An Integrative Framework of Personal Growth

How it all fits together...

This is a big one

I have been looking forward to writing this for a long time… For bringing this together…

This is for the people who want to get more out of life.

For the people who want to not only have a collection of tools…

But an integrated way of how these tools can be used in harmony to facilitate personal growth.

This is for people who want to have a positive impact in the world:

  • On themselves

  • The people around them

  • The stranger they meet on the street

  • Their Community

  • Their region

  • their country

  • or the world itself.

This is the summary of the past 10 weeks of my writing…

Which is a summary of a good chunk of my thinking about personal development, psychology, and spirituality of the past half decade.

This is what I want to offer to those who feel a bit stuck. Who have plateaued. And who want to move on to a higher level. To have the impact that they are dreaming of having.

This…

…is for you!

The Hero in You!

How to Read This

This is the integration of what I have written about over the past 10 weeks. Which means that in integrating this, I have to span many levels…

…from the very specific…

…to the very abstract.

Here, I start with the abstract. Step by step, I will summarise my thoughts, principles, and tactics into an integrated framework that can help you make sense of your own development and growth. Of how you have already developed and will develop in the future.

The point here is to give you an holistic understanding of development and growth. Your development and growth!

Throughout this article, I will leave links to my other writings that go into more detail about the specific aspects of this framework.

You can start here, see this as an integrated summary, and then dive deeper into the things that call out to you. Listen to these things as you read. Your unconscious (and maybe even conscious) mind knows what you need. When you hear it call, mark it down. And follow up with the specific piece of writing that goes more into detail about the aspect that is calling to you.

Come back to this as much as you want and need. Put this on your regular-re-reading list.

Because it might just change your life…

That’s what I have written it for at least. So that it changes your life for the better. So that you can then go on, and change someone else’s life for the better. That’s all I am looking for.

To turn you into a hero!

So… Make sure to read to the end. I promise that when every level of this framework starts coming together in your head, it will be more than worth your while…

And with that being said,

Let’s jump into it…

1. How We Make Meaning: Ego Development

Sources:

Given that this is a model about growth…

Let’s start with the basics.

This model is centers around a spiral…

The Spiral of Ego Development

…the Spiral of Ego Development.

There are many different models that describe human development as a spiral (including, you guessed it: spiral dynamics). But here, I take another model as the foundation on which my thinking rests:

Susanne Cook-Greuter’s model of Ego Development.

In this model, Cook-Greuter describes how human being go through a series of stages that become more and more complex as you go up.

With each stage, your ego develops further.

With each stage, you learn to see things from a new perspective.

This is what this model is fundamentally about: How you can reach higher stages by developing your ego…

The question then is: What is your ego?

And the answer to this question is: That which makes sense of the world.

Think about it.

You are reading this at this moment. Your ego is that thing that tries to understand this text. The thing that throws ideas at you as you read – seemingly out of nowhere…

“This links to this other idea I read about yesterday“

“Mhh, I don’t really understand this“

“This is fascinating!“

These and other thoughts likely go through your head while you are reading (or doing ANYTHING, for that matter).

Your ego is the thing that helps you to make sense of the experiences that you encounter as you go through the world. It is our inbuilt meaning making machine. And that’s why we want to develop it further…

1.1. Developing the Ego

As you can see above, the spiral of ego development becomes wider and wider as it goes up. This has a good reason…

You move up the stages – the spiral – by increasing your ability to take larger and larger perspectives. As you go up, the stages, you will be able to make sense of more and more things in the world. And as you are able to make sense of more and more things in the world, you will be able to go up the stages.

Think about it. At some point, you were born… At that point, you couldn’t do anything other than following your impulses of eating, sleeping, and pooping…

But look how far you have come.

  • You have learned to distinguish between different objects.

  • You have learned to point at things in the world and move through it

  • You have learned to not only talk about what is directly there, but things that are in your memory… Abstractions… Constructs.

  • You have learned to read representations of reality in the form of language and words (this is what you are doing now)

  • You have learned to describe the world in representations (e.g., talking and especially writing)

  • You have learned to think about yourself. You are literally able to take a step back and take a look at how you look at and interact with the world.

Isn’t that crazy?

All these things you have learned to do… They are hyper complex. But you are so good at them, that you just take them for granted.

All of this is just possible, because you developed your ego. You started out with the first person perspective – how you experience the world directly – but started to build powerful perspectives on top of that. With each perspective that you expand or add to your already existing perspectives, the spiral grows.

