COLLABORATION AS A HIGH LEVEL COMMUNITY SKILL

Neuro-Semantics emerged originally from the very special premise. In the words that I have often use the original premise is this: We can do so much more together than alone or apart. Now I believe that. I don’t a lot of people don’t, but I do.

I believe it within myself and you. This same idea centrally highlights the importance of cooperating within yourself so that what you can achieve something more with all of your “parts” when you meta-state yourself. That is, just as you create new gestalts (i.e., meta-state experiences that are “more than the sum of the parts”) by bringing together and synergizing different facets, you generate new creativity in your personality. Similarly, together we can do more together as a community than we can individually.

The point here in singular: Alone you can do things, and achieve many things, yet if you really want to achieve something great, if you want to invent or create something of lasting excellence, you are going to need to do so within a community. You can’t build a cathedral alone. You can’t build a pyramid by yourself. The industrial revolution wasn’t launched by a single person, but many. And this means cooperation as you get along with others and from that cooperation comes true collaboration. That means the combining of minds and hearts to achieve a shared outcome.

Collaboration is a developmental achievement. A long time before that, we strive to reach normalcy and become “normal” or “average.” First we want to belong, to be accepted, to not be weird. But then, after awhile we find that being normal is not as satisfying as it seemed prior to reaching it. The next step, developmentally, is to become unique, special, to assert your differences and to stand out as your own person. That’s the next developmental step and so it should be. Developmentally, that’s what comes next. But that is not the end state. There’s more beyond that.

It was at that developmental step that the Human Potential Movement (HPM) reached and it was there also where the movement died. Too many individualists! Too many people “doing their own thing” and unable to find the flexibility to work together. And that led, in the United States, to what was dubbed “The Me Generation.”

True enough, this was a step forward out of the bland conformity stage of getting up to average, fitting in, and belonging because we all complied and conformed. Yet no matter how large the group of individualists would grow, when there’s no unifying frame to pull people together and enable them to get their egos out of the way and live for something bigger than self, then the

collection of individualists can never become a true community. This happened to the HPM in the 1980s and led to the demise of that movement. And it pretty much characterizes the majority of people who have learned NLP, they are part of a large number of that collection, but they are hardly a community.

In terms of personality development, a community does not arise merely because there’s plenty of people who are “their own person.” It is a legitimate stage for a group to go through where individuals are able to stand apart, think their own thoughts, be truly independent and no longer “needy” on the group. But the group must evolve beyond this stage. It is only a stage and in itself will not support a movement.

The next step of development is using the autonomy of the independence of people to move to an integrated form of community where inter-dependent people come together to cooperate for a higher purpose. It is, in fact, the higher purpose that creates true community and enables people to actually get their egos out of the way. The higher level intentionality gives everyone something bigger than self to live for, to be a part of something that will transcend self and one’s life, to leave a larger level legacy behind. Without the higher vision, values, and mission the group of people is a group of highly creative people, but not a team, not a community.

And this leads to a higher quality cooperating for an experience of collaboration. In this stage, each of us act and contribute to bring out the best in others. So we think about others, we their thoughts and feelings into account. We unite my internal and external resources with theirs building relationships of trust, communion, integration, integrity, etc. in order to experience a higher level collaboration as we share brainstorming, decision-making, and the actions of innovation.

To achieve a community like this, we have to learn to work with the group dynamics that emerge when people come together. We have to create a functional and situational leadership that develops the sensitivity of knowing when to step forward, when to step back so someone else can step forward, etc.

The fact that the first Human Potential Movement did not move to that level, that the field of NLP has not moved there, and that other groups never moved to that level tells me that collaboration must be a lot harder for most people than I realize. It is truly for grown-up people and not children. What I am now realizing is that is has to be founded on Self-Actualization Psychology and that it requires self-actualizing leaders. A single individual cannot do this by him or herself. I can’t do that by myself. It takes a community of self-actualizing people to do this! And now you know one of the central things we are working to create in Neuro-Semantics.

Neurons now on Facebook: You can now share the Meta Reflections with friends on facebook. http://www.facebook.com/lmichaelhallneurosemantics — (Thanks to Nathalie Himmelrich).