RESEARCH-BASED SELF-LED COURSE

Growing Humans: How Raising Children Raises Us

The field of parenting is vast and growing. Mostly, it assumes that if adults are taught the right approaches to raising thriving children, they will be able to turn theory into practice. Yet that is not the case. As parents, we - Valerie and Alis - like so many others, have often found ourselves incapable of showing up as our wisest selves, despite knowing what the wise thing to do was.

As human development researchers, we have studied why this 'knowledge - action' gap exists in the first place. 'Growing-up' doesn't stop when we reach adult age, but is a life long, beautiful, messy and complex process. The more we grow on the inside, the more able we become to walk the talk of maturity, even when it's hardest.

This course takes you on a journey into the heart of adult (vertical) development and into yourself. It will invite you to slow down, look inwards and learn how you too are still growing up and what the next edge of your evolution might be. It will also open the door to a community of self-aware, curious adults who are keen to reflect, ask themselves challenging questions and experiment with new behaviours.

50% off for our paid Substack Subscribers

Keri Dattilo

SARAH MAYHEW

ANONYMOUS

DR. MARTINE GEORGE

MARIA ELIADIS

Valerie Livesay has composed a most insightful workshop to explore our innermost dynamics and how they shape our personal and professional lives. Through the use of stage and theater metaphors, Valerie's approach helps to illuminate our myriad personas--all our internal characters vying for stage time. Every day we are confronted with an array of situations and scenes.

Through Valerie's framework, we examine those aspects of self through different contexts and have an opportunity to cast our own play, asking, "Who will land each part?" I enthusiastically recommend this workshop to anyone wishing to explore these dynamics and more through a focus on calling on our internal ensemble in the betterment of ourselves.

Tom Cesarini

Jennifer Abrams

Balance the freedom of self-led learning with the connection to a vibrant community of peers!

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Lifetime access

Take the course at your own pace and have all your resources accessible whenever you need them: over 5h of videos, participant handbook, comprehensive slide deck; handouts with practical activities & worksheets you can take right into your family; guided audio practices and additional readings.

50% discount for Substack paid subscribers

If you are a paid subscriber to our "Growing Humans" Substack, you will not only receive articles and podcast episodes right into your inbox every week, but also gain access to dedicated community events AND a 50% discount for joining this course. Please check your paid subscription welcome email for the code before you enrol into this program.
Explore our Substack HERE.

Live fire-side chats

Every 6 weeks we will come together in live fireside chats facilitated by Alis and Valerie to ask questions, share our learnings and work through our challenges. give and receive feedback.

These ongoing sessions will be open to all course participants. Attend in your own time, even after completing the rest of the course.

Growing Humans Alumni

It takes a village to raise a grown-up and we are counting on you to become that village!

As you complete the Program, we will welcome you into our Alumni community and invite you to be soundboards for future research projects and take on leading roles in the next evolution of the Growing Humans project.

It was during my doctoral program that I first encountered adult development theory. I could understand the developmental stages I had been through as a child and later as an adult. And, I began to conceive of what might lie ahead through my conscious engagement in the experience of my life.

It felt empowering, freeing, and also a bit disconcerting. Because I could certainly spot the times that I was able to show up with my full capacities when I was my best self on the good days. And, I also saw the many ways and times I did not have access to these capacities…the times when I felt constricted, stuck, small.

The theory wasn’t super explicit about these experiences –what they were, or what caused them, or how the hell I could get out of them and back to my bigness. So, I started to study this thing—this phenomenon of fallback—that we seemed to know so little about. I was intent on figuring out how to rid myself of the less complex, less mature parts of me, and share what I learned so others could do the same. Next, I turned my attention to understanding it in real life.

And in the process I discovered that our fallback is not something we want to get rid of. In fact, it is these very experiences of losing our developmental footing that provide the biggest springboard for our growth.

The fact that my own developmental journey was simultaneously playing out in technicolor only enhanced my learning. Along the way, I had become a mother. And it turns out that parenthood can be an incredible catalyst for our development…both in our leaps forward and our inevitable stumbles back.

Indeed, from the time I was cooking (then) little Townsend in my belly, I have been fully in the observation and wonderment, despair and glee, of myself as a human charged with growing this other human. Townsend was the being who, through his reflections of the fullness of me, made the depths and frequency of my fallbacks undeniable, and solidified my commitment to poking into all of the corners of my developmental house (yes, even the cluttered ones with all the spider webs and that unidentifiable sticky mess on the floor). As he (and Sloane, too) grow and develop, I notice myself falling back regularly…and growing and developing, too.

