The 3 Levels of Personal Growth You’re Missing (Snippets of Wisdom) | #583

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast. This is another snippet of wisdom, where I select my most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today's snippet comes from vertical development expert Ryan Godfredson, who talks about the three levels of personal growth and how our nervous system and trauma shape our mindsets and behavior.

Let's dive right in.

[Ryan Gottfredson]
There's kind of three different levels of depth that we can engage in to do this effort. So I'm going to say that there's surface level efforts, there's deeper level efforts, and there's deepest level efforts. So at the surface level, and in fact, I thought it was interesting, as I was scrolling through your podcast here in preparation for this, I'm seeing some podcasts about kind of breathing, resetting your body.

The infinity wave was one of these. Calm was a part of this. Ikigai was one of these, right?

So as I'm looking through these, all of these topics, which is interesting, I don't know if you picked up on this, but really all have to do with the being side and not the doing side, right? And so some of these surface level being side efforts are things like meditation and breathing, or self affirmations are some of these types of things. So these are surface level efforts that are designed, or if we harness them appropriately, they are designed to help us better regulate and become in control of our body's nervous system.

And so those are some pretty basic efforts that we can engage in. In fact, when I talk about these surface level efforts, I use the example, and I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with this book, but I use David Goggins as a primary example. So David Goggins wrote, Can't Hurt Me, and also his next book, Never Finished.

And in his books, he talks a lot about some of these surface level practices that he engaged in to elevate himself. And so those are some of those surface level exercises there. Okay.

The next level, these deeper level strategies, to me, this is where kind of doing mindset work resides. So most people, as we kind of mentioned already, we all have mindsets, but most people aren't conscious of their mindsets. And our mindsets can range on a continuum between being more wired for self-protection to being wired more for value creation.

So for example, most people are familiar with fixed and growth mindsets. When we have a fixed mindset, our body is wired to always ensure that we look good. We only want to do the things we know we will be successful at.

So we tend to steer away from learning zone challenges. And that protects us in the short term. So it is a self-protective mindset.

And it's justifiable because it's uncomfortable to take on learning zone challenges. But people with a growth mindset, they have a wider window of tolerance for discomfort. And that allows them to be more willing to step into learning zone challenges, step into that initial discomfort, because of the benefit that they're going to get in the long term of greater learning growth and development, which allows them to be a greater value creator.

So fixed and growth mindsets are one set of mindsets that we could investigate. And as you alluded to, but when we identify and focus on our mindsets, this is now a deeper level of vertical development because we are getting more precise focus on how our body's internal operating system is wired. And when we could get that precise focus, it's almost like we could be more surgical in our development efforts.

So everything that we've talked about is that our being side is very much intertwined with our body's nervous system and how our nervous system is prone to make meaning of our world. So we have some programming built into our operating system. And one of the ways that we can discover our programming is through if then statements, such as if I get constructive criticism, then my body does what?

Does it get defensive? That's more self-protective. Or does it create space to listen?

Right? So that's kind of a continuum that might be a little bit revealing of our being side altitude. Now, when we focus on our being side, we want to get in touch to our automatic programming.

Now, what shapes our automatic programming? Well, I've kind of learned that there's three primary factors that shape our body's internal operating system and how it is programmed to operate. One factor is trauma.

What I've learned is that the more trauma one experiences in their life, the more their body's nervous system becomes wired for self-protection. It's our body's natural reaction to trauma. The second thing that shapes our body's nervous system programming is our current culture.

What are the incentives in our environment? What are the pressures in our environment? Right?

So when I work with organizations and leaders or employees are incentivized to hit certain outcomes by a certain date and to do so better than others, that oftentimes fosters competition that makes people wired more for self-protection as opposed to value creation. So that's the second one. So we've got trauma, we've got culture.

And then the third factor is different variations of neurodivergency. So one of the things that we've learned is that people who have some neurodivergencies, this includes things like ADHD, dyslexia, and others, that part of the brain wiring associated with those neurodivergencies causes one's internal operating system to be more wired for self-protection as opposed to value creation. And so ultimately, the reason why I bring up these three factors is because these deepest level strategies are more designed to address these factors.

So at the deepest level, some of the work that we might need to do is we might need to work with a therapist to heal from our past trauma. Even beyond this, and I've got my eyes and ears to the ground on this, is there's some recent research that is effectively finding that psychedelic assisted therapy is one of the most effective forms of therapy to help people to rewire their internal operating system. So to your point that you asked earlier, I'm not going to suggest that people start here, but it's often a place where most of us need to go if we ultimately want to become the best version of ourselves.

I mean, I've had to get there. I've worked with a trauma therapist for over two years. So these are some of the examples of some of these deepest level strategies.

[Agi Keramidas]
Thank you for listening. You will find the full conversation with Dr. Ryan Godfredson in episode 512. The link is in the show notes.

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