We all get stuck at times, and it’s not always clear how to get un-stuck. One key place to look is within ourselves. As embarrassing and humbling as it can be, our emotions can be a major limiting factor to our success. So let’s look at a framework for making progress on emotional challenges.
There are eight levels of transformation that can describe our emotional development at any given time.
- Love
- Purpose
- Desire
- Courage
- Anger
- Fear
- Grief
- Apathy
Let’s look at each level briefly. We’ll discuss them from the bottom up since the idea is to build on what we have to rise to the next level.
Competitive levels
These first, lowest levels are competitive. They’re playing not to lose.
Apathy
Apathy is the lowest state. It’s you versus the world, and you lose. It’s giving up on feeling, and really on life. “What’s the point? I’ll never make it anyway.”
Anybody reading this is unlikely to be stuck here, but many of us have pockets of apathy.
How to move past apathy?
Grief
You realize that you’ve been hurt. You’re a victim.
Obviously this is an unproductive place to stay, but it’s the step that moves you out of apathy.
So go through the grieving process.
Fear
So you realize that you can’t just live in a puddle of tears. Now it’s time to move on and take responsibility for yourself. Well, that’s scary and unknown. Yep, sure is. You’re at the fear stage.
How to move past the fear?
Anger
Tired of being afraid of everything? Get angry, get angry at the things you encountered in your grief work, get angry at yourself, whatever it is.
At this point we’re getting close to the highest level that many people reach in daily life. Many people get stuck rotating between grief, fear, and anger. Think about the news—most of the stories are about victimhood, fear, and outrage.
Collaborative levels
So you’ve gotten past apathy, you’ve made contact with your grief, fear, and anger, and are ready to take productive steps. Now you move up to the collaborative levels. We start playing to win instead of playing not to lose.
Courage
Courage is looking for the win. What’s my goal, what am I moving towards, precisely? What will that look like in five years, in terms of my life, my job, my friends and relationships?
But if we stop at courage we may be satisfied with little wins. We can move beyond that to ask: why are we courageous?
Desire
Think of desire as chasing a carrot on a stick. Pursuing a particular goal can be motivating, and that’s very good. But no particular thing is going to make you a whole person, so we need to keep moving through this stage too.
Purpose
Letting go of desire to look at the “why” behind it brings us to purpose. Now we start acting out of inspiration, not neediness.
Love
What is the purpose of our purpose? Now we’re talking about love.
Our journey
While we work on this, challenges will come up. We can take note of them and figure out where they are on the progression—they won’t always match where we thought we were.
Social anxiety? Fear.
Self-sabotage? Maybe grief, trying to stay low. Or could be anger, or desire—neediness.
We can figure it out and use the information to make sure we keep moving in the right direction.
Why people fail to apply this
People may misunderstand the path and decide that the negative aspects of their current level (e.g. anger) are bad, and stop.
People may not know which level they’re on, and apply advice that’s applicable to someone on a different level. The fear and courage levels require different work, for example. But there’s a lot of self-help advice that assumes a particular level, so knowing which level you’re on helps you to discern.
People attempt to jump too far ahead at a time. We should go stepwise, at most two steps at a time. It’s a journey.
Exploring further
Julien Blanc talk on the levels of emotional transformation is the basis of this article. This link jumps to 13:32 where he begins talking through them.
An article that summarizes the full set of levels in the book Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins that Blanc is drawing from in his talk.
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