What do you think?
Rate this book
The Elegant Self: A Radical Approach to Personal Evolution for Greater Influence In Life
"Clear, lucid and powerful! The Elegant Self is a must read if you are interested in the further reaches of development." Ken Wilber author of The Integral Vision Grow Beyond Conventional Adulthood and Distinctively Give Your Gifts. The Elegant Self offers a unique perspective on the future of you. Explore adulthood through a new lens as you tour the many dangers facing our world today. Gain rare clarity into some of the highest stages of development. Learn how the trap of completeness may be holding your influence in the world back in virtually every facet of life. Enjoy this rare invitation into the courage for you to become more of an elegant self. Save thousands of dollars by understanding the origin of inadequacy. Go beyond the limitations of the autonomous self most adults are stuck in. Free yourself from the trap of completeness. Leverage paradox to fuel greater influence and impact in the world. Discover never-before-seen ways to free yourself from limiting habits. Rob McNamara is an author, advisor, and leadership coach with an expertise in adult development and human performance. He is a co-founder of the advisory firm Delta Developmental, serves on faculty at the Ivey School of Business' LIFT Advanced Coaching Program and is a former Harvard University Teaching Fellow. McNamara currently advises and coaches initiatives advancing US National Security efforts and provides educational direction for individuals, organizations and governments navigating civilizational transitions.
163 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 3, 2013
14 people are currently reading
35 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 23, 2016
A few sparkling quotes from arguably one of the best books on personal development I've read:
When the adult mind fails to cultivate his or her own internal development, a compensation is often made. This is when the drive for more psychological power over one’s inner life gets subverted into the drive to obtain, possess and retain various forms of social and relational power.
...loneliness is a simple, pervasive consequence of consolidating an identity around being separate and autonomous…..injunctions stemming from a presumed primacy of selfhood often reinforce and further entrench autonomous functioning…Loneliness is a fuel or dissonance that can be a powerful core process for outgrowing the constraints of autonomy……
In course of a larger trust with conflict, the fantasy of resolution no longer governs the self’s attempts for working with conflict……..Conflict is a way to recapture complexity. It can serve as a reminder that we have an engrained habituation to formulate positions and pretend for them to be complete…
(the self-transforming mind) allows the problem( s) to co-create and co-construct systemic transformations that are in an ongoing creative dialogue with the underlying tensions.
The self-without-form is empty, yet this mysterious open and unconditioned seat of subjectivity is intimately connected with the self-as-form……the self-as-form provides the essential seat of incompleteness while the self-without-form offers the second taste of completeness…….The grand liberation of formlessness is an integrated gesture of intimately engaging with and as the form of your life.
Elegance involves the fluid embrace of polarity……Elegance involves an ongoing exploration of polarity with some polarities being worked with reflectively and retroactively, while others have already been integrated into your mind’s ability to navigate them in immediacy. The greater influence of elegance moves freely between dramatic destabilizing changes and rigorously defended homeostasis.
Elegance is often born from an intentional confrontation with the many layers of habituation in order to free up your ability to participate more skillfully with novelty.
Elegance as you is a creative flexibility of mediated and unmediated intelligence.
Biasing (premature) integration diminishes the creative dynamism between polarities and paradoxically inhibits higher order integration and the free functioning of the extremities inside polarities.
The larger proficiency in life, in every domain, is a dialectical oscillation between effort and surrender.
A complex matrix of thoughts, reasons, feelings, intuitions and contrasting possibilities are brought together, providing shifting integrative views of self and reality – as ‘transient approximations’.
Grace and your most fierce devoted effort merge and co-create something inexplicable.
…..the deconstruction of habituation involves a meta-analysis of your automated and often unexamined mental scripts, which tend to close down the aperture of experience so that you feel less by thinking more....
...Yet, one of the pervasive traps many adults fail to navigate successfully—sometimes for decades—is this movement toward the body, feelings, and intuitions at the exclusion and expense of the discursive intellect. This false substitution privileges feelings over thinking....
The divorce between body and mind, thinking and feeling, thought and emotion is a costly one. It is a shift away from the integrative capacity elegance demonstrates.