This can happen in one of two ways:

  1. Laterally

  2. Vertically

Lateral & Vertical Growth

Let’s have a look at the first one. Lateral growth is what makes up most of the development that you are aware of. It’s basically the process of broadening your perspective, at a given level of perspective. For example, when you have reached the 3rd person perspective (the ability to look at yourself as an object and self reflect) you can expand this perspective by applying the new found abilities to all sort of domains. You could reflect on yourself at your job or at school. But also in your relationships. Your hobbies. Your routines… Basically your entire life. That is what lateral growth is. Maxing out the capabilities of the stage you are currently at.

Vertical growth on the other hand is where the real juice is… Here we don’t maximize the perspective we currently have...

…but we expand it by adding a new dimension to it. Continuing with the 3pp example from above, you can imagine that once you are able to look at yourself as an object that can be described and reflected upon, you can do that not only in different domains in the present but also across time. This is what happens when we move from one stage to the other (in this case from the Expert to the Achiever stage).

I cannot go into detail about all the stages here (Cook-Greuter’s original paper is 90 pages long!). So, if you are interested in this, make sure to read my essay on The Science of Ego Development where I go more into detail about this (while still keeping it way below 90 pages 😉).

So, now we know that there are two ways of going up the spiral of ego development: by growing laterally (within a stage) and vertically (to a new stage)…

But why is it important to develop your ego in the first place? Isn’t the ego something bad that I should just get rid of? And even if not…

Why should I work on my ability to make meaning (your ego)? Why is this so important?

…to answer this question, let’s have a look at what we are actually making meaning of…

2. What We Make Meaning Of: The Way of Being

Sources

We – you and I; our egos – are meaning makers…

But what are we making meaning of?

REALITY…

…is the simple answer.

Now, of course this is not a simple answer. It is also not a simple topic. In fact, it is easily one of the oldest and most hotly debated topics since the birth of humanity: Who are we, what is reality, and how can we make sense of it…

The fact that humanity has grappled with these questions for such a long time should be evidence enough that they are important… But let me try to put a simply answer – my answer – into words…

2.1 Why Make Sense of Reality?

Reality is that in which we life. Reality is what surrounds you as you read this. Its the screen of the device that you are reading on. The chair or couch that you are sitting on. The air that you are breathing.

But reality is also you. You are not separate from it. Do you notice that? You are real. At least that is how it feels like. Of course, there are many people who say that consciousness and reality are just an illusion, but for the purpose of living a good life, that doesn’t matter too much in my eyes.

And here is why:

It feels like something to be in reality. It feels like something to read these words. It feels like something to sit where you are sitting. It feels like something to breath in air through your nose…

It feels like something to be happy or sad.

It feels like something to love or hate.

It feels like something to just Be.

That is why it doesn’t matter whether reality is an illusion. Because it – reality – has an inherent feeling to it (independent of it being an illusion or a simulation).

And that is part of the answer of why we are so good at making sense of reality. Because it definitely feels like something. I don’t need to tell you that. Your experience is your own proof…

To finally give you an answer of why it is important to develop your ability to make meaning:

This “feeling like something” that experience brings with it can be experienced as positive, neutral, or negative… You can feel really really great… And you can feel really really shiit!

Understanding reality – trying to make sense of it – allows us to have some say into how the experience of reality manifests itself...

And so, if someone asks: “Why make sense of reality?”

You can answer:

“Well… How do you want to feel?”

Because making sense of reality is how you have a say in how the experience of this very same reality feels.

So, with that out of the way, let’s have a look what we make meaning of…

2.2 The Structure of (Human) Reality

Of course, any take on the nature of reality has to be taken from a perspective. And in this case, its my perspective, based on my experiences, knowledge, and state of ego development. Keep that in mind 😉 

But with that being said, let’s quickly review what I call the three parts that make up (human) reality:

  1. The Stream

  2. You as Resistance

  3. The Known and the Unknown

The Way of Being

These three elements are expressed by the illustration above (which is the logo of my newsletter btw).

Let’s start with the stream.

Reality as a stream is a very common representation. Not necessarily in our modern culture. But in more traditional takes on reality – like taoism, for example – it is very common.

If you grew up in a westernized country, you likely learned to see the world as a place of separate objects that are mostly static.

But what if I told you that the fact that objects seem static is just a limitation of your perception…

Here is what I mean by that:

Take a look around. What do you see?

  • A chair

  • A desk

  • A lamp

It doesn’t matter. Pick some object…

It looks static, doesn’t it?

