INsight/ Beyond Your Role
/Photo by Good Faces on Unsplash.
Manila, 10 July 2025 — Who are you beyond your role and self-image?
Story
It happened in 1982. An idea burst on the international scene that human development doesn’t stop at adolescence. Professor Robert Kegan’s book The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development shocked a generation of developmental psychologists in the West. And rightly so.
In the rest of the world, however, including in China, Japan, Korea, Southeast and South Asia, and the Middle East, Kegan’s idea wasn’t seen as completely new. They had long developed models of human growth that continued into and throughout adulthood.
For leaders today, both the Eastern and the Western traditions hold great value. Our mission as leaders is to keep growing as adults even after we have developed a self-image (a set of conditioned ego structures) and have chosen to identify (and thereby limit) ourselves with certain roles, both professionally (like engineer, doctor, lawyer, CEO, coach) and at home (like father, mother, son, daughter, etc.). In truth, we are not that self-image and those roles.
Challenge
So who are we really? And how can continued adult development help us to discover that? As leaders, we can inquire into this at several levels. First, with continued adult development, we can find many possible career transitions. Think of Professor Arthur Brooks research on careers, reported in his book From Strength to Strength. They concern changes of roles, not what lies beyond those roles.
We can also take our inquiry deeper, and much deeper. As we discover more about our True Nature, we can transform into more effective leaders who make more of a difference and generate more impact. Both Eastern and Western traditions offer deep insights in how this can work. We decided to put that to the test in the Grow3Leaders community of practice this week, with the question “Who are you beyond your roles and self-image?”
The responses surprised many. For example, members shared that they witnessed their true natures as: the gentle strike of sun that finds its way through clouds, as rocks providing a foundation, as water that adapts, as rivers flowing through life, as a source of spontaneous creativity for human and planetary Love and Light, and, perhaps most profoundly, as a presence that just is. They saw this inquiry as an important step to advance in our human development.
Question
Our question, “Who are you beyond your roles and self-image?” is more important than you may think. Looking around us, we are witnessing that a regression to narrower worldviews is becoming more popular, from kosmocentric and worldcentric back to ethnocentric (us vs. them) and plain egocentric reasoning by some leaders.
Seen from the framework of Professor Carol Gilligan, a leading psychologist and developmentalist, what we are witnessing shows a regression from the higher adult developmental stage of universal care to the more narrow-minded stages of care for others (our in-group, especially) and care for self. This is a worrisome development.
The much better way of solving the complex world problems we face today is, of course, to keep advancing on our journey of adult human development, and not to give in to calls for regression. To do that, we need leaders with a deep insight into who they truly are, beyond limiting beliefs about their roles and conditioned self-image. Interested? Then you’re welcome to join us on the journey.
P.S. Diya Shrestha, Fany Wedahuditama, and Zaki Shubber contributed to this article.