I’m guessing that when you read that headline, you might have had a thought like, “How does Jeff know my boss?”

I don’t know your boss. And I’m not talking about your boss.

I’m talking about you. More specifically, who you were as a child.

At our most critical moments, a child is often in charge. The person we were as a child. Because it is at our most critical moments, when we feel least safe, when we feel like we might be kicked out of the tribe if we make a mistake, that the person we were as a child reemerges to try to protect us.

The child in us knows what it’s like to feel unsafe. And a long time ago, she mastered a strategy to protect us.

Have you ever gone on automatic pilot, triggered by something you may not even understand?

Your inner child wants to keep you safe

That’s your inner child protecting you.

You might lash out, or argue, or defend your position, or say cruel things to coworkers.

You might withdraw or leave.

You might work unreasonable hours in an attempt to fix things.

You might make sure everyone around you is happy, even to the detriment of your own happiness.

And any of this could be triggered by a work situation that feels like something that was unsafe in your childhood.

You’re an adult now. A successful one, too. But maybe this child is getting in your way. How can you move from that unconscious trigger to developing the capacity to choose between this option and another that might work better?

Releasing old patterns

Last week, I was working with one of my clients who is responsible for a major function at a $10 billion company. She was having trouble, falling into what she called “my old patterns.”

We spent some time talking about what that looked like for her, how it felt in her body.

She said when she was in that place, she was “ready for battle.”

And I asked her to take the physical posture of “ready for battle.”

She was tensed up, hunched over, protecting her core and her heart. She was ready to lash out, ready to yell. She had a lot of energy and focus when she was in that coiled position.

I asked her if she associated this with anything, and she immediately had a memory of a former job, years before, where a colleague was trying to get her fired. She jumped in to action, defended her position, and not only kept her job but got a promotion. “Ready for battle,” had, in this case, worked for her.

I asked her about other times, maybe earlier, maybe younger. I ask her about her family, about whether there were times growing up when she had taken that position.

She had. Her parents had divorced when she was young. There was a lot of yelling. She remembered being in that position to protect herself from the yelling, and doing a fair amount of yelling herself.

It was the way she kept herself safe.

We all have memories like this, of a time in our childhood when we felt unsafe, when we doubted that our parents loved us, when we were afraid that somehow we didn’t belong, or that there was something wrong with us.

And we all developed a strategy to respond, to at least temporarily ease the pain.

My client developed a combative strategy, “Ready for battle.” Maybe it’s different for you. Maybe you work on relationships, or you work harder, or you save the day by figuring things out.

If you see yourself using the same strategy over and over again, often without realizing it, the chances are very good that you learned this when you were a small child.

That it kept you safe. That it got you love. That it helped you belong.

Because it’s unconscious, it comes up whenever you feel danger. And because you have been as successful as you have been, there is a very good chance that this strategy has worked for you.

But at some point, it might not be the right strategy anymore. In fact, it might keep you from doing what you really should do. It might even keep you from advancing in your career.

And while it’s easy to say that, it’s not always easy to do that in the heat of the moment. Because it’s hard wired into our bodies and we’ve been doing it for decades.

I asked my client if “ready for battle” ever limits her. She said that it absolutely did. That she could be so focused on what she thought was the right answer, and defending that answer, that she could miss other solutions. She could miss opportunities to partner or collaborate. And as her responsibilities broaden, it becomes more and more important for her to do that instead of simply advocating for her position.

So we did an experiment. I asked her to choose how she wanted to come across in these conversations where she is combative today. When she would rather see the opportunity to collaborate.

From “ready for battle” to “open and present”

She said she wanted to show up as “open and present.” I asked her how that would look physically. Instead of bent over and flexed, she was tall, relaxed, and open. Her heart was exposed. Her face was relaxed.

She was a person who I would be happy dealing with, not a person girding for a fight.

And we had her flex between positions. Between “ready for battle” and “open and present.”

If she practices that enough, she will learn to take a new posture in the moment. It will first become an option, and then become instinct.

She is embodying a different style of communication, of leadership.

She is no longer the scared child protecting herself. She is an adult choosing what’s best in this moment, rather than constrained, like so many of us, by the wounds of childhood.

Using the body to release the past

That might sound like magic. But I encourage you to try this for yourself. We are so used to using language to create what we want in life, to the idea that we can try to be a different way simply by using different words. But some things are beyond, or in this case, before language. Some things are deep in our history and deep in our bodies. And often, our bodies are the key to changing them.

I recently spoke with Tim Alison on his Screw the Naysayers podcast. Tim focuses on leaders who have defied conventional wisdom, who have taken a different path, and I was honored to be included.

