Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is a cutting-edge leadership development author, researcher, and consultant. He helps organizations vertically develop their leaders primarily through a focus on mindsets. Ryan is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work, & Leadership. He is also a leadership professor at the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton.

Vertical development is enhancing our ability to make meaning of our world in more cognitively and emotionally sophisticated ways. The concept comes with two assumptions:

1. People vary in their cognitive and emotional sophistication

2. Those with higher altitudes of cognitive and emotional sophistication will navigate life more effectively, be better leaders, and be more positive influences within their sphere of influence. There are different levels or altitudes or levels of vertical development/cognitive and emotional sophistication. I call them Mind 1.0, Mind 2.0, and Mind 3.0. Each serves as our internal operating system that causes us to focus on different goals and needs as follows: Mind 1.0 – Focused on safety, comfort, and belonging; Mind 2.0 – Focused on standing out, getting ahead, and winning; Mind 3.0 – Focused on contributing and adding value. Understanding this should leave us with two questions:

1. How do I elevate vertically? (i.e., How do I become more cognitively and emotionally sophisticated, with particular interest in Mind 3.0)

2. Because we have elements of all three mind levels within us, we also need to ask: How do I spend a higher percentage of my time in Mind 3.0? Find out more about Ryan at https://ryangottfredson.com/