Self-Directed Growth

Douglas L. Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780915202751
• eBook ISBN: 9781317706489
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Self-Directed Growth is a valuable map to the no-man's land where education, philosophy, adult-development, and counseling meet. This is the trackless waste that we usually encounter when we try to explore the relation between learning and personal meaning. The book helps the student wrestle with issues of identity, knowledge, change, and purpose. Betteryet, it does so in a clear sequence of steps that keep the student on track. With the "average" student today being more and more likely to be beyond the traditional college age, this map of the territory of self-directed learning is long overdue. Too many of its would-be competitors err either by being about "adult education," while leaving out anything for learners themselves, or by being cookbooks full of recipes for how to throw off the past or dive into the future, while leaving out the critical process of learning. Robertson's book will be used in many ways. Self-directed learners, either inside an educational institution or outside, will use it to launch themselves on journeys of self-discovery. Groups of them, working under the guidance of a mentor, will use it as a text for exciting new kinds of courses. And teachers will use it as a guide to reorienting their own efforts away from implanting content and toward developing students.

CHAPTER 1

GETTING STARTED

Luck is a crossroad where preparation and opportunity meet.

Anonymous

This is a book about learning to create this kind of luck. Our topic is how to prepare ourselves, and how to manage our worlds, so that we consistently find opportunity rather than oppression, growth rather than stagnation. Our focus is on change—chosen or unchosen—and how to help it to lead to development.

This book is not just another rallying call for personal growth, nor is it yet another cookbook for personal success, although it is long on both enthusiasm and straightforward suggestions. Certainly a place exists for each kind of book. However, I am seeking a deeper empowerment here.

My aim is to increase our proficiency at directing our own development. In order to do this, we must not only be inspired…we must also be informed. We must go beyond doing merely what we are told… we also must understand what to do. In short, we must have our own well-founded theory of development and be able to apply it in new situations to whatever developmental project on which we may be working. Large or small, personal or professional, chosen or unchosen, all of our growth projects can benefit remarkably from a good theory of development…if we have one. This book will help to generate such a theory.

Noted psychologist Kurt Lewin once wrote, “…there is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Lewin, 1951, p. 169). I firmly believe this. Having an understanding of the process in which we are involved helps us to move through that process more productively and satisfyingly, just as having a good map empowers us to find our way more easily. Theory and practice, like the left and right brains of the fully functioning person, are best developed in integration. And so it will be in this book…theory and practice in interdependent relationship.

OBJECTIVES

Influential theorist Ervin Goffman, in attempting to crystalize his perspective on human experience, wrote that his work essentially focused on a single issue: how individuals go about answering the question, “What is it that’s going on here?” (Goffman, 1974, p. 8). As you begin this book, let me assist you in answering this basic question by briefly discussing my objectives.

In our time together, I want to do three things:

1. Generate in each of us a clear and easily applied framework for development,

2. Explore ten specific features in ourselves and in our worlds which promote development, and

3. Improve our skills at actualizing these features in our day-to-day living.

Objective One: A Framework for Development

The first objective is critical for any growth project: we must know what development is. From our conception of growth comes our specific developmental goals in any particular situation. And from these goals come our specific strategies.

When asked what time is, St. Augustine replied, “I know, but when you ask me I don’t” (Watts, 1951, p. 55). For many of us, this would be our response to the question, “What is growth?” While this is a perfectly understandable answer—after all, the question is a difficult one—this approach does have its limitations.

The philosopher Michael Polanyi made an insightful distinction between “tacit knowledge”—the silent, intuitive kind which comprises things which we “just know”—and “articulate knowledge”—the rational kind which we can verbalize and explain (Polanyi, 1962). He pointed out, quite perceptively, that we know far more than we can say (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4).

While this may be true, conscious planning to facilitate our own development, or the development of others, is made difficult if our knowledge of development is only “tacit.” Structuring a definition of growth does not mean that we need to lose a “feel” for it, as we may sometimes fear. It simply means that we have a critical basis on which to formulate clear and effective goals—those which help us to organize our activities in truly constructive ways. Our work on the first objective—to create a conscious and well-organized framework for development—will not strip growth of its beauty, magic, and serendipity. Instead, it should make this kind of special experience more likely.

Objectives Two and Three: Identifying and Enhancing Conditions which Promote Development

Whereas the first objective involves creating a basis for goal setting, the second and third objectives—exploring conditions which promote development—relate to learning to create effective strategies and resources in order to achieve these goals. Enough is known about the developmental process that we can identify some specific features—within ourselves and within our everyday worlds—which seem to foster growth. These features provide us with an initial checklist to consider as we go about formulating our various growth projects.

LOOKING AHEAD

So much for the objectives of this book…how do I plan to achieve them? The approach will be fairly straightforward, as an overview of the book’s three parts will indicate.

Part I: Answering the Question, “What is Development?”

In Part I, we will work on the first objective by exploring a framework for development. We will begin by making a distinction between development-as-change and development-as-growth, making clear that this book is about growth. Then, we will examine a few basic principles from systems theory as a means of acquiring some key concepts with which to understand development-as-growth. Next, we will discuss a useful way of thinking about that which we are trying to develop—human beings. We will talk about the person as an integrated system of content and process. Development will then be defined as the transformation of the person, either as a whole or in terms of specific content or process aspects. Following this exploration of the nature of development, we will investigate development’s various phases, or those periods in the transition process which William Bridges has aptly termed “endings,” “the neutral zone,” and “new beginnings” (Bridges, 1980). In Part I, by improving our understanding of what development is and the course which development typically follows, we will increase our ability to formulate our developmental goals and to anticipate problems which may arise, regardless of the specific situation.