Raising humans has been one of the most significant developmental crucibles of my life and I have discovered myself anew, again and again, through this process. Having a community to witness me in this process has provided a tremendous scaffold for my growth.

When Alis and I met a couple of years ago, she became one of the holders of a me in development in so many contexts, not the least of which was the experience of motherhood that we both fid ourselves in. In the course of our journeying together, we realised how much the developmental structures that have been present in our research and practice within self and with others have supported us as we grew ourselves and our children as humans…and how fortunate we are to have access to these.

Alis invited me to wonder alongside her: “What might a developmental space for all adults who raise kids look like? A space where nobody tells you WHAT TO DO with your kids (which is the focus of much of the field of parenting), but instead where you are nudged to reflect on HOW YOU are showing up in the process of raising the children in your life.”

And this is how Growing Humans came to be.

For the last decade, my professional endeavours, as a coach and facilitator, a researcher and author, a teacher and companion to adults, have focused on helping individuals, navigate what it means to be human and the inevitable growing and shedding inherent in that process. It feels like the most natural extension of my soul’s yearning and purpose to now accompany others who are also on this path of raising ourselves as we raise our kids.

I am the author of Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating fallback in embrace of the fullness of you in which you will find more than a few stories about how parenting brings us to our knees developmentally, and also encourages us to take the next step.

To learn more about my research and work, please visit the Ghost Light Leadership website.

My journey to co-creating this course with Valerie has been long. It fact, it started two and a half decades ago, when I was 16 and I began writing my very first journal, as a way to process my sadness and frustration at not feeling seen or understood by the adults around me.

Back then, it seemed to me that grown-ups suffered from a mysterious form of amnesia which prevented them from remembering that they too had been teenagers. I was certain they too had suffered through their first heartbreak, had felt unsure about their future, had had big emotions they didn't comprehend - and yet they seemed unable to remember any of it and, consequently, unable to empathise with what I was experiencing. In my very first journal entry back then I wrote:

"Perhaps time will make my memories fade, perhaps when I grow up I’ll perceive my teenage years very differently than I do now. I hope that this journal, which I start today, will help me understand my children much better when they reach my age now. I hope this journal will help me bridge that ‘generational gap’ that everybody seems to be talking about.”

I have been faithfully journalling for the past 25 years. It was much later that I understood this decision from so long ago might have been the biggest gift I have ever given myself for my own growth as a human being (and, later, parent) and also the very first step which put me on the path I have been walking my whole professional life.

For over 17 years I have been working with leaders across the world, supporting them in growing their self-awareness and capacity to show up as their wisest selves with their teams, as well as deal with the complexities and disruption of organisational life. My insatiable hunger for better understanding human beings (and by extension myself) led me to complete a Masters Degree in Positive Psychology and later a PhD in Adult (Vertical) Development - where I explored how adults transform when faced with profound disorienting dilemmas.

In my professional journey I had the privilege of working with thousands of leaders in organisations large and small and in every leadership course the topic of parenting came up. People could not help considering how their beliefs, thoughts, emotions impacted not just how they showed up with their teams, but how they showed up with their kids. Long before I had my own child, I became convinced that lessons from parenting and leadership are profoundly inter-connected.

Beyond my work, life happened. I navigated the intricacies of love, heartbreak, big decisions, wrong decisions, life lessons, breakdowns and breakthroughs. Nine years ago I became a mother. I discovered, like so many parents, the painful gap between 'theory' and 'practice'.

Here I was, an expert in human development, struggling to mange my emotions, to show up as my wisest self on my hardest days, wondering if I'm doing the right thing, finding myself reacting in 'knee-jerk' fashion when I wished I was responding with gentleness and compassion and struggling mightily to balance life, work, relationship and motherhood and leave some room for self-care in-midst of it all.

Being a parent forced me to put my research into practice in a whole new way. My family became my best laboratory for learning and growth. I noticed, over and over, the direct link between my self-awareness, self-regulation and the response I would get from my child.

When I met Valerie through shared work we do with coaches and leaders, I found a kindred spirit who sees, just as I do, that parenting might just be one of the most powerful catalysts for our life-long growth as humans and that, in turn, our growth might just be the biggest gift we can ever offer our children.

We set out to bring all of our knowledge, research and lived experience together in service of any adult who is raising children, in whatever role they may be playing. We are both convinced you don't have to be a parent to have a life-changing impact on the children in your world.