We spoke at length not only about my leaving the corporate world, but also about building a business as an executive coach, and about the ultimate futility of external goals in defining success.

Please enjoy this episode here.

I recently had the pleasure of appearing on Kyle Weckerly’s Career Challenges Podcast, talking about the importance of self-awareness as a gateway to change.

If you want to change something, you have to be aware of it. And there are a lot of ways to cultivate that awareness, of your thoughts, of emotions, of sensations in your body, of triggers that show up for you. In that way, leadership is self leadership before true leadership of others can take place.

My experience is that without some kind of formal awareness practice, it is difficult to make major changes. If someone else sees something in us, it is often quite difficult to take action on it, even when we agree with it. But when the insight is ours, seeing new possibilities, making new choices, and taking new actions becomes much easier. And in my experience, that kind of insight shows up much more frequently when there’s a practice supporting it.

Kyle and I talked about all of that and more, including some client stories, for almost an hour. Have a listen here.

I often find myself thinking about the next thing, thinking about how far I have to go, rather than celebrating how far I’ve come. And it feels self-aggrandizing even to take a moment to celebrate something I’ve accomplished.

I take time with my clients to celebrate their accomplishments, so I’m going to take time to celebrate an accomplishment of mine here. As Labor Day is often considered the end of summer, I’m going to celebrate a challenge I took on in June, and tell you a few surprising things I learned.

In early June, I decided to learn to swim better. And I set a goal of swimming a mile. That’s 64 lengths of a 25 meter pool without stopping.

I’ve had a difficult history with swimming. I was five the first time I had a swim lesson. At the end of the lesson we were asked to jump off the diving board holding on to a pole. I was terrified and refused. No more lessons for me for more than a decade. I took lessons at the same YMCA so I could swim enough to pass PE in high school. But I hated every minute.

I returned to swimming in my late thirties when I decided I wanted to do a triathlon. I learned about something called Total Immersion Swimming (you can Google Tim Ferris taking about it if you’re curious) that was supposed to be a lot easier than traditional swimming. I even took a weekend workshop on the method and got to the point where I could (finally) swim a length of the pool comfortably. Sometimes I could even make it two lengths. I started going to another Y, in Bethesda, Maryland, to try to get better. But I don’t think I ever got past 4 lengths. And I quit, again. The triathlon never happened.

Now I’m 54 and returning to swimming (and a potential triathlon?) for a third time. And for the first time I’m really loving not only the sense of being and moving in the water, but also the process of learning. While there’s a lot of discomfort at the beginning, there’s also rapid progress.

I started swimming again at the local pool in June. My first workout, I swam for a total of 8 minutes. The most I could swim at a time was two lengths of a 25 meter pool. On August 28, less than three months later, I swam a mile in one workout, and the first 38 lengths of the pool were without any breaks. I have not met my goal of swimming a mile nonstop yet, but I have come a long way.

(I started to swim in a cloudy lake over the weekend and realized I now have a whole new set of mental challenges to overcome if I want to do a triathlon, which has open water swimming. I made it about twenty yards and when I realized I was literally in over my head, I panicked and turned back.)

The value of new challenges

This is one of the reasons I like to take on new challenges. This is one of the reasons I like my clients to take on new challenges. To have the feeling of discomfort at the beginning and to also the feel the rush of progress that happens when you have pushed through that discomfort. The confidence that comes from succeeding at new challenges seems to transfer to other life areas, too.

It’s a good way to experience beginner’s mind, and to practice the acceptance of not being an expert. I can have another swimmer blow past me in the next lane and admire that person rather than beat myself up (at least more than I used to!). This admiration of others and kindness to myself is new for me.

There’s another way that I’ve been surprised, too. In some important ways, learning to swim and learning to be a better leader are actually quite similar.

Change is uncomfortable. When you’re engaged in a physical pursuit like swimming you clearly feel discomfort in making your body do things that it’s not used to. But most people don’t see that leadership is an embodied practice, too. If you’re trying to be different as a leader, you will feel discomfort in your body. That’s actually the only place that discomfort can show up. You know on some level that what you are doing is different. Your body automatically resists new things by making you uncomfortable. It’s trying to protect you! You might feel a flutter in your stomach, a tightness in your chest or throat, or something other physical sensations that indicate you are outside of your comfort zone. These sensations will change as you get more and more comfortable with your new way of being.

Like any journey of mastery, no matter where you start from, you can always improve. I’ve talked to leaders, often longtime ones, who are always learning, and my swim coach says he’s still learning after swimming for more than 30 years. There’s a humility and respect for the process that seem to be necessary, and present both in the best and those aspiring to be the best.

