Hello Friends,
This is the inaugural post of a new blog called Unfolding New Worlds: An Aletheia Blog. The blog will unfold as a collection of essay series — each series is composed of ten poetic essays exploring a single theme.
The first theme Beyond Self-Development: The Post-Developmental Turn in Coaching.
Upcoming themes include:
Living After the Career: Unfolding Work, Meaning, and AI in a Post-Capitalist World
The Age of Redesign: Where Everything Is Being Redesigned — and Everyone Is a Designer
From Burnout Society to Caring Society: Where exhaustion ends and aliveness begins
The Ecology of Belonging: Designing Worlds That Hold Us
and much more.
My intention in publishing these short, poetic essays is to unfold renewed way of experiencing the world — one that feels both illuminating and inviting. I hope to amplify the emerging, empowering view of life we explore within Aletheia, and to invite you to join us in its unfolding.
Please share these essays with anyone that might benefit.
With love,
-Steve
Brief Announcement
Our next Level 1 coach training will be launching in late January in a newly redesigned format that we are excited to share with you. More details will be forthcoming later this month.
Beyond Self-Development: The Post-Developmental Turn in Coaching
At some point, the language of growth and self-improvement stops making sense.
You’ve done the work — coaching, therapy, mindfulness, meditation, leadership training, shadow integration, endless reflection into who you are and how you show up. You’ve become more self-aware, more skillful, more compassionate. Yet beneath all of that, a quiet unease remains.
The feeling of self-deficiency persists.
You realize the self-improvement project is endless.
It’s the feeling that the project of improving yourself has reached its edge.
That even the most refined version of the self is still a performance — subtle, spiritual, and deeply weary.
This is where the path of self-development gives way to something quieter and more radical: unfoldment.
From Fixing to Revealing
Self-development begins with the assumption that something is missing and must be improved.
Unfoldment begins with the recognition that wholeness was never absent.
Development organizes, optimizes, and ascends.
Unfoldment listens, reveals, and deepens.
At Aletheia, we explore transformation not as progress but as participation — the art of allowing life to disclose itself through us, rather than attempting to engineer it from above.
We work in the territory beyond “better,” where practice is an expression of love and awareness matures into intimacy.
The Post-Developmental Turn in coaching
Aletheia Unfolding is post-developmental.
“Post-developmental” doesn’t mean rejecting development.
It means including its gifts — practice, reflection, differentiation, and integration — while letting go of developmental assessments and designing development plans.
What evolves beyond the self isn’t higher; it’s deeper.
It’s the shift from authoring your life to co-authoring with life itself.
This is the Aletheia turn — from improvement to unfoldment, from striving to participation, from constructing meaning to letting meaning emerge.
Over the next ten essays, I’lll explore this shift through the lens of Aletheia Unfolding: how it changes our relationship to growth, improvement, embodiment, practice, service, and the project of self-development.
Each post will invite reflection, not conclusion — an opening, not an argument.
An Invitation
If you sense that the self you’ve been perfecting can no longer contain what’s waking up inside you, you’re in the right place.
You don’t need a new map. You need to trust the terrain that’s already alive beneath your feet. Apprentice that!
“We don’t transcend the self by outgrowing it — we out-love it.”
Welcome to the series Beyond Self-Development: The Post-Developmental Turn in Coaching.
Let’s unfold, together.
