If You Want to Change the World for Real with Your Giving, That Process Begins With Your Own Psychology

Wherever you are in your journey as a donor seeking to translate money into meaning, chances are, there’s room for improvement in either the impact of your giving or your own sense of fulfillment as you do it. 

Why? Because your fullest potential as a human being and a change agent is almost always outside your current comfort zone. What’s more, the vast majority of us are still functioning on a kludged together version of humanity’s original mental operating system, something that is optimized for a simpler, bygone world of prehistoric “fight or flight” survival by individuals and small groups. 

So how do we meet the challenge of finding both joy and impact in the time and place we actually live in? This is an increasingly interconnected world full of wickedly complex problems that we can neither fight our way out of nor run away from. All of us who are seeking to translate money into meaning through philanthropy are called to evolve ourselves and our own level of consciousness—our own way of being—in order to maximize the impact as well as the joy we create with our giving. 

Are You Ready to Expand Your Psychological Range As a Donor?

Let’s begin by exploring your baseline comfort zone and then consider what the next level in your growth might be. A great place to start is with a framework from cognitive behavioral psychology. This tells us that your state of mind in any given moment is determined by the intersection of three factors: your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions.

 You can think of your “psychological range” as being made up of all the various states of mind that you experience over time. Within your personal psychological range, chances are you have some home turf, or a comfort zone made up of one or more states of mind that you tend to experience more often than others. There’s a good reason for this tendency towards following routine mental patterns. Without some default mental patterns, navigating a world crammed with choices from one moment to the next would be overwhelming. 

It’s possible you even have one or more go-to mindsets. Let’s define a mindset as a state of mind that you gravitate to so repeatedly that it becomes a habitual frame of reference—an orientation from which you approach much of your life.

As you gear up your giving, there’s a good chance that the mindsets that have served you well in your life to date may not get you where you want to go in this arena. What if the secret to your success so far has been taking no prisoners in a highly competitive industry where quarterly earnings reports and balance sheets make it plain for all to see who’s winning and who’s losing? How might you need to stretch and grow your own habits of mind to gear up your giving in a way that truly makes sense for tackling long-term, complex social challenges such as chronic homelessness? If you want to be able to answer this question on a practical basis, it’s time to take a closer look at your mental operating system. 

Five Fundamental States of Mind

Let’s dig a little deeper to explore five states of mind that almost all of us experience at one time or another in our lives. 

• Scarcity: When you are in this state of mind, your overwhelming concern is that you won’t be able to get what you need. Your focus is on doing whatever it takes to get your needs fulfilled. There are certainly times in life when you need to operate from this survival focused frame, such as when you are caught in the immediate crisis of a natural disaster. But when your survival instincts kick in, they typically narrow down your field of vision. When you are in this mental mode, your choices often appear binary. Either I do what it takes to meet my needs, or I lose out. It’s costly to let a scarcity state of mind creep in when it’s not truly necessary. When you are caught up in this mental mode, you may act in ways that violate your own values in order to get what you need. This mindset comes in at least two forms:

• “Individualist” mode, in which your focus is solely on your individual needs. 

• “Loyalty” mode, in which your focus is on meeting the needs of your group, your family, your organization, or whatever unit of people you define as “yours.”

• Externally directed: When you are in this state of mind, you are focused on figuring out the “rules of the game.” What do others expect and value in you and your behavior? You are looking to others for clues and cues about how best to shape your thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to fit in and find success within a given social order. This state of mind is an essential part of our socialization as a species. We would never be able to live together in groups and cooperate if we didn’t have a large part of our mental wiring available to process all the signals we get from those around us and to shape our behavior accordingly. There are several different forms of this mode:
• “Fitting in”, where you are focused on figuring out what is socially acceptable and meeting that norm. You want to be just like everyone else, to “go with the flow” and “run with the pack.” 
• “Getting by”, where you don’t necessarily embrace a given social norm, nor do you want to deal with the consequences of openly going your own way. You focus on performing at the absolute minimum threshold of acceptability. Ever worked somewhere with a dress code you chafed against?  
• “Standing out”, where you want to win the approval of others by outperforming over and above the norm. You want to distinguish yourself in the eyes of those whose judgment you respect. Phi Beta Kappa anyone? 
• Executive: When you are in this state of mind, you are focused on formulating plans, identifying and acquiring key resources, and enlisting others to help you accomplish your goals. This is the state of mind that many of us rely on to exercise “leadership” in the conventional sense. There are a few versions of the executive mode as well.
• Manager: This is about telling others what to do and having them execute exactly to your directions. Remember the distinction between simple, complicated, and complex challenges we talked about in Chapter Eight? Manager mode is great when the task at hand is relatively simple, and the causal chain is clear. Your job is to make sure that people have clear directions and perform their assigned duties reliably. 
• Engineer: This is a matter of putting together a complicated, step-by-step process where failure at any point leads to failure overall. Tight control is key to make sure everyone does their part and the process functions as specified. Bursts of creativity under pressure are also key when something does go wrong—think Apollo 13. This is often a highly functional leadership mode when the task at hand is complicated. It involves many precise, sequential steps in a causal chain from A to Z.
• Conductor: In this mode, you are attuned to the individual voices, qualities, and attributes of others, and you seek to get things done by bringing a team together in the most harmonious possible way. The sum is greater than the parts, and you appreciate possibilities for collaboration with an artist’s sensibility. Notwithstanding the artistry of this mode, at the end of the day, like an orchestra conductor, you are still clearly in charge. Your responsibility is to deliver a result for a simple or complicated challenge drawing on a bounded ecosystem of actors over whom you have at least formal authority. Think of university presidents or legislative leaders at the top of their game.
• Evolutionary: When you are in this state of mind, you see your own growth and adaptation as a key way to address challenges and find fulfillment. You operate on the premise that the best way to meet your own needs and to serve others is by shifting your own approach by being more flexible and creative in how you pursue your aims. You are even willing to reconsider which aims you find most valuable. You tend to focus most on exercising positive influence rather than formal authority. The nature of the challenges you tackle is often complex, where there is no reliable formula for achieving a solution in advance. Think about Nelson Mandela and the evolution in personal outlook during his twenty-five years in prison that lay behind his success establishing South Africa’s first National Unity government. 
• Self-transcending: When you are in this state of mind, you are focused on looking beyond the limits of yourself as the key actor. Some of the questions you ask yourself seem almost metaphysical: What larger truth or whole is seeking expression through me? What larger systems am I a part of, and what leverage do I have to transform these systems through my own actions and by coming together with others? What ripples can I help set in motion whose ultimate impact I can’t even predict or perceive? Your problem-solving focus and leadership style in this mode are focused on taking yourself out of the equation. How can I develop others, how can I best position others to address this challenge above and beyond anything I do myself? Think of spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama when looking for inspiration or examples of this.

