Published : 4 years ago, on 14/12/2020

How make big developmental changes in little ways:  3 reasons why it pays to think, act and feel at the Micro level

By Paul Austin, Accredited Coach Practitioner and Associate with Verosa

Micro v Macro, all sounds very techy in an article piece about personal development doesn’t it?  Well, in our technological world, driven as it is by machines and Artificial Intelligence, we can lose sight of just how complex we humans are… and how we continue to put even the most ‘macro’ of computers to shame.

As we deal with life, our default is that we take ourselves for granted and think this is just the way we are. Yet, we can take another more challenging view that asks why are we so complex?

Unlike modern machines which have an average “mean time between failure / obsolescence” of say, five years, our complexity comes from our average life span, which in the Western World which is in the 80s.  Imagine a computer that lives and grows for 80 years with ever-updated software and an endless supply of memory (although the hardware may let us down after a while!)

And, turning this thinking on its head, the way that machines are being developed to attempt to catch up with us, is by learning how to process the micro rather than the macro.

So, what is Micro Thinking and how can it help us to move forward in our personal development, relationships, careers and sense of well-being?

We need to have a “Micro vision” of what we want for ourselves

“The devil is in the detail”, “Lets get down into the weeds”, “marginal gains” …

All of these sayings have some value in our developmental thinking and behaviour.  While some may be seen as clichés, they remain current in our everyday language because there are grains of truth in them.

One example is the assertion that in order to be able to make big changes and adjustments in the way we behave, think and relate to others, we need to have a Big Vision of what we want (Macro level).  That may well be true and yet the reality and challenge with this is that in order to make changes that last we need to work on understanding and living with the Micro detail.  Only when we have grasped that, and it becomes part of our Unconscious Competence can this be real for us.

An example of this might be checking ourselves before we make that off the cuff hurtful or ill-advised comment, or not allowing someone else’s mood or behaviour affect our feelings about ourselves.

Sweeping large scale Macro changes may sound great, but as we know with New Year’s Resolutions, they often don’t get past February.  Often, we don’t take enough time to map out the changes in detail, to go down to the real gritty detail of how our vision looks in every important aspect of our lives.  Sitting down or taking time to do this on a regular basis, revisiting it as necessary and adding to the map, sets the groundwork for reasoned and worthwhile personal development.

This is not necessarily a written process, we can think about it before we sleep, on a long walk or in the shower – it all builds a sense of questioning ourselves on the way we do things.   Sir John Whitmore refers to this in his book Coaching for Performance as “Awareness”, and I would go further and say that we can grow deeper, faster and more lastingly with “Micro Awareness”.

We can often see what we don’t like in other people (the Macro). To develop we need to see the Micro in ourselves and our own 

The psychological term “Projection” is defined as being a defence mechanism in which we defend our ego / feelings against our unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative), by denying their existence in ourselves and attributing them to others.  This points to our abilities to be able to hide away from ourselves both when things are negative or when we are embarrassed by praise or getting attention.

Again, this is something that affects us at the Macro Level, sometimes obscuring our sense of our reactions and behaviour expressly because it happens to us at that level i.e. we can be aware or unaware of it, depending on our level of reflection and self-understanding.

Yet to even have got as far as appreciating this in ourselves, we need to have gone to the Micro level to understand how when we are projecting our facial expressions change, the tone of our voices rise or fall and the words we choose to speak have developed a pattern.  Some of this comes from our learnt behaviour from our parents, yet this our interpretation of their behaviour, and again only at the Micro level can we break this down, see it for what it is and make the choice or whether or not we want to continue behaving like this.

We condition ourselves to present our exterior in the way that we feel society wants, and to develop real change, we need to cast that off for new thinking

The terms “group think” and “unconscious bias” are two more examples of Macro thinking that can hold us back in our personal development or in making the changes that we want to make in ourselves.   This “fitting in” or hiring someone who is in our mould does not move either ourselves or society forward because the Macro is limiting us in our choices.  It can also limit us in our friendships, our work relationships and ultimately how we feel about ourselves and others.  Again, picking this apart and getting to the Micro level of why we think this way, what it means for us and others, and deciding if this is how we want to be can help us move forward as individuals, see matters from a different perspective and ultimately make the development changes that can move us ever forward.

While we are synthesising all this thinking, we get into the habit of Micro thinking about everything – without it being a burden. Taking the time to become aware of how we are, behave, think and act at the Micro Level enables us to come to terms with ourselves and be ready to make an informed choice about how we want to be as humans.

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