Well, from your perspective it does. But how will it look next week? How about a month or a year from now? And how about in hundred or 10,000 years? What about in a billion years?

Do you see how things look static because of how we look at the world? Imagine a timelapse of the object that, at this moment, looks static to you… Does it still look that static..?

This is why I love the illustration of reality as a stream so much.

  • A stream is in constant movement

  • A stream is one but has separate parts

Especially the second statement is worth unpacking.

Imagine a vortex in a stream. It is definitely part of the stream… But it also is its own entity. Otherwise you couldn’t identify it as a vortex in a stream…

It’s the same with you and me. We are both part of this amazing, infinitely complex, and ever changing stream of reality. And yet, we are our own selves. Clearly distinct entities and yet one with the stream?

Isn’t that amazing?

I think it is…

…partially because this is what allows us to have some say in the stream itself…

That is what I mean with you as resistance in the stream – the second part of the way of being. In the image above, it is illustrated as the little orange dot.

Have another look at it.

What do you see next to the dot?

It’s another vortex. Some space that you are carving out through your presence. This is how you affect the stream.

Imagine that you take a walking stick and put it in the stream. Around it, you will see vortices forming. But when you take it out, the vortices start fading away until they become fully one with the stream again.

That is how it is with you.

And you can either

  • resist against the stream or

  • resist with the stream

Ultimately, this is up to you…

But know that the effect that you have on the stream will only last as long as you can hold up the energy to resist.

That’s why it’s smart to resist with the stream. To not waste your energy. But to be smart and understanding. To deepen your engagement in reality…

And to appreciate it for what it is, so that you can do the work that you came to do in an effective way.

Like a fish, you can learn to use the energy of the stream to swim upstream without using much energy. So that you can sustain the positive impact on the stream for longer…

There is a last piece that is important to consider when it comes to the way of being…

The Known and the Unknown.

Because we are humans…

…we have a specific perspective.

But this perspective is limited. It doesn’t allow us to see and know everything. We try to capture reality as good as we can, using language and symbols. But we can never fully get it.

This is because reality – the stream – is infinite and ever changing. And our language and abstractions are limited and dead.

That is what is expressed by the hexagon in image above. It marks the line between The Known and The Unknown… It is a hexagon, because it is as rough and sharp… Like our human understanding. And even if you would expand it, it could never capture all the round nuances of the stream underlying it.

But here is the cool thing…

As you go up the ego development spiral, your domain of the known expands...

…and you get better of making sense of reality and your place within it:

The Known Over the Course of Personal Development

This idea is expressed above. As you grow and your ego develops, so does your domain of the known. The more you understand…

But even at the highest levels, the stream is always greater than your understanding…

Never forget that!

I guess by now you noticed that we are slowly building up the model…

To make it a bit cleaner, I am not going to map The Way of Being onto the spiral like in the image above, but only map out how the border between the known and unknown grows as you go up the spiral:

Expanding of the Known

Now FINALLY…

We have a fundamental understanding of how our ego develops and how this allows us to understand more and more of the dynamic and flowing nature of reality…

With this equipped…

…it is finally time to dive deeper into how we actually use our perspective to make sense of the world…

3. How We Perceive to Make Meaning:
The Perceptual Hierarchy

Sources

Quick check in!

How is it going with the reading?

It’s a lot… I know! But you are doing great!

Did you notice how slowly, the things start coming together? How the simple spiral starts to develop into something more exciting? Something more practical?

Now, this really starts to happen. We are now starting to build the bridge that connects the abstracts ideas that we discussed above…

…with the concrete principles that you can implement in your life, today.

I promise you…

…it will be amazing when everything comes together in the end!

So, keep on going and enjoy what I still have in store for you… 😉 

As I already outlined above…

…your perspective shapes how you see reality.

It is the way your ego makes sense of how you act in the world…

…and through that, it influences how you resist in the stream…

…and leave your mark on it.

And therefore, understanding how your perception is shaped (and how it shapes your actions) is absolutely crucial. Understanding this by itself – on an embodied level – will help you to grow beyond the 3rd person perspective that most people hold…

It will allow you to go into the postconventional stages of ego development (read The Science of Ego Development to fully get what that means 😉).

