Want to see a magic trick? Let me see if I can blow your mind with this. But first, let's set a little context.
Good things happen when our self matches our environment
Elsewhere on this site, I explain a common misconception about Kegan stages:
The stages are a map, not a game to win.
People are best off when their developmentally native stage matches the demands of their life circumstances. E.g. If life in Stage 3 is going smoothly, why go through the upheaval of a stage change and introduce friction and misunderstanding into one’s environment?
Today, most adults reach and stay in Stage 3. However, many modern jobs, like management, operations, and engineering demand a Stage 4 organization. As societies become less role-bound and unified in their expectations, Stage 4 becomes more adaptive there too.
Many of people's largest problems can be resolved by evolving to match the demands of their environment. But whether that means progressing to a higher stage or re-integrating strategies from lower stages is entirely situationally dependent.
Further, there's evidence to suggest that people do not need to developmentally progress to get many of the benefits of later stages. Rather, people can learn to apply the patterns when and where they are most useful.
I'll repeat the most important line of that: People are best off when their developmentally native stage matches the demands of their life circumstances!
What's difficult, though, is that our modern lives includes all kinds of people and situations and challenges. So even if our native stage is fairly adapative to our environment, we might still need to code-switch into other stage patterns regularly.
The difficulty of reintegration
Now let's talk about why this is so difficult.
Developing the sight of a higher stage is cognitively taxing, and it breaks our current frames, so we feel confused and lost. Often for years. This objectively sucks, so if someone has pushed themselves through this, you can reasonably expect that there was something badly wrong they were trying to escape from. The old stage was no longer working.
Given this, it makes sense that as we reach for the next stage or shortly after we get there, we'll have bad feelings about the old one. E.g. Stage 3s might look with disdain at Stage 2's selfishness and callousness. Or stage 4s might look with disdain at Stage 3's irrationality and disorganization.
Once we've developed the feeling that previous stages are bad and wrong, it's very difficult to tap back into their wisdom, even when situations call for them!
The magic trick
Now, the reason I'm calling this a magic trick is because it's kind of exciting, but like magic it is also a bit of illusion. No one framework will ever encompass the whole truth of the world (many important things will always be left out).
That said, it's shocking how cleanly you can map the self-help industry to the Kegan stages. And it's sort of amazing how branding and marketing are used to keep our biases against non-native stages at bay.
Here's a bunch of examples:
Kasia Urbaniak teaches power to women. Her framework takes women who are deeply people-pleasey in Kegan Stage 3 and gives them a safe container to reintegrate their Kegan Stage 2 selfishness. This is branded in such a way that it doesn't set off their Kegan-stage-2-is-bad alarms (arguably you can credit this to how she continually reaffirms Stage 3 values). And in the process, since the framework and exercises call for metacognition, it leaves them in the doorway of Stage 4.
The Hormozis are business moguls who teach an audience of small business owners how to move from Stage 3 to Stage 4 by promoting "systems over feelings." They preach about putting your long-term values ahead of your short-term ones and carrying out the plan even if you don't currently feel like it. Stage 3s are often horrified by 4-patterned thinking, but the desire to improve QOL through wealth is a huge motivation. From there, they're also able to sneak in 4-patterned relationship advice and more.
Joe Hudson teaches techniques for bettering one's relationship with themselves and others, making better decisions, etc. His audience is already native 4 (Silicon Valley elites, founders, and other intelligent try-hards), so he’s all about reintegrating Stage 3 by restoring a connection to one's in-the-moment feelings and intuitions. Because he's a powerful-looking guy and has such high-profile clients, his approach doesn't trip people's suspicions about Kegan 3 irritationality but rather feels like something totally new and novel.
Byron Katie used to be more popular; I loved her books years ago. I think she's an excellent example of someone who has spent her career spreading 5-patterned ideas. Speaking for myself, I can say that her work felt more like a spot-treatment, because I didn't have the developmental underpinnings for it to usher me to Stage 5. Nonetheless, the way she encourages people to deliberately look beyond their own frames is extremely 5-coded and has helped a lot of people despite being such a far reach stage-wise.
In my circles in San Francisco, a lot of people are into meditation and ancient spiritual traditions. Programs offer promises of peace, wisdom, and happiness. Whether these are helping usher people into a new stage or reintegrating past ones seems highly dependent on the tradition and techniques, but I can see elements of that world touching everything from Stage 1 to Stage 5.
The formula
All that said, if you want to make a difference, you might just locate a place on the Kegan map where people are struggling and offer them the next stage up or a reintegration of a past stage in disguise.
Since people are in different places at different times, there is no one panacea that will heal everyone's problems. For example, Tony Robbins and Alex Hormozi's people came to a head recently, and Alex was accused of promoting overwork. But this is only true if the solutions he offers are going to the wrong people at the wrong time.
The wisdom of Kegan's highest stage, Stage 5, is that many things are true at once. And as difficult as it is for human brains to grasp that everything we know is only a tiny crumb of what exists, that we and the world will always remain in flux, that there is no once-and-for-all way to be — by entertaining ideas like this, we open ourselves up to a lot of tools and a lot of peace.