Our lives as transformative stories
Consider this: we replace every cell in our body every three years. Our memory is flexible and re-formattable. So, every one of us has the power to, as Gandhi once said, “become the change you want to see in the world”. We change and transform our lives regardless, whether we use any aids to do so or not. So, why not turn such transformation into a conscious and deliberate process?
Our life is a transformational journey whether we plan for it or not. The people we encounter, the events we live through, they all impact us in different ways. But, as John Dewey said:
“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”
Yet, so many of us keep on transforming without much awareness of how we change.
Are you in a transformational process or not?
Let’s start by unpacking what transformative experience is. It is about putting yourself on a display, reinventing your identity over and over again without taking a fictional role. Actually, every human behavior can be seen as a performance. Consider this:
— you can see it as a portrayal — a theater, with you on a stage,
— you can also see it as an enactment — embodiment between you and an object (for example, technology),
— it can also be staging — you acting and collaborating with others in public, much like embodied programming,
— and you can see it as engagement — you and others acting and shifting roles, much like a mixed reality performance.
If we keep on putting ourselves on display and reinvent our identities over and over again, why not every situation we find ourselves in is transformational. Firstly, not every act of ours is genuine — we shift a role of a moment which may feel like change in that very moment, but, in fact, it is pseudo-transformation, a transformation that won’t last because we never committed ourselves to become that particular version of ourselves.
But even if we are motivated to change, we may be running away from the old version of ourselves rather than towards a new version, which makes transformation extremely difficult. If you run away from who you are, your old self has a tendency to suck you back in, much like a black hole. You think you are out but, in fact, you just have an illusion of progress while little changes. It is, certainly, important to know where you are coming from to know where you want to go but blindly running in a random direction of change is much like Brownian motion — a lot of action that leads exactly nowhere.
What do you need to transform?
Transformation is your identity development let by your conscious and subconscious motivations. Therefore, it needs to be guided not just staged. In other words you need an aid of sorts that helps you progress. Certainly, such aid can take a form of another human — a coach, a mentor, a teacher. But it can also be an object like a book, like, for example, “The Artist Way” by Julia Cameron. It is a book filled with questions and challenges that provoke you to discover who you are and want to become.
The elements of a transformative journey
A transformation cannot be imposed, it needs to be voluntary. It is like shedding a skin — if voluntary, it happens in your own rhythm, if forced, too quickly it starts resembling skinning. You need your commitment and open mind because shifting yourself for one stage to another has a deeply personal pace towards your desired direction — never fast and always cyclic (much like skinning an onion). The only thing that can be done for you is preparing the right conditions for a transformative journey to take place.
In their book “Designing Experiences”, Robert Rossman and Mat Duerden talk about four elements of any such a journey: anticipation, participation, reflection and integration. Anticipation means that you need not only be ready but await the transformation. Participation is about being present when the journey takes place. Reflection means that you consciously recognize the reframing of the reality that took place. And, finally, integration is about the practice of what you just changed about yourself most likely leaving you with more questions to take upon your next transformational cycle.
Capital and small case transformations
Transformational journey is about discovery. But it is not always the case that you go for a voyage around the world. Sometimes it is a trip as small as crossing your threshold. The aforementioned author and a guest on the Catching The Next Wave podcast Mat Duerden distinguishes between small “t” versus capital “T” transformations.
A small “t” transformation occurs whenever you change your attitude about something, or when you choose to see a person differently, or if you try to do something in a different, hopefully, better, way. In this very moment, it is impossible to put a finger on the notion of the transformative act itself. But, if you keep on going with conscious change, these small “t” transformations accumulate into something profoundly different (much like we don’t shad all the skin cells at once).
The capital “T” transformations are those where you experience a fundamental shift in who you are and how we see the world. It can be an event that triggers such a change or you can willingly undergo a transformative process that gets you to change your ways of thinking, acting and seeing the world. In other words, in a fairly limited period of time you change your own personal narrative.
Regardless whether you accumulate small “t” or capital “T” transformations, they are all about fulfilling your aspirations and becoming a better version of yourself. And for this, you need to have right conditions — you need to create a headspace that allows you to reflect on what is happening to you. Otherwise, you might fall into a trap of becoming a “transformational junkie” — a person who goes from one retreat to another never quite reflecting on what happened and barely integrating the lessons onto their lives. It is crucial to note becasue, above all, transformation is about your emotional labor not about somebody else doing something to and for you.
Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.
