Notice what your attention treats as real objects
Sort a day’s concerns into concrete, subtle, and awareness-level objects to see which tier you mostly live in.
Why it works
In the STAGES model the first and most basic parameter is the kind of object a person can hold in awareness: concrete objects (things, bodies, rules), subtle objects (thoughts, feelings, goals, systems, other perspectives), or MetAware objects (awareness itself, constructs as constructs). Each tier repeats the same pattern with a new kind of object. Deliberately sorting what you attend to makes the parameter visible in your own experience instead of leaving it as a diagram.
How to do it
- At the end of a day, list ten things that occupied your attention — worries, plans, conversations, decisions.
- Mark each one C (a concrete thing, event, or rule), S (a thought, feeling, goal, relationship pattern, or system), or M (noticing awareness itself, or seeing a belief as a construction while it is happening).
- Look at the proportions, without scoring yourself. Notice which kind of object you reach for first when something goes wrong.
- Repeat for a week and note whether the mix changes with stress, sleep, or setting.
Evidence
The three object types (concrete, subtle, MetAware) are the first of the three parameters O’Fallon uses to define the 12 stages, set out in the 2020 Integral Review special issue. Her 2020 paper describes how each tier repeats the same pattern with a new kind of object. The sorting exercise is a reflective use of that parameter, not a validated measure. (mechanistic)
Self-sorting is not a stage assessment. People can attend to subtle or awareness-level objects in a moment without that being their stable way of making meaning.
Sources
- O’Fallon, T. (2020). States and STAGES: Waking up Developmentally. Integral Review, 16(1).
- Murray, T., & O’Fallon, T. (2020). A Summary of Research on and with the STAGES Developmental Model. Integral Review, 16(1).
Common mistake
Treating a high share of "M" items as proof of a late stage. Talking about awareness is itself a subtle-tier activity; the model is about what you can reliably hold as object, not what you can describe.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES Model, Made Practical
- Find the confusion your stage is working on
Use O’Fallon’s list of stage-specific confusions to locate the blind spot that is currently live for you.
- Shine a new capacity on the old confusion
Use whatever you can newly do — reflect on your thinking, notice context — to look straight at the confusion instead of around it.
- Turn your view back on yourself
Take the perspective you can now hold of others and turn it around so you see yourself from it.
- Practice the orientation your stage is not leaning toward
If your stage leans individual, deliberately practice the collective view, and the reverse.
- Walk an idea through four ways of holding it
Take one hard idea from receptive, to either/or, to both/and, to seeing how the two sides define each other.
- Use a scored assessment instead of self-typing
If you want to know your stage, take a sentence completion test scored by a trained rater rather than matching yourself to descriptions.
- Expect fallback and meet it without judgment
Plan for the times you make meaning from an earlier stage under stress, and treat them as information.
Related concepts
- Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
Moving from being run by your assumptions to being able to examine them
- Spiral Dynamics, Made Practical
Understanding how value systems develop and how to navigate across them
- Self-Authorship: Moving From the Socialized to the Self-Authored Mind
Kegan’s stages, subject-object moves, and authoring your own life
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