Leveraging lag: engineers and salespeople

Accelerating personal development with analogies between domains

Photo courtesy walls_io

You may possibly have noticed that STEM-educated people often lag in their social and emotional development.

Perhaps also that salespeople excel at getting along with people, but may be weirdly incapable of getting a balky printer working.

Or maybe this doesn’t seem mysterious? People have different interests, choose different careers, and so learn different skills. Some people learn how to fix printers, and others learn how to make friends.

There’s reasons to think there’s something different at work. Something deeper, more difficult, more interesting and important.

Trouble in getting along with people can cause software engineers (for example) great suffering. It can limit their career advancement. It can make sustaining romantic relationships impossible. These problems may become the most important thing in their lives. Then they may put enormous effort into overcoming the trouble—and fail.

If it was just a matter of learning skills—well, engineers are great at that! But, it’s not. They’re up against a fundamental limitation, at the level of selfness—of what sort of thing they are.

Analogously, some salespeople may face constant frustration in dealing with machines, or with hard-edged abstractions like personal investment finance. Try as they might, they simply can’t get a grasp on these. This can leave them feeling helpless and vulnerable, because their only recourse is to persuade some geeky person to deal with whatever their trouble is; and that can be costly or infeasible.

I think these complementary difficulties can be understood in terms of adult stage theory. Here, I will also use these problems to illustrate and explain some key, confusing points of the theory. And, this may be helpful in overcoming difficulties of these sorts, if you are facing them now!

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Stage theory concerns the ways we relate to systems. Stage 4 is systematic; stage 3 (and earlier stages) are pre-systematic. Operating at stage 4 means acting on the basis of abstract, rational principles and procedures. Stage 3 is unable to do that; or at any rate doesn’t do that.

The different problems faced by engineers and salespeople concern two different types of activity. There are the “hard” domains of facts, concepts, and objects (especially manufactured ones); and the “soft” domains of emotions and interpersonal relationships.

Applying stage theory: engineers operate at stage 4 (systematically) in hard domains, but many are unable to do so in soft ones. They operate pre-systematically (stage 3 or even 2) in relating to other people, and to their own emotions. Conversely, some salespeople operate at stage 4 in soft domains, but pre-systematically in hard ones.

This model suggests leveling up your lagging domains by analogizing them to your more developed ones. If you are an engineer having difficulty with emotions and relationships, try treating them the way you do impersonal systems. Conversely, if you are a salesperson having trouble with a printer, you might try understanding it like a social system.

Here’s a two-minute video clip about that, from an AMA session I recorded in November 2024. This post is a more detailed explanation of the possibility I sketched there.

The analogy between treating machines systematically and treating social interactions systematically may seem obvious. It’s not uncommon to recognize it, and to try to catch up your lagging domain accordingly. However, this is difficult: partly because the analogies aren’t perfect, and partly because it may require an emotionally wrenching reworking of what you considered your self. So I’ll explain some of the obstacles, and ways of addressing them.

Lag, domains, and what a stage is

Although it’s common to speak of a handful of discrete “stages,” theorists acknowledge that development is gradual, so it’s common to be “between stages.” Empirical studies find that the majority of adults are somewhere on a continuum from stage 3 to stage 4. (Smaller fractions are not yet at 3, or somewhere beyond 4.)

However, “continuum” is still a somewhat inaccurate model. Most theorists also acknowledge that it’s possible to be at one stage in some domains, but at another stage in other domains. The examples I’m using here are engineers at stage 3 in soft domains and 4 in hard domains; and salespeople at stage 4 in soft domains and 3 in hard domains. Developmental psychologists call this mismatch “lag” (décalage, technically).

Other psychologists stubbornly refuse to admit lag occurs, because it throws the whole idea of “stages” into question. To which I want to say: Have you ever met a software engineer??

There are complex conceptual issues here: what even is a stage? Is there such a thing at all? And what does it mean to be at one, and how many stages are there, and which? And what is a “domain,” and which are they? I plan to address these questions in an upcoming post. For now, I’ll explain one way I think the stage model is useful, both theoretically and practically—so long as it’s not applied too rigidly. Including consideration of lag is part of that.

