Old Dogs
Our beautiful German Shorthair showing her age & wisdom!
“Old Dogs Can’t Learn New Tricks”....Or Can They???
That saying, along with “zebras don’t change their stripes,” and more all seem to be sharing with us the “wisdom" that dogs, zebras and presumably humans, do not change once they are grown. So where does this “wisdom” come from and is it really true?
Up until the last 40 years or so, it has been the conventional wisdom that human cognitive development followed the same trajectory as physical development - a steep curve of growth and development until the early 20’s and then a plateau thereafter. The research in the past 40 years has completely flipped that conventional wisdom out the door and we now know that mental complexity capabilities and development does have the potential for growth in adults. Two prominent researchers in the new understanding of growth in the field of adult learning/development are Robert Kegan, Ph.D. and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Ed.D., along with their colleagues from Harvard University. They focus not only on the “can” adult learning continue but also have done great work in the “how” of the process and frameworks to help adults with the growth.
The new model of adult human cognitive development reveals that humans can (but not necessarily will) continue the growth in mental complexity and that there are three distinct plateaus in the growth. Each plateau of complexity is characterized by very different ways of making sense of the world and operating within it. I am not going to get into the details here but what is important to understand is that the old axioms do not hold up and indeed, we CAN grow and change! There is a catch though - it is not easy and it takes a lot of work! As it turns out, just like our bodies have an immune system to protect them from outside harm, our brain has its own protection system and it has evolved to “protect” the brain from outside influences, aka CHANGE! This “immunity-to-change” system has important purposes but also significant implications that we encounter when we want to make a change (e.g. lose weight, “be happier”, decrease stress, get more creative, etc). Understanding the immunity-to-change system and how it works against us when we are trying to make intentional changes is very important - it is no wonder that we rarely are able to find a path to truly grow our mental complexity to the next level!
So where does that leave us? Well, we now know that old dogs can learn new tricks! And yes, we can make really profound changes in how we see the world, how we interact with others, and how we operate - all “new tricks”. But the real “trick” requires us to overcome our built-in immunity-to-change. This is not a matter of willpower or “powering through.” We can all just look at last New Year’s Resolution and how did that work out? There are usually paradigm and mindset shifts required that mean we have to uncover our blind spots, be willing to dig into our unique “what makes me tick” inner workings, and start to find some “ah-ha” revelations that have been keeping us from making the changes we really want to achieve. Working with a coach who is experienced in the immunity-to-change model can help us with the process of uncovering our hidden immunities and help us to find that path to the lasting changes needed to help us grow to our full potential!
Recommended Reading:
Kegan, Robert, and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Review Press, 2009
Kegan, Robert, et al. An Everyone Culture Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Boston, Massachusetts Harvard Business Review Press, 2016.
Recommended Listen: