The next generation of change work

There’s a question underneath all the noise about AI, and it isn’t whether the machines will get smarter. They will. It’s that they’re now improving the very thing that does the improving. Each generation doesn’t just solve new problems — it upgrades the system that solves problems. Recursive self-improvement.

Meanwhile, most of us are meeting an accelerating world with roughly the same inner operating system we had twenty years ago.

So I find myself asking a slightly absurd question: why aren’t we doing what they’re doing? Not getting better at one more thing — getting better at getting better. Evolving how we evolve.

That’s the work I’ve spent years assembling. Let me lay out plainly what makes it a next generation of change work — not a replacement for anything that came before, but the next floor up.

Here’s something that always bothered me. If a person has twenty or thirty years to work on something, why are so many still struggling with the same thing after twenty or thirty years?

It isn’t for lack of effort, or insight, or good practitioners. It’s that most change work — therapy, coaching, most personal development — goes straight at the content of the problem and tries to solve it from inside. And from inside, it genuinely is endless: there’s always another layer of the same story.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part people mishear. That work is real, and the relief it brings is real — I’ve had it, and I still send people toward it. This isn’t instead of any of it. It’s a different aim.

Underneath every technique I use is a single move: we don’t argue with the part of you that wants to stay as it is. We change the structure that keeps generating the experience in the first place.

When that structure reorganises, something specific becomes possible — and you can feel it before you can explain it: if you want to engage with the old trigger, you can; if you don’t, you don’t — and it no longer depends on the other person being any different. That decoupling has names in developmental terms (self-authoring, the self-transforming mind), but the felt version is simpler: you stop being on the seesaw.

What slows ordinary change down, more than anything, is a bundle of hidden assumptions — about how long change takes, how hard it has to be, how much you have to do. Those assumptions are the brake. Loosen them, work the structure, and change stops crawling and starts to compound.

People often think nothing’s changed because the feeling hasn’t vanished. But change shows up in four ways. The intensity of a reaction drops. Recovery gets faster. It happens less often. Or — the one most people miss — the intensity stays the same, but the space around it grows. Any one of those is the work landing.

And then the recursive turn, which is the heart of it. We’re not only trying to handle the trigger; we’re building the capacity to handle — so the reaction to the reaction softens too. Because most people, it turns out, are more upset that they got triggered than they are by the trigger itself. When that layer relaxes, you’ve stopped needing the method. You’ve become, in a real sense, self-evolving — the continuous evolution starts happening by itself.

One more thing makes it different in the room: it’s experiential before it’s explained. The question isn’t can you talk about this — most of us can talk about anything — it’s are you living it? Real change tends to move through a slightly disorienting, not-knowing, liminal state, where the old way of making sense loosens and a new one can form. The more at home you become in that not-knowing, the larger the leaps you can make.

And it isn’t a single ideology. The work is a confluence of many models — developmental, somatic, energetic, contemplative — held together by that one structural move. I’m not wedded to any of them. I’m interested in what reliably produces change.

Not everyone. It’s for people who’ve already done a lot of work on themselves, and can feel the difference between something genuinely new and a repackaging of what they already know. The current group includes a medical doctor, executive coaches, an adult development practitioner, a psychotherapist, a serial entrepreneur, a thirty-five-year communication specialist — people who’ve spent decades in this terrain. The next layer is only reachable because they’ve already climbed the earlier ones.

One of them, reflecting on last year’s cohort:

“That program end of last year — it was life changing for me. And it continues to be fabulous.” — Christine L.

DM Life Evolution begins this afternoon — Monday, 1pm ET — six months, live, in a small group. There’s one seat left.

If something in you leaned forward reading this, that’s worth listening to. Email me at anand@adventuresinmind.co.uk and we’ll have a short, honest conversation about whether it’s a fit — or see the full picture at adventuresinmind.co.uk/dmle.

And if now isn’t your moment, that’s completely fine.

There will be other doors.

— Anand