So, let’s have a look at the Perceptual Hierarchy…

The Perceptual Hierarchy

As you can see, the perceptual hierarchy is made up of four parts:

  • Action

  • Incentives

  • Values & Goals

  • and Mode of Being

And as you can see, the higher level of this hierarchy have an impact on the lower levels of this hierarchy…

Let’s explore how, by starting at the bottom…

3.1 Action

Your actions are the lowest level of the hierarchy. They are what you do on a daily basis.

They are external (you behaviour) and internal (your thoughts).

And they are absolutely crucial!

Actions are the end product of a prioritization process that starts at the top of the perceptual hierarchy…

Do you remember how your perspective is limited. How it can never fully capture reality?

Because of that, we need to prioritize. We need to make choices about what we attend to and what actions we engage in. We are limited beings. And so we need to make sure that we use our limited resources (attention & energy) in a good way.

That’s why your actions are a fundemental expression of who you are

…and so, we should choose wisely how we act…

This is where incentives come in…

3.2 Incentives

Incentives are cues in the environment.

Or more accurately: incentives are your interpretation of cues in the environment.

Imagine that you have made the goal to go to the gym. Your sport stuff is ready. You even already put on your shoes. But then your phone rings…

It’s your friends, inviting you for a night out…

What do you do?

Chances are, you throw your plans overboard and go binging with your friends…

Why is that?

Didn’t you say your goal is to get fit?

It turns out, that we can say one thing and mean something else. And in this case, you interpreted the cue (your friends) message as an incentive that is more attractive then going to the gym (and who can blame you for it…).

Now, this was one example – one simple cue. But now multiply this by 1000x. The environment is screaming at you with cues to interpret…

How do you decide which one’s to consider?

And even more important…

Which one’s to act on?

3.3 Values & Goals

This is where values and goals come in…

Do you remember how reality is infinite? And how our perspective is finite… Do you remember how that means that we need to prioritize how to act and think?

A big chunk of this prioritization process is determined at this level. This is why Values and Goals are so important… This is why everybody is talking about them.

Think back to the situation above. The environment is screaming at you! It want’s you to interpret it. But how do you decide?

By privileging some cues over others. This means that you are more likely to give some cues more attention than others. And in the same way, you are more likely to act on some cues and not on others.

This, is what it means to value something…

This is why action is the output of a prioritization process.

Here at this level you (or mostly your unconscious mind) decides what to attend to and what to act upon…

…based on what you value and what your goals are.

After all, a goal is just a particular future that you value.

Now, the risk here is to think that you know what you value. That you know what your goals are…

But why did you then not behave the way you planned? Why did you go drinking with your buddies (or did whatever else you promised yourself NOT TO DO)?

Because you don’t know yourself 100%. That’s why you are here. That’s why you are reading this. Because this framework tells you how to get to know deeper and deeper parts of you. So that you can make more meaning of the world. And act in alignment with what you truly value.

But at the moment…

…chances are that you are fairly blind to what you actually want…

Which means that you cannot fully be in charge our your perceptual hierarchy…

It means you are unaware of how you operate on a moment-to-moment basis.

It means that you don’t know the Mode of Being, that you are currently in.

3.4 Mode

The Mode is the highest level of the perceptual hierarchy. It has been described by many people. But here I will use the description of Erich Fromm:

  • Mode of Having

  • Mode of Being

Many thinkers have talked about the fact that it seems that we can Be in the world in two ways.

The first is the Mode of Having. It is the mode that makes us pursue things. It’s the mode that narrows our attention to a single thing, sets it as a goal, and interprets everything in relation to that goal.

The Mode of Being on the other hand is more open. It is less precise… Less aggressive. It is the mode of “taking things as they are”. It is the mode that allows us to simply experience. To notice what is going on. Not in relation to any goal. But just as things are… It is the mode that will allow you to expand your perspective…

…and year new levels of development…

Do you understand now why the Mode is at the highest level of the hierarchy?

Do you see that the mode that you are in clearly determines which goals you pursue and whether you set goals in the first place?

If you are in the mode of being, your perception shrinks around your goal. You interpret every cue of the environment in relation to that goal. Everything becomes either positive, irrelevant, or negative – for that goal.

The problem with this is that you are missing things. Like… a lot of things…

And this is not good.

If you don’t stop and evaluate which mode you are in at the moment…

…it might be that you quickly run into the walls of reality.

Because you oversaw a cue that was relevant for a goal that you were currently not pursuing…

If the goal is irrelevant, this might not be a problem. But if we are talking about an important goal, like being healthy, the consequences of missing a cue can be tremendous (literally death).