Engineers: leveling up emotions and relationships

How stage 3 causes trouble in soft domains

Engineers, when reading about stage theory, invariably decide that they are at stage 4 (or beyond). And they are right, as far as their engineering work goes! Engineering is systematic activity in hard domains: the application of principled methods, derived from reliable scientific knowledge, to practical problems. A competent engineer must think and act in a stage 4 way, when doing engineering.

Commonly, engineers misunderstand stage theory by confusing stages and domains. (I wrote about this in “Natural misunderstandings of adult stage theory.”) Their takeaway may be:

Stage 3 means “cares about, and is good at, emotions and interpersonal relationships.” Stage 4 means “cares about, and is good at, abstract ideas and the non-human material world, particularly the world of artificial constructions.”

But I have never cared much about, nor been good at, emotions or relationships, so I never had a stage 3. I skipped that stuff!

But “stage 3” means “thinking, feeling, and acting concretely,” and “stage 4” means “thinking, feeling, and acting systematically.” This is true both in hard and soft domains.

“I skipped stage 3,” said by an engineer, usually means the opposite. You neglected your emotional and relational development, so you are still back there now, lagging in the soft domains. That may now be causing great trouble—in your career or in your love life.

Once or twice a month, I get an email from a STEM professor or technical manager who has read my posts about stage theory:

I have a graduate student / team member who is really good at their work, except that they simply can’t behave professionally in groups. They can’t contain their emotions, squabble with peers, are tiresomely defiant with me, and act out in group meetings. They’re stuck at stage 3! I’ve been working with them for months, trying to get them to see the problem, but they are not getting it. I don’t want to discharge them. What can I do?

Once or twice a month, I get an email from an engineer who has read my posts about stage theory. They are deeply unhappy because they want a romantic, sexual relationship more than anything else, but can’t get one started. Or, their relationships are always difficult and unrewarding, and eventually they give up. But there’s always a lingering, forlorn hope that somehow, someday, a satisfying relationship will manifest.

These may be misunderstood as mental health problems, calling for psychotherapy. But the person may be perfectly mentally healthy. The problem is developmental, not pathological. Their environment demands stage 4 functioning, which they are not yet capable of: professionalism at work, or an adult partner bond.

Alternatively, the difficulty may be misunderstood as a skill issue. The person’s problem is that they lack specific skills of professional interaction; or specific skills of forming and sustaining relationships. Those skills generally are lacking, and learning them is part of what’s needed during the stage transition.

But the problem is deeper: the person would not yet be capable of deploying those skills—except perhaps superficially, inaccurately, and unreliably. Nor, perhaps, would they even be willing to! Stage 4 ways of thinking, feeling, and acting seem alien, unacceptable, and just wrong when you are at stage 3.

Therefore, there is no quick fix. There is no recipe. Stage transitions typically take years, and are hard. They are hard work, but they are also emotionally hard. They mean giving up what you thought was your self, and becoming a different sort of thing altogether.

The essential capability of stage 3 (that stage 2 lacks) is putting oneself in another’s shoes. Through empathy, you can feel what they are feeling. You might find yourself sympathetic, in which case their feelings become yours in the interaction. You do not clearly distinguish other people’s emotions from your own. Alternatively, you may find their emotions unwanted. Then, in order to avoid taking them on, you have to reject the other person entirely, because you can’t separate transient feelings from the person.

What stage 3 can’t do is to be with other people’s feelings and opinions, taking them as valid but distinct from one’s own. It also can’t separate emotions and attitudes from a person who has them, but isn’t ruled by them. At stage 3, selves either repel or snap together, like magnets.

The essential capability of stage 4 (that stage 3 lacks) is to recognize and be comfortable with people having different feelings and opinions; and to act effectively while taking those into account. This is necessary for both professionalism and adult pair-bonding.

