What is adaptive actualization?

Adaptive actualization strategies that help you sense more about yourself and the world around you are tied to your reflective and discovery capacity.

To sense more about yourself, start by looking at your execution effectiveness: your ability to control and get perspective on fulfilling the demands you place on yourself and the world places on you. Examples include looking at how well you use your time, seeing how long items sit in your inbox before you process them, the number of active, on-hold, stalled, or complete tasks and projects you have, how long it takes to get your work finished, and how well you completed work to a standard. 

Develop your inner sensitivity to understand yourself at a deeper level beyond your observable behavior. Look at your emotional response to what you've experienced or done, consider how it sits with you, and consider what tensions or trauma were raised. These often have valuable insight into what might be inhibiting your authentic self.

To understand the world better, seek out new information, knowledge, and perspectives from many sources and levels of perspective. Balance first-person points of view with neurobiology, psychology, and critical theory to give yourself a multi-decade or generational perspective of how the world works. You'll start to see the world in a new light and realize there is no "one right way."

When using adaptive actualization strategies to frame your experience, think of your current model of the world as your experience architecture, a multi-dimensional structure that your experience passes through to create meaning. For example, you might perceive something differently depending on the time span you apply, be it minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, or generations. Perhaps it's the complexity you perceive in some or all parts of the system. Or maybe different based on what you attribute to the environment, your behaviors, capabilities, beliefs and values, identity, and spiritual purpose. Even the number and kinds of people involved an experience changes how you see things. Each frame offers a unique meaning, so being aware of which frames you use or favor gives you new awareness. 

Some framing strategies help you identify and determine which frames have outlived their usefulness or meaning to you and how to move beyond them. Realizing that a familiar and internalized model of the world is actually inhibiting your authentic self or denying your humanity may be a sign that it's time to let it go or at least reprioritize its importance in how you think and operate.

Other framing strategies are important to help you see, assess, and increase your capacity to handle change. When you connect with your own internal resourcefulness, survival strategies, and self-care, you can learn to hold more space for yourself and others through more complex and higher-stakes transformations. 

Adaptive actualization strategies that create focus make sure people are inspired, compelled to act, and manifest tangible change. 

Focusing strategies that drive to a dream state offer a north star, something that gives yourself and others something to reach toward even in the darkest of times. When these states are articulated around a humanistic vision—a specific vision for the future that brings out the best in everyone while leveraging their differences and gifts—it draws on your inner drive to help others. 

A mandated mission is an important focusing strategy for amplifying that drive. It's getting in touch with and dialing into what you sense to be your specific life purpose and direction, along with the degree of commitment you bring to a course of action and persevering through challenges. 

The focusing strategies that manifest the change you want to see and the true leadership you bring involve revolutionary actions. It's your willingness to defy norms and conventions, be heretical, and withstand opposition to see your vision through and fulfill your mission. 

Adaptive actualization strategies that help you make the best strides are ones that level you up beyond individual, heroic actions to achieve systemic impact. 

Striding strategies that help you directly embody your actualized self are centered around mindful habits, routines, and deliberate practice. They create the muscle memory needed to make desired behavior automatic and easy to do while remaining intentional about why you're doing it. 

At the same time, don't try to keep it all in your head. In today's world, there's too much complexity to do that effectively. System-driven performance is a striding strategy that enables you to use technology and even build your own solutions to act as your "outboard brain" and give you the contextual reinforcement you need to stay on track. 

Lastly, the mark of a striding strategy that truly goes beyond individual contribution to affect others is one that helps you make your presence known even when you're not there. This means developing and managing your own personal products—from points of view and perspectives to checklists and lessons to software and other automation—that build on your unique knowledge and wisdom to enable others to be their best. 

Adaptive actualization strategies aren't just about infinite repetition. The more you actualize yourself and adapt, the more you find in your transpersonal experience—seeing the world beyond the conventional self across states of being, time, and space. As either Pierre Teilhard de Chardin or G. I. Gurdjieff put it, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

Deliberate exits and pivots are an important set of finding strategies. There are times when you'll realize that a certain space—a job, a family unit, a community—inhibits your continued actualization, and you decide to leave it, either to explore a liminal space or search for another. Making these exits with gratitude, grace, and compassion for who and what you're leaving behind can make the transition easier for everyone.

Other finding strategies help you decide when its time to double down on your current path, expanding the capacity you place on the commitments where you have extraordinary passion and drive while softening your commitment to others. These are best balanced with sensing strategies to ensure that you don't lose sight of essentials that give you strength.

Lastly, some of the most profound experiences we have in our actualization are realizing when we are operating at another level of being. These finding strategies include evolutions and the transcendence of your ego into new states. Sometimes, these are spontaneous moments brought on by a combination of experiences you often can only see in hindsight. When assisted by intense meditation or sacred medicine and rituals, the support of the sensing, framing, focusing, and striding strategies are essential to supporting reintegration.