Are you a Gold thinker?

 Are you a "Gold“ Thinker? Ever heard of navy thinking, copper thinking, jade thinking? And, why should you bother anyway?

Just continue reading the following paragraphs please. I promise you will not regret it. Instead I promise you that your curiosity will get triggered. What a start into a fullfilling weekend!

My last question before telling you various insightful news: Ever heard of Clare W Graves? Yep, you are absolutely right: He is the great explorer of human nature, the father of the Gravesian theory.

These are some of his words: "The psychology of the adult human being is an unfolding, ever-emergent process marked by subordination of older behavior systems to newer, higher order systems. The mature person tends to change his psychology continuously as the conditions of his existence change. Each successive stage or level of existence is a state through which people may pass on the way to other states of equilibrium. When a person is centralized in one of the states of equilibrium, he has a psychology which is particular to that state. His emotions, ethics and values, biochemistry, state of neurological activation, learning systems, preference for education, management and psychotherapy are all appropriate to that state."

How cool is that? Our own, individual psychology and nature is not set and stable for all times. On the contrary: It is flexible and adoptable to the person´s evolutional state. It is like an ever emergent open system. Graves discovered eight fundamentally different ways of thinking. Eight different ways of making sense of the world. These thinking systems, he argued, would represent eight distinct levels of human existence. The first level being “Autistic Thinking” and the highest level, the eigth level, being “Holistic Thinking.”

This research and thinking model is also central to John Robert´s beautifully stimulating book “Igniting Inspiration” in which he proposes a new paradigm for creating inspirational communication tailored to the different 8 “target groups.”

Robert argues that the seventh level, the Gold thinking level (which Graves called “Systemic Thinking”), gives our species the chance of surviving. Gold, he argues, is the first level of thinking that rises above ideology. The gold thinkers´theme for living is “Express self for what self desires and others need, but never at the expense of others, and in a manner that all life can continue to exist.” This requires in his opinion that people express their individuality while still recognizing and respecting the individuality of others.

Gold trusts in life itself and its own intuitive assessment of other people. Gold is not seeking social approval, personal advantage or a sense of absolute truth. Gold is not seeking anything but an opportunity to contribute. Their faith in life is such that, even when they screw up, they always come away with a valuable lesson.

Representative examples are for Robert the so-called “Cultural Creatives” like Barack Obama, Google, David Bohm, Apple, collaborative innovaters and the sustainability movement.

Are you a Gold thinker? Do you know anyone being a Gold thinker? Thanks for sharing with us!

Andreas von der Heydt