1) Journal. By consciously reflecting on your beliefs and experiences, you are no longer captive to those beliefs and experiences.

“The process of journaling allows you take perspective on your experience and it releases it from being just being in the subjective realm,” Brown tells Science of Mind magazine. ”When you are able to take multiple perspectives on your life experience you are strengthening your perspective-taking capacity. To take more perspectives and to see more polarities and paradoxes is really the major driver for later stage development. So the more that people can take multiple perspectives on life situations, the greater capacity they have of seeing the nuances of each perspective. Then they start to see the connections and patterns across the perspectives and it becomes a very powerful self-transforming tool.”

2) Surround yourself with people who think differently than you do, especially people who have a broader view than you do. Brown says all the people he studied at higher stage development “worked with people who were constantly challenging them to take a new, more expansive view of the world.”

Brown says it can be useful for some people to consider working with a professional consultant or mentor. For a list of his recommended consulting organizations, see note 43 on page 22 of his white paper “The Future of Leadership for Conscious Capitalism” available at www.tinyurl.com/consciousleadership

3) Develop a consistent spiritual practice. “Hands down, this is the important element,” says Brown. “Every high stage leader I studied has a spiritual practice.” Studies show that meditation, like journaling, also helps people look more objectively at their beliefs and become more flexible to transform limited beliefs and perceptions. It’s also been shown to have the greatest impact for accelerating growth through developmental stages.