In a professional work context, stage 3 is dysfunctional. Repulsion makes coordinating teamwork difficult. Disagreements in the workplace are inevitable and should not be problematic or emotionally explosive. Emotional merging obstructs constructive disagreement too. A team has to be able to argue productively, to critique plans without taking it personally. “Taking it personally” is the inability to separate opinions from selves.

Stage 3 may work well in a romantic relationship, so long as both people are at that stage in all domains. It may be dysfunctional for someone who is at stage 4 in hard domains, particularly when relating to someone who is at stage 3 overall. You can’t help judging their way of being from your partially stage 4 point of view.

Their epistemology sucks. They make major decisions on the basis of astrology or advice from “spirit guides.” Their opinions are nonsensical, based in neither evidence nor logic. They can’t stick to a plan, nor honor agreements they have made. Their demand for constant closeness is stifling. They get upset and overwrought about trivial slights. You cannot relate to them as an adult; they seem childish to you.

On the other hand, to the extent that you also are still at stage 3 relationally, you cannot yet give your partner space to be different but still close. You still enjoy and crave the experience of undifferentiated emotional merging. You wish you could make a life together completely aligned in all things. “Why can’t we just love each other, without fighting all the time?”

Transitioning soft domains to stage 4

The first step is to admit to yourself that you are the problem. When you are squarely in stage 3, its way of being seems obviously and unquestionably right. If you keep getting into fights at work, or keep getting into dead-end relationships or dumped by lovers, you may take that as their being wrong. Morally wrong, even: they have violated what you take as fixed moral imperatives.

The split soft 3 / hard 4 pattern, common among engineers,¹ may make it still harder to admit to being the problem. Where stage 3 automatically feels morally righteous, stage 4 automatically feels epistemologically certain. You make systematic, rational arguments that your coworkers are doing bad work, dooming the project. Or that women are all inherently irrational and needy, and therefore can’t sustain a sane relationship; or men are all inherently domineering and selfish, and therefore etc. This is the stage 3 pattern of completely rejecting anyone who contradicts one’s own feelings or opinions.

Others perceive this as arrogant, tedious, and disruptive, and may tell you so. Sooner or later, you may take that in. And then, in the stage 3 way, you may be unable to separate it from yourself. You take all the blame in conflicts, and may feel worthless, helpless, and hopeless.

At some point, repeated failure may jolt you out of this too. Reluctantly, you admit you need to be differently with other people. Then you are motivated; but you have not yet begun to move forward from 3. You don’t know what that would mean, or what direction to head in.

The next step is to recognize the lag as such. It’s not that you are intrinsically defective or unacceptable. It’s that you haven’t yet done a particular sort of developmental work. But you can, because you already have: just in a different set of domains—the hard ones.

And then, you can begin the work of distinguishing your feelings and opinions and relationships from your self. Some types of meditation can help with this! So can imaginative practices, and (when you are ready) interpersonal experiments. You come to realize that you are not your feelings, opinions, and relationships; you have them.

Then the work is to establish a coherent, principled framework as the space within which emotions and relationships operate. This is your new, systematic, stage 4 soft-domain self!

This is where the analogy between soft and hard domains may help. (Although, as we’ll see later, it’s also somewhat inaccurate, and so may mislead.) A computer program is a coherent, principled system within which data objects travel, interact with each other, and are transformed. At soft-domain stage 4, you are the coherent, principled system within which feelings travel, interact with each other, and are transformed. Both your feelings and other people’s—with clarity about which belong to whom.

You can understand a relationship as a defined interface. It’s for exchanging mental contents such as beliefs, intentions, and desires. It’s also affordances for speech acts: requests, promises, commands, refusals, apologies. You can understand a social group with multiple, distinct formal roles as a modular system of systems with distinct interfaces. That is the key to professionalism.

This two-minute Star Trek video explains professionalism elegantly:

(If you click through to the YouTube site, many of the comments give further insightful explanations.)

