Robert Kegan Quotes

#1. What we mean by maturity in people's thinking is not a matter of how smart they are, but it is a matter of the order of consciousness in which they exercise their smartness or their lack of it.

Robert Kegan

#2. We uncovered a phenomenon we call "the immunity to change," a heretofore hidden dynamic that actively (and brilliantly) prevents us from changing because of its devotion to preserving our existing way of making meaning.

Robert Kegan

#3. Change does not fail to occur because of insincerity. The heart patient is not insincere about his wish to keep living, even as he reaches for another cigarette. Change fails to occur because we mean both things. It fails to occur because we are a living contradiction.

Robert Kegan

#4. Learning is the making of meaning.

Robert Kegan

#5. But reflection without action is ultimately as unproductive as action without reflection.

Robert Kegan

#6. What Cathy took from her rejection experience was self-doubt. Until this current traumatic hospitalization, Cathy hadn't realized the fear she was carrying around, how burdened she was by it, and how that fear kept her in a mode where she had to continuously prove her value to others and herself.

Robert Kegan

#7. It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger that causes anxiety.

Robert Kegan

#8. Motion is the context of living. We find meaning my and in our doing.

Robert Kegan

#9. Successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. To resist our tendencies to make right or true, that which is nearly familiar, and wrong or false, that which is only strange.

Robert Kegan

#10. We all know that change is hard, but we don't know enough about why it is so hard and what we can do about it.

Robert Kegan