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What is the significance of the Spiral?

The colored Spiral used by Spiral Coaching is specific. The colors and the order of the colors in the spiral from bottom to top have special meaning for human development.

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A psychologist named Clare Graves and his student, Don Beck, are the authors of a philosophical and psychological system called Spiral Dynamics. Their premise is that all humans go through the same stages of development of their values.  Development in stages is not a unique or new concept, and values are not the only things that develop through stages over a lifetime.  Other researchers have done similar things for emotional, cognitive, social, and world view development. Spiral Dynamics, however, is a great system to use for coaching because a person's values heavily influence how they react to coaching and what coaching can do for them. There is even a subset of coaching called "Values Coaching" which looks a that.

The colors of the spiral are explained in the video below.  Scroll below it to see a text explanation.

Though the gods and culture may be different, the people are the same. Spiral Dynamics proposes several stages of values development with certain characteristics.  The conditions of your surroundings push you to evolve and grow (or to stay where you are, or go backwards). Each stage transcends and includes all the stages before it. In other words, it's not a ladder. You don't leave a stage and go to the next one.  You incorporate a stage and build the next one around your old stage, like a concentric circle. Each stage gives gifts and skills that stay with you in the next one. You also shed the disadvantages of the previous stage if you translate to the next one skillfully. 

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Stages of Development

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Beige 

  • At this stage, the person is concerned with bare survival: food, sex, warmth, and sleep. The person  identifies as a body, and not much beyond that.

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Purple 

  • The person gains awareness of surroundings: the land, the air, the other people. They see magic in these things and attribute the unknowns to "spirits" or other entities that work for or against them. The person identifies as a group, not so much as an individual.

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Red 

  • The person gains awareness of their own power and strength. They realize they can explore, take things, create, and exert force at the individual level to better themselves. The person identifies with power to do things.

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Blue 

  • At this stage, the individual craves a sense of belonging and Truth. They fixate on the "One True Thing" of their group or society as being the truth of all things everywhere. The person identifies with that Truth and becomes tied to its existence, often for the purpose of sacrificing something in the near term for some future gain.

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Orange 

  • The person finds problems with communal existence and wants more. Rationality becomes paramount and desire to achieve and obtain are the new vehicles of value. The methods of achievement vary by culture and individual. The achievement could take place in the cultural and economic conditions of whatever time and place the individual inhabits, yet in all cases they are pursued with a sense of rationality and personal drive.

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Green 

  • Eventually, after tiring of accumulation, the person becomes aware of the relativistic nature of meaning and relationships with others and the world. That is to say, they realize that meaning and value are man made. The person identifies as a member of a group again, but usually a larger group than just a nation or a religion, i.e. the world.

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Yellow  

  • At this stage the person no longer identifies with a single particular correct way of being. ALL ways of being play a role in the System. Some are more wrong than others. All of them are partially right and partially wrong. Within each color are truths and gifts that are useful and they are made to interact with the other colors in such a way as to advance Humanity and the world. The person gains the ability to pose temporarily as any other color in the stages below Yellow. The person identifies as an individual part of a System of all colors and Stages working together.

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Turquoise  

  • The thing about big systems is they are often too complicated to grasp fully. Trying to do so gets tiring, and eventually a person in Yellow realizes that the system is too big and too complicated to get a hold of to control it, but that also does not excuse someone from the obligation of contributing to it and making it better. Where Purple was about tribes, Turquoise is about mega-tribes. All of Humanity is a tribe and the planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe where Humanity resides, as well as everything in it, is under the care of the tribe. The person at this stage readily acknowledges that humans of all Stages exist and will always exist. Eliminating a particular Stage is not on the table.  Working with them is. Managing the people at those Stages and helping them to express their Stages in healthier ways is the mission. The person identifies with the mission.

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You cannot skip a Stage. In order to get to one, you must go through ALL the Stages before it. Moreover, if you go through a Stage unskillfully or in a deficient way, you are likely to repeat it. If your foundation is not good, the Stages you reach beyond that can crumble and you can go backwards. Personal development is not linear.  It's jagged.

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The Spiral is the symbol that encompasses all the ideas on this page in a nice little icon.  It is the foundational model for my coaching, teaching, and world view.

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