Professionalism involves conforming to a defined communication protocol, rather than blurting out whatever you are feeling in the moment. It means separating the social role from the person. It demands respect for the authority of the role, regardless of whether you respect the person who happens to be in the role, or agree with their opinions on a particular occasion.

From a stage 3 viewpoint, this is artificial, inhuman, constricting, and unfair. It may seem emotionally unacceptable, or even morally wrong, to adopt this way of being. However, it’s what professional workplaces demand, because it’s effective in coordinating diverse types of work in a shared project. It’s a more sophisticated, powerful, and intellectually challenging way of being. It can also be extraordinarily satisfying when mastered: for instance when a team is “working like a well-oiled machine”—as the relevant cliché has it.

Full soft-domain competence at stage 4 requires understanding the whole structure of complex social systems. (The upcoming section on sales explains an example.) It may eventually imply taking responsibility for a system’s overall functioning.

The analogy between soft and hard domains is imperfect, because soft domains are soft: nebulous, in the language of Meta-rationality. People actually aren’t formal systems. Unlike computer programs, we are not rule-governed. We only orient to rules. We maintain awareness of them, and take them into consideration among other factors in our activity.

Each developmental stage includes and incorporates the previous ones, but relativizes them. At stage 4, the “other factors” include emotions, preferences, personality quirks, and the informal, natural aspects of personal relationships. One should not value these any less, nor lose touch with them. This is made clear at the end of the Star Trek clip:

Data: I am sorry if I have ended our friendship.

Whorf: Sir, it is I who has jeopardized our friendship, not you. If you will overlook this incident, I would like to continue to consider you my friend.

Data: I would like that as well.

It’s possible, at stage 4, to misunderstand this, by taking the analogy between hard and soft domains too literally. You might try to become an unfeeling machine, or “oblivious geek” in the language of Meta-rationality. But stage 4 should not reject or abandon the soft domains. It organizes them into coherent, systematic structures.

Often, it is taking the first steps beyond stage 4 in hard domains—in technical understanding—that triggers your realization that you have been lagging in the soft domains. You start to be meta to your whole worldview, and start questioning everything you thought you were. Whatever boundary you placed between the soft and hard domains breaks down. “Whoa! Now I see my relationships are communal-mode. This needs an upgrade, asap!” The deal you struck with yourself, which let you leave them in stage 3, is off.

After developing stage 4 professionalism at work, it may be difficult to extend relational and emotional systematicity to romantic relationships. That may seem even more inhuman and emotionally and morally unacceptable, so you continue to relate to your partner in a stage 3 way. But this is difficult to make work, as I explained earlier. You cannot maintain the firewall between your stage 4 judgments of your partner and your commitment to stage 3 emotional merging.

Once achieved, a stage 4 romantic relationship can be more sophisticated, respectful, emotionally and communicatively accurate, exciting, enjoyable and trouble-free than stage 3 can imagine. And no less loving! (I will write about this in an upcoming post.) Here, again, it may be helpful to level up intimate relating by analogy with professionalism. Both can be systematic, although of course they are quite different systems.

Overcoming sticking points in the transition

Three common difficulties, with their antidotes:

• Not sufficiently consolidating stage 3 before heading for stage 4

• Misunderstanding stage transition as skill acquisition

• Adopting a mistaken systematic model

Not sufficiently consolidating stage 3 before heading for stage 4

Each stage incorporates, coordinates, and builds on top of the capabilities of the previous one. (That’s why they are necessarily sequential.) You can’t develop stage 4 emotional and relational capabilities unless your stage 3 ones are solid.

Can you:

• Feel your emotions in your body? (As opposed to having concepts about what they must be, based on what you think would be appropriate for the situation.)

• Empathize reliably and accurately?

• That is, feel someone else’s emotions, as opposed to guessing at them conceptually?

• See yourself in an interaction as the other person sees you?

• Anticipate how they would feel in response to different things you might say or do—and feel that?

• Understand what your social group feels about you collectively, how they see you fitting in (or not), and why?

