The Mystery of Growth: Effort and Surrender in Adult Development
Recently I was speaking with a colleague with deep experience in adult development. The conversation was rich, varied, and filled with morsels I’m still chewing on. “How it happens is a mystery.” This one in particular sticks with me. He was talking about our understanding of what supports adult development, what enables stage shifts and calling out the mystery of it. It connects with something by Thomas Keating (a great mystic of our time), “In the beginning we have to make a lot of effort for spiritual growth just to find out that human effort does not work.”
In an age of information about increasing happiness, reducing suffering, optimizing our humanness, the ethos of both of these sentences lingers with me. What is it to hold the tension or may be better said, relax into the seeming paradox of our need to participate and the insufficiency of our participation.
The Paradox of Transformation
This paradox shows up in many wisdom traditions. Zen practitioners speak of “effortless effort.” Christian mystics describe “active surrender.” Modern psychologists talk about “planned spontaneity.” All point to the same curious dynamic: transformation seems connected to both our intentional participation and recognition that our deliberate actions alone cannot produce the change we seek.
The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan once noted that true development isn’t something we can directly control, yet neither does it happen without our engagement. Like a garden, we can prepare the soil, plant the seeds, and provide water, but the actual miracle of sprouting and blooming happens according to its own mysterious timeline and process. Life moves on its own accord. What can happen when we attune to its impulses and cooperate?
Action and Effort
I am curious to know what your own experience, dear reader, is in your life and if you’re a coach with your clients. My sense is most of us are engaged with efforts to grow, or learn, for two reasons: 1) to ease our own discomfort or suffering, 2) to ease the discomfort or suffering of others. Stated in the affirmative: 1) to experience greater happiness, peace, joy, etc and 2) for others to experience more peace, happiness, joy, etc. Often the second is more connected to the first than we initially realize.
We have all sorts of ways to go about doing this and a new book or podcast episode coming out with rapid frequency with the latest technique.
What I notice is an attachment to a particular way of life unfolding. I’m doing this practice so x will occur. We are caught in a constrained world view of analytical thinking and sense making.
The Limits of Technique
This instrumental approach to development—where we apply technique X expecting result Y—reflects the mechanistic thinking most prevalent in our time. We’ve been conditioned to see ourselves and our growth as engineerable systems: if we just find the right inputs, we’ll get the desired outputs.
Yet anyone who has spent significant time in personal growth work encounters what might be called “the technique trap.” We master a meditation practice, perfect a communication framework, or implement a productivity system, only to discover that these techniques, while helpful, haven’t produced the transformative shift we were seeking.
This isn’t to say techniques are worthless—far from it. They provide structure, focus attention, and create conditions that make growth more possible. But techniques themselves don’t cause development; they merely invite it. The actual mechanism of change remains elusive, operating according to cosmic principles our analytical thinking cannot fully encapsulate.
The Mystery of Integration
What seems to happen in genuine development is not that we master new techniques or information, but that we become someone altogether different. Our mind patterns change (as observed with brain scanning technology), our physiology shifts, and our attention includes aspects of reality previously left out. For example, we might more thoroughly integrate and experience the deep and inherent connection to the people around us more immersively, saturating us with a feeling of belonging.
This integration doesn’t happen through force of will alone. It requires a kind of psychological and spiritual readiness that can’t be manufactured. In some traditions, it is referenced as grace or a gift.
Consider how insights emerge in therapy or deep personal work. The therapist or coach doesn’t “install” new understanding. Rather, they create conditions where previously unavailable connections and perspectives can arise organically in the client’s awareness. When the moment is right, something shifts—not because it was forced, but because the system was ready.
This readiness often comes through a combination of intentional practice, life circumstances and grace. Sometimes our most profound growth occurs not when we’re striving for it, but when we’ve exhausted our striving and finally let go.
Embracing Dynamic Unpredictability
In an age of ongoing complexity and chaos I hope we remain connected to the underlying energetic dynamic of life which seems to have a primary mode of dynamism and unpredictability. How then can we rest into this alive nature of life rather than concentrate our efforts on controlling it, ourselves, other people, and in so doing disconnect from Source?
Perhaps the answer lies in adopting a different metaphor for growth. Rather than seeing development as a linear journey with definable milestones, we might think of it as participating in a complex, living system—like a forest or an ecosystem. We can tend to this system, but we cannot determine precisely how or when it will evolve.
This perspective invites a profound shift in our relationship to growth. Instead of asking “What technique should I use to fix this problem?” we might ask “How can I be more present and responsive to what’s actually happening?” Instead of “How can I make myself develop faster?” we might wonder “What’s calling my attention to emerge now, and how can I cooperate with it?”
Intention, Attention and Presence Before Technique
As I wrote in a previous article, who we take and experience ourselves to be is a primary place from which our actions arise. More importantly, the “who” infuses our action with a particular quality. For example, you can be in the action of cooking dinner with the energy of constriction, frustration, and being rushed. Alternatively, you could be making this same meal within the same time frame and be experiencing tranquility or peace. You could also be in a “no-self” experience where you are not even aware of the object “you.”
This primacy of presence before technique points to two important distinctions:
One, that our intention matters. Our willingness to enter our practices, and our life with the posture of surrender, humility and willingness to be moved allows and invites shifts to occur.
Two, how we direct our attention matters more than the specific methods we employ. A technique practiced with rigid attention, impatience, or held expectations yields different results than the same technique approached with wholehearted porous awareness, one in which we are releasing what we are conditioned to pay attention to – whether it may be certain thinking patterns, particular emotions, or sensations in the body.
The Sufi poet Rumi captures this when he writes: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” In development terms, our task may not be to force growth through willpower and technique, but to identify and gently dissolve the internal obstacles that block the natural movement toward greater integration, awareness, and capacity.
The Power of Reactivity as Fuel
Taking actions and in the process releasing effort. Our reactionary responses are the trail head into the deeper work. Inspired and eager to move past outbursts of one kind or another? Moved to address a greed of always wanting more? Those very aspects of our personality structure are the fuel to place on the fire.
This perspective transforms our relationship to our own shortcomings. Rather than seeing our reactivity, attachments, or limiting patterns as enemies to be overcome, we can recognize them as signposts pointing toward precisely the growth that is wishing to emerge. When we react strongly to criticism, for instance, this reaction isn’t just a problem to fix—it’s revealing important information about our relationship to validation, self-worth, and identity.
By approaching these reactions with compassionate curiosity rather than judgment or force, we create an internal environment where healing and integration can occur naturally. We don’t have to make integration happen; we simply need to stop interfering with the process that’s already underway.
Holding the Both/And
The wisdom in those statements that began this reflection—”How it happens is a mystery” and “human effort does not work”— points to how our actions matter and how we can ease any effortful attachment for something to happen. There is a generativity that can exist between being and doing when we include a third aspect of mystery/source/life. An invitation to hold this as a triad instead of merely a dyad of being and doing.
The developmental journey invites us to hold this paradox with compassion and humility. We make efforts, knowing they aren’t enough. We apply techniques, without expecting them to be the whole answer. We work diligently, while remaining open to grace.
In this balance—this dance between agency and surrender—we create the conditions where the mystery of development can unfold in its own time and way. And perhaps the greatest growth happens not when we finally figure out how to make it happen, but when we develop the capacity to trust the process we cannot fully understand.
What would it mean for your own practice, dear reader, to honor both the necessity of your participation and the mystery of how growth actually happens? How might this perspective transform your relationship to your own development journey?
Article written by Adam Klein, NVW Managing Partner & Senior Faculty. Originally posted in “Substance” on March 2, 2025.