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.

 

 

There’s a practice that my coach, the late Doug Silsbee, often used with his clients who had been able to make a significant shift, or to see themselves or their world in a different way.

He called it, “Taking in the good.” And in short, it means to enhance the effect of a change, or an insight, by being grateful for it. It’s the perfect practice to share in a time of thanks.

Beliefs that no longer serve

Most of the leaders I work with have beliefs about themselves or their worlds that no longer serve them.

And as we work together, some of those beliefs dissolve. Or they are replaced by newer, more useful beliefs and ways of being.

I was working with a client recently who I will call Jill. Jill has been given a lot of additional responsibility during the time we’ve been working together. She’s gone from leading a team of ten to a team of several hundred, and there are likely more people on the way.

Jill is seen as someone who has a good balance between being an excellent people leader and having a holistic view of the business. She prides herself on being able to look at complex problems and find and fix the root cause.

Jill is now at a point where her strength is getting in her way.

She is responsible for so much that she can’t possibly understand everything at the level of detail that she once did.

Jill was reflecting on this in a recent call, and was seeing that overwhelm would sometimes enter the picture when she tried to manage too much.

Seeing and reinforcing a shift in perspective

But suddenly, Jill got what she needed to change and how to do it.

In that moment, Jill saw that her role is no longer the person who figures out the root cause. She is now being asked to be the person who finds the people, who creates the team, that will figure out the root cause.

She is no longer the doer. She is a builder now. A creator and motivator of teams.

A leader.

In that moment of insight, Jill literally became a new person.

I reflected this back to her and talked about the practice of taking in the good.

“I want you to reflect on this shift for a moment,” I said. “Be grateful that you have seen it. And let that gratitude sink into your body as you ground this new way of being.”

We spend so much time doing what has been automatic to us that when we see a different possibility, it’s important to highlight it, to sit with it, to let the new psychological wiring solidify.

And this is what the practice of taking in the good accomplishes. If you can do this regularly, even if it’s only for a minute or two, you can help ease the path to making major changes.

When we take in the good, we give our bodies time to assimilate what our minds have seen. We hard wire the shift. Through the practice of taking in the good, my client was able to shift in her being in a way that was permanent, rather than a fleeting glimpse.

Most people instinctively go back to the thing that has always worked when stress shows up. The old way of being.

Even if it doesn’t work any more.

The practice of taking in the good can help prevent these relapses.

The journey never ends

My experience, both for myself and the clients that I have worked with, is this. One insight can change everything. But people seldom have just one insight.

When Jill and I started working together, she could not see that it would be possible network for another job. Then it was seeing that more money and more satisfaction could coexist. Then, in a big shift, Jill say that her stories of being an imposter were just stories. And now, she is working on the shift from doer to leader. She has shifted into bigger and bigger versions of herself, and become a more present and powerful leader in the process.

Everyone works through some version of this, of formerly solid parts of their identity dropping away as the next version of themselves emerges. And from what I can tell, so long as we are willing and curious, there is no end to our capacity to evolve.

A key element in lasting change

Taking in the good, as a regular practice, can help shorten the time it takes to change a habit, or a perspective. And it can lay a foundation for future change.

And as we approach Thanksgiving, it seems appropriate to share with you, much as I am grateful that Doug shared it with me.

Happy Thanksgiving.