This is how this course came to be. We are here to learn, just as much as we are here to guide and hold space for you to learn from each-other's wisdom. I'm so excited to have you with us, exploring this incredibly intricate world which is YOU!

To learn more about my work and research, visit the Vertical Development Institute's (VDI) website.

Every 6 weeks our international group of participants in the online "Vertical Development Practices" program come together for Group Mentoring sessions. These sessions provide a precious opportunity to connect with the growing global community of experienced coaches and dive more deeply into different aspects of vertical development coaching practice.

You have 8 group mentoring sessions included in your program curriculum, which you can attend at any time. They are also a great opportunity for you to practice.

Here you can find the GROUP MENTORING CALENDAR. Please book your attendance for all the sessions you would like to participate in (there are 2 time-slots available for each session - the calendar converts times automatically to your time-zone). Please choose the one that best suits you. Booking is essential to keep track of participation and award the relevant CCEs.

words FROM OUR RESEARCH PARTNERS and mentors

WILLIAM (Bill) TORBERT

"Alis' PhD dissertation studying a flagship Executive Leadership Program in Australia and NZ is quite simply the most sophisticated and comprehensive study in the world at present — in theoretical, methodological, and practical terms — about how to support ‘vertical’ leadership development and organisational transformation.”

DR. JENNIFER GARVEY BERGER

"I had been a developmentalist more than a dozen years when I met Val. Before Val, I had reached out a (sometimes reluctant) hand of empathy to those smaller parts of us that lie in wait for our exhaustion or rage or overwhelm. I had acknowledged them and tried to make space for them in both my theories and in my sense of myself. But I absolutely didn’t want to get to know them, and, if I’m honest, I sort of hoped I would someday be able to sneak away from them and leave them behind, like slipping out the restaurant’s back door without paying the bill.

Over the years I have worked with Val, though, I’ve discovered that when I try to sneak away, these monsters chase after me. They claw and rage and scare away little children. This happens to you too. It happens to us all, no matter how much we try to prevent it from happening or deny it when it does.

What Val has taught me over the years and what she will invite you into over these pages is a transformational journey of acceptance and love, not just for your own humanity but for the humanity of those around you."

MIKE VIEROW

“Alis' work has brought clarity to how we support leaders in developing their inner capacities to exercise more wisdom. Her work is generating rare and valuable evidence-based approaches to constructing leadership education programs with measurable impacts in accelerating psychological maturity.

We need more peer-reviewed contributions such as hers in this field - without which practitioners would be left to continue guesswork.”

This is a course for any adult who plays a role in raising and educating children. It is NOT a typical parenting course. You will not learn WHAT the best practices for raising and managing your children are - there are many other valuable parenting courses out there focusing on that.

Instead, you will learn to know yourself - how your mind and emotions work, how you as an adult continue growing through many stages of development throughout your whole life, how to recognise those stages and how to take yourself out of your comfort zone to step into ever more maturity and wisdom.
This is a course about YOU, designed with the belief that your self-awareness and capacity to make conscious choices in your behaviour every day are, in fact, the biggest gifts you can ever offer your own children or any other child you interact with as a family member or educator.

The field of human development is a sub-branch of developmental psychology, studying how adults continue growing through subsequent stages of increasing internal complexity all of their lives.
Vertical development describes a particular type of learning. Unlike its counterpart - horizontal development - which is concerned with WHAT people know (information, knowledge, skills), vertical development is concerned with HOW they know: what their worldview is, what beliefs and assumptions inform their behaviours, how conscious they are of the workings of their own minds and consequently how capable to choose their behaviour versus react on auto-pilot.

To be rounded as human beings we need both 'horizontal' and 'vertical' learning. While the first can more easily be acquired from books or courses, the latter comes about from lived experience. Which is why we have designed this program as an immersive journey full of dialogue, self-reflection and experimentation, where you won't just learn about what 'vertical development' is, but will be challenged to put it to work in your day to day lives and your relationship to the kids you love and raise.

Extensive research shows that adults who operate from a more mature level of vertical development are more effective, more capable of thriving in disruption and dealing with ambiguity and complexity. We review some of the core research on the value of vertical development throughout the course, and you can check out some of interesting studies on the VDI research page: https://www.verticaldevelopmentinstitute.com/research

Interestingly, most of the studies demonstrating the value of vertical development have been undertaken in the context of leadership. To our knowledge, this course is the first one to bring this topic in the realm of parenting. We firmly believe the lessons of vertical development are as useful in our families as they are in our teams and organisations. And with your help we will put this belief to the test.

