The last couple of weeks have been the most difficult we’ve seen in years.

COVID-19 and all of its ramifications. Concerns about an energy market crash. A pending global recession.

This is a difficult time for leaders. It can be easy to either overreact, or to stick your head in the sand and hope things go away. If you have spent much time on social media, you have seen many examples of both approaches.

In my work with leaders, one thing that often comes up is how to show up in the face of uncertainty. How do you know what to do in the face of an uncertain future?

Perhaps more importantly, how do you know how to be as you face that uncertainty?

I don’t know what the future holds, and I don’t know what actions you should be taking right now. So much of this will be about where you are in the country and what your customers, suppliers, employees and communities need from you. But I do know some of the traps that leaders can fall into when they are faced with complex and uncertain times. Here are three things you can focus on in the coming weeks.

Manage your state

Your physical state determines the world you see. When our sympathetic nervous system is activated, we go into fight or flight. Notice if this is happening to you—if your breath gets short, if your chest or throat or shoulders get tight, if any of the signs that you are “triggered” are present.

When we are in the SNS, the options we see narrow. We are less able to think holistically and more likely to react mindlessly. We are also less able to connect to other people. The more you can clear your head, the more you can move toward an optimal focus and flow, the less likely you are to make a rash mistake, or to simply freeze in the face of the challenges in front of you.

Do your best not to make any important decisions from the triggered state. Breathe deeply. Maintain your mediation or yoga or martial arts practice. Continue to exercise regularly. Minimize caffeine and alcohol. And make sure you get as much high quality sleep as you can.

Understand that we are in a complex environment

Complicated things can be figured out in advance. Complex things, like weather and viruses and people, cannot. Complex things require small experiments and the willingness to shift course, to change your mind, as you get better information. Remember that you are choosing in each moment, and that no choice you make has to be locked in. Don’t be afraid of looking foolish if changing course is what is called for.

We do not know what is going to happen next. But by being flexible and willing to experiment, we can find our way.

Know your traps

Jennifer Garvey Berger writes of five “mindtraps” that affect us all, especially as leaders.

While I recommend that you look at all of them, there are three that seem particularly appropriate right now.

1. Your desire for a simple story blinds you to a real one. There is so much information out there right now, and it is human nature to want a simple answer. “It’s no worse than a cold,” is a simple answer. “We have to shut down everything,” is another. The truth is likely more nuanced and more variable, and less clear. And the truth may also change as this situation evolves.
2. Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right. Your gut may be giving you signals. And you may be tempted to follow them. But gut feelings typically work in your area of expertise (see Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink for a discussion of this), when you can see holistically and react to patterns at a subconscious level. When you are outside your area of expertise (as most of us are right now), something that looks like a gut feeling can just be a triggered reaction (see the discussion of managing your state above).
3. Being trapped in your current identity as a leader can keep you from what’s needed next. For example, if your identity is “I am decisive leader,” you may not feel you can change a decision even when the data suggest you should. Rapidly changing times may call on your to be a different kind of leader. It’s important to recognize that you might need to change before you can change your mind.

What does the future hold?

I don’t know. But I do hope that these practices and perspectives will be helpful as you navigate it.

May you be safe and focused in the next few weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

At our deepest core, each of us is a blank page.

It sounds like one of those vapid aphorisms, but you can test this for yourself.

When you look out at the world, what do you see?

I was listening to the Sam Harris “Making Sense” podcast in the car last week, to Episode 181, entitled, “The Illusory Self.” After a rather long introduction it’s a conversation with a gentleman named Richard Lang, who is a colleague of the late Douglas Harding, who years ago wrote a book entitled, “On Having No Head,” the Kindle version of which is free on Amazon.

Finding your blank page

If you are interested in a provocative and deceptively simple way to discover not who you think you are, but who you actually are, I highly recommend you listen to the podcast, read the book, or go to some of the exercises on his website, headless.org.

I’ll give you just a hint, just a taste, here. When you look out at the world, you might see the blue sky, your office computer, a coworker, a spouse.

You see your world. (And if you close your eyes, you hear your world.) You have sensations, you have feelings, and those are part of your world, too.

But that world is not you. Your thoughts are not you. Your emotions are not you. They are things that are appearing in you.

Who or what is this “you” that is looking and listening and feeling? Does it have any characteristics? Any at all? And why should we care?

After doing some of the experiments that Richard Lang suggests (and getting on a Zoom call to do them with a group),  I can’t find any characteristics at all in what is looking out of my eyes. I see things that are appearing in my consciousness. But I don’t see anything that I can ascribe to whatever they are appearing in. I’ll describe more below, but I encourage to you try this for yourself. Reading about it and experiencing it are completely different.