You cannot remain fixated in a struggle to get out of habituation….. this creative synthesis of habituation and freedom or the self-without-form— which is innately unconditioned— and the “unique teleological conditioning” of who you are yields new performance capacities.
Courage’s broader vulnerable heart and willingness to openly approach that which triggers our most basic habituated closures and avoidance is a facet of a larger maturity that you can participate with more consistently…….because some of the greatest pleasures, most powerful gifts, and most enriching purposes that can co-create you are also intertwined with that which invokes the experience of annihilation.
The elegant self is here; perhaps it merely awaits our larger participation. Be explored by elegance...
When the adult mind fails to cultivate his or her own internal development, a compensation is often made. This is when the drive for more psychological power over one’s inner life gets subverted into the drive to obtain, possess and retain various forms of social and relational power.
...loneliness is a simple, pervasive consequence of consolidating an identity around being separate and autonomous…..injunctions stemming from a presumed primacy of selfhood often reinforce and further entrench autonomous functioning…Loneliness is a fuel or dissonance that can be a powerful core process for outgrowing the constraints of autonomy……
In course of a larger trust with conflict, the fantasy of resolution no longer governs the self’s attempts for working with conflict……..Conflict is a way to recapture complexity. It can serve as a reminder that we have an engrained habituation to formulate positions and pretend for them to be complete…
(the self-transforming mind) allows the problem( s) to co-create and co-construct systemic transformations that are in an ongoing creative dialogue with the underlying tensions.
The self-without-form is empty, yet this mysterious open and unconditioned seat of subjectivity is intimately connected with the self-as-form……the self-as-form provides the essential seat of incompleteness while the self-without-form offers the second taste of completeness…….The grand liberation of formlessness is an integrated gesture of intimately engaging with and as the form of your life.
Elegance involves the fluid embrace of polarity……Elegance involves an ongoing exploration of polarity with some polarities being worked with reflectively and retroactively, while others have already been integrated into your mind’s ability to navigate them in immediacy. The greater influence of elegance moves freely between dramatic destabilizing changes and rigorously defended homeostasis.
Elegance is often born from an intentional confrontation with the many layers of habituation in order to free up your ability to participate more skillfully with novelty.
Elegance as you is a creative flexibility of mediated and unmediated intelligence.
Biasing (premature) integration diminishes the creative dynamism between polarities and paradoxically inhibits higher order integration and the free functioning of the extremities inside polarities.
The larger proficiency in life, in every domain, is a dialectical oscillation between effort and surrender.
A complex matrix of thoughts, reasons, feelings, intuitions and contrasting possibilities are brought together, providing shifting integrative views of self and reality – as ‘transient approximations’.
Grace and your most fierce devoted effort merge and co-create something inexplicable.
…..the deconstruction of habituation involves a meta-analysis of your automated and often unexamined mental scripts, which tend to close down the aperture of experience so that you feel less by thinking more....
...Yet, one of the pervasive traps many adults fail to navigate successfully—sometimes for decades—is this movement toward the body, feelings, and intuitions at the exclusion and expense of the discursive intellect. This false substitution privileges feelings over thinking....
The divorce between body and mind, thinking and feeling, thought and emotion is a costly one. It is a shift away from the integrative capacity elegance demonstrates.
You cannot remain fixated in a struggle to get out of habituation….. this creative synthesis of habituation and freedom or the self-without-form— which is innately unconditioned— and the “unique teleological conditioning” of who you are yields new performance capacities.
Courage’s broader vulnerable heart and willingness to openly approach that which triggers our most basic habituated closures and avoidance is a facet of a larger maturity that you can participate with more consistently…….because some of the greatest pleasures, most powerful gifts, and most enriching purposes that can co-create you are also intertwined with that which invokes the experience of annihilation.
The elegant self is here; perhaps it merely awaits our larger participation. Be explored by elegance...
January 23, 2017
Good and difficult
I started easier than i finished the book. The content and concepts are for sure very interesting but if the reader is not informed about integral and developmental psychology it can get ready difficult to read and grasp what is being transmitted. Anyways, I appreciate the author and his work.
I started easier than i finished the book. The content and concepts are for sure very interesting but if the reader is not informed about integral and developmental psychology it can get ready difficult to read and grasp what is being transmitted. Anyways, I appreciate the author and his work.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews