The Unschooling Mindset: I Am My Relationships with Jon Barnes
with Jon Barnes, Coach, Facilitator & Co-founder at Pala
Jon Barnes on why shifting from "I am my relationships" to "I have them" unlocks autonomy — in teams, in parenting, and in self-managing cultures.
Most of us think we have relationships — but what if, psychologically, we still believe we are our relationships?
That distinction sits at the heart of Episode 54 of the Love Not Fear podcast, where host Tine Bieber talks with Jon Barnes — coach, facilitator, and co-founder of Pala — about what happens when the unschooling mindset meets organizational culture.
The Shift That Changes Everything: From “I Am” to “I Have”
Jon draws on Robert Kegan’s developmental framework to describe a stage most adults get stuck in: the socialized mind. At this stage, we don’t just care about what others think — we are what others think. Our boss’s opinion feels existential. Social media comparisons feel like identity crises. Setting a boundary feels like risking everything because disappointing someone threatens our very sense of self. The growth move is deceptively simple to describe and enormously difficult to make: shifting from “I am my relationships” to “I have my relationships.” When that shift happens, you don’t stop caring about others. You just stop outsourcing your identity to them. And suddenly, autonomy becomes possible — not as rebellion, but as a genuine capacity to hold your own needs alongside someone else’s.
Why Fear Runs the Show in Most Organizations
Jon points to a pattern that anyone who has worked in a traditional hierarchy will recognize: decisions driven by extrinsic pressure rather than intrinsic motivation. Performance reviews where you present yourself to the boss for judgment. Reward systems that mirror the points-for-good-behavior schemes used in schools. These mechanisms aren’t just annoying — they actively reinforce the socialized mind. They keep people operating from fear of losing approval rather than love of the work itself. The alternative Jon and his team at Pala put in place looks different. Self-reflection practices where people generate their own growth insights. Voluntary mechanisms where people opt into projects and roles. Peer-to-peer feedback that’s open, not anonymous and not hierarchical. The shift is from outside-in to inside-out, and Jon is clear-eyed that it’s slower at first — but dramatically more powerful over time.
Conflict Is Not the Problem — Avoiding It Is
One of the most practical threads in the conversation is about conflict. High-performing teams don’t have less conflict — they have more. The difference is that conflict doesn’t feel existential. It feels like the normal, sometimes uncomfortable process of understanding each other better. Jon describes the pattern he sees constantly: teams that approach the edge of real conflict and then pull back. Leaders who play messenger between two people who should be in the same room. The cost isn’t just unresolved tension — it’s lost trust, lost performance, and lost growth. His advice is straightforward. Stop triangulating. Get people together. Let them be honest with each other. And model repair publicly, especially if you’re the leader. A CEO saying “we were in conflict and we worked it out” sends a more powerful cultural signal than any values statement on a wall.
What Unschooling Taught Jon About Autonomy at Work
Jon’s path to this work didn’t come from business school. It came from parenting. When his son was six, the family moved to an eco-village in Costa Rica with a radically autonomous school. The philosophy was simple: don’t steal their autonomy. Put things on the bottom shelf. Let them make breakfast decisions. Let them struggle with choices because the struggle is the growth. After six months in that environment, the family continued with unschooling — a child-led approach to education built around play, exploration, and following the child’s own inner curriculum rather than an externally imposed one. The results were striking. When his son decided at twelve to attend traditional school, he had no adaptation period. His teachers were surprised. And his son said something Jon will never forget: “Thank you that I got to choose to go. I can tell not everyone chose to go.” That sentence captures everything Jon believes about coaching, culture, and what it means to genuinely empower another person.
The Trouble with Consciousness Models
The conversation closes on a topic that generates strong opinions in the progressive organizations space: consciousness levels. Models like Spiral Dynamics and the framework behind Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations claim to map stages of organizational and individual development. Jon’s position is nuanced and honest. He finds the patterns real and the observations useful — people do swing between individualism and collectivism, and noticing that pattern in yourself is genuinely valuable coaching work. But he’s uncomfortable with the hierarchy these models create. Knowing someone’s “level” doesn’t tell you what to do with that information, and it can easily become a new form of judgment dressed up in developmental language. His suggestion: use the patterns as conversation starters and mirrors for self-awareness, but drop the stages as identity markers. You get most of the value with almost none of the division.
Listen and Connect
This episode is rich with ideas that bridge parenting, coaching, and organizational culture — all grounded in the same question: what does it take to grow from the inside out? Listen to the full conversation at lovenotfear.com and learn more about Jon Barnes and his work at Pala, where he and his team help organizations build cultures of genuine autonomy and self-management.