Lucky for you…

…as we go up the ladder, we can learn to be more and more aware of the mode that we are currently in…

4. How We Learn to Make More Meaning: Integrative Processing & Embodied Science

Resources

Now you understand the perceptual hierarchy…

Now that you understand it, we can go into the really cool stuff.

Because here’s the kicker:

As the influence of the perceptual hierarchy reliably goes top down…

…we can trace it back from the bottom up.

This is where Integrative Processing and Embodied Science come into play…

4.1 Emotional Cycles

There is a whole science about emotion and how to regulate them.

The good thing is, you don’t need all the science to take charge of your emotions…

…to truly start using them as an integrated part of your sense making process.

The only thing you need to understand for now is this:

The Cyclical Model of Emotional Processing

The figure above shows the cyclical model of emotional processing.

(note how I use the word “processing” instead of “regulation”. I feel the latter creates this understanding of having to control emotions while I hope that the former is more focusing on integrating our emotions)

The cycle starts with a situation. Something happens.

Then, within that situation you pay attention (remember that we have to prioritise what we attend to because our attention is limited).

When we attend, we start evaluating what we see. This is basically the incentives level of the perceptual hierarchy.

And finally, we respond. We engage in some behaviour or have a specific thought or feeling.

Until now, we are talking about a linear model: Situation → Attention → Evaluation → Response…

But with the last step – Reflection – we turn it into a cyclical model.

Reflecting on our emotions is what allows us to not only experience the our emotions…

…but to draw the right lesson from them…

…and act accordingly.

This, is Integrated Emotional Processing…

Or, for short, Integrated Processing…

4.2 Integrated Processing

Integrated processing is the highest level of emotion processing.

It is made up of three steps:

  1. Open Receptivity

  2. Curious Exploration

  3. Informed Responding

By engaging in these steps, we can overcome the urge to immediately act on our emotions or to suppress them without processing them fully. Either of these outcomes is not good… And Integrated Processing allows you to take your emotion processing to the next level.

Here is how this might look in practise:

Think about the cyclical model above:

Imagine you are in some situation (it really doesn’t matter what it is). Suddenly, you feel some strong emotion – let’s say anger or sadness.

In an instant you went through the first for stages of the cyclical model: Situation → Attention → Evaluation → Response (the emotion). But it happened so quickly, that you aren’t even fully aware what triggered this emotion or – more importantly – why it triggered this emotion.

This is where integrated processing comes in.

Rather than immediately acting on the emotion, you can go through the three steps above…

First, you simply acknowledge the emotion. You take a breath and notice that it feels like something…

Then, you go to the second step: curious exploration. Just pay attention to the feeling. How does it feel? Where does it sit in your body? Is it changing? Where did it come from?

This way, you are basically tracing back the way up the perceptual hierarchy to figure out what actually happened…

And once you are up there, the really cool thing can happen…

You go full circle via step 3: informed responding. Now that you understand this emotion by tracing it back up the perceptual hierarchy, you can now go down the hierarchy again, but this time fully conscious.

You decide how you respond.

This amazing idea is expressed in the illustration below:

Integrated Processing of Perception

This is what you did just now, over the last few sections:

  • You learned to understand the perceptual hierarchy AND

  • How to trace it back up, basically creating a cycle of emotional processing.

This is so powerful!

Especially when I give the following to you…

Adding Integrated Processing to the Ego Development Model

Isn’t that amazing!

How well this maps onto our development?

At the lower stages, you are just aware of your direct actions…

…but as you get better at reflecting (and taking the 3rd person perspective) you become aware of more and more levels of the Perceptual Hierarchy.

By going through cycle after cycle of integrated processing, you move up the spiral. You grow both laterally and vertically, and expand your domain of the known by doing so.

How awesome is that?

How far we have come…

We started super abstract with just a spiral…

And now we are here! With an understanding of both

  • the abstract theory

  • and the practical implications

But there is more…

4.3 Embodied Science

Embodied Science is the specific, practical steps you can take to move yourself up the stages bit by bit…

…and basically improve your life in any domain of your choosing.

It’s quite simple. What you do in science is…

  1. Come up with a Hypothesis

  2. Make an Experiment

  3. Evaluate your outcomes

  4. Learn what you need to learn to…

  5. …come up with the next Hypothesis

This is what scientists do more or less all day long.

And this is what you can do in the context of your own life:

Let’s say you have gone through a process of integrated processing and noticed that you are unhappy with a specific aspect in your life (e.g., having to do the dishes).

