As the training industry has grown over the past 20 years, many organizations have taken on the learning and development of their leaders and employees. Did you know that two-thirds of corporate training budgets go to traditional and costly formal training programs? Yet, 64% of business leaders believe it is informal learning programs which drive the greatest business value? This misaligned spending leaves limited dollars for informal learning, such as coaching programs, knowledge sharing, social learning, and mentoring – all of which have significantly higher business value and are much more cost-efficient to employ. What is behind this belief? Why are organizations so committed to spending that hasn't yielded the desired results - greater employee and leadership capability and capacity?

These questions have been with me professionally for some time now.  About four years ago I decided to dive into them and became a student of change.  I began asking "Why is it that people aren’t changing when they go through these programs? Why doesn't training stick? What makes sustaining new behavior so difficult when the motivation to change is so high?"   And not just for others, for me too? I read a multitude of books on change, studied with some of the great teachers of our generation, and most of all I've become a student of human behavior. Watching and observing myself and others in action - doing the same thing over and over, getting the same results we've always gotten, and getting frustrated that nothing's different.

Child psychology has taught us that there are stages of development that go from infancy to young adulthood. With each of these stages there are cognitive, emotional and physical milestones that must be met in order to move to the next stage of complexity. We are now learning through adult development psychologists AND neuroscientists that development doesn't end at young adulthood as was once thought. There are increased levels of adult development that also have cognitive, emotional, and physical milestones that must be met to reach these higher capacities for complexity (leading to what Maslow called Individuation). A big difference I see is that as a child our bodies propelled us into the next stage. Once we reach adulthood we need to actively make the choice to continue to evolve to higher levels of consciousness.

So why aren't more adults choosing these higher levels of consciousness? Why do we so often seem to be stuck? There is emerging medical and psychological research to help us here too.  Researchers are finding that it is our mindset, unexamined and engrained beliefs, assumptions, and habits from our earlier stages of development, that are often guiding our behavior in the current moment. These engrained habits show up in our thoughts, our relationships, and the way we communicate and influence the world around us.   AND they are usually invisible to us. We often don't even realize we're acting out an old pattern and expecting a different outcome. Or, we are acting out an old pattern which no longer works or serves us and the situation well. Yet, we keep going, keep pushing, and keep demanding of others. Why? And more so, what can we do about this?

One of my favorite quotes from R.D. Laing is "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."  The starting point for all of us, whether CEO, a middle manager, a parent, or a student – is to begin to notice.