And the Single Most Important Personal Development Concept Is ... Maturity?

I'm playing my favorite game this morning.

The one where I try to discover and blog about the single most important concept in personal and spiritual growth, in living a meaningful, empowered, purposeful and relevant life, and in developing a successful business aligned with this.

The question as always, is. 'Is there one hook on which we can hang our hat, upon which all others depend?'

And I believe there is - it's called maturity.

With maturity, we come to recognise the need to ...

• engage with our own personal growth
• take response-ability for our own material and spiritual well-being
• heal our past trauma
• build a coherent personal (and business) philosophy
• play nicely and share our toys
• take response-ability for our state of consciousness (state of mind)
• develop skillful means and our ability to be responsive and not reactive
• work to influence and not control
• master our mindset, and not struggle against our behavior, and the context of our life

But WHAT is maturity, WHY is it important and HOW does one go about intentionally developing it?

I was walking with my family yesterday, and we got to the exist door of our community, which in order to open, needs you to press the electronic release button. Radha, my youngest, ran up to push the button. She loves pushing buttons, in more ways than one, but to her dismay, she was just not tall enough to reach it - which is weird, since she does the same thing everyday ;)

Of course it will happen, she just needs to grow-up.

So I asked her, 'Tong Tong (her Cantonese nick name), how do you grow up', and she looked at me, and with surprise in her voice, said, 'papa, I need to eat my porridge' - like, whoa, you don't know the answer to this one.

Sure, if she eats reasonably well, sleeps and takes exercises, she will grow-up, she will develop physical maturity, that's it, that all she needs to do.

Now, psychological maturity allows us to reach up and push those buttons, and open those doors, that we where just unable to reach and open before. And of course, lets take a moment to recognise how frustrating, debilitating and depressing (victim) it is, to be dependent on others, to do what we so much would like to do ourselves.

So, what is maturity, and why is it important?

Maturity is our ability to connect the dots, between cause and effect, or action (and non-action) and consequence.
I wrote this example of what I mean by connecting the dots, a few months ago, and I've been dying to use it, so here goes ...

If I do, or do-not, FEEL, THINK, SAY or DO this (or that), then these WILL be the consequences I'm going to experience, now and into my future.

• If I let fear motivate my actions, then regardless of what results my actions may produce, I WILL have grow my capacity to fear, and to be motivated to take action because of the need to escape suffering (resistance to fear and pain), which WILL paradoxically only increase my degree of suffering.  

• If I act in anger (suffering), I'm going to hurt others, and they WILL not forget (or forgive) that I have hurt them. I WILL have broken trust and damaged the relationship, and they WILL not feel inclined to meet my needs now, or in the future.

• If I rely solely on my limitations of my rational thinking to make decisions, I WILL have dis-empowered myself, and I WILL experience limited and undesired results. 

• If I do not heal my pain and shadow, many of my reactions WILL be irrational, and this WILL result in very undesirable consequences. 

• If I do not develop my skilful means, then regardless of my intention, the results I WILL experience, WILL not be as good as they could have been. 

• If I try to live in this rapidly evolving world using an obsolete, fractured, incoherent, inherited and immature personal philosophy, I WILL struggle to make sense of the world, and this WILL inhibit my ability to respond in a way that WILL influence my ability to experience better results. 

• If I try to control the people and events in my life, or my own feelings, thoughts, words and actions, I WILL, firstly alienate them and fragment myself, and secondly, suffer the stress, anxiety and frustration that comes from trying to control that, over which I have no control. 

• If I interpret my experiences, no matter how difficult and unfair, they may feel, as a victim, then I WILL suffer, anxiety, stress, depression, anger (and the list goes on). 

• If I'm not even aware that I am a victim, immature and unskilful, then I WILL not find the capacity to take response-ability for my own life, and I WILL continue to suffer and achieve limited results - I'll be stuck or trapped.

And the list goes on and on ...

Let's recognise that at the leading-edge, we live in a very complex, fast and rapidly evolving context.

And any attempts to ignore this, bury our head in the ground, hope we'll die before we need to actually face it, or surround ourselves with mythic beliefs and customs in the hope that they will protect us, are just naive (immature) efforts to not grow-up - a bit like refusing to eat your veggies, take reasonable exercise or sleep, in the hope that you can avoid physically growing-up.

But here's the thing - consequences follows action (or non-action) regardless. Either connect the dots, or suffer the unintended consequences of an immature mindset, and therefore random behavior.

So how do we connect the dots, how do we develop psychological maturity?

We do it by paying attention, observing, questioning and investigating (studying, thinking and contemplating) - of taking notice of  ...

• Behavior, and the inner psychological assumptions that determine it.
• The inherent irrationality of those assumptions.
• The feedback loop - this is what I do, and this is the results I get, when I do that.
• The habit of blaming others (including yourself), for the piss poor quality of life, and success results, we experience.

We simply become more interested in learning, than we do in blaming and justifying.

So, if you notice yourself either blaming, or justifying, your reactions, behaviour, or the consequences of your behavior. Know for a fact, that you are investing your time and energy in an activity, that although may help you feel better for a moment, will ultimately deliver very limited, or even regressive results.

So I encourage you to go on, and eat your veggies ;), grow-up, push that button, open that door, and liberate yourself from your unintended servitude to ignorance, fear, immaturity and naivety.

A few hurdles along the path.

• Maturity is not a final destination -  Unlike physical maturity there is no point in our psychological development, that we actually get to, where we've connected all the dots. There are simply more dots to connect in an ever evolving landscape.
• As we connect more dots, the picture or landscape evolves, giving us new-world views, or meta-perspectives, changing how we respond to the context of our life. It's a bit like pictures within pictures giving you new meta-pictures.
• We inadvertently invest our self-image in 'less mature' world-views, and with developing maturity, we need to revise our relative position. This becomes difficult to do, since we've invested ourselves (our self-image), in the old one.
• We're either managing our psychological growth, or our self-image, we can't manage both, simultaneously.