy building.

Also worth noting is the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, who looked at vertical development from the perspective of morality and showed that people who operate at the later stages are more likely to have a strong internal moral compass and embrace a world-centric perspective that upholds universal values such as human rights or justice. In a world plagued by ethical dilemmas, late-stage thinkers might be more needed than ever.

Finally, getting back to the world of organisations, let’s not forget the contribution of Clare Graves, the father of Spiral Dynamics - who prompted people to think of development on an organisational or collective level or, more recently, applied contributions of people such as Frederic Laloux and his famous book of case-studies on late-stage organisations: Reinventing Organisations (an exceptional read for any leader who wants to better understand vertical development and how it might apply to their team or whole company).

Hopefully this short trip across the vertical development landscape has offered you a glimpse into how complex and nuanced this field is and gotten you curious to explore more. We’d love to hear some of your reflections, if you’re keen to share in comments - what is it that you feel is developing during vertical development? Thinking of your own process of growing more mature, what is it that you feel has changed?

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As our Substack community is growing, more of you are keen to explore fundamental questions about Vertical Development, such as - What is it? How does it occur? Why does it matter? How do we foster it in ourselves and others? I thought it might be good to invite you to go back to the basics with this article exploring the very nature and value of this concept. All of the research-focused articles are now hosted together in the Nerdy Bits section here on Substack, so you can always check out the list there and dive deeper.

The term “Vertical Development” has entered the organisational jargon relatively recently, mostly due to the long-time work of researchers such as Bill Torbert, Susanne Cook Greuter or Robert Kegan. It is a more ‘user-friendly’ way to refer to theories which have been known in developmental psychology for decades and originally called ‘ego-development’ theories or later ‘constructive-developmental theory’.

What all of these theories have in common is the proposition that human beings continue maturing mentally and psychologically way after they stopped growing up physically. They all also propose this type of development is very different from simply accumulating more information, knowledge or skills, and it is in fact a series of profound transformations in a person’s worldview and outlook on life. Vertical development brings fundamental shifts in people’s capacity to access more and more internal complexity to adequately respond to a complex world.

Kegan describes vertical development beautifully when he compares the mind with cup and knowledge with water being poured into the cup. Information means to put something new ‘in-form’ - in the existing form of mind. ‘Horizontal development’ means simply adding to the existing cup.

However, you can’t pour water into the cup ad infinitum, because there comes a time when the cup itself cannot hold its contents and overflows. In a human life, those are the moments when our current way of seeing the world simply doesn't serve us anymore and our long-held beliefs about what is true no longer hold. At such pivotal moments, Kegan’s metaphorical cup breaks and some sort of profound growth happens. The ‘form’ of mind ‘trans-forms’ - a new worldview emerges, a more expansive self is born - and with it comes a radically new perspective and a ‘bigger cup’. One becomes capable to ‘look at what one before could only look through’. A previously invisible lens becomes visible. This is ‘vertical development’.

Think of life-changing moments such as going from being a teenager at home, concerned with fitting in and belonging to one’s group of friends, to leaving home, having to carve your own path and discover who you are as an individual, what you’re good at, and what you want to do with your life. Or later, in your professional life, being rewarded for your expertise and individual achievements by being promoted into a position of leadership and having to figure out how to achieve with and through others, versus alone, and shift from depending on yourself only to collaborating and co-creating. Or think of even more disruptive, painful moments such as becoming gravely ill or losing a loved one and having to put your whole life into a new perspective. While deeply painful, such life cross-roads often create profound transformations and give rise to new, more complex and mature versions of oneself. And these more mature versions in turn become capable to better navigate the messiness of life and put some of the hard-won wisdom to good use.

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Meanwhile, the less spectacular but equally important ‘horizontal development’ unfolds in the background. You keep on learning new things, upgrading your knowledge and skills and constantly putting new information into your existing cup. While those cup-shattering and growth moments often happen years apart, it is the day-to-day learning that helps you create reliable incremental progress.

For a long time the terms ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ weren’t even mentioned when people spoke of development in organisations because the distinction was often not known or not believed to be important. In designing learning programs, the focus was mostly on providing leaders with knowledge and skills which, it was assumed, they would take forward into their work - all this despite constant proof that leadership programs are often not as effective as organisations hope. So, what has changed?

In recent years the complexity and disruption facing leaders have grown exponentially. Huge disruptors such as climate change, economic instability, social unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently the war in Ukraine, have painfully revealed the limitations of leadership at all levels. The pandemic in particular has become a sort of collective wake-up call, shattering countless mental ‘cups’ all at once and getting a whole generation of people to re-assess how they want to work and live their lives.

With this collective unrest came a stronger impetus to discuss what is needed to live and lead in disruption. More than before, organisations are starting to wonder what it might take to grow their leaders’ maturity and capacity to thrive in complexity. There was increasing awareness that such skills such as tolerance for ambiguity, systemic thinking and capacity to leverage paradox cannot be learnt from books or traditional training programs. Hence, vertical development has all of a sudden become topic of interest.

Much has been done to define the stages of development and point out their characteristics. Also, there is extensive research showing that more mature (vertically developed) leaders are simply more effective and better equipped to lead in a VUCA world. Now more and more interesting questions are emerging:

How does vertical development unfold and how do you foster it in leaders? Can it occur in the absence of catastrophic life disruption? Can it be stimulated through workplace learning? If yes, how does organisational learning need to transform to become a catalyst for vertical, not just horizontal development?

You’ll find an exploration of some of these questions and more in the Nerdy Bits section and I’m always keen to learn your questions and write new articles that meet your curiosities. So bring them on in the comments section!

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation. Our self-led flagship program- “Vertical Development Practices for Coaches” is our most comprehensive mastery course for leaders and coaches seeking to integrate developmental approaches into their work.

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