The Western corporate mindset celebrates progression. But growth is a bi-directional process and falling backwards often helps us move forward.
By Jane Brendgen
Most of my work as a coach is devoted to vertical adult development. In essence, this is about supporting individuals to expand their ability to reflect on and understand their subjective view of themselves, with others and the contexts they interact with.
Adult development theory posits that we move through different developmental stages in the course of our lives. As our capacity to process more complex information grows, our meaning-making changes and the potential to transition into the next stage is enlivened. We take a step forward on our developmental path. And, sometimes life has other plans for us. We fall backwards.
Many of us work in corporate settings and, considering the predominant Western corporate mindset, achievement, goal-attainment and success is all about progression, moving forward. In these contexts, it’s understandable that regression or failure will be viewed in a negative light. The reality is that growth is a bi-directional process and regression is part of the full lived experience of being human. Paradoxically, falling backwards is often exactly what we need to spring forward.
Our evolving self is inextricably context-bound. A new set of circumstances can significantly affect our development. When the events began to unfold in Palestine–Israel on 7 October something in me became energised. As a global citizen, it felt important to bear witness to the tragedy as a way of contributing to systems change. I experienced profound grief as my heart broke open to the suffering of men, women and children victimised by the ravages of conflict. Until recently I hadn’t realised I was actually engaging in Tonglen, an ancient Buddhist compassion practice that offers a portal to our evolution.
Tonglen focuses on holding and transforming the suffering of others in our hearts. During the months of active engagement, I recognised the capacity to somatically contain an increasing amount of emotional pain. I also felt a deepening into love as the sweetness of compassion poured in through the cracks of my heart.
Conscious collective
I joined solidarity marches and felt connected to the power of generations of people speaking out for social change and justice. The collective consciousness of hundreds of thousands of us pulsed with rage, despair, longing, hope and love. I listened daily to a multitude of different journalists’ perspectives to gain as broad and nuanced an understanding as possible. I often felt in over my head as I struggled to make sense of the complexity. Each day I stepped into an emotionally charged system where my fellow human beings were being triggered into primal emotions. The common threads in many of the narratives I heard were saturated with antagonistic language, and I lost my balance.
One particular thread triggered me. I found it incomprehensible that those leaders with significant geopolitical influence were allowing the red lines of international law to be erased, lines that at least one of their predecessors had previously enforced which led to the immediate cessation of violence. I got caught in a quagmire of ambiguity, uncertainty and volatility and I lost perspective.
Activism
I took to writing as an expression of activism and grappled with novel and disorientating dilemmas as I navigated the minefields of posting on social media platforms. After nine months, I attempted to pull the threads together into one coherent whole and wrote a personal reflection of 7,000 words.
This was a monumental task, a labour of love, and I noticed a cognitive sluggishness after this period of intense thinking. I also noticed an emotional and somatic settling as the threads I’d been holding were beginning to weave their way into the fabric of my consciousness.
Two days after completing this piece I followed a desire to reconnect with Harthill Consulting’s Leadership Development Profile which uses the completion of 32 sentence stems as data to map one’s current stage of development. Yes, I agree, not the wisest of choices given my cognitive fatigue and prolonged focus on death and destruction. I didn’t heed the voice of wisdom which was whispering ‘darling, it’s probably best to wait until the dust has settled’. My report revealed that I’d regressed into my ‘trailing edge’, the go-to area in times of stress. In adult development vernacular this is known as temporary fallback.
What a gift. Grace opened the door to a deep inquiry. I saw the attachment to my previous stage as being ‘more advanced’ and laughed! This is one of the traps we can so easily fall into, where our conditioned hierarchical thinking evaluates later stages as ‘better’.
I found Livesay’s paper on fallback (2015) which helped me to make sense of the factors contributing to my regression. Aside from the cognitive fatigue, which affected the quality of my thinking on the day, the central factor was my choice to step into a novel context which disabled elements of my capacity for complexity.
The Palestine–Israel tragedy is the most painful and disturbing geopolitical event that I’ve engaged with in my lifetime. It awakened something in me that strangely felt both personal and transpersonal. Personal, in that I recognised the echoes of a childhood pattern that had been lying dormant in the shadows of my unconscious. And, transpersonal in that I felt I’d become a conduit for the expression of a universal pattern, ‘The Hero’, an archetypal instinctual energetic form embedded in the collective unconscious. Whatever the case, the agenda for contribution occupied a sizeable portion of my awareness at times and siphoned a commensurate amount of energy from my reservoirs.
Gravitational pull
I was confronted with new and disorienting experiences which is another contributing factor in fallback as is the phenomenon of contextual gravitational pull. Our developmental ‘centre of gravity’ is the most complex meaning-making system or perspective we’ve mastered. Given that I profiled at later stage, statistically, the centre of gravity of the field I was engaging with was likely to be collectively earlier than the one that I was situated in.
The resonance of this exerted a powerful tug on my meaning-making capacities and constricted my perspective agility. I also wonder whether this gravitational force was happening at the same time that I was touching into the next stage of development. Perhaps the choice to engage with a complex devastating event pulled the rug from under my feet when I was developmentally vulnerable.
Another factor that causes fallback is unresolved trauma, where unintegrated aspects of ourselves are bracketed off until we’re psychologically robust enough to feel them somatically. My window of tolerance has expanded over many years through the ability to contain and process experience by feeling it rather than thinking about it and the daily practice of Tonglen has stretched it further.
This unique set of circumstances created the conditions for my childhood activist part to triggered, expressed and felt. She appeared in most of my stem completions. A few days after receiving my report, I recognised it was time to have a loving conversation with her, for the sake of the wellbeing and resourcefulness of the whole of my internal family system. I acknowledged the beauty of her commitment, bravery and compassion and suggested she step back from her agenda for contribution, at least for now. She cried and, with relief, let go.
This part of my life’s journey, which includes this reflection, has been replete with rich poignant learning. Understanding fallback exposes the myth of onwards and upwards development. It gives us access to a more nuanced view on why our clients regress and how we might support them to reframe their experience to make the most of the valuable developmental opportunity.
Reference
Livesay, V. T. (2015). One step back, two steps forward: fallback in human and leadership development. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 12(4).
- Jane Brendgen is founder of Compassionate Cultures. She is an executive coach specialising in authentic leadership, adult development and therapeutic coaching. She is a mindfulness supervisor.