Robert Kegan Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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