This essay establishes some key concepts that provide the foundations for an exploration of the human condition. These foundations will form the basis of alignment for the concepts found in my approach as a whole and offers you a framework within which to explore life in general. These ontological foundations also establish a basis for an approach to coaching. This approach can be applied to self-coaching or coaching others and is ultimately aimed at living authentic and fulfilling lives.
The essay includes in-depth discussions on:
The basic premise which forms the platform for all ideas in my ontological approach;
The ‘Integral Model’ originally developed by American philosopher Ken Wilber;
The domains of the human condition which contains body, mood, emotion and language in an hierarchy of predispositions;
Our relationship with time and how this upends our understanding of the present;
The utilisation of the Integral Model as a means of identifying what we can control and influence; and
The core concerns underpinning our every action.
The Ten Key Ideas found in this essay are:
- The human experience of life is entirely subjective, internal, and bounded. Our life consists wholly and solely of our experience of living. We live in our own world, a world of our own making. We each go through every day in our bounded experience dealing with other people going through their own unique and bounded experience. Yet we mostly assume that their experience is like ours.
- The present is not a space in time but infinitesimally fine boundary between the past and the future. This idea of the present as a boundary undermines a common idea we exist in some nebulous present moment, which is really the immediate past and the immediate future on our temporal arrow. This new distinction of the present as a boundary does not mean we have to overthrow our sense of a present moment but does allow us to explore the human condition through a different lens; one of always ‘stepping into the future’.
- As we share a similar biology with other humans, it is reasonable to assume similarities in our experiences. This assumption allows us to relate more effectively with others and create a ‘social reality’. We can put our observations of them into the context of our experiences and seek to make sense of what they will do. We can get a sense of how they feel and empathise with those feelings by appreciating how we would feel in that situation. However, the key is to appreciate our interpretations of others are simply our best guesses about their experience and not their actual experience.
- In his book, ‘A Theory of Everything’, Ken Wilber identified four aspects that are always present with the human experience. He called these four aspects, the ‘Four Quadrants’. These four aspects reflect the interior and exterior aspects of individuals and collectives. In other words, the four aspects reflect the subjective experiences of our individual life, those shared in relationship with others and a more concrete perspective of individuals and communities. Ken Wilber called the four quadrants ‘I’, ‘We’, ‘It’ and ‘Its’.
- The ‘I’ Quadrant is seen in the human condition as a coherence of three domains – physical being (body), emotional being (moods and emotions) and linguistic being (language). Rather than these domains being seen just as a set of lenses into the human condition, they are defined as a hierarchy of predispositions. The idea is the lower level of the hierarchy creates the conditions where higher levels tend to produce certain states or dynamics. Our physical being (body) sits at the bottom of the hierarchy and supports all the other domains. Think of it this way. Without a body, there is no emotion, no language, no experience at all.
- If we accept the future is always unknown to us, then always stepping into it implies we are always moving into the unknown and therefore uncertainty. Our way of being is always focused on dealing with that uncertainty by making guesses about what the immediate future holds and then testing them against sensory data. The better our guesses, the better we navigate the uncertainty.
- Ken Wilber’s concept of the Big 3 – ‘I, We and It’ – provides a useful framework to address this challenge and achieve a more fulfilling life. This framework is based on three aspects of life – our concerns (who and what matters to us), what we can control and who and what we can influence. We can think of this in terms of three circles extending outwards – Control, Influence, Concerns – that speak to our capacity to address our concerns.
- Our ‘Circle of Control’ is limited to ourselves. To be in control, we must make a conscious choice and so our Circle of Control is limited to the conscious choices we enact. ‘Control = Awareness + Choice’
- Our ‘Circle of Influence’ and is related to the extent and quality of our relationships and the quality of the conversations occurring within those relationships. When done well, influence is based on our capacity to build trust and authority with others and gain substantive promises from them. The bigger the promises we can gain from others, the bigger the impact on our ‘Circle of Concern’. When done poorly, we seek to control others leading to a process of forcing people to choose what we want them to choose.
- Our fundamental core concern is that we will continue to exist, making our physical safety our primary core concern. Beyond that I utilise David Rock’s ‘SCARF’ model; an acronym for five domains of concern – Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.
