Savvy About Psychodynamics

Dear <subscriber>,

I’ve been invited back to the The Stoa to share my freshest thinking on the keys to creating a bright future … and I’d love to share them with you!

It’s all about becoming a more effective co-evolver for yourself and the world and being able to navigate these times with more ease, aliveness and agency.

I’ll be The Stoa’s  “Philosopher in Residence” for four free online events during November. The first one is Tuesday, Nov 9 @ 9am PST (click here for the time in your timezone). You can register for it here.

Over the arc of the four events, we’ll be exploring …

The Way Forward Beyond the Dysfunctions of Modern Culture

My August presentation at The Stoa, Cultural Co-Evolver: Frameworks, Skillsets, & Strategy for Embodied Action, described three foundational dysfunctions that I see as pervasive throughout modern culture:

• Being clueless about psychodynamics
• Using narrow modes of cognition
• Using an outmoded strategy for success

Based on my 40+ years as a culture-change thought-leader and activist, I see the combination of these three at the root of all of the big issues the world now faces: climate change, social injustice, species extinction, unsustainable economy, deforestation, dysfunctional governments, nuclear weapons, soil depletion, runaway technology and on and on.

I’ve come to feel that the fastest, most effective way to make progress on all of these issues is to address those foundational dysfunctions directly. As so often happens, the most potent places to intervene in a system aren’t at the symptom level but at a deeper root level.

I’ll be turning those dysfunctions around and diving deep into the way forward beyond them:

• The first week (Nov 9) will help you become savvy about psychodynamics.
• The second (Nov 16) enables you to be skillful with diverse modes of cognition.
• The third (Nov 23) get’s you adept at the new strategy for success.
• The fourth week (Nov 30) will be an open exploration weaving together the threads of the previous weeks.

Savvy About Psychodynamics

We start on Tuesday, Nov 9, with our inner life. Everything else on the path to a bright future depends on this transformation from clueless to savvy. Psychodynamics refers to:

While the term goes back 100+ years, our knowledge about it has grown immensely in the last few decades. Nevertheless, the general culture has hardly begun to catch up. Where there is knowledge, it is mostly fragmentary and all too often used for manipulation, as in advertising and social-media algorithms. In contrast, I’ll be offering an empowering, whole-system pathway into your own healing, understanding and capacity. It’s so needed!

We’ll be getting into:

• Cognitive biases and the subconscious
• The Autonomic Nervous System
• Threat detection and response
• Trauma and personality
• Your Optimal Zone
• Motivation

The event will be Tuesday, Nov 9 @ 9am PST (click here for the time in your timezone). You can register for it here. As usual with Zoom, registering doesn’t commit you to attending but it makes attending possible and gets you the link to the replay.

If you plan to come and haven’t yet seen Cultural Co-Evolver: Frameworks, Skillsets, & Strategy for Embodied Action, I recommend you watch the replay. It provides important context for what we’ll be doing during this Philosopher in Residence series.

I look forward to seeing you there!

With appreciation,
Robert Gilman
November 4, 2021