I am hosting a Meetup twice a month called Living with Intention.  This past Sunday we were considering what it means to grow up… or to be a “grown up” and are we interested in being one.  One of the themes in the conversation, as we considered what it means to be a grown up, was that the image is a result of the expectations of others have of us.  Often we have no interest in being who they think we ought to be.

We tried on the notion of “becoming more mature” but we ran into problems there as well.  The notion of maturity implies immaturity which means childish.  There are aspects of being childlike that we want to hang onto.  And pointing out that someone is not fully mature is a put-down.

But I have recently found An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey in which the authors use the term “developing mental complexity.”  That phrase works as a way of talking about the direction I want to be moving in.  While not central to their argument, they point out four characteristics of the change in our perspectives as we develop a greater capacity for embracing mental complexity.

• One is that we become able more and more to see the whole picture. We are able to embrace more of what is real.  We see the larger picture and see with more detail.
• We also become more and more able to be less focused on ourselves and to take others into account. We see the validity of their perspectives even when they are different from our own.
• A third quality is that our maps for understanding what is become less and less distorted. We all have cognitive distortions as a result of the incomplete understanding we have or from the trauma we have experienced.  Developing mental complexity allows us to abandon those faulty maps.
• And the fourth quality is one that we talked about extensively at Living with Intention. That is the ability to be less reactive.  As we develop we are less likely to go off on people and are better able to choose how we are going to show up based on what works to create what we need.

Do these notions work for you as you consider the intention to commit to developing mental complexity?