If by 'Parenting' we understand teaching adults what behaviours they should do so they can raise happy, thriving children, then NO. This is not a typical parenting course.

This program focuses solely on you as an adult - your journey, your mind, your emotions, your choices on how to show up. It aims to support you to raise your self-awareness and boldly experiment with new behaviours as a result. Throughout, you will constantly be invited to look inwards, reflect, take the learnings and apply them in the real world, with your kids and within your family.

Every concept in this program is supported by research - ours and many others'. Yet, we do not expect us to take our word for anything. On the contrary! We invite you to challenge everything and put everything to the test. The core purpose of this program is to give you the scaffold and context to build a science-informed understanding of who you are and who (and how) you are becoming as a human being and increase your capacity to act from your wisest self more often than not.

We know that the completion rate for self-led learning is abysmal. People get quickly demotivated just watching videos and doing solo activities, with no imput from another human being. We simply are not built that way.
We have many years of experience designing and facilitating offline and online learning and have created this course to honour the best of both worlds - the flexibility busy adults need so they can pace their learning around the constraints of their lives AND the interaction they need to be able to reflect with other people, feel supported and contribute their own wisdom to a learning community. All in a virtual space, across cultures and time-zones.

Throughout the course you will find many 'community reflection' activities. Here you will be invited to share your learnings and experiments with other participants on the course and read their thoughts in turn. You will also be able to share resources - articles, videos, artwork - whatever helps you and you think might support others on their own learning.

Every 6 weeks Val and Alis will host community learning calls - where we will be unpacking insights from the program, answering any questions you might have and where you also get to meet fellow learners. These will be timed along multiple time-zones, so you can always find a good time to attend.

We'll invite you to form self-led learning pods - small groups of like-minded learners - who can meet and learn with and from each-other.

Beyond the course - we encourage you to subscribe to our Substack - "Growing Humans" - and engage in the weekly chats on the platform, come up with article topic ideas or even join us as a guest contributor - sharing your own experience in an article or podcast episode.

As you see, you are not at all going to be left to your own devices, but instead have lots of freedom and lots of structure that will remind you constantly that you are not alone - others are there to support you, learn from you and teach you something valuable in return.

The full content of the "Growing Humans" Course is immediately accessible to participants upon purchase, therefore we reserve the right not to issue refunds. However, if you do not see any value in the program or you find it doesn't meet your needs at all, we will be happy to discuss refunds on a case-by-case basis. For any genuine complaints about the quality of the course or a mismatch with your expectations, please get in touch with us directly.

Write your awesome label here.

Growing Humans: How Raising Children Raises Us

The biggest challenge of parenting is not WHAT to do in relation to our children, but HOW to be in relationship to ourselves.

50% off for our paid Substack Subscribers

Incredible support | Insight | Challenge | Inspiration | Compassion | Transformation | Self-acceptance

Participant benefits

Lifetime access

50% discount for Substack paid subscribers

Live fire-side chats

Growing Humans Alumni

Your Guides

Dr. Valerie Livesay

Dr. Alis Anagnostakis

Clarity | Wisdom | Comprehensive | Rigorous

Frequently asked questions

Who is this course for?

What is human (vertical) development?

What are the benefits of vertical development?

Is this a Parenting course?

If this course is 'self-led', does it mean I'll just be left to my own devices?

Refund policy

Join the 'Growing Humans' village!

Featured links

Connect with us

Growing Humans: How Raising Children Raises Us

The biggest challenge of parenting is not WHAT to do in relation to our children, but HOW to be in relationship to ourselves.

50% off for our paid Substack Subscribers

Incredible support | Insight | Challenge | Inspiration | Compassion | Transformation | Self-acceptance

Really important work for all of us who want to grow (up) to do. This workshop helped me learn about all of my many selves and how to be more generous and self-compassionate with the selves that I feel can trip me up.

Participant benefits

Lifetime access

50% discount for Substack paid subscribers

Live fire-side chats

Growing Humans Alumni

Your Guides

Dr. Valerie Livesay

Dr. Alis Anagnostakis

Clarity | Wisdom | Comprehensive | Rigorous

Frequently asked questions

Who is this course for?

What is human (vertical) development?

What are the benefits of vertical development?

Is this a Parenting course?

If this course is 'self-led', does it mean I'll just be left to my own devices?

Refund policy

Join the 'Growing Humans' village!

Featured links

Connect with us