Taking Stock: Which States of Mind Have Served You Best So Far?

 Which of these states of mind do you tend to experience the most? We experience all these states of mind, sometimes dramatically so, from one moment to the next. What’s the secret of your success so far? Have any states of mind become so well patterned for you that they have crossed over to become mindsets, or comfortable lenses through which you tend to view the world?  

Assessing your own state of mind can be difficult to do. If you are in the grips of a scarcity or externally directed state of mind, you may not have the mental space to notice your own thoughts and feelings in the moment. Likewise, if your go-to mode is an executive mindset, you may move through life so focused on getting things done that you haven’t taken much time to build up your skills for “getting up on the balcony” and critically examining yourself. If you want some help assessing your mental modes, there are a number of options, from tracking down an interviewer trained in Kegan and Lahey’s “Scale of Mental Complexity” to the STAGES Matrix and its online assessment. 

But without getting hung up about wherever you are starting from, the most important question is where do you want to go from here?

Which States of Mind Will Serve You Best as You Gear Up Your Giving?

As you gear up your giving, it’s perfectly natural for you to draw on the mental modes that have served you well in your life to date. For example, donors who are starting out sometimes adopt an externally directed mindset precisely because philanthropy is a relatively new field to them; they’re looking to others to learn the ropes. It’s understandable that you would initially look to others for cues and clues about how to think, feel, and act when it comes to your philanthropy, maybe at first by “fitting in” and over time by setting your sights on “standing out” in the eyes of others.

It’s also natural for those looking to gear up their giving to draw significantly on their executive mindset.  It’s no surprise if a key reason you’re in a position to be philanthropic in the first place is that you are good at analyzing challenges, making plans, and getting things done, whether in manager mode, conductor mode, or engineer mode. So, you may be naturally excited to bring your leadership experience and talent to bear on social challenges of your choosing—let’s get going making the world a better place!

But if you want your giving to contribute to lasting change on the most entrenched problems that most impact our shared future, you’re going to need to cultivate at least one additional mindset, maybe two. For complex challenges in which solutions cannot be engineered in advance, you’ll need to invest in your own growth and evolution in order to give in a way that truly makes sense for you and for the larger world. This comes back to the distinction we made earlier between simple, complicated, and complex problems.

Complex problems are characterized by emergent, systemic dynamics. You can’t achieve success by charting out a linear cause-and-effect solution in advance. One of the most critical misfires in philanthropy is a faulty diagnosis of the nature of the problem the philanthropist is working on. Too many philanthropists proceed as if the problem they are committed to addressing is simple or complicated at best. These are the types of problems for which an executive mindset is well suited. But what if the issue you want to address is actually a complex, emergent challenge? For example, if you are committed to addressing chronic homelessness in your home city, a significant part of your giving is going to involve backing folks on the front lines to identify promising pathways for emergent solutions. As you address one aspect of the challenge, such as mental health issues and substance dependency, you may find that new challenges arise. This can come in the form of opposition from residents in some neighborhoods who do not want homeless people relocated to their area. Rather than trying to specify every single step of the strategy in advance, you’re going to have to be willing to adapt and evolve your approach over time. When you take on complexity, you have to be willing to embrace its messy, nonlinear nature. You have to be willing to adapt and evolve your own patterns of thoughts, feelings, and action in response to the system’s emergent properties and convolutions. You will find yourself needing to call on not just your executive mindset modes but also an evolutionary state of mind.

This is why it’s worth trying on an evolutionary state of mind and even a self-transcending state of mind when possible. These states of mind ultimately stem from an ability to trust that you can be flexible and adaptive enough to overcome any obstacles to meeting your own ego-driven needs as you carry out your giving.  This frees you up to focus your highest and best self on maximizing your service to something larger than yourself. 

Further reading/resources on psychological range and levels of consciousness

• Ken Wilber: The Spectrum Of Consciousness

• Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey on “Levels of Mental Complexity” in their book Immunity to Change

• Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Warner Klemp on “Four ways of leading” in their book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

• Terri O’Fallon and Kim Barta’s work on the STAGES matrix of developmental psychology