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Douglas LaBier

Dr. Douglas LaBier founded the Center for Adult Development as a premier nonprofit educational, research, and service organization whose mission is to promote adult development in the workplace and in personal lives.

The Center's activities are based on Dr. LaBier's pioneering work on adult development within today's career culture. His critically acclaimed book, Modern Madness, showed how and why career success can become a hidden source of emotional and values conflict. His subsequent work has focused on how adult development becomes distorted and deformed by the larger "culture of disconnection" to which men and women adapt today; and how individuals and organizations can develop and integrate emotional, spiritual and creative capacities within our current culture. In particular, Dr. LaBier's current work focuses on creating holistic strategies through which men and women can transform, redefine and evolve their relationships, creative work, and overall life purpose during their adult years.

The Center provides state-of-the-art knowledge and resources for organizations, institutions and individuals seeking positive development and continued evolution of human capacities within the context of today's career and technology-driven culture. Positive development is often impeded by the many confusing transitions, conflicts, competing values and social conditioning that affect adult and midlife men and women within a rapidly-changing culture.

The Center helps individuals and organizations deal with the ways in which careers, the changing workplace, gender issues, and the urban culture affect adult character development -- either contributing to health and growth or to conflict and decline during adulthood, especially during midlife and midcareer. The Center develops ways to apply this understanding to career conflicts, management and leadership development, intimate relationships and sense of life purpose.

For organizations, the Center provides resources to deal with the impact of change and transition upon the organizations's mission and leadership. It helps organizations learn how to reduce the gap between organizational mission and actual conduct or practices. The Center also helps organizations address and resolve the mixture of personal and management conflicts which frequently affects individuals in today's organizations.

It helps create effective solutions and strategies for leadership development and transition in the light of state-of-the-art knowledge of adult development and both the internal and external forces affecting organizational success. In addition, the Center conducts executive assessments for determining the best fit between organizational culture and mission, and prospective candidates for senior positions within the organization.

For individuals, the Center provides a range of resources directed towards new learning, personal change, and resolution of emotional conflict in personal lives.

Resources for individuals include executive coaching, focused on development or transformation in both career and personal lives; support groups for men and women dealing with life change and transition; and psychotherapy for individuals and couples.

Dr. LaBier and the Center carry out this mission for organizations and individuals through:

The Center's Philosophy

The Center's work is grounded in a recognition of the interconnectedness of all life; that interwoven relationships exist between our physical, emotional, cognitive, relational, and spiritual lives; and between our mind/body/spirit and the larger physical, social and cultural systems of which we are a part. The latter include family dynamics, gender socialization, socially conditioned attitudes and values, economic and political forces, the changing marketplace and new technology.

These larger systems are communicated through and reinforced by the workplace and the larger culture. They shape our character orientation, our values, the kinds of relationships we engage in, our unconscious attitudes and conflicts. All of these forces become expressed in our overall way of life, or life practice. They also determine our perceptions of available solutions to our life dilemmas, including those in the realms of intimate relationships, career, and life purpose or vision. The mix of family, cultural, and social forces can negatively affect, distort or freeze human development, psychologically and spiritually, throughout adult lives.

Human development -- personal evolution and growth of such human capacities, as compassion, connection, and creativity -- is both possible and necessary for the well-being of individuals and societies. However, the forces which support it are inadequately understood and seldom practiced. Human development extends beyond resolution of conflict or trauma. It extends to the realm of major shifts within our awareness, perspectives, and overall life practices. In addition to freedom from the distortion and damage from childhood experiences, positive development also requires awakening to and letting go of socially conditioned attitudes and values which limit self-awareness and feed self-serving, egocentric perspectives and behavior.

Cultivating meaning, purpose, and the capacity for love are forms of strengthening our connections in life, rather than serving our isolated egos. This core life task is essentially nonmaterial and spiritual. It requires cultivating our relational lives through practicing compassion and mutuality, as opposed to domination, submission or isolated detachment. It also requires cultivating our creative powers in work and in everyday life, through flexible thinking and resiliency in the face of new challenges or problems.

The Center seeks to contribute to reversing the prevailing assumption in our culture that human life exists to serve economic and business development and success. This assumption has generated the rampant workaholism, disconnection and dysfunction in our society. In contrast, the Center supports placing economic development and business success in the service of human development -- enhancement of well-being and security; strengthening human connection and community; and building democratic institutions, community, and social justice at all levels of society. In short, the Center believes that the creation of wealth and capital should serve the positive development of human lives.

Contact Us:

Center for Adult Development
Suite 214
5225 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20015
Telephone: 202-363-8184
Fax: 202-363-8367
E-mail: centerinfo@adultdev.org