The Co-Intelligence Field of Individual Capacity

Human potential and wholeness



Central inquiry: How can individuals grow to their fullest, most integrated selves, fully engaged with the aliveness that's within them and around them?

Forms of co-intelligence particularly useful in this field (see Five Dimensions of Co-Intelligence): Our personal wholeness and engagement includes developing our multi-modal intelligence -- integrating head, heart, feeling, intuition, and so on. In addition, the challenges of a journey towards psycho-spiritual wholeness require (and generate) a good measure of wisdom.

Sample projects in this field: Individually and collectively we can: Develop our unique personal potential. Integrate the many dimensions of who we are, and the many ways we engage with the world. Realize our innate interconnectedness and co-creative role in the world. Increase our openness and ability to fully listen -- not only to other people, but to our deepest selves and everything around us. Develop our capacitance -- our ability to live with and work with ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery, dissonance, complexity and all the other untidy (incoherent) aspects of life.

Comments: Ancient psycho-spiritual traditions, modern psychology, education research, and the human potential movement have all generated an abundance of approaches and tools for individual development. There's a risk that people in individualistic cultures will believe that cultural transformation involves nothing more than widespread personal transformation. While personal development is absolutely vital, it needs to be integrated with a broader transformation of cultural beliefs, institutions, and stories. A hopeful sign is that, on the leading edge of spirituality, psychology and education, practitioners are finding that our engagement in human and natural communities lies at the heart of our nature. Such engagement provides a powerful means for personal development. In a complementary trend, more people are realizing that personal development enhances the "human resources" available to meet the needs of organizations, communities, and society at large. Both of these trends provide a healthy context for expanding human capacities.

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