Robert Kegan Quotes

“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

If you have wanted to lose ten pounds for ten years and a diet finally helps you do it, you might well assume you have accomplished your goal. But your goal actually isn't to lose ten pounds. Many people (even you?) have lost ten pounds many times! The goal is to lose ten pounds and keep the weight off. Dieting doesn't lead to weight loss that endures. For this we must join a change in behavior with a change in the way we think and feel-and in order to change the way we think and feel, we need to change our mindsets. When we are working on truly adaptive goals-ones that require us to develop our mindsets-we must continually convert what we learn from behavioral changes into changes in our mindsets.

— Robert Kegan

“What Cathy took from her rejection experience was self-doubt. Until this current traumatic hospitalization, Cathy hadn't realized the fear she was carrying around, how burdened she was by it, and how that fear kept her in a mode where she had to continuously prove her value to others and herself.”

— Robert Kegan

“We all know that change is hard, but we don't know enough about why it is so hard and what we can do about it.”

— 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

“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

“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

“Motion is the context of living. We find meaning my and in our doing.”

— Robert Kegan

“Learning is the making of meaning.”

— Robert Kegan

“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

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