Is your Adaptive Child or your Functional Adult running the show?[1] This is a crucial question whether you’re a leader or if you simply face complexity in your personal or professional life.
(Remember! All significant relationships are complex circumstances.)
The Adaptive Child endures or confronts its world using a fear-based, reactive operating system. The Functional Adult engages using a passion-based, creative operating system.[2]
When we were young, the Adaptive Child created strategies to endure or avoid difficult circumstances. Maybe a dysfunctional family or some sort of trauma. These strategies are typically brilliant because they tend to work very well. They help us persevere. They are always formulated unconsciously, and they tend to serve for long periods of time. (All of which makes them hard to let go of.)
But contexts change. Roles change. You’re a physician now, you’re a leader, or you’re a parent. The Adaptive-Child strategies have become anachronisms, brilliant strategies that once served but begin to work against you.
Most people are unaware that their Adaptive Child is controlling their thinking, feelings, and behavior. And most organizations are oblivious to the subsequent “staggering” waste of their most precious resource, the cognitive and emotional energies of their people.
Carl Jung implores us to be aware, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”
The smartest people on the planet can be controlled by their Adaptive-Child. The brilliant surgeon, the scientist, the executive. It has nothing to do with intelligence or level of education.
Self-doubt, avoidance, unnecessary conflict, anxiety, depression, even suicidal ideation. These are often Adaptive Child strategies.
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Fern EPC is the Adaptive Development Fast Track for Physicians and Executives.
[1] Concepts from Terry Real’s Real Life Therapy.
[2] Creative and reactive operating systems, concepts from the Leadership Circle.