What I have found

When I saw this, I saw that I am not the story that I call “me.” I am the blank page on which that story appears.

Most of us have pages that are already close to full. Our pages consist of assumptions, of stories about people, about ourselves, about the world, about what we need to do or have in order to be worthy.

These assumptions, these stories, were for the most part told to us by other people. By parents and siblings and peers and teachers, by the media and society. And we believe them without really looking at them. Sometimes, if we are into self improvement, we try to change the stories with other stories we call “affirmations.”

But I’m not my affirmations, either.

When I look out of my own eyes I do not see myself as others see me.  I can’t see my head, my eyes, my ears. If believe solely what I see, rather than what I have been told, I am just open space. I am a blurry oval space of indeterminate size in which the entire world appears. “I” have no characteristics whatsoever.

I know this is true for me and I highly suspect it is true for you, too. Again, try it, by listening to the podcast or going to the website.

We appear in the third person to others. You see me and I see you as finite. I construct stories about you based on what I see and know, and those stories are infinitely smaller than you are. But I see myself in the first person. And the space of first person is just an opening for the world.

Empty. I find that most people instinctively think this is impossible. We can’t possibly be all of this. We can’t possibly hold all of this.

Who are you, really?

So if we are not infinite, if we are not what we actually see, who are we? Someone must know who we are, even if we don’t. So we look to others to tell us what we are. We give them the power to define us. Parents, friends, teachers, coworkers. We are wired to believe that if we don’t get their approval, we will be kicked out of the tribe. So we act as we think others want us to act.

We are also wired to believe that there is some amount of money or status that will make us feel whole. That wholeness is “out there,” rather than being an intrinsic part of us.

But it isn’t true. Take a look for yourself.

What will you find? And what can you do?

What stories have you believed about yourself and the world instead of looking closely at what you actually know to be true?

It may take some time for you to see some of these stories. For some of them to bubble into your consciousness once you see that you are much bigger, and much less limited, than you ever thought.

What do you see when you see the world and yourself without those stories?

And what happens, what becomes possible, when you return to your blank page?

In almost all my client work, the most powerful insights come from discovering stories that are running in the background of the client. Stories that the client is not conscious of, and that often get in the way of making the best decisions.

The way we discover these stories is often through the body. Through the “triggered” fight or flight state that shows up under pressure—sudden anger, pulse pounding, or an immediate need to leave the room, for example.

Sometimes those triggers are around money, or around feedback from others. I have one CEO client who recently discovered a trigger linked to a fear of board criticism.

I could tell you more about that, about how he discovered it and about the process that we used to begin to dissolve that trigger. But the truth is there is another trigger that resonates more strongly for me right now.

My own.

A couple of nights ago, I very quickly discovered myself triggered—too quickly to stop it, in fact. There is a righteous anger that emerges from me when I get triggered. It’s ugly. And it seems to happen most often when our older kids are home and we are trying to do things as a family that no one might individually prefer. One or more of us gets triggered, and there is yelling and often tears.

It started with a game of Yahtzee

This one happened during of all things, a game of Yahtzee.

One child didn’t want to play, and came up with what I am sure was a good excuse to them to quit, even though the game was almost over.

We talk about doing things as a family a lot. And that sometimes, we have to do things that we might not choose individually, because it is something the family can do together.

Yahtzee is one thing that we can all (the kids are 10, 20, and 22) do together. And requiring that we all finish seemed like a good way to reinforce the importance of family time.

That sounds reasonable enough in retrospect, but that’s not how it showed up for me.

Let the righteous indignation begin

Instead, I was hugely triggered and in that moment I didn’t know why. I ordered the offender to remain in the game. I yelled. I blustered as I lectured. It was ugly and I’m ashamed of it and I wondered what the heck had happened.

Has anything like this happened to you?

It was what happened in the aftermath that was interesting. As we all settled down and they rejoined the game, I had an insight about what had triggered me.

When I was a child, my dad had outbursts like this occasionally. I had never really thought about why, but it hit me in that moment. He was reacting because his authority was being challenged. Behind that was a story that your job as a parent is to maintain control through authority. If you lose that authority, you aren’t a good parent. Or at least that’s what he thought as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. I don’t consciously believe that now. But I saw that he did. And the wiring in me is clearly there.

Now one of my children was challenging my authority.

And here was my father’s story, showing up in a visceral way through me.

Is it any wonder I struggled in that moment?

It helped to name it

As things cooled, I apologized for being triggered and told the offender, in front of the group, that I would tell them a bit about my experience later.

My wife gave me a gentle nudge. “Would it be helpful for everyone to hear?”

Not only was it helpful to them, but it might have been even more helpful to me.

I explained what a trigger was and what I thought had happened to me and why. My oldest actually laughed and said, “Well, we’re certainly good at challenging authority.”

