Top 8 Quotes by Robert Kegan

Successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. To resist our tendencies to make right or

Successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. To resist our tendencies to make right or true, that which is nearly familiar, and wrong or false, that which is only strange.

Robert Kegan

Strange, Tradition, Lifestyle

Learning is the making of meaning.

Robert Kegan

What we mean by maturity in people's thinking is not a matter of how smart they are, but it is a matter of the order of consciousness in which they exercise their smartness or their lack of it.

Robert Kegan

Smart, Mean, Exercise

Robert Kegan (1995). “In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life”, p.130, Harvard University Press

It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger that causes anxiety.

Robert Kegan

Anxiety, Feelings, Defense

Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey (2013). “Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization”, p.49, Harvard Business Press

Change does not fail to occur because of insincerity. The heart patient is not insincere about his wish to keep living, even as he reaches for another cigarette. Change fails to occur because we mean both things. It fails to occur because we are a living contradiction.

Robert Kegan

Heart, Mean, Wish

Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey (2013). “Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization”, p.38, Harvard Business Press

That 'change makes us uncomfortable' is now one of the most widely promoted, widely accepted, and under-considered half-truths around. [I]t is not change by itself that makes us uncomfortable; it is not even change that involves taking on something very difficult. Rather, it is change that leaves us feeling defenseless before the dangers we 'know' to be present that causes us anxiety.

Robert Kegan

Anxiety, Feelings, Half

When we see that we are not made up by the other's experience, we then have the capacity not to take responsibility for what is now genuinely and for the first time not ours. And as a result, we can get just as close to the other's experience (even the other's experience of how dissapointing, enraging, or disapprovable we are!) without any need to react defensively to it or be guiltily compliant with it.

Robert Kegan

Responsibility, Needs, Firsts

Robert Kegan (1995). “In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life”, p.127, Harvard University Press