Parts II and III: Answering the Question, “What Can the Environment and the Person Contribute to Development?”

In Parts II and III, we will deal with strategies and resources for achieving our developmental goals. These sections will deal with the book’s second and third objectives—identifying factors which promote growth and enhancing their presence in our daily lives.

Our growth, whether personal or professional, all-encompassing or relatively narrow, can be seen to result from the interaction of two sets of factors: those having to do with our environments, and those having to do with ourselves. In Part II, we will explore five characteristics of the environment which tend to promote development: novelty, minimal threat supportiveness of the learning cycle, information richness, and learning facilitators. In Part III, we will examine five features of the person which contribute to development: self-awareness, growth motivation, learning skills, knowledge of the developmental process, and developmental planning. The reasons why these characteristics of environments and of ourselves tend to encourage development will be discussed in some detail, along with ways in which we can enhance each of the ten features in our specific growth projects.

SOURCES OF LEARNING

In this book, I have synthesized learning on change and growth which has come from several sources. One source is the last ten years of studying the existing theory and research on adult development. A second source is a decade of serving as a teacher, counselor, and program manager in a special part of the world called the Liberal Arts Division, an innovative, exciting, and very effective set of adult learning programs at Marylhurst College, in Portland, Oregon.

Through this work, I have learned that adult students typically re-enter school because of a trigger event which has catapulted them into transition (Aslanian & Brickell, 1980). A spouse’s death, a job loss, an empty nest, a health loss, a divorce…whatever the specific event might be, re-entry adult students frequently find themselves needing to create a new self for a new world forged by transition. They usually enter or re-enter college programs not necessarily needing a degree, but much more importantly, also needing to meet some critical developmental challenge.

During my years in the Liberal Arts Division, I have had the privilege of sharing intimately in the developmental struggles of several thousand adults, ranging in age from young-adult to elderly. I have been able to watch these people’s courageous transformations from a counselor’s and teacher’s vantage, and I have tried to understand the process which was unfolding before my eyes. I also have had the opportunity to try out various ways of facilitating these developmental transformations, rather than forcing or just ignoring them. This first-hand experience, along with a careful study of the scholarly literature on adult development, forms the basis for this book…at least much of the basis, anyway.

My own journey also plays a major role in this synthesis. Helping my father to die an early death from cancer, participating in the peaceful dissolution of a marriage, changing careers, living and working in another culture…each of these events—sometimes excruciatingly and sometimes exhilaratingly—has triggered a significant transition in me. I always have tried to learn and to grow from these changes, not merely to endure them. This learning, too, is an important part of this book

PROACTIVITY VS. REACTIVITY

As we get started, a key concept which informs my frame of reference needs to be explained. Underlying this book’s objectives and overall perspective is the value of proactivity. The idea has fundamental significance in a world of rapid change and perhaps can best be understood in contrast to its opposite—reactivity.

Proactive Perspective

Proactivity has several key features. To begin, the proactive perspective recognizes that change is constant, and that we are involved in its process, no matter how powerful we become, either personally or through our allegiances. With wisdom, we come to realize and accept this bond, as this Zen story illustrates:

Once when Hyakujo delivered some Zen lectures an old man attended them, unseen by the monks. At the end of each talk when the monks left so did he. But one day he remained after they had gone, and Hyakujo asked him: “Who are you?”

The old man replied: “I am not a human being, but I was a human being when the Kashapa Buddha preached in this world. I was a Zen master and lived on this mountain. At that time one of my students asked me whether or not the enlightened man is subject to the law of causation. I answered him: ‘The enlightened man is not subject to the law of causation.’ For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness I became a fox for five hundred rebirths, and I am still a fox. Will you save me from this condition with your Zen words and let me get out of a fox’s body? Now may I ask you: Is the enlightened man subject to the law of causation?”

Hyakujo said: “The enlightened man is one with the law of causation.”

At the words of Hyakujo the old man was enlightened. (Reps, 1957, p. 96)

While change may be constant, it is not random. A “law of causation” does exist. The present in which we live is related in an important way to our past, just as the future in which we will live will evolve from our present. Assuming a proactive perspective simply acknowledges this connectedness of events and places a premium on participating actively, yet humbly, in the change process.

Of course, our present actions do not rigidly determine how we will be in the future. For one thing, the change process is complex, and we are only one participant in it. And for another thing, choice seems to be an essential feature of human existence. We are always constructing our present through our choices.

However, even though the present does not determine our future, it does seem to shape the range of possibilities from which we have to choose. We are neither totally free agents who are able, with a little “positive thinking,” to leap tall buildings in a single bound, nor are we preconditioned automotons who respond predictably to every stimulus. We are something in between superbeings and robots, making choices among options which we ourselves have helped to create. Being proactive simply means that we take responsibility for our power to create our options, while being fully aware that our power is not absolute. We seemingly acknowledge that at every moment we are laying groundwork for the next moment. Thus we accept that we are all agents of change, whether we like it or not.

Reactive Perspective

In contrast, the reactive perspective tends to see us as separate from the dynamics of change. From this point of view, change is something to which we react, not some all-embracing process of which we are a part. The reactive frame of reference fragments and reifies change into specific events, as in, “this change” or “that change.” We are seen to respond to these external events, and either maintain the status quo, or not. If we do not, crisis ensues. In the reactive frame, crisis precipitates innovation, rather than ongoing planning. And consequently, pain—rather than pleasure—comes to be associated with transition....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• DEDICATION
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• READERS’ COMMENTS
• 1 GETTING STARTED
• PART I WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT?
• PART II WHAT CAN THE ENVIRONMENT CONTRIBUTE?
• PART III WHAT CAN THE PERSON CONTRIBUTE?
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR