Vertical Development made simple, clear and practical
While much valuable content exists on this topic, often its practical implications and applications are obscured in academic language. Here we aim to make this complex theory easily accessible and practically relevant for leaders, coaches and L&D practitioners, while preserving its rigour and constantly offering you resources to dive much deeper if you wish.
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Walking the Talk of Vertical Development: How To Keep Ourselves Honest and Avoid WTT Bypassing
Just as some people use practices like mindfulness as an avoidance tactic from feeling their own painful feelings or facing uncomfortable realities - a strategy often called “spiritual bypassing”, coaches and facilitators may use our conscious belief that we are acting on a mission to ‘bettering the human condition’/ ‘transforming leadership’/ ‘uplifting organisational cultures’ as a guise to avoid facing the dark little corners of ourselves, where all those aspects of us that we are not too proud of tend to lurk - our fear, our arrogance, our smallness.
We might call this strategy ‘WTT (walking-the-talk) bypassing’ - which essentially means that we keep ourselves too busy helping (or believing we are helping) others to walk their talk to notice that we’re not actually doing it ourselves.