Author site, where you can download a free copy
Townhead interview on the Coaches Rising podcast
Townhead was exploring his relationship to work when he developed this insightful framework by connecting the I/We/It perspectives on the world (from Ken Wilber’s integral coaching approach) with the Platonic ideals of truth, beauty and goodness to identify three archetypes:
- “The Artist (I / subjective) speaks the language of beauty. Their creations are expressions of what moves and inspires them — what they find beautiful.”
- “The Merchant (We / relational) speaks the language of goodness. Their trade is intended for mutual benefit, to offer goods and services that enrich everyone.”
- “The Seeker (It / objective) speaks the language of truth. Their search for knowledge and understanding seeks to reveal the nature of reality—the truth of who we are.”
When Townhead talks about work, he goes beyond the quotidian to the spiritual:
“Work is the tasks, emails, projects, meetings, and invoices that populate your to-do list, the actions you take to build something in the world. It’s also the work of expressing your inner creativity, birthing new things that change the landscape and touch people. And it’s the spiritual work of discovering who you really are and showing us the truth of this world.”
When expressed that way, work can be our sacred offering to the collective, the work we were born to do. Townhead developed these archetypes to explore how we might be blocking ourselves from doing that sacred work. Only when we embody all of these archetypes can we bring our full selves to our work, and have the unique impact only we can have on the world. When we instead repress the archetype or express a “shadow” twisted version of the archetype, we develop distorted unhealthy patterns around our work.
To make this less abstract, the Merchant archetype is ideally expressed as somebody offering a product or service they uniquely created to somebody else (a customer) who can benefit. That exchange creates greater goodness for the world, as the merchant gets more capital to invest in their creations and the customer gets the value of the creation. But it only works if both sides benefit, where the transaction is voluntary in a free market without monopolies and coercion. It also only creates greater good if the merchant is responsible for the consequences of their actions, if they deal with all of the so-called “externalities” like pollution, addiction, carcinogens, etc. Late-stage capitalism (descended from colonialism) created a twisted version of this archetype that focuses solely on extracting as much value for the seller, forgetting about the relational / community “we” component of healthy merchants.
Townhead also identifies three subtypes of each archetype, one each for the I/We/It perspectives:
- Artist: the Poet (subjectively expressing their art), the Performer (relationally connecting with an audience) and the Artisan (objectively improving their craft)
- Merchant: the Innovator (developing their own solutions), the Marketer (sharing their creations with potential customers), and the Operator (doing the process work necessary to run a business)
- Seeker: the Mystic (exploring their subjective inner truth), the Scholar (studying what others have discovered), and the Scientist (looking for the objective truth)
Unsurprisingly, I really identified with the Seeker archetype. I started my career as the Scientist, studying particle physics as one of the most fundamental sciences. I expanded to become the Scholar, reading books obsessively to learn about different frameworks that others had developed (as this blog was originally started to document). Over the last few years, I’ve been starting to embody the Mystic, exploring my own inner experiences, including childhood trauma and trusting my somatic knowledge and unconscious brain more.
The subtypes also provided a surprising insight:
- I felt most comfortable with the relational subtypes across archetypes. I am very comfortable as the Performer (as evidenced by my choral singing), as the Scholar referring to other people’s frameworks, and even as the Marketer sharing my insights on LinkedIn or through my newsletters.
- I felt least familiar with the subjective subtypes: I have never created my own art (poetry, drawing, fiction), and have never had the Innovator impulse to build products to address my frustrations, instead finding ways to work around the challenge. I’m just now starting to explore my inner experience as the Mystic: “The Mystic is not concerned with the truths of others, or of accepted science or doctrine; they search inside for truth in the form of direct experience.” This has been unfamiliar to me as somebody who regularly deferred to others or to accepted science, but I’ve started to lean into it more recently, and perhaps this exploration within the Seeker archetype will help me grow more comfortable with exploring my subjectivity in the other archetypes of Artist and Merchant.
- I don’t like the objective subtypes – I don’t enjoy grinding to improve my craft, eking out small improvements, whether that’s as a writer (I hate editing!), a business person or a scientist. I know it’s helpful, I just don’t enjoy doing it.
These surprising insights are a signal for my Seeker self that there is valuable truth in this book, as these archetypes helped to illuminate where I am struggling with my work / business.
Townhead was kind enough to chat with me, and suggested spending more time with the Artist archetype, particularly the Poet subtype, to learn to channel my own vision and creativity into the world. To quote the book, “When you do not embody the Poet in your work, it is stripped of the deeply personal expression of your experience, leaving it derivative and shallow.” Developing that inner compass, where I connect to my own self-expression, can help provide me more guidance and aliveness as a solopreneur who is not otherwise constrained. The question for me to reflect on is “What is it that you are moved to create?”
To sum up, Townhead writes:
“Our developmental work is unique to each of us, but the deep structures never change — to journey into the dark places we fear to tread, reclaiming what has been lost, and to return to the marketplace, embodying the full power of our gifts. … You stand out by unashamedly being you. This is the biggest game there is — to play full out at life, trusting that who you really are, and what you really want, are all you really need to walk the path.”
His book is a guide designed to activate the archetypes within each of us, especially the ones we currently repress or twist, so that we can share our unique value with the world and do the work we are here to do. I will continue to use this book to guide my own Seeker exploration of that inner terrain and hope that you will consider reading it as well to help find your own path.
the work we were born to do: In Sobonfu E. Somé’s book, The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships, she shares that African shamans asked babies while still in the mother’s womb what the baby’s purpose in coming to this world…and they would answer. This is the sort of thing that I would have dismissed as ridiculous a few years ago, but am now wondering if my own preconceptions were preventing from me from hearing truth.
