More than altruism, which involves doing something good in the world for its own sake, generativity involves sustained “good works.” As a professional coach we can be in the business of helping a client translate altruism into action—thereby coupling a push toward doing good with a set of actions that actually bring about the good. Generativity provides opportunities for mentoring and motivation. It involves organizing a parade that is intended to be a yearly event or building a monument that will endure for many centuries. It involves leading a community project that impacts many people, directly and indirectly. For the professional coach, a nurturing of generativity is based on the opening of a vista regarding generativity options.
The goal of a professional coach who is oriented toward their client’s generativity has been clearly articulated by one of our Sage leaders. In offering two simple examples, this leader captures the fundamental nature of generativity and deep caring. Several generative pathways are identified that extend both time and space beyond the single act of good will:
“Nurturing writers and then seeing them get published has given me much meaning and satisfaction. There is also nothing more rewarding than seeing a single-parent family getting a house for the first time after spending hundreds of hours working on a Habitat site to realize that dream.”
Given the insights offered by McAdmas and our Sage Leader (along with Plato, Becker and Wakefield) we would propose that deep caring is more than just a narcissistic desire to extend and outlive ourselves. Immortality is a part of the generative incentive. It can push us. However, the need for immortality is not the entire soulful nature of generativity and deep caring. There is something more that resides at the heart of generativity and that is enhanced—and pulled–by one’s residence in a generative society. We identify this something more as a virtue — the virtue of deep caring to which we turn in conclusion.
Conclusions
Carol Gilligan (1982) is one of the developmental theorists who have built upon the foundation established by Erik Erikson. However, she has expanded on and modified Eriksonian theory in several important ways. First, Gilligan has sought to capture a portrait of adult development that is less often aligned with men and more often aligned with women (and both men and women living in many nonwestern cultures). She writes about women finding their voice, rather than just expressing themselves through more masculine action. In many ways, Gilligan has placed greater emphasis on the communal side of generativity than on the agency side.
Gilligan also describes a contextual process of reasoning and decision making that moves beyond the emphasis placed by Erikson (and many other developmental theorists) on the capacity for abstraction and consistency irrespective of the context in decisions are being made and outcomes produced. In this re-envisioning of the reasoning process, Gilligan seems to align with a model of generativity that emphasizes diversity of generative roles and engaging generative roles within the context of a larger play and a more generative society. For Gilligan, generative push does not exist independent of generative pull. Proximal is intertwined with distal.
Perhaps of greatest importance with regard to generativity is Gilligan’s portrait of mature adult development as an embrace of care as a fundamental virtue in life. It is necessary, according to Gilligan (1982, p.98), that we recognize “the importance throughout life of the connection between the universality of the need for compassion and care. The concept of the separate self and of moral principles uncompromised by the constraints of reality is an adolescent ideal . . .”
Download Article 1K Club