I told all of them that I believe life is a perfect system, which brings us exactly the things that we need to work on. I felt like talking about it and naming it helped me to process what had happened. I hope that it normalized triggers, and the process of repair that is often necessary after, for my three kids. But perhaps most importantly, I think they appreciated my willingness to be vulnerable, even though (maybe because) it was difficult for me.

The next test

Triggers that show up in the body are often from stories that were formed when we were young, sometimes even before language. The stories are often strategies that keep us safe.

Sometimes they cross generations.

I was living my dad’s story, trying to stay safe as a parent by staying in charge. But I’ve also seen clients work with stories from their childhood around not feeling safe, not being enough, not being able to speak up.

Of course, seeing the story behind a trigger is only the first step. It’s a very important step, the most critical one. Robert Kegan calls it the “subject-object move.” We move from being subject to and unconscious of the effects of a story, to seeing its effect on us, to being able to make another choice.

The next test will be when I’m triggered again. Sometimes, the subject-object move is enough to see that you are triggered and either stop in the moment or repair pretty quickly after the fact. Sometimes, there is deeper somatic work that is necessary to release the trigger.

I’ll talk about that work in future posts.

Where does this show up for you?

Just about everyone I know is triggered sometimes. In that triggered moment, you feel unsafe. You flip into fight or flight in a split second. Getting out of the perceived danger, through taking a deep breath or even removing yourself from the situation, may be the best move you can make when you are caught in the middle of a triggering situation.

Later, it can be helpful to unpack that trigger, and how it impacts your leadership, with a qualified coach or another professional. But it can also be helpful just to know that there is something about the situation that feels threatening or unsafe to you, and that it is often based on a childhood fear.

Triggers are a normal protective mechanism, but they can get in the way of our leadership. Whether that’s leading a family or leading a company. Seeing that you are triggered can be very helpful. But seeing the story of why you are triggered can change everything.

 

 

Whenever January is looming, my habitual tendency is to think about New Year’s resolutions.

Of course, resolutions are notoriously bad at motivating change. A book I’ve been reading, and highly recommend, begins to identify why.

Helping People Change, by Richard Boyatzis, talks about two kinds of efforts to help people to change.

One, by far the most traditional, is compliance. You could also call this accountability.

This fits right in the standard New Year’s resolution. You know the one. I’m going to lose 25 pounds. I’m going to stop being so lazy. I’m going to hire a personal trainer to meet me at the gym three times a week at 6 am and we are going to GET THIS THING DONE!

That doesn’t tend to work very well.

The question is why? And the answer doesn’t have anything to do with the skill level of personal trainers.

Our wiring creates our resistance

The answer has to do with our wiring. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is the part of us that reacts to stress. It is the source of the fight or flight response, among other things. When our SNS is activated, we get very focused, but also, very narrow.

The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is the part of us that rests and recovers from stress. When our PNS is activated, we are more open, more relaxed, and more able to consider and create new possibilities in that calm, open space.

When we are making changes, by definition we are creating something new.  But our bodies and brains. want things to stay the same (this is called homeostasis), and they resist anything new. (When you can’t stop thinking about chocolate cake two days after you started your New Year’s diet, this is homeostasis in action.)

The traditional approach is to try to overwhelm that resistance with a plan, very specific things to do, through a closed, compliance-based system. The problem with this is that it also activates the SNS. This creates adrenaline and cortisol and stress, and, ironically, even stronger homeostasis against the very change we are trying to create.

A different approach

What to do instead?  Boyatzis calls this alternative approach coaching from compassion.

When we are compassionate, with ourselves or with those we are helping, we open up to new possibilities, to new ideals. And the research suggests that if we start from a place of identifying our ideal self, we have a much higher chance of success.

Maybe that ideal self weighs less, but maybe, if we look behind that initial goal, we see something else. Maybe we just want to be more active or to eat in a way that makes us better. Maybe our ideal self wants something else first—to meditate more or to spend more time with family.

But the crucial part is to allow that exploration to occur. To allow that ideal self to emerge, rather than to be an automatic reaction. Exploring, dreaming even, activates the PNS. It reduces stress and self-judgment and other negativity, and increases love and compassion and awe.

Creating from possibility

The first step, then, is to create, to visualize, and even fall in love with, our ideal self.

And then from that place, we can ask, “What kinds of habits does that ideal self have?”

And only then do we create a plan.

I ask you, as you consider 2020—

Who is your ideal self? What does your ideal self want to create in the world? What kind of habits will support that self and that creation?

If you start from there, your chances of success are much greater. And you might be surprised by what that success actually looks like.

The key is to start, and to be willing to be surprised.

Good luck in starting that journey in 2020.

Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.