Based on this, you could hypothesise that if you buy a dishwasher, you will be happier because you don’t have to do something that annoys you.

If you have found a valid hypothesis, it’s time to run the experiment. Actually do what you specified in the hypothesis (e.g., buying a dishwasher) and see what your experience – your emotions – tell you.

Once you have done this it is time to evaluate whether the things happened that you hypothesize about. Do you actually feel happier? Then the cycle ends here and you can go on experimenting with another aspect of your life… If not, you can investigate what unexpected thing happened… You can educate yourself, either by going to some external sources, or, even better, by diving into Integrative Processing again.

And finally, once you have a new idea, you set a new hypothesis…

…and the cycle starts anew.

5. The Completed Model

An Integrated Model of Personal Growth

And here we are…

…look how far you have come in reading less that 6,000 words. You learned about:

  1. Ego Development

  2. How you can grow laterally and vertically

  3. The Nature of Human Reality (and why it is important to make meaning of it)

  4. How your perception shape your actions

  5. How you can step into this process through integrated processing

  6. How you can actively shape your life through embodied science

And finally…

  1. How all of this fits together holistically in an Integrated Model of Personal Growth…

How amazing is that?

Like, for real?!

Take a second and think how you can apply this to your own life…

  • What stage are you at / What level of perspective can you take?

  • How can you grow laterally? How can you grow vertically?

  • Do you know your boundary between the known and unknown? Do you have an embodied understanding of how you are a part of the infinite stream of reality?

  • How does your perception shape your actions? What mode are you most often in? How does this affect your values & goals? And how does that shape how you interpret the cues of the environment?

  • How can you practise integrated processing to close the loop of your perceptual hierarchy? How far up the hierarchy can you see at the moment? How could you practise to see higher?

  • And finally: How can you embody the principles of science to improve your life step-by-step, in a systematic fashion?

Ask yourself these questions…

…if you want to, you can dive deeper at any of the provided links. They will lead you to other essays that dive deeper into the particular topic that called out to you.

But before you go…

…I still have a bonus for you…

6. Bonus: Heroic Attitudes

Sources

The three articles above didn’t really fit into the model.

And yet, what I tried to express in them is hugely important for applying this model in your own life…

…because they are about the right attitudes towards life itself!

Or, better put: in these articles I am outlining the attitudes and ways of looking at the world that help me on a daily basis to push through all the difficulties that life throws at me.

And I hope that they can inspire you, or remind you, to look at the world in a way that is beneficial to the flourishing and growth of you, the people around you, your community, nation, and ultimately, the world…

That’s why I am writing this here. To help you play your part in this amazing process that we call Life and Existence :)

In Become a Parent to the World, I talk about how parents are heroes because they notice something in the world (their kid) that has potential and take it onto themselves to foster this potential into actuality. I admire parents so much! The job they do is so tough… So under-appreciated today. And yet, we can learn so much from them. You can become a parent to the world… either by having a kid… or by seeing something else in your environment that is immature and needs some fostering to grow up… Whatever it is, take on the role of parent to the world!

In Why You Will Always Need Stories, I talk about the forgotten magic and power of stories… These days, we seem to only take on stories as entertainment. But we forgot that stories are there to learn from them. Stories tap into our ability to learn from others – to imitate. And because stories are about heroes… we can learn from them how to be heroes in our own life…

And finally…

In Why You Will Always Need Faith, I take a deeper dive into the inherent uncertainty that comes from being a limited being in an infinite world and look at how faith can help to overcome and integrate this uncertainty. I am not talking about the traditional religious faith here. But a heroic orientation within and towards the world that helps me on a daily basis to take on the challenges of the world…

With that being said, I hope I gave you something on the way that you can apply to your life!

As I wrote in the beginning: put this on your re-read list. Come back to it every now and then… Because as you engage with these ideas, you will change. And when you change, so will your relation to this text and the model presented within it. You will be able to learn new things. Which hopefully will allow you to share more of your greatness – what you have to offer – with the world.

In line with this, I have a small favor to ask:

If you liked this… If you found it helpful…

If this really added something to your understanding of life and your place within it…

I would highly appreciate if you would share this essay with someone who could get something similar out of it!

My whole goal is to help people make sense of the world and to provide them with tools for navigating within it. To help them share what greatness they have to offer! Because we definitely need as many people as possible to rise up and become true modern-day heroes!

I would be eternally grateful if you would help me out with that!

And with that being said…

I have given you all I can for now…

Now Go and Do!

Much Success With It!

All the best,
Niklas