During the transition from 3 to 4, you develop further soft-domain capabilities that go beyond the concrete, local, and immediate (3), but are not yet abstract, systematic, and long-term (4). These include:

• Clearly distinguishing loved ones’ emotions and opinions from your own

• Understanding conflicts between two people other than yourself, empathizing with both without taking sides

Developing stage 3 and transitional 3-to-4 capabilities can be unusually difficult for those of us with Asperger’s syndrome (“on the autism spectrum”). We are inclined to overweight what people say relative to what they feel. It may help to recognize that other people also often fail to notice what they are feeling, so what they say may be inaccurate.

Reliably perceiving one’s own emotions makes it easier to recognize other people’s feelings, and their implications. That may greatly improve relationships, still within the stage 3 mode.

Psychotherapeutic methods are helpful at all these points. Even if you are entirely mentally healthy, a good therapist can you teach you to feel emotions accurately, and can provide pragmatic relationship advice.

There are also specialized meditation methods for locating your emotions, feeling them viscerally, and separating them from mental concepts about their meanings.² That can free you from the recurring dysfunctional action patterns they may seem to compel.

Misunderstanding stage transition as skill acquisition

“I need better social skills” is a sensible approach, upon first realizing you consistently have problems in relationships. This could be a good way to start! Environments that demand systematic relating have rules and patterns of interaction that you need to learn. Some may be explicit, but you have disregarded them. Most may be tacit, so you need to notice them in action, and resolve to act similarly.

However, skill acquisition is insufficient in the longer run. (There’s a section of “Natural misunderstandings of adult stage theory” about this.)

We can understand this with an analogy from software development. Junior developers often program by combining snippets of code they find on the web, or that they have learned and can recall. They may be able to create variants of these, adapting them to new uses. They may be able to write small new functions from scratch, by analogy with ones they’ve seen before. However, they lack fundamental understanding of how software works, or even what it is. They can’t reason accurately about the relationship between a program’s text and its runtime execution. In the language of cognitive developmental psychology, their approach is concrete (stage 3) rather than systematic (stage 4). That limits their ability to debug, to hold the structure of large programs in their heads, or to build substantial new modules. They can only make local changes or small additions to a program. That’s not because they are missing specific knowledge or skills. They lack systematicity itself.

Analogously, social skills can take you a fair way. You can behave smoothly in short-term, relatively superficial interactions. Examples are business etiquette, flirting techniques, and rules for dating.

However, such concrete, local skills are inadequate to navigate serious office politics, no matter how well polished. Likewise, in a marriage, they may prove insufficient to amicably renegotiate role responsibilities or major life plans. You need to understand workplaces, and long-term intimate relationships, structurally: as complex systems that evolve over years.

Adopting a mistaken systematic model

If you are comfortable in the systematic, stage 4 mode in hard domains, taking the same approach in the soft domains may seem obvious and natural. Common pitfalls at this point are applying a wrong structural model of yourself, and/or of a social system. Some variants of this mistake:

• Coming up with your own eccentric theory of how selves, and/or relationships, work. Often that is by reasoning from “rational” first principles. This doesn’t work. A wrong systematic understanding of your emotions can (in the worst case) send you into clinical depression or delusional psychosis. A wrong understanding of relationships and social groups can (in the worst case) get you ostracized and rejected by everyone.

• Adopting an innovative, intellectually exciting model you read or hear about. These are generally wrong. They may nucleate harmful cults, as well as misleading individuals.

• Applying a systematic model that is accurate for some context, but not the one you are in at the time. Different contexts have different social norms of relating. You need to understand how relationships work in the particular social groups you inhabit: your workplace, church, LARPing group.

• Stubbornly sticking to a wrong model that you have decided is Correct, even though you can see it isn’t working. You may tell yourself that everyone else is wrong and they should feel and act according to your theory. However, your opinion about how emotions, relationships, and social systems should work is irrelevant. What matters is how they do work.

