What is needed for a leader to become mentally mature?

In the previous article, I talked about how the key to leadership growth is not a technical challenge, but an adaptive challenge, and that mental maturity, accompanied by a transformation of values, is important.

What should leaders focus on to develop themselves?

In this article, I want to talk about how to realize mental maturity.

Mental maturity requires the experience of struggling with contradictions

It is said that much of a leader’s growth comes from “experience”. Lominger, a leadership research organization, says that 70% of leader growth is due to experience, 20% due to inspiration from others, and 10% due to training. While there are factors such as influence from others and training, I think you may agree with the realization that experience develops leaders.

So does any experience make a leader grow? But it turns out that this is not always the case. I’m sure you can think of some leaders around you who grow as they gain experience, and others who have gained experience but not much growth.

In the previous article, I mentioned that mental maturity is a “staged transformation” towards an integration of contradictions. In the process of harmonizing our true selves with our surroundings, we face the contradictions that arise, and in the process of integrating those contradictions, a transformation of the value and belief level occurs.

Therefore, the experience that leads to mental maturity needs to be an experience of contradiction. Essentially speaking, it is a contradiction between living in subjective truth and living in harmony with our surroundings.

To put it plainly, there is a contradiction between the way we want to be and reality, a contradiction between the way we want to be and the way people around us want us to be, and a contradiction between the way we want to be and the way the company expects us to be.

The experience of struggling with such contradictions is sometimes described as “an experience of breaking out of one’s shell” because being able to overcome it involves mental maturity = increased generosity and forgiveness.

Growth as a leader
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Growth with mental maturity
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Increased generosity and forgiveness
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Growth with a change in value and belief level
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Growth involving the overcoming of adaptive challenges,
not technical challenges

What you need to foster your growth as a leader
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A breaking-out-of-one’s-shell experience
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A contradictory and conflicting experience
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Experience facing the contradiction between living in subjective truth and living in harmony with one’s surroundings.

A common story of overcoming contradictions and struggles

Since I started my own business, I’ve overcome a lot of contradictions and conflicting experiences to get to where I am today. One of the biggest ones was the struggle between myself, who tried to live with the idea that I had to do everything by myself in the end having a huge amount of debt as a personal guarantee, and myself, who wanted to create values as a team by constructively collaborating with the people around me in harmony with each other.

(I talk more about that contradiction and the story of the conflict in another article, which you can also read here)

My own story (2): “The President’s Isolation” that I created by myself

As I confronted many struggles with contradictions, I began to realize that even though the content of the contradictions at the time was different, the stories of overcoming each conflict had something in common.

That’s when I came across Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Zen’s Ten Bulls.

In The Hero’s Journey, mythologist Joseph Campbell, while studying myths from around the world, discovered that they share a common pattern. Broadly speaking, the pattern is that the hero, who is in a dull reality, embarks on a journey of encountering the unknown and, with the help of mentors and peers, overcomes many challenges to gain new powers and, at the end of the journey, overcomes the greatest challenge of all to gain honor and glory and return to his original place as his new self.

The Hero’s Journey is said to be the archetype of not only a common storyline in mythology, but also a prototype for the stories of hit movies. For example, George Lucas used the Hero’s Journey as a reference in part to come up with a Star Wars storyline.

The other, “The Ten Bulls,” is an introduction to Zen in the Chinese era of Song Dynasty. It is a metaphor for the human mind, on which there is a bull, which is usually docile but can be very powerful when out of control. By describing the process of finding the bull, taming it, and becoming one with it, the book shows the way to spiritual enlightenment.

What they both have in common is that they depict (essentially) the inner struggle of a person and describe the process of overcoming that struggle.

In The Hero’s Journey, the challenges may be facing with a different monster or a villain, but what it essentially describes is the inner life of the hero. The hero’s inner conflict is depicted in the form of a confrontation between the hero and the villain.

In “The Ten Bulls,” the inner conflict is also depicted as a process of searching for, finding, taming, and uniting a bull (i.e., one’s mind).

The reason why I talk about stories of overcoming conflicts is because it is easier to face the inner conflicts of contradictions by imagining such a common story, or story archetype.

You can prepare your mind by thinking, “I am on a journey of XX theme, and the next phase will be XX.” In this way, you can reduce the risk of panic, such as “Why on earth is this happening to me?”

I’ve talked before about how when you struggle with inner contradictions, it’s good to be aware of two selves: self as the film actor struggling with the contradictions and another self as the film director observing the struggle.

By imagining “The Hero’s Journey” or “The Ten Bulls,” you, as the actor/hero of the story, can become more immersed in the story, and you, as the director of the story, can observe the outcome of the story from a bird’s-eye view, more calmly.

As a result, the process of conflict as the actor/hero becomes a deeper, richer experience, and the process of observing the conflict as the director becomes calmer and more confident.

Another benefit of imagining these story archetypes is the timeline. In a previous article, I mentioned that the transformation of the stages of mental maturity described in the Constructive Developmental Theory can take years, sometimes more than a decade, to occur.

Although each person’s perception is different, I believe that growth on a scale of a few years or ten years is too long to be aware of on a daily basis. This is not to say that the stages described in the Constructive Developmental Theory are meaningless. I think they are very useful as a map of the entirety of mental maturity, and I think they are very significant in knowing the current stage of one’s consciousness.

However, as I mentioned earlier, I am aware of the challenge that the developmental stages of the Constructive Developmental Theory may be a bit too long a time frame to be aware of on a day-to-day level. On the contrary, I think the common story of “The Hero’s Journey” and “The Ten Bulls” can be viewed as a time axis of months or a year, and it is easy to imagine that we are on a journey with a theme of “XX” and that the next phase of “XX” is waiting for us.

(As for the Ten Bulls, I think the process from the first “Searching for the Bull” to the seventh “Forgetting the Bull” can be viewed as a few months to a year, but the elements after the eighth that cannot be described in a time frame.)

In this article, we talked about how leaders need to experience inner contradictions and conflicts in order to mature mentally, and how being aware of the archetype of the story of the process of conflict can help them to overcome it.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how we can create the experience of inner contradiction and conflict.

Here are the quests of the day. (If you’d like, please share your thoughts in the comments.)

・What inner conflict, if any, did you experience that allowed you to grow mentally?

・When you apply the process of overcoming inner conflicts to “The Hero’s Journey” or “The Ten Bulls”, what kind of scene comes to mind?

Bunshiro Ochiai