2.8.a Including Blue
Our short conversations about including Red was useful. Can you talk a little about the benefit of including Blue as one grows to later stages?
Yes. I agree, it is good to pause and reflect on how we value and include the building blocks, the foundation and structural elements of each stage as we build our lives. So let’s look at some Blue traits that we might choose to carry forward:
Loyalty: being honest, accountable, and reliable to your friends and supporters.
Order/organization: developing the ability to manage ourself during this stage can be a real plus as we mature.
Following: there are more well-rounded versions of followership that we learn at later stages. In Blue, being a good follower does not involve much questioning and challenging.
Patience: delayed gratification is a major value for the Blue level: do right and eventually you will be rewarded. This can be exploited by leaders who delay needed change.
Persistence: along with patience, this is where we learn to be persistent and keep getting up when we fall.
These sound great, but taken too far they can be destructive.
That’s quite right. Buddhism is about the Middle Way, the path between the extremes of chaos or control. We talk of balance in our lives. These traits need to be fine tuned all the time.
We will definitely talk a lot about the shadow side of Blue and the other stages. This exercise is limited to finding the positives of this stage and carrying them on where they apply.
Once again, I find this useful to think about the stuff we retain from earlier stages and that often have a prominent place on our mantel of traits we feel good about.
Do some people stop developing at Blue?
Yes. People can stop, stall, or slow way down at any point. The factors that often underly these developmental dynamics are the Life Conditions we encounter, which we talked about in post 2.6 and I will say more about next week.