  This may be a problem when navigating office politics, for instance. You may be morally and intellectually justified in your opinion that the org chart is unfair and irrational. But unless you have the power to change it, expressing or acting on your opinion will just create fruitless interpersonal trouble for you and everyone else. Understanding how and why power flows in the organization enables accomplishment, instead.

Enterprise software salespeople: systematic social competence

Some salespeople operate at stage 4 in soft domains, but pre-systematically in hard ones. I’m using this as an example not because I understand it thoroughly,³ but because it’s a useful contrast with the typical lag pattern in technical professionals.

This section intends to:

• Clarify, by example, that stages are distinguished by how we apply systematic understanding, or don’t. They are not defined by the domains they concern. Stage 3 is not “the soft stage,” and stage 4 is not “the hard stage.”

• Point out that people may develop systematicity in any domain first, with others lagging. Systematic understanding of hard domains doesn’t necessarily come first.⁴

• Provide a concrete example of stage 4 relational competence, to give a sense of what it means for those lagging in that domain.

Salespeople, obviously, need people skills. Every competent salesperson has to be at stage 3 in soft domains, at minimum. Some specialized sales work requires at least stage 4.

The example I’m somewhat familiar with is enterprise software sales. “Enterprise software” coordinates the work of many people in a large company. It’s extremely complicated, extremely expensive, and usually works extremely badly.

These drawbacks make companies extremely reluctant to buy it. A purchase decision requires the agreement of dozens of people in different departments: managers whose subordinates need it for their work, finance people who must authorize spending millions of dollars for it, technical managers whose teams will have to try to make it more-or-less somewhat work, and often ultimately the CEO who coordinates all of those.

This makes selling enterprise software extremely difficult. Ordinary sales tactics (stage 3) are insufficient, and may well backfire when detected. Enterprise sales require systematic strategy (stage 4), coordinating diverse activities of many people over months or years. Competent enterprise salespeople must be relationally at stage 4, or beyond.

Impeccably professional behavior is the minimum table stake. Executives in prospective customer companies won’t be willing to interact with anyone who isn’t up to that. Further, you represent the face of your own company. Making your company look bad by acting unprofessionally may be career-ending.

The strategic sales process requires understanding customer companies as complex social systems. This includes general understanding of corporate departments and hierarchies, the patterns typical in the customer company’s industry, and idiosyncratic aspects of the particular company you are trying to sell to.

Before you get a purchase order, the customer company has to have completed a sequence of elaborate bureaucratic rituals. Driving each to completion must be a major aspect of your overall strategy. Planning for this includes relatively formal, “hard” aspects: understanding their org chart, the official responsibilities and authorities of particular titles and work groups, and their defined communication channels and business procedures. What you need to know is who has to sign which pieces of paper, in which order. This may actually be easier to grasp for engineers than salespeople!

But for you, it’s just the starting point. How do you get those people to risk signing?

This depends on informal, tacit, often deliberately obscured aspects of the social system. These are more important than the formal, explicit, official ones. They explain what’s going on when that systemic logic seems not to be followed.

How does work actually get done, and by whom? The person who signs off on the decision may not be the person who actually decides. And who influences their decision? Often their subordinates. Those are the people you need to persuade first, before going after the big fish.

Who is politically allied with who, and against whom, and why? You need your own allies in the customer company, who can give you the inside dope, and who will advocate for the purchase. Their enemies may try to obstruct them—and you—for internal political reasons, rather than rational business ones. Who are those enemies, and how will they maneuver? You need to conspire with your allies to work around, sabotage, mollify, or overrule them.

What are the motivations of relevant individuals, according to what incentives? (Knowing this is key to knowing how to persuade them.) Who has a personal like or dislike of who, and why? (You need to avoid getting pulled into personal vendettas that are irrelevant to your aims, but you might be able to leverage them for support.) Who operates at which developmental stage in which domains? (You have to talk to people at different stages quite differently. Do you present a case in terms of personal relationships, or structural ones?)