The more awareness you have, the more rapidly you will progress. This includes getting feedback from others. A trusted observer is essential to progress, especially one who has been through the same journey you are going through. You can read about things but until you have a coach looking at you or you see yourself on video you might not have a clear perspective on how you are actually doing things and how that compares with what you’re trying to do. A change as simple as where you put your hands with you push off the wall can take seconds off your lap time. A change in how you hold your body as you ask for feedback can make a huge difference, too.

A lot of the fundamentals are counterintuitive

Three areas of swimming struck me has having very distinct parallels to leadership, in that the thing that works is actually opposite of what most people instinctively try.

The quieter you are, the more effective you will be. In swimming, you see a lot of beginners kicking and splashing as hard as they can as they move up the pool. Like me, they are exhausted by the time they have completed a length or two. But look at an expert, especially an expert distance swimmer, and you will see very little splash. You will hear very little noise. You barely see their heads when they breathe.

What does this look like in leadership? We all know the classic leader who pounds his (and it is almost always a he) fist on the podium, exhorting his people to greater effort. Whoever came up with that t-shirt that says, “The beatings will continue until morale improves” was thinking of this kind of leader. This can work. For a little while.

But the most effective leaders over the long term are often the ones who don’t make a fuss. Who rarely raise their voices. They focus on connecting with their people rather than being in the spotlight. And not only do their people take ownership, the leader is happy to give them credit for their success.

It’s more effective to reduce resistance than it is to increase effort. In swimming, you see a lot of people kicking a lot at first. This is a terrible way to move through the water. Generally speaking, the reason that people are kicking is that they have their heads too high—they want to have access to air! They have to kick to stay afloat because their heads are so far out of the water that it pushes their legs down. But when they lower their heads, when they rotate to the air instead of lifting, their legs magically pop to the surface. And they discover that gliding is a lot easier (and faster!) than kicking.

Lowering resistance is something that you used to see in Washington. Back when I was a child, there were lawmakers who worked diligently, across the aisle, seeing how to get a deal done, seeing how they could improve things for the most people. They lowered the resistance of those on the other side by seeing what could work for everyone. These days, a willingness to compromise is often seen as a negative. The effort is there—politicians on both sides tirelessly declare that they have a monopoly on truth and pledge to their base that their view will prevail—but resistance to actual progress (however defined) has increased rather than decreased.

The folks who get things done, whether in politics or business, are often the ones who are working with those with differently perspectives to see what is possible. They are willing to move a little at a time toward their goal rather than making an all-or-nothing effort and failing over and over. And because of that, they go a lot further over time.

You can control the commitment, and the goal, but not the timing. I decided to commit to learning to swim better. I set a specific goal of swimming a mile at the pool. At that point, though, from what I can tell, I was no longer in control.

When I’m committed to a goal, I usually meet it. But I often have no idea how long it will take to meet that goal, especially if it’s something I’ve never done before. I could not have told you if it would take a month, or three months, or two years to get to the point where I could swim a mile. And while I am close to swimming a mile without stopping, the local pool is now closed and I will have to move to an indoor pool in the next town, which will not open for winter for another week. Sometimes things happen that are outside of our control.

In swimming, when I got that first rush of progress I started looking for triathlons that I could do this year. I even found one in southern Utah at the end of October. But my coach pointed out that the process is supposed to be fun! How easy it is to forget that! It was a big learning for me to realize that I actually wanted to enjoy the journey, and that I would enjoy it more if I thought about a triathlon next summer rather than a couple of months from now.

In business, you see deadline-based goals all the time. In fact, Wall Street often demands them. But, especially when it is something that hasn’t been done before, it’s almost impossible to predict timing. I had all kinds of overachiever ideas around how quickly I could build my business. My ego was strong enough that I decided that I would take the time it typically takes a successful coach to establish their practice and halve it. And then I beat myself up for not meeting that. Being hard on myself didn’t do anything other than make me feel bad. Things went a lot better when I accepting that I could only control my commitment, my goal, and the actions I was taking toward it. Not the results of those actions or the growth rate of the business.

Making the commitment

Have you beat yourself up for not being able to change? Maybe you want a different role, or to take your business to the next level. If you’re clear on your goal, commit to it! But don’t get too attached to how or when you get results. You’re doing your best, and learning to enjoy the process of change is a practice in and of itself. You may find, as I have, that life has an even better plan for you than you do. And that you will be pleasantly surprised from what you learn along the way.