The relationships you form in the course of a successful enterprise-scale sale may last years, even decades. You will continue to sell your company’s add-ons, version upgrades, new products, and complementary services. Strategizing for the long run, you must understand your own company’s evolving plans, market strategy, and internal structure and politics—as well as those of the customer company.

Your relationships with customer company representatives will also evolve. Those relationships will have both cordial and slightly adversarial aspects. They may grow and change, as you get to know each other well; and as you and they grow and change, and your companies do also. They may become genuine, even deep friendships, although (ideally) within the bounds of professionalism. It is good to find this humorous and enjoyable, without ever making it explicit.

Enterprise salespeople often lag in hard domains. Many, even ones who do very well, can’t be systematic when it comes to non-human things. That, unfortunately, often includes whatever products they are selling. What they know about enterprise software may just be words, typically in the framework of “features and benefits.”

They may be incapable of understanding, much less explaining, what the product actually does. Salespeople often rely on “marketing collateral” that describes software in words and pictures. No English description can accurately explain the scope and limitations of a “benefit.”

Salespeople’s difficulty may not be lack of detailed knowledge of their wares. More fundamentally, it’s not understanding that hard systems are hard-edged: they simply can’t do what they can’t do. Unlike people! We often can “sort of” do things, when properly motivated. It’s not that the sales brochure is misleading or incomplete in its description. It’s that it’s a stage 3 explanation of a stage 4 artifact.

Inconveniently, technical people in the customer company often want to know what the product actually does (and doesn’t do; and probably how). Generally, eventually, salespeople have to bring their company’s engineers with them on a customer company visit. This is awkward and risky for everyone involved.

If the engineers lag in the soft domains, they are likely to offend customer company personnel accidentally. I have seen large sales efforts sunk this way.

I might possibly have been slightly at fault in a few such cases.

Coaching, therapy, recommendations, and thanks

The main practical applications of stage theory are in leadership coaching and in psychotherapy. Adult stage transitions are always difficult, often painful, and usually take several years. A mentor, or suitable social or therapeutic environment, can help. They provide insight, support you through trouble, and will challenge you to keep going.

My spouse

Charlie Awbery

, and our friend Dr. Judith Sachs, provide guidance to technology professionals navigating corporate politics and personal relationships. That’s founders, C-level executives, AI researchers, highly-placed engineers, and STEM professors. One difficulty in finding a good coach or therapist may be discovering that you are smarter than most. That’s unlikely with either of them.

Charlie Awbery is accredited in Growth Edge Coaching, based in adult developmental stage theory. A unique metasystematic coaching approach draws on multiple frameworks, including relevant somatic and meditation practices, and offers individualized transformational methods to practice between sessions.

Dr. Judith Sachs is a clinical psychologist/neuropsychologist specializing in difficulties in professional and personal relationships. She provides Executive Therapy, which is like Executive Coaching but protected by confidentiality laws. She draws on adult developmental theory among other psychological approaches and methodologies, and has a specialization in Asperger’s-y folks, with more than twenty years experience in practice.

This post incorporates insights from both Charlie and Judith. I appreciate their lending relevant professional expertise. Any confusions, distortions, or eccentricities are mine only, though.

1. Alternatively, you may refuse to deal with the soft domains altogether. You declare that emotions and relationships are trivial, and you only care about your intellectual interests. You avoid conflicts at work by interacting as little as possible: “Just leave me alone to get on with coding.” You declare that dating is fake, impossible, nightmarish, that you don’t want any of what’s on offer, and you are better off alone. Usually this reflects lagging at stage 2 in soft domains. In that case, the way forward is to level them up to stage 3 first.

2. Evolving Ground’s Liberating Emotions course teaches such methods, focusing on anger, grief, loss, and joy.

3. Like many of my readers, I’ve worked as an engineer, and I understand our lag pattern well. I have only limited experience of working with enterprise salespeople. I would appreciate feedback on the accuracy or errors in this section from them, if any read it.

4. In fact, I’d guess that, in the general population, it’s more common to develop systematic